Best Sign from 2010 Tax Day Tea Party

 ...said "I can see November from my house!"

That's if you don't count the pink-haired college kid with one that said "Bigots Go Home."  Which is equally priceless.

A Little Paranoia is a Good Thing

Rich Lowry makes the interesting point that political paranoia, like most things, is historically good in moderation.

Chesterton

I've been reading G.K. Chesterton like crazy lately.  If I believed in reincarnation I would be fairly certain that a small, diminished part of Chesterton's soul found it's way into me.  I am constantly surprised at how perfectly he describes the things I've always known and felt, but never heard adequately expressed.

It's surprising that someone writing at the turn of the 20th century can be so relevant today, but it really shouldn't be.  Since human nature is unchanging, it's utterly predictable that we would continue to have all the same old arguments dressed up in new clothes.

Everyone should read him.  Everyone.  I'm reading Heretics right now in Volume 1 of his collected works.  It was written before his conversion to Catholicism and is the lesser-known predecessor to his more famous Orthodoxy.  His arguments are so stunning that I've decided to collect and read each volume of his collected works.  There are about 35 volumes.  Should be a fun "bucket list"-type undertaking.

Julie would make fun of me for using the word "fun" to describe it, but hey...to each his own.

Let the Games Begin

Justice Stevens is retiring.  And at a mere 90 years young.

Europe is a Free-Rider

Pure gold from Goldberg.

*****

If We Europeanize, Europe Is in Trouble
We can’t become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America.

...

Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.

The most obvious and most cited illustration of this fact is national defense. Europe’s defense budgets have been miniscule because Europeans can count on Uncle Sam to protect them....  If America Europeanizes, who’s going to protect Europe? Who’s going to keep the sea lanes open? Who’s going to contain Iran — China? Okay, maybe. But then who’s going to contain China?

But that’s not the only way in which Europeans are free-riders. America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it’s usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn’t seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.

If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?

Europhiles hate this sort of talk. They say there’s no reason to expect America to lose its edge just because we have a more “compassionate” government. Americans are an innovative, economically driven people. That’s true. But so were the Europeans — once. Then they adopted the policies they have today and that liberals want us to have tomorrow.

Thaddeus McCotter Rules

Greg Gutfeld recently explained on Red Eye  what makes Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) so awesome:  If you were making a movie and needed someone to play the part of the crusty, old, heartless conservative - based on looks alone, you would pick Thaddeus McCotter.  I mean, the guy is Montgomery Burns.  Eeeeexcellent.

And yet, he's actually the smartest, funniest and best communicator on Capitol Hill.  Not impressed yet?  How about this: he's in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing guitar in the world's longest concert.

The internet it teeming with videos of Rep. McCotter giving lessons in awesomeness, but this interview from PJTV is one of my favorites.  Around the 3:20 mark McCotter wonderfully explains exactly where Republican political philosophy needs to be:  Right at the intersection of free-market economics and community-style government.

Libertarians who focus on unrestrained markets and unfettered individualism have it wrong.  Republicans believe government is valuable, but only on a small scale.  Communities, churches, families, voluntary associations - these are what effective government looks like.  Despite the pop-culture caricature of conservatives, we are primarily driven by a concern for others, rather than a concern for efficiency and profitability.  But when this concern for others is dictated by those in a far-removed, centralized government that bears none of the costs of the sacrifice it imposes on its citizenry, the result is tyranny.  That is what is unacceptable to conservatives.

*****
UPDATE:  The uncanny resemblance between McCotter and Mr. Burns made me remember my favorite "evil conservative" doppelganger (I'm starting to detect a trend here):

Krauthammer on Obama's Nuke Policy

The Grinch hits one out again. "Either insane or ridiculous." Classic.

Monsters Do Exist

I love this piece from Jonah Goldberg.  This sentence sums up the theme:

Meanness is no longer innate; it’s the unfortunate side effect of being misunderstood, the forgivable self-defense mechanism of victims.

Some people will think he's being a little paranoid; sometimes movies are just entertainment, not tools of propaganda - and I think he would wholeheartedly agree with that. But he's not out to censor anyone, he's making a point about our society's increasing tendency to excuse bad behavior. It's hard to deny the power of his argument.

Not every monster is a misunderstood victim. Some of them are just monsters. It's a valuable exercise to try to understand why people act they way they do - but evil that can be understood is no less evil.

I also agree with him that our society has incohenetly made judgmentalism the only inexcusable vice (If you consider someone to be judgmental, aren't you being judgmental?), and that is an extremely disturbing development.

*****
UPDATE: And here's a great little comment from John J. Miller:

There was a time when we knew a monster when we saw one — and understood that some nasties need to have their heads chopped off and their mouths stuffed with garlic. Nowadays, however, vampirism and its related maladies are just alternative lifestyles. Condemning them is an unforgivable rendering of judgment and a crime against the imperatives of moral relativism. A society that has trouble recognizing monsters in its art probably will have difficulty identifying terrorists at its airports.

Some Thoughts on the Census

After hearing that many people in Chicago were receiving duplicate census forms, I began to wonder if that might throw the accuracy or impartiality of the process into doubt. The particularly cynical side of me wondered if bureaucratic slip-ups could be intentionally targeted to engineer a desired result in certain parts of the country. I know what you're thinking, but no - I don't also suspect that the Russians are behind it.

Have no fear! The Census Bureau assures me that they have "procedures to eliminate duplicate forms. There is an ID number associated with each household’s form. This prevents us from counting you more than once." Ah, an ID number. Thank goodness. Now I can sleep easy.

Okay, so let's assume that the ultra-professional temporary hires being paid to sort millions of forms for the Census Bureau have neither the means nor the inclination to tamper with the super-duper, double-encrypted, kryptonite-laced ID numbers that determine distribution of government funds to their own neighborhoods. What assurance can people have that political considerations aren't driving the determination of which communities will get two shots at the Census?

Well, today Steve Pendlebury at AOL News put all my fears to rest. You see, the Census Bureau is only sending duplicate forms to "about 40 million homes in areas where response was low in the 2000 census."

Ah. So this isn't a tactic to engineer a desired result, it's just a way to...um...give people in certain parts of the country a little extra encouragement to fill out the form. There. No problem, right? I mean, it's only going to places where response was low in 2000.

Question: If the purpose of the Census is to give us an accurate count of the population, how is it possible to say that response in a particular area is "low"? I understand that there are other indicators of population that allow us to infer a rough estimate to compare with census returns. But if a preconceived idea of population in a particular city is used to determine the accuracy of the census...what is the purpose of the census?

More importantly, if the Census Bureau is empowered to take extra measures to ensure a particular rate of return in certain areas of the country, how childlike would one have to be to claim that this process (being inherently opaque to public scrutiny) is not subject to political considerations or pressures. And by implication, how can we have any confidence in the results?

When the government takes steps to engineer results that circumvent their notion of public stupidity, the result is always a fiasco. This is because government is made up of people - the same people whose stupidity the government aims to outflank. And all people are much better at pointing out the stupidity of others than they are at recognizing their own.  And yes, that includes me.  I have no idea how stupid I am.

Kumbaya Foreign Policy

This is precisely why you don't put a law professor/community organizer with no executive, foreign policy or military experience in charge of your country.

I would usually be glad to see president Obama essentially handing the government back to conservatives in 2010 and 2012, but in this case he's also putting my life in danger. So maybe not such a good thing, on the whole.

*****
Obama Limits When U.S. Would Use Nuclear Arms

by DAVID E. SANGER and PETER BAKER
Published: April 5, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.
...
Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack….
*****

I agree with Allahpundit's analysis at Hot Air:

All this is, really, is a symbolic gesture of good faith to put pressure on Russia and China to reduce their own stockpiles. Why we think they can be trusted to do that, especially when the United States is handing them a tactical advantage by reducing its own stockpiles unilaterally, is beyond me. But then it’s also beyond me why Obama would suspend development on any new forms of nuclear weapons, which the new policy also demands...

...In limiting the nuclear deterrent to nuclear weapons (and, in certain cases, biological attacks) instead of WMD generally, doesn’t this create an incentive to focus on developing bio and chemical weapons? In most cases those are less dangerous than nukes, but nukes are also harder to develop and more easy to monitor. Do we really want tomorrow’s A.Q. Khans focusing on smallpox instead? Exit question two: If the point here is to raise the taboo on using nuclear weapons, doesn’t that actually make them more enticing for jihadi fanatics?

Obama Zombies

Is this the most effective book cover ever?

I haven't read it (I rarely read books about current political events - seems like a better idea to let things marinate for a little while before drawing any book-length conclusions), but I don't think I really need to. I lived through the past few years (at a public University and in Chicago, no less), so I have a pretty good understanding of the sort of juvenile groupthