Whose Values?

After less then a year, Keith Olbermann has been fired from Current TV and has been replaced with...it's coming...you guessed it:  Eliot Spitzer.

An excerpt from the press release from Current TV founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt:

Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it. 

We are moving ahead by honoring Current's values.  Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily -- especially now, during the presidential election campaign.  Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation.

So they are honoring Current's values by hiring Eliot Spitzer.  Makes sense.

They Do Exist!

Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard has a blog post today on an interesting phenomena displayed in most of the analysis by liberals prior to the oral arguments this week on the constitutionality of Obamacare:  the disbelief that there are those out there in the world who actually oppose Obamacare on constitutional grounds.  Cost on the reasons for this:

The problem for the left is that they do not have a lot of interaction with conservatives, whose intellects are often disparaged, ideas are openly mocked, and intentions regularly questioned. Conservative ideas rarely make it onto the pages of most middle- and high-brow publications of news and opinion the left frequents. So, liberals regularly find themselves surprised when their ideas face pushback.

I think that is exactly what happened with Obamacare. The attitude of President Obama (a former con law lecturer at the University of Chicago, no less!), Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid was very much that they are doing big, important things to help the American people, why wouldn’t that be constitutional? No less an important Democratic leader as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee cited the (nonexistent) “good and welfare clause” to justify the mandate.

Liberals soon realized after hearing oral arguments this week that arguments actually exist that are against Obamacare--even arguments from conservatives that make some semblance of sense (see Jeffery Toobin's shock and amazement after hearing the justices' critical and tough stances).  Many on the Left have accepted the idea that conservatives are either stupid, evil, corrupt, or all of the above for so long that they forgot to make an argument themselves, because in their own minds, no problem concerning these things existed in the first place.

Simply throwing around some vague references to the Preamble's promotion of the General Welfare is not enough to save Obamacare (I am talking to you, Nancy Pelosi).  But it's interesting that Solicitor General Verrilli thinks he even needs to do that.  I thought the Constitution was a living, breathing document that evolved over time.  Why are we still even referencing what those old white men said over two hundred years ago?  

It's All About the Results

At No Left Turns, Pete Spiliakos takes on Dahlia Lithwick and Jonathan Chait and their arguments--really, the core arguments for the Left--on the constitutionality of Obamacare:

The arguments advanced for the federal health insurance purchase mandate often came down to some combination of "only mean people oppose nice President Obama's law" or "all really smart and honest people all agree with smart and honest me that Obamacare is like so totally constitutional."  Dalia Lithwick's tantrum is an example of the first kind of argument and Jonathan Chait's rant is an example of the second.  Lithwick's post is less interesting.  It doesn't contain any actual arguments about why the Obamacare mandate is constitutional.  She mostly just says that only a horrible person would even think about considering whether such a wonderful law as Obamacare is constitutional.  I wonder why Solicitor General Verrilli didn't go with that strategy during oral arguments.

Chait's post is a more telling example of how self-congratulation and group think can weaken one side's argument.  Chait writes that the health insurance purchase mandate must be constitutional because health care is interstate commerce and the federal government must therefore be able to compel an individual to contract with a private firm to purchase a product they do not want.  Chait specifically takes on the activity/inactivity distinction.  Chait argues that the government does regulate inactivity in that it mandates vaccinations and sometimes compels military service. The federal government derives the power to draft from the power to raise armies and navies rather than the interstate commerce clause.  The states (not the federal government) have the power to compel vaccinations from the general police power that the federal government lacks. 

It's sad to see the results based jurisprudence of Lithwick and Chait virtually unadorned and without any pretense of intellectual or legal argument of any kind.  At least General Verrilli had the tact to cloak the core argument in other forms.

Fools and Knaves

By way of Jonah Goldberg, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate argues for the constitutionality of Obamacare in an essay published last Thursday.  I haven't read many pro-Obamacare arguments, so I was curious to read what she came up with.  The following sums up the main thrust of her argument:

But amid all the throat-clearing, odds-making, and curtain-raising that surrounds next week’s health care case, it seems worth noting what is in dispute and what’s not. So let’s start by setting forth two uncontroversial propositions.

The first proposition is that the health care law is constitutional. The second is that the court could strike it down anyway. Linda Greenhouse makes the first point more eloquently than I can. That the law is constitutional is best illustrated by the fact that—until recently—the Obama administration expended almost no energy defending it. Back when the bill passed Nancy Pelosi famously reacted to questions about its constitutionality with the words, “Are you serious?” And the fact that the Obama administration rushed the case to the Supreme Court in an election year is all the evidence you need to understand that they remain confident in their prospects. The law is a completely valid exercise of Congress’ Commerce Clause power, and all the conservative longing for the good old days of the pre-New Deal courts won’t put us back in those days as if by magic. Nor does it amount to much of an argument.

Let's unpackage this "argument."  Since Obamacare was passed into law, it is therefore constitutional.  Lithwick obviously believes her "argument" is self-evident and leaves it at that.  But simply stating a truism and actually attempting to make an argument are two entirely different things.   Notice that she never goes beyond the circumstantial, e.i., the "energy" expended in defending the law.  Because the Obama Administration did not feel the need to expend much "energy" means that the case is airtight.  But the energy expended tells us nothing about what that energy is directed towards.  Wouldn't a member of the KKK spend lots of "energy" defending the position that the world was made for the benefit of the white man only?  And since when is confidence equated to rightness or goodness?  Surely that same KKK member is confident in his opinions. 

But, as Jonah points out, Lithwick's ultimate logic boils down to this:  "George Soros has spent zero energy defending the view that all of his money actually belongs to me. Therefore it's mine."

And if that wasn't enough, here is the real howler:  Obamacare must constitutional because of Nancy Pelosi's incredulous response at being asked if it was constitutional.  Only a fool or a knave would even question the wit and wisdom of the great constitutionalist Nancy Pelosi...

 

Obamacare, Day Two

Today was the second of three days of scheduled testimony for The Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, otherwise known as the Obamacare case.  Carrie Severino at NRO Bench Memos has some thoughts on day two:

Solicitor General Verrilli had a rough start to his argument, speaking haltingly, stumbling, and stopping to take a drink.  The solicitor general spent almost all his time trying to convince the justices that health care is, in fact, different from other markets. While Justices Ginsburg and Kagan were trying to throw him soft balls, Verrilli kept striking out with Justices Scalia, Roberts, and Alito, and to some extent, Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy was particularly concerned because, as he put it, the government bears a “heavy burden of justification” when a law “changes the relationship of the individual to government in a unique way.”  From my reading, General Verrilli didn’t ultimately convince them, and Justice Kennedy returned to the issue several times.  He asked whether the administration’s argument had any limits “at all,” and noted that the mandate “requires the individual to do an affirmative act,” a completely novel type of law. 

The Chief Justice and Justice Scalia were most vocal on this issue, the Chief declaring that “all bets are off” if they accept the expansive interpretation advanced by the administration.  

[...]

Justice Ginsburg, unsurprisingly, sent clear signals that she accepted the administration’s position. While she agreed that the mandate is a form of cross-subsidization, she was untroubled by this, given the cost-shifting that happens due to uncompensated health care.  

Justice Breyer was perfectly comfortable with Congress creating commerce ex nihilo, a position even the solicitor general went to great (and, I believe, illogical) lengths to distance himself from. The solicitor general insisted on making the demonstrably false statement that the mandate in fact is not “creating commerce,” but is regulating actual market participants.

You can read the whole thing here.

So far, it seems that Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas will be one one side.  Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and the wise Latina Justice Sotomayor will make up the other bloc.  As Charles Krauthammer recently noted, these important cases always seem to "depend on whatever side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of that morning."  Scary.  But at least the other branches can interpret the Constitution as they see it.  After all, we are somewhat still a republic--not a judicial oligarchy.  

Our Race Problem

Jay Nordlinger has some real gems in his Impromtus column today.  Here are a couple:

Of the shooting victim in Florida, Trayvon Martin, President Obama said, “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Yeah, so? What if he wouldn’t look like Trayvon? What difference does that make?

What if the victim had been of Chinese ancestry, or a freckly red-headed Irish-American kid, or a kinky-haired Jewish piano student? So?

What is wrong with people? Do we really serve the god of biology? What Barack Obama’s offspring would look like: Isn’t that the least important thing about the Trayvon Martin case?

And:

If I remember correctly, Chris Rock once had a talk show, which had Jesse Jackson as a guest. And the host, Rock, asked him, “Could you tell me something, reverend? I’ve always wondered: What is it you do?”

A few days ago, Jackson said, “Blacks are under attack.” That’s what he does.

Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers

I was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer this morning and I came across this PolitiFact article titled "Even in an age of fact checking, the whopper lives."  The article, written by reporter Henry Gomez, focuses criticism on the supposed lies told by current Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and his refusal to back down from those lies.  I want to instead focus on a self-evident and apparently unquestionable truth as cited by Gomez in his article.  Gomez writes that politicians "have been lying since the beginning of the republic" and then states the following as evidence that lying on a voluminous scale still continues to this day:

The two previous presidential administrations are perhaps best known for lies or untruths -- see Lewinsky, Monica, and weapons of mass destruction. And even in this, another presidential election year, rare is the day when a candidate does not utter or repeat a claim that will be debunked by PolitiFact or another independent truth squad.

Hmmm...if President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, then so did President Clinton, virtually every member of Congress, and virtually everyone involved in national defense in both the Bush and Clinton Administrations.   As John Hinderaker has noted time and time again, "But the 'false belief in weapons of mass destruction' was not some sort of popular (let alone Republican) delusion. It was the considered judgment of the CIA and every other intelligence agency, world-wide."  Moreover, it's hard to believe that the weapons that were still unaccounted for by the U.N. since the Gulf War were not shipped out of the country as soon as Saddam discovered that U.S. forces were preparing to invade.

I don't have time to fact check the entire "fact-checking" article, but I can take a guess that this isn't the only falsehood. 

For a take-down of the whole fact-checking craze, read this article in the The Weekly Standard.

A Tale of Two Budgets

Yuval Levin has a great essay in the upcoming edition of the Weekly Standard that contrasts Paul Ryan's budget, which he made public on March 20th, and the budget--or lack thereof--proposed by the Obama Administration.  Here is the take-away paragraph:

On one hand are Obama’s 15 numinous know-it-alls, charged with setting prices, rationing care, and finding just the right balance between quality and access from Washington, and without the power to change Medicare’s payment system. And on the other hand is a system that seeks efficiency by having 50 million consumers in search of the quality they want at the lowest price they can find pressuring 15 million insurance and health care providers to find innovative ways to meet their demands and make a good living. One involves sheer faith in expert managers, and the other involves using real economics to lift the burden of the oppressive fee-for-service system and enable a new era of innovation, efficiency, and quality in American health care. It is hard to imagine a clearer contrast for voters than that between the two visions of government, and of American life, at the heart of these two proposals​—​and indeed, at the heart of these two budgets.

Of course it goes without saying that this budget will not be passed by the Senate (besides they aren't concerned with passing budgets of any kind anyway).  Ryan's budget does some of the heavy lifting for the Republican hopefuls, and I hope that they take full advantage of the opportunity.  

But even more than that, Levin really gets at something that is a fundamental contrast:  do we have faith in the experts who run the vast bureaucracies or do we have faith in the reason and common sense exhibited by the American people?    

No Heart

A headline on Yahoo! News that is currently scrolling by reads as follows:  "Was Cheney too old for heart transplant?"

 For some reason, I don't think this would ever pop into the heads of the MSM if it were a story on, say, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.  Just a guess.

The Moral Ground of Our Indecency Laws

At Right Reason, Hadley Arkes has an extraordinary essay on indecency laws and our problems with finding any ground of judgement to enforce those laws.  In FCC v. Fox Television Stations,

The heart of the argument before the Court was whether there was any clarity in those standards for judging the words and gestures that the FCC would filter as patently unsuitable for material diffused to a broad public. The case against this kind of screening was offered by those evidently accomplished lawyers, Carter Phillips, joined by Seth Waxman, a former Solicitor General. And yet, that vexing F-word was never sounded in the arguments they put before the Justices, woven as they were with analytic prose. But we had been told so often in the briefs, and in the opinions in the lower courts, that our public speech would be radically diminished—that it would be torn from the truth of life as lived—if it could not incorporate this kind of language in interviews and documentaries, no less than movies. And yet, why do we have the sense that if it were the N-word at issue, we would not be hearing how much our dramas and interviews were diminished when cops and truck drivers were not heard to be spitting out their contempt for "niggers?" Messrs. Phillips and Waxman are seasoned lawyers. They would not have ill-served their clients by holding back any useful tools in their arsenal. Evidently they did not think their arguments were impaired in any way because they did not invoke the F- or S-words.

But because of the elite educations offered in our prestigious law schools, the ones that generate lawyers today that make arguments based the subjectivity of the English language, the moral ground of indecency laws has been largely lost.  Instead, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, in defending the law on behalf of the government, has to make claims such as this:

The corporations holding licenses to broadcast have been given a lucrative franchise, and in turn they should accept certain rules. Justice Kagan quickly noticed the absence of any moral rationale: The Solicitor General was suggesting an implicit "contract," but why, she asked, is "this condition [or rule] appropriate when many other conditions would not be?" Mr. Verrilli would permit himself only this response:

This condition is appropriate, Justice Kagan, because it has been a

defining feature of the broadcast medium from its inception in the 1920s in the Radio Act and has continued to be a defining feature of this medium throughout its history.

This is nothing more than an argument based on tradition and the simple fact that the law's enactment somehow means it is good.  Force in other words is equated to the good. 

Justice Kennedy, in a rare moment of clarity, argued that FCC indecency laws inspire a certain symbolic value, because we aspire to be a culture that is not vulgar.  Justice Scalia, citing Kennedy's concerns and noted that

these are public airwaves, the government is entitled to insist upon a certain modicum of decency. I'm not sure it even has to relate to juveniles, to tell you the truth.

But in the recent case in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, under the majority opinion authored by Justice Scalia, in response to an argument brought forward by Justice Alito, Justice Scalia said that

"these disgusting video games in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." After all, children were resilient: "Grimm's fairy tales," he said, "are grim indeed." The Court could not let restrictions on speech be smuggled into the law under the banner of protecting children .

Arkes notes in closing:

But it went now without saying: The law was cast in terms of children because the Court had gradually pared back, over the years, any ground of judging and restricting the entertainment offered for adults. And yet that reporter, hearing a man savoring the dismembering of a woman on the screen, thought that something vicious was producing its effect on an adult. It was not less objectionable, not less debasing in its tendencies, not less harmful in the sensibility it shaped, than the same "entertainment" offered to a child. What Scalia glimpsed, in this rare moment, was a truth he had known long ago before it had become obscured in layers of theories built up in the law by his colleagues past and present. That small glimpse could be the epiphany come in time. It could be the opening that leads Scalia and his colleagues back to the grounds of judgment that the judges used to know, along with all of those ordinary folk around them.

Judicial Confusion

CNN legal anylyst Jeffery Toobin on Marbury v. Madison:

Courts, not Presidents, “deem” laws unconstitutional, or uphold them. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, and that observation, and that case, have served as bedrocks of American constitutional law ever since.

Ed Whelan on Toobin:

Properly understood, Marbury stands at most for the limited proposition that the courts, in exercising their judicial function, may review the constitutionality of statutes that they are asked to apply (the power of judicial review). As I’ve pointed out before, one good thing to come out of the American Bar Association’s badly confused report opposing presidential signing statements was liberal scholar Laurence Tribe’s acknowledgment that Marbury in no way establishes that the federal judiciary in general—or the Supreme Court in particular—is supreme over the President and Congress in determining what the Constitution means:  “presidents have never taken so wholly juricentric … a view of the constitutional universe—a view that certainly isn’t implied by the power of judicial review as recognized in Marbury v. Madison.” The Court itself didn’t assert the myth of judicial supremacy until 1958. And, as Abraham Lincoln put it in his First Inaugural Address:

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

In short, Marbury simply doesn’t stand for what Toobin imagines it to stand for.

Still too many liberals (and conservatives for that matter) believe that Marbury established judicial supremacy.  But what about the oath the Executive takes to "solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"?

And what about President Obama ordering his Department of Justice to halt supporting DOMA, a federal law?  I thought only the Supreme Court got to decide those questions???

Etch-A-Sketch

The following is from an exchange this morning between Romney campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom and a CNN anchor:

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.

FEHRNSTROM: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

When the main goal of your campaign is to convince voters that you actually have principles that don't shift depending on the situation, that was probably the worst thing to say.  The statement is, however, somewhat less of a major gaffe because it did not come directly from Romney.

About an hour ago, Romney had a press conference where he addressed the issue by calling himself a "conservative Republican" several times, thinking that would convince everyone.  At least he didn't call himself "severely conservative."

Audacity of a Dope

Earlier in the week VP Joe Biden (I still can't get used to that) called Operation Geronimo, the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound, the most "audacious" plan in the past 500 years.  So storming the beaches at Normandy, Washington crossing the Delaware, and Pickett's charge at Gettysburg didn't make the cut??

Prudence in Politics

At The American Spectator the following video was posted in today's "The Day Ahead" post:

This is a video from the Romney campaign that shows Rick Santorum publicly endorsing Romney in 2008.  But I don't get why this is such a smoking gun.  At the time, Romney was certainly superior to McCain in terms of political credibility and principle.  I would bet that most people who are against Romney today were for him in 2008.  The missing ingredient in all this is prudence.  Politics practiced at its highest level used to be called statesmanship (we now call them "leaders"), which is the ability to know the principles and use prudence, or practical wisdom, to achieve the principles given the circumstances.

Dingleberry

I had no idea that Gary Trudeau was still producing Doonesbury comics until I read this post on Power Line. Contained in the post was a sample of one of the latest works of comic genius by Trudeau, a real howler that shows them Republicans to be nothing but misogynist males who want to force more than just their views into OBGYN offices everywhere.  Here is the strip in question:

One could try to begin to describe the ignorance of basic medical practices and overall stupidity contained in this "comic" but it would just be a waste of time.

The Wages of Sin

Matthew Cantirino explores the first and second Godfather films and finds their teachings to be a rejection of Machiavelli by showing the effectual truth of the life without reason and revelation.  Cantirino explains what sets the Godfather apart from most other gangster movies:

In the absence of grace, the movies affirm, life becomes a power struggle, a fact which the Machiavellian Michael understands better than anyone else. Revenge becomes an obsession–a path which reaches its nadir in the second film when he cannot forgive even his own brother. But what’s remarkable about the films is that this existence is not glamorized, as many contemporary gangster movies or other elements of our culture are too eager to do. Michael has made it to the top (unlike, it ought to be noted, everyone else who competed–too bad for them), but even winning the contest of wills doesn’t grant fulfillment.

Michael Corleone slowly becomes a tyrant without friends, a man without God:

Ultimately, the films exhibit agreement with Socrates’ almost-preposterous assertion to Glaucon in the Republic that “the tyrant is the unhappiest of men.” As the series progresses, Michael eliminates everyone who has featured in his life, but he also becomes increasingly paranoid and ruthless. His initial promise to “go legitimate” within five years of his marriage is put on indefinite hiatus; killings which are supposed to settle problems inevitably lead to another murder, and another, as further plots are uncovered; trust collapses and love, even the much-exalted “family” love, is methodically eviscerated. The master becomes dependent on the slaves, and when he can no longer trust them, sets off on his own into the desert to throw himself off the temple. He is peerless–and that is a terrible thing.

Even though I've seen both films numerous times (the third one, not so much), I will have to watch them again after reading this essay.  As they say, please read the whole thing.

Mr. Mandate

From the Republican debates in 2008:

Charlie Gibson: Governor Romney’s system has mandates in Massachusetts, although you backed away from mandates on a national basis.

Mitt Romney: No, no, I like mandates. The mandates work.

As Bill Kristol points out, the problem is that Romney still believes this to be true.  Is a Republican managerial progressive better than a Democractic managerial progressive?  Bill answers that what we really need right now doesn't come from either of those two options:

Indeed, what Republican primary voters sense is that a technocratic and managerial mindset could prove an obstacle to coming to grips with the situation we face. If the problem is a liberty-encroaching unlimited government, we don’t need that government to run more efficiently. If the problem is a suffocating nanny state, we don’t need better organization of the nannies. If we have an opportunity to revitalize citizenship, we need leaders who view us not as clients to be managed or consumers to be served, but as self-governing citizens who would fare better without an overbearing and overweening government. If we are sick of being managed by liberal technocrats, we’re not going to be thrilled merely to replace their rule with that of moderately conservative technocrats.

Mitt Romney likes mandates. Conservatives—especially in light of Obamacare—don’t. Conservatives like liberty.

Be Prepared

News has now broken that before his death, Osama Bin Laden tried to organize attacks to kill President Obama.  Administration officials say that the threat was never serious (the plan was to attack Air Force One and aircraft holding David Patraeus as they took off from bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan).  Bin Laden's reasons for the assassination plot in his own words:

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

Who is Being Civil?

In the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn has a great piece on the way that liberals seem to get away with describing conservatives using language that should be reserved to describing radical Islamic extremists.  Bill really hits the nail on the head here:

What's interesting about all these usages is that they come without nuance. The liberals who deploy them mean them in their full pejorative sense: with "jihad" shorthand for a brutal war of fanaticism, "mullah" implying a religious fanatic, "Shariah" a synonym for an inhumane system of law, and so on. What's also interesting is that none of these words was invoked to describe an actual mullah, an actual fatwa, or an actual suicide bomber.

Though I think Bill misses something when he says that liberals will continue to do this type of thing because "they know the civility police will never be coming for them."  Well that's because they are the civility police.

Just Like Lincoln

Yesterday at a fundraiser (I think he had about five of them scheduled for Friday) President Obama said that the GOP candidates--who have been campaigning in Illinois for the upcoming primary on Tuesday--should be more like Lincoln, you know, just like Obama.  In case you haven't heard, Obama likes to compare himself to Lincoln from time to time.  Here is Obama's message:

“My message to the candidates is:  Welcome to the land of Lincoln, because I’m thinking maybe some Lincoln will rub off on them while they are here,” Obama said.

[...]

“Lincoln, the first Republican president, knew that if we as a nation through our federal government didn’t act to facilitate these things, then they likely wouldn’t happen,” Obama said, adding that he hoped the candidates visiting his adopted hometown “reflect on this great man.”  (He did not identify Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum by name.)

Well...there was also this thing called the Civil War that was going at the time.  And after the Civil War, it was the only time in history that the federal government shrunk in size and scope.  See Allen Guelzo's essay on this and other common misunderstandings and myths about the Lincoln Administration.  

And it is always important to point out that Lincoln's political philosophy was based on the natural right and natural rights principles of the American Founding.   Those principles are an anathema to modern liberalism which contends that we "can't force our values on anyone else" and that diversity of opinion is the end, not the beginning of the road to knowledge.

Thoughts From Hayes

I guess Rutherford B. Hayes got wind of Obama's put down and has some thoughts he would like to share:

He Shouldn't Quit His Day Job...Actually No, He Should

Today President Obama once again waded into historical analysis when he compared the GOP energy policy to Rutherford B. Hayes supposedly not seeing the point of the telephone and flat-earthers of the sixteenth century.  A recap from the speech today:

President Obama got a laugh out of a Maryland audience on Thursday when he mocked the Republican Party in a speech, comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the “Flat Earth Society” in Christopher Columbus’ day and President Rutherford B. Hayes’ apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself.

In mocking the GOP, Obama cited an anecdote about Hayes in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, he said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”

“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something."

One problem:  It was in Hayes' presidency that the first telephone was installed in the White House (along with the first typewriter and public display of the newly-invented phonograph).  Here is Nan Card, curator of the manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center with more:

While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.” You can read the full story here.

“He was pretty technology-oriented for the time,” Card said. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”

Also, another interesting point to note is the oft-cited flat earth claim which Obama repeated in his speech.  I guess it's supposed to indicate the enlightenment of the current age as compared to the barbaric, savage, racist, immoral past of our ancestors.  But the claim is one hundred percent false.  John Hinderaker from Power Line explains:

In fact, it was well known by educated people in the 15th century that the world was round. Not only that, they knew that the circumference of the Earth was around 25,000 miles; this had been calculated by the ancient Greeks, using triangulation. So when Columbus tried to raise money for a voyage in which he proposed to reach the East by sailing West, he had trouble because everyone knew that going West was not only an unknown route, but was the long way around the globe.

Never Enough

William Voegeli, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, wrote a book a couple of years back titled "Never Enough:  America's Limitless Welfare State."  Voegeli's main contention was that modern liberalism does not have a limiting principle when it comes to how far a government can reach into the lives of regular citizens.  The limitless principle that Voegeli examines also applies to the debate surrounding the right to abortion.

In his column on The Catholic Thing, Hadley Arkes notes that those who hold the right to abortion as a constitutional right  based on high principles do not have a coherent idea of the limit to the exercise of that supposed right.  Arkes' work in the creation and passage of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002 and protects babies who survived an abortion) bears out this idea:

...the opposition understood our bill better than many of our friends, for they understood the principle that lay at the heart of the thing. They understood that, if they conceded that simple premise to us, we would be able to raise the kinds of questions that could unravel their position: What was so different about that child five minutes earlier – but then five hours, five weeks, five months before it was born?

A recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics featured two professors openly arguing--although after drawing fire they contended it was simply an "academic" argument--that newborn babies are not "actual persons" and thus do not have a "moral right to life."  Arkes notes that these professors had borne out the logic of the right to abortion, or, as he contends, the right to a dead baby:

Just why controversy should flare over this article may be a puzzle, since the argument was quite straightforward, drawn from the familiar logic of the argument for abortion: If a child in the womb is afflicted with conditions such as Down syndrome or other “deformities,” conditions that the authors think would justify aborting the child in the womb, why should it make a difference that the child has been born? The child may still not have a “life worth living.”

[...]

But why call these killings “after-birth abortions.” Why not homicides? The authors reply that these are not yet real persons who are killed, for they are aware of no life plan, no “aims” yet of their own. Neither of course are young chidren, and if the test is an awareness of “aims” in life, there may be many youngsters in college who are candidates for an “after-abortion.”

The more people who confront the logic of the right to abortion, the more they recoil from what they see.  The moral sense of the people is still alive and well.

Pragmatism and Principle

If you need further convincing that Mitt Romney is just another in the long line of managerial progressives and in principle find nothing truly wrong with Obamacare, then this post by Paul Rahe is for you.  Please read the whole thing, but here is the take-away paragraph:

Mitt Romney knows next to nothing about the principles underpinning American government, and it has never crossed his mind that we cannot sustain political and personal liberty in the United States if we embrace the economic bill of rights proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944 and blur the distinction between public revenues that our elected representatives can rightly spend within the limits specified by the Constitution pretty much as they see fit, on the one hand, and the property that remains our own, on the other. In politics, the prospective Republican nominee operates on the same set of premises as Barack Obama. Both men presume that the property we hold is really public property – to be spent as the legislative power directs. Both take it for granted that it is the job of government to guarantee healthcare to everyone. Both are perfectly happy to take from the industrious and rational to support the greedy and improvident. If they disagree, it is only about the most efficient way to deliver the goods.

In reading this piece, I picked up on something that I've been forgetting to mention:  In the midst of his pseudo-Tenth Amendment defense of Romneycare, Romney maintains that the states should serve as laboratories for democracy, a cliche that has been included in many forgettable political speeches (and which is supposed to signal some high respect for the principles of federalism on the part of the speaker).  But who first coined that line?

It was written by progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932). Brandeis, who was nominated to the Court by President Woodrow in 1916, was a progressive who had great influence on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who famously discounted any idea of universal truth outside the positive law) and "favored federalist 'experimentation in things social and economic' as a means to progressive, statist ends."

Romney's reliance on Bradeis's dictum--albeit unknowingly I'm sure--is an interesting irony that tells us something important about Romney and the political philosophy to which he and most of the Republican presidents of the 20th century subscribe.

Same Old Song and Dance

To the utter disbelief of the New York Times, President Obama's poll numbers are dropping, even amongst women, the same women whom the evil GOP are warring against.  This is how the piece, which is titled "Obama Approval Rating Down as Poll Reflects Volatility" (as if he had nothing to do with this "volatility"), begins:

Despite improving job growth and an extended Republican primary fight dividing his would-be opponents, President Obama is heading into the general election season on treacherous political ground, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. 

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.

I can't see a similar story from the same outlook written about George W. Bush.  In fact, if I remember correctly, the Times was complaining about the horrible unemployment rate of 5.4% and what an ominous sign it was for the economy. 

As John Hinderaker notes in his take on the same Times piece, the original title of the story was a little different:

UPDATE: This made me laugh: the Times has changed the headline on its story from “Obama Approval Rating Shows Big Slip in Poll” to “Obama’s Rating Falls as Poll Reflects Volatility.” In other words, we at the Times are hoping that Obama’s rating will soon bounce back up again, and we will do all we can to make it happen.

In Honor of Woody Hayes

Today is the anniversary of the death of the legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes.  Harry Jaffa, a faculty member of OSU before his travels West, remembers the mark that Hayes left on the university in this essay.  I will quote Jaffa's thoughts in full:

History will record that Woody Hayes (who died March 12, 1987) and I began our careers at Ohio State the same year, 1951. No one in the press has taken note of this fact, and history is always slow about such things, so I will climb down from my pedestal that the world may be aware of this famous juxtaposition. I write of him as one who was a friend, albeit one who, unlike Woody, has always avoided controversy. I left Ohio State after 13 years — in 1964 — to the warmer and greener pastures of southern California, but Woody enjoyed another decade of great achievement in Ohio before ending his career with both a bang and a whimper. Alas, a national television audience watched him slug a Clemson player who had intercepted an Ohio State pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl, two minutes before the end of the game, which Ohio State lost, 17-15. And so ol' Woody passed into the night, defeated in the end by the only one who could defeat him: himself.

Woody's career, and its inglorious ending, somewhat resembled that of his hero: General Patton. Patton had become something of an anachronism at the time of his meaningless death in a jeep accident, shortly after the end of World War II. He was an anachronism because, at the very moment we grasped the hands of our Russian allies in victory, Patton declared that they had never been our friends, and were now our enemies. Of course, it was little more than a year later that President Truman declared much the same thing that Patton had declared, but when he died Patton was out of favor with all enlightened thinkers.

Woody was never popular with the Ohio State faculty. He was popular with the Ohio State legislature, and with the alumni and with the townspeople of Columbus. I do not believe that there was a single unsold seat in Ohio stadium during his entire 28-year tenure. I remember one bitter November Saturday when there were some empty seats — which was regarded as scandalous — but they were not unsold. This of course made him very much persona grata with the administration. In 1961 Ohio State won the Big Ten championship and the invitation to go to the Rose Bowl. By some fluke, however, the contract between the Big Ten and the (then) PAC 8 had lapsed, and university rules (which I believe had never applied, before or since) required a vote of the faculty to accept the Rose Bowl bid. The faculty voted the football team down. Ohio State did not go to the Rose Bowl that year, and Woody's recruiting was badly damaged in the years that followed. In fact, Woody's recovery from that episode, his coaching Ohio State to an undefeated and untied season, a Rose Bowl victory, and a national championship in 1968, is one of the great unsung comeback stories in sports history.

I remember the 1961 episode vividly. A typical liberal arts professor at Ohio State — in those years — lived his life in Woody's shadow. Most of those professors were not Ohioans and had earned their doctorates at Ivy League universities. They regarded Columbus, Ohio, as a kind of frontier outpost where they were temporarily exiled. Woody and his Saturday circus, they regarded as a Neanderthal ritual of the natives, from which they shudderingly held aloof. But what they resented most of all was what happened when they went abroad, anxious to tell the world of culture and light about the success of their fastidious efforts to preserve the purity of their souls amidst the bourgeois barbarism of Columbus. But the world of culture and light, alas, was often more interested in hearing about Woody and the team. Pity the plight of the poor literary scholar, who has labored years to produce a monograph on "The Use of the Circumflex in the Early Provencal Chanson." He arrives at the meeting of the PMLA, burning with the fire of anticipated recognition, only to discover that his professional colleagues, once having done their professional duty, turn the talk once again in the direction of Woody. I say I remember the episode vividly. I campaigned as best I could for Woody and the team, but it was a lost cause. Yet in some ways this was Woody's finest hour. There was an ugly mood on campus. This was before the campus riots of the later sixties, but it was something of an augury of things to come. The team had played its heart out to go to the Rose Bowl. The entire Columbus establishment (and Columbus, remember, is the State capital) felt that the team belonged to them, and to Ohio, and not to the rotten outsiders who by a quirk of fate had had the power to vote them down. But Woody stood against them. Before a great rally — in the light of the bonfire in which the crowd would gladly have immolated the objects of their anger — Woody defended the faculty. They had done their duty as they saw it, and we must accept the decision of the vote, he said. What they represented in the life of the university, he told the angry crowd, was far more important than the football program. He told the crowd to disperse, and the students to go back to their books. That ended the matter. Woody was a team player, and the university was his team. There was neither bitterness nor condescension in his manner. And I never heard of him complaining about it afterwards.

In 1956 Ohio State was placed on a one-year probation because of Woody's having given money to some of his players. I took my two boys to a pre-season warm-up with Woody at the Faculty Club that fall. In the course of the evening we asked him for his explanation of the episode. I have never seen that explanation in the press, and I give it here for what it is worth. This, mind you, was in the mid-fifties, long before the anti-discrimination laws of the following decade. Woody said that he got summer jobs for many of his players, but that it was often the case that the black athletes received less for the same work than the white athletes. When that happened, he said, he made up the difference out of his own pocket. He was proud of having done so, he said, and if need be he would do it again. Many I know who read this will regard it with cynicism. I can only say that I believed Woody then and still do. However brutally he may have treated them sometimes on the practice field, Woody's devotion to his players — whatever their race, creed, or color — was legendary. One story may stand for many others. One of his proteges had been admitted to Harvard Medical School, and was half way through his first semester. He had found the going rough, as so many first-year medical students do. And he was on the point of dropping out. Woody heard about it and took the next plane out of Columbus for Cambridge. And he did not leave Cambridge until he had the young man's promise to stay in school — the young man who is now no longer younger, but a very successful and distinguished member of the medical profession.

Farewell, Woody. Whatever his faults, we may say of him, as Antony said of Brutus, "This was a man."

Is Media Matters at it Again?

This story, which has been prominently displayed as a news item on Yahoo's homepage all day, is another classic example of the underhanded tactics the media uses in their attempt to filter and package the news, ready for instant consumption.  The story, written by George Stephanopoulos, is titled "Former Sarah Palin Adviser Says 'Game Change' Was 'True Enough to Make Me Squirm'" which would lead one to believe that the HBO movie Game Change, based on the book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, is an accurate account of the ill-fated McCain/Palin campaign.  But here is what Stephanopoulos says four paragraphs in:

Many of Palin's other aides, including the treasurer of the pro-Palin Super PAC, have  condemned the film, calling it everything from a "false narrative" to "sinful." To counter that "false narrative," Sarah PAC put out a video that juxtaposes scenes from "Game Change" with actual clips from the 2008 campaign.

And here is an important bit of information that one may find relevant:

This is not the first public clash of opinions between Palin and former adviser Wallace, who have had a rather high-profile feud since the campaign ended.

Wallace said in October that she based the mentally ill vice-presidential character in her fictional book, "It's Classified," off Palin. She told  ABC News' Top Line in October that Palin "seemed deeply troubled" at times during the campaign and that some of her behaviors "concerned me."

Of course many studies have been done that have determined over and over again that most people never get the end of news stories (a reason why anything semi-important in the New York Times is included from about A30 and on).  It's just strange that the one outlier would determine the truth about Palin.  Usually one doesn't determine a scientific theory based on the one variable that is vastly different than the rest.  Certainly the media would never have determined anything useful about Barack Obama during the 2008 just based on what Rev. Wright said?  Right?

Something Else is Missing

In this post, Steve Hayward has an interesting aside on Ron Paul and the Declaration of Independence (I left it out of this earlier post, of which the main focus was centered on the proper ground to marshal a philosophical attack on Obamacare).  Here is Hayward with more:

I don’t recall hearing Paul articulate the founders’ theory of individual natural rights which is the philosophical cornerstone of the founders’ constitutionalism.  For that matter, I don’t recall hearing Paul mention the Declaration of Independence; I suspect he dislikes the Declaration for reasons similar to Paleocons.

Steve really opens up Pandora's Box with this observation, but I will leave it to just a few thoughts:  Paul is part of a libertarian/Paleocon alliance that believes--with Stephen Douglas and John C. Calhoun--that the American Revolution was not at all a revolution (see Thomas Woods' Politically Incorrect Guide to American History):  it was a claim by the Founders asserting their rights as Englishmen.  Instead of asserting the natural right of revolution, a right stemming from their standing as human beings, the Founders instead believed they were seceding from the Great Britain and that the United States was really just a league of states, each state retaining its own complete sovereignty.  Here is Ron Paul explaining why secession is an "American tradition":

This also forms the basis of why Paul and others in this alliance, like Thomas DiLorenzo and Lew Rockwell, do not like Abraham Lincoln very much.  Here is Ron Paul in 2007 when he argued on Meet the Press that Lincoln started an unnecessary war and above all, overturned Founding principles:

In order to defend the natural right and natural rights principles of the American Founding, we have to be clear on what those principles are.  The battle for what those principles are and what their implications are wages on.

Civic Ignorance

Below are some words of wisdom that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted on Super Tuesday:

Santorum scoffs at notion that gov't creates rights. In other words, he doesn't believe in the US Constitution.

And here is a follow up tweet responding to those who were calling him out:

Dear Cons, show me where in the Constitution is god mentioned. In fact, it states "we the people" as the source of the rights (Preamble).

It makes civic education all the more difficult when one has absolutely no foundation on which to build anything.  Not that he would be at all interested but he could start out by reading this book.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

"Looks like somebody might've fainted up here, have we got . . . Somebody . . . EMS . . . Somebody . .  Don't worry about it: Folks do this all the time in my meetings," Obama said. "You always got to eat before you stand for a long time--that's a little tip. They'll be OK, just make sure--give them a little room."

Characterized by Virtue

Today the Indianapolis Colts formally cut ties with its Hall of Fame QB, Peyton Manning.  Ever since Jim Irsay, the owner of the team, and then-GM Bill Polian picked Manning over mega-bust Ryan Leif first overall in the 1998 NFL draft, Manning has arguably been the best QB in the league.  I have great respect for Manning and--if he truly is injury-free--I'm sure he still has a few great years of football left in him.  Here is a sample of what Irsay said about Manning:

"This is difficult because of the things Peyton has done for our city, our state and our franchise," Irsay said. "There will be no other Peyton Manning."

I am reminded here of how Aristotle defined virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics:  virtue can be described or it can be taught by witnessing someone characterized by virtue.  Peyton Manning shows us the truth of this statement.  

The Influence of Media Matters

Rumors are running large that almost 40 advertisers have dropped their ads from Rush Limbaugh's show.  This ABC News story published on the Yahoo newsfeed claims that "42 advertisers, two radio stations and two musicians have closed the door on Limbaugh."  They include Rush's counter claim that he made today on his radio show that there is a stark difference between local advertisers and national advertisers--he doesn't receive any dollars from local advertisers because of the difference in revenue streams between local and national advertising.

But who is really behind this story?  The answer:  Media Matters and its President David Brock.

It's interesting what stories the MSM picks up on...

The Principles of the Constitution

In the ongoing project of touting his new book, Steven Hayward has some great thoughts on the lack of sustained and intellectual talk about the Constitution.  As Steve argues, in order to truly understand the principles of the Constitution, you have to do better than simply make some vague references to the enumerated powers in Article I.  Ron Paul in particular gives one pause to wonder whether he would find the Air Force to be constitutional, which is not specifically listed among the powers in Article I (I am sure he would but it would certainly betray his strict, literal constitutional interpretation that anything not listed is therefore unconstitutional). 

But all of this would not rebut the common liberal argument for unlimited government:  reliance on the Necessary and Proper Clause.  Here is more:

No doubt a liberal will find any use of government power to be within the necessary and proper clause, and many courts will rightly not wish to interfere with the determination of the legislative branch on its interpretation of both its enumerated powers and their extension through the necessary and proper clause.  This may include, unfortunately, Obamacare, which is why I have thought it a minor mistake to rest the case against it on the narrow grounds of whether the individual mandate violates just the Commerce Clause. This seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

Here is Steve citing Chief Justice John Marshall from his opinion in Marbury v. Madison for proper guidance on how to view the Necessary and Proper Clause:

Even without the aid of the general clause in the constitution, empowering congress to pass all necessary and proper laws for carrying its powers into execution, the grant of powers itself necessarily implies the grant of all usual and suitable means for the execution of the powers granted. Congress may declare war; it may consequently carry on war, by armies and navies, and other suitable means and methods of warfare. So, it has power to raise a revenue, and to apply it in the support of the government, and defence of the country; it may, of course, use all proper and suitable means, not specially prohibited, in the raising and disbursement of the revenue. And if, in the progress of society and the arts, new means arise, either of carrying on war, or of raising revenue, these new means doubtless would be properly considered as within the grant. Steam-frigates, for example, were not in the minds of those who framed the constitution, as among the means of naval warfare; but no one doubts the power of congress to use them, as means to an authorized end.   

This is all the more important when arguing against the wrongs inflicted by Obamacare, because, as Steve rightly maintains (and is in agreement with Hadley Arkes), focusing on the Commerce Clause misses the forest for the trees.

Reliance on the principles of the Constitution, e.i., separation of the powers, federalism, and the Founders' natural rights philosophy, would make a much stronger case than the current popular arguments.

A Defense of Rush

Mark Carollo comes to the defense of Rush Limbaugh in the most concise and well thought out defense I've read so far.  Here are a few excerpts:

Rush, in his entertainer’s way, went over the top to make a point. Since when should any human being, corporation, or government entity that is not engaging in the sex act be forced to pay for someone else’s birth control? Absurd.

Rush apologized for his choice of words. But apparently, that’s not enough to satisfy the liberal media. The Washington Post went on the offensive in a Saturday editorial. President Obama gave our young hero a phone call.

On the media's extremely inconsistent treatment on these matters:

There are literally dozens of instances in which liberal entertainers and commentators have called Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Laura Ingraham, and other conservative women “sluts,” and “whores,” and have gone to great lengths to describe various violent sex acts they’d like to perform on them. I told my researcher to stop looking when she reached 50. It took less than five minutes. 

This includes Georgetown University President John DeGioia:

To Georgetown University’s president who found time in his busy schedule to publicly attack Rush, but seemingly didn’t have time to explain to the Obama advance people in April 2009 that covering the Jesuit symbol IHS (Iesus Hominem Salvator — Jesus Savior of Mankind) when President Obama spoke at Georgetown would be an insult to the University and the Catholic Church — that the lesson of our first Pope denying our Lord three times still rings true 2,000 years later — how about acting like the leader of a Catholic university and telling the young woman that her public whining was an embarrassment to the university she claims to represent?

It goes without saying that much of what Rush does is satire; his humor is a tool for education in order to show the absurdities and inanities of today's politics in a way that doesn't want to make people hang themselves (e.g., Lou Dobbs and sometimes Glenn Beck).  It doesn't excuse what he said, but I've been noticing that in many, if not all, of the stories I've read so far the MSM (too many to link) doesn't even seem to get this premise even though I'm sure they listen to him daily, as Rush says, for their show prep.

The One Thing Needful

I was reading this post by John Yoo when I came to this sentence:

Decide a case in a liberal direction, and the [New York] Times will say you have "grown" in office and are "exercising statesmanship" (See, e.g., Justices John Paul Stevens, Harry Blackmun, Sandra Day O'Connor, and now Anthony Kennedy, who were all appointed by Republican Presidents but became more liberal once on the Court).

That about sums up the thousands of words spilled in the pages of the Times over the years concerning the Supreme Court.

Profiles in Courage

This morning on his radio show, Don Imus called Rush a "fat, gutless, pill popping loser" for his comments on Sandra Fluke and his subsequent apologies.  Imus of course famously got in trouble for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy-headed hos."  As Andy McCarthy observes:

Of course, as Rush eloquently explained today in publicly apologizing, yet again, to Sandra Fluke, his error in judgment was to succumb to a temptation at odds with the personality fans have come to know, and the person friends have come to know, over the past 25 years: the temptation to resort to the base language of unfounded personal insult — the language that is the Left’s stock-in-trade and that Imus often seems unable to complete a sentence without. The post-Rutgers Imus, much like the pre-Rutgers Imus, is a well-trained house pet. He’s got down perfectly when you need to grovel, when you can afford to be sanctimonious, and which targets are safe for his bile-laced tirades. What a profile in courage.

 Imus's courage is more along the lines of Dan Rather than Aristotle.

The Fire is Still Burning

One post involving a New York Times piece is one too many, but I can's resist commenting on this story on Rick Santorum's Catholic faith.  Here is a description of the ground of Santorum's politics:

Mr. Santorum’s religious beliefs would come to infuse every aspect of his political life — not just his views on social issues like abortion, but also his work to overhaul the welfare system, increase financing to fight AIDS in Africa and promote religious freedom.

While that maybe be true as far as it goes, the Times certainly is not familiar with the natural law teachings that are also a part of the Catholic Church, which does not depend on sectarian belief or faith for the truth of its arguments.  Here is Hadley Arkes with more:

What has been strangely lost among certain Catholic jurists and lawyers is that the natural law finds its ground in “the laws of reason,” not in appeals to faith or “belief” or woolly sentiment. Anyone tutored in those laws of reason may be able to explain then that, from a person’s height or weight or color, or from his disabilities, such as deafness, we cannot draw any moral inferences as to whether we are dealing with a good or a bad man, who should be welcomed or shunned. 

On Santorum's rigid adherence to his traditional conservative Catholic faith:

Unlike Catholics who believe that church doctrine should adapt to changing times and needs, the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops.

I wonder if the Times would ever put something like this in a story about Barack Obama--positing contrary views first and then describing Obama's views at the end of the sentence which infers that those views are out of the mainstream and probably wrongheaded.  But if a wrong is a wrong--which Santorum thinks abortion falls into that category--then the changing times do not at all alter the wrongness of that thing.  This is simply a confusion of applying principles to changing times and the principles themselves.       

Gray Lady Crashing and Burning

In today's edition of the New York Times, business columnist Jay Nocera takes some time to dole out some hard truths for Republicans:  they need to become less "ideologically" rigid, and only by electing Rick Santorum and losing big in the general election will the purification process begin.  Here is Nocera on lessons Republicans should learn from Democrats:

During the McGovern-Mondale era, the Democrats were exactly where the Republicans are now: the party had been taken over by its most extreme liberal faction, and it had lost touch with the core concerns of the middle class, just as the Republicans have now. When I spoke to Whitman this week about what the Republican Party needed to do to become a more inclusive, less rigidly dogmatic party, she said, “It’s going to take some kind of shock therapy.” Those terrible losses in 1972 and, especially, in 1984 were the Democrats’ shock therapy. Just eight years after Mondale’s loss, Bill Clinton was elected president.

What happened in the interim? In effect, moderate Democrats wrested the party back from its most liberal wing. Moderates like Richard Gephardt and Charles Robb began meeting weekly to rethink what the party stood for. One of the people involved in those discussions was Al From, who would later go on to create the Democratic Leadership Council, which became the platform for new Democratic ideas — and, for that matter, for Clinton’s presidential run.

Interesting. I always thought the Times considered that McGovern and Mondale lost because of the incompetence of their respective campaigns--certainly not because of their political beliefs.  By way of John Hinderaker at Power Line, here is what the Times had to say in 1972 about McGovern:

The New York Times urges the election of George McGovern for President of the United States. We believe that Senator McGovern’s approach to public questions, his humanitarian philosophy and humane scale of values, his courage and forthrightness can offer a new kind of leadership in American political life. …

A McGovern administration, the Times believes, would reverse the unmistakable drift in Washington away from government of, by and for the people. …
On virtually every major issue from the war to taxes, from education to environment, from civil liberties to national defense, Mr. McGovern…seems to us to be moving with the right priorities, with faith in the common man, and within the democratic framework.

And here is what they said in 1984 about Mondale:

[Mondale's] election would mean franker, fairer decisions on the hard economic choices that the President has concealed during the campaign. Mr. Mondale would offer an enlightened and humane conception of what Government should, and should not, do. Most of all, he would bring to the White House the will to control nuclear weapons. …
Walter Mondale believes in a sturdy defense. He also stands in the middle of the bipartisan community that long ago learned to abandon the fruitless quest for nuclear superiority. In this election, he represents all those Republicans and Democrats determined to tame the nuclear threat.

Lawyer Mondale offers pragmatic skill at making the best of reality. … Walter Mondale has all the dramatic flair of a trigonometry teacher. His Nordic upbringing makes it hard for him to brag. The first debate may have been the high point of his political personality. But there’s power in his plainness.

Precisely by not dramatizing issues, he has consistently produced consensus and agreement, as a Senator and as Jimmy Carter’s Vice President.

Seems a little bit different than what Nocera maintains, doesn't it? 

Nocera interviewed Christine Todd Whitman for his op-ed, and her evidence for the rightward drift of the Republican Party in recent years was the fact that in 2008, “'John McCain got two million more self-identified social conservatives than George Bush in 2004, yet he was soundly defeated. Constantly looking for ways to drum people out of the party is not a long-term, successful strategy.'"  I am sure this assessment got the silent nod of approval from Nocera.  But here is what the Times had to say about McCain just as far back as 2008, before he became the extreme and ideologically rigid Republican nominee: 

Mr. McCain, who has delighted in sticking his thumb in the eye of mainstream Republicans throughout his political career, is now accumulating a base of support among party regulars who see him as the strongest general election candidate in the remaining Republican field.

[...]

Many object to his moderate views on immigration. Pro-business conservatives have attacked his positions on the environment, pointing to legislation Mr. McCain has co-sponsored to address climate change. Conservatives have also attacked his high-profile criticism of Republicans in Congress over pork barrel spending and of President Bush on the early conduct of the Iraq war.

I think the next thing to be eliminated at the Times, along with all pretenses of objectivity, is the search button on their website.

Apology Tour on Hold

The President is not only apologizing for mistakes made by marines when they accidentally burned a Koran in Bagram Air Force Base but he is also apologizing to Sandra Fluke, the now famous Georgetown law student.  In a telephone call to her last week, he "offered his support" and called Rush's comments "inappropriate personal attacks."

Where are the apologies for the family of Brian Terry, a Border Patrol Agent who was killed on the border between Arizona and Mexico?  And if it is now unfair to attack a person giving testimony or answering questions in front of Congressional committee, then Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito require apologies too.

It just seems that if one did not know what Rush said or did and simply observed the reactions to it, one would assume he walked down a city street and opened fire on unarmed civilians.

On the Passing of Andrew Breitbart

With the sudden passing of conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart, there has naturally been an outpouring of support from all corners of the globe: 

Good! F#*k him. I couldn't be happier that he's dead. - Matt Tabbi from Rolling Stone Magazine

Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.  - Matt Yeglesias, Slate

And the Daily Kos has planned to invite some close friend and family to Breitbart's funeral:

Although the news of Andrew Breitbart’s death is still fairly fresh, the merry band of faceless marauders at the Daily Kos have decided it is time to use his death as an opportunity to make political hay.

A post dated March 1 by “dragon82a,” titled “Let’s Help Andrew Breitbart go out In Style..Get Westboro Baptist Church to Protest Him” encourages readers to post on the Westboro Baptist Church’s Facebook page calling for the group to protest Andrew Breitbart’s funeral.

Obviously all this is just a very small sample of the kind words and thoughts directed towards the memory of Andrew Breitbart.

Right Reason

The newly formed Center for Jurisprudence of Natural Law, a project of the Claremont Institute, has just come out with a new online journal titled Right Reason that is focused on applying natural law reasoning to past Supreme Court cases.  Hadley Arkes, the center's director, has just put out a new essay that examines what should be the line of attack against Obamacare:  that it is violation of the natural rights of the governed.  Here is Hadley on why we should break away from the current cast of argument that is centered on the Commerce Clause:

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the government was virtually compelling unwilling vendors to enter into commerce with people of another race with whom they had no wish for commerce. Set against that landmark and the accretions of the past 70 years, it was no longer so momentous to say that the government, under Obamacare, would be forcing us-gasp-to buy a product, medical insurance.

That is, with the new inversions of the Commerce Clause by the Court over the last 70 years, would it truly be remarkable if they somehow find some way to expand that Clause even further?

The Court's most obvious break from reasonable Commerce Clause jurisprudence can be found in Wickard v. Filburn.  In that decision, Justice Robert Jackson found that a farmer cannot grow wheat on his farm for the consumption of himself and his family without being regulated under the Interstate Commerce Clause.  But where did the interstate portion come into play?  Justice Jackson said that if the actions of the farmer were considered in the aggregate, that its effects were multiplied thousands of times over, that that would greatly affect federal policy on agriculture.  And, as Hadley shows us, the same argument could be made of the right to abortion.  Abortion in the aggregate affects 1.3 million lives a year and so it could sensibly be regulated under the Commerce Clause.  But

this argument would not stand a chance of succeeding. For we could speculate with high surety as what our friend Laurence Tribe, at Harvard, would say when faced with this kind of an argument: namely, that the policy that restricts abortion would run counter to a principle that must be firmly embedded in the logic of the Constitution as nearly a first principle of personal freedom. My hunch is that he would offer an argument then that transcends the argument moving in the familiar grooves of the Commerce Clause.

An argument on more firm grounding, or the natural law reasoning on which the Commerce Clause itself rests:

Past the formulas of the Commerce Clause understood and believed mainly by lawyers, there was something elementary that could be understood by ordinary people and caught crisply by Sarah Palin when she saw in this new scheme the immanence of "death panels": She saw, that is, that any system of national care managed by the government would lead, as it has led in all such systems, to schemes of rationing. One way or another there would be a denial to patients of surgeries and treatment, based on budgets drawn in the aggregate. And the denial would not come from an insurance company, chosen by a customer among several companies, and subject to appeals. The denial would come with the powers of law, from an agency that would have little fear of being corrected from above, by higher authorities.

Just A Fluke

The latest controversy that has been brewing involves Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law school student, and Rush Limbaugh.  Fluke testified before a congressional committee on birth control, and in her testimony, she said that because birth control pills cost her $3,000 a year, it should be picked up by insurance companies--which naturally falls in line with the Obama Administration's HHS mandate regarding religious institutions.  Rush Limbaugh picked up on this and said that because Ms. Fluke needs all of this birth control, she is a "slut" and a "whore."  The media of course has been running with this ever since and have heavily condemned Rush and the Republican Party for allowing him to be their spokesman. 

It goes without saying that Rush should have said it differently.  We should keep the standards high and not stoop to levels that are beneath us.  But the point he was making was fairly good:  Why should these types of things be federally mandated?  In essence, this turns the liberal argument against conservatives on its head--it's liberals who want to patrol the bedrooms and breach the supposed right to privacy discovered by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut.  They are supporting more government intrusion in these matters, but for years they have been screaming at the threat of conservatives' monitoring the bedrooms of the U.S.  And why that private sphere does not extend to regulating light bulbs, T.V.'s, computers, washers/dryers, cell phones, virtually all food products, stoves, microwaves, refrigerators, video game systems, paint, etc., is anyone's guess.

Also, here is an interesting point to ponder from Daniel Foster of NRO:

The outrage against Rush is highly selective. He considers himself an entertainer, and routinely says outrageous and/or un-PC things in the service of being provocative (in both the good and bad senses of that word). By rights, anything he says should be judged against the standard of liberal political entertainers like Bill Maher, Janine Garafalo, or if you like, Keith Olbermann. Yes, Rush’s audience is orders of magnitude larger, and his influence on the conservative movement equally outsized. But that doesn’t make him John Boehner. So why is Nancy Pelosi acting like the whole of the congressional conservative opposition to the mandate just accused an arbitrary 20-something woman of sexual promiscuity?

Especially in light of Bill Maher's recent donation of one million dollars to the Obama campaign, every vile thing he said should be examined with the utmost moral scrutiny, right?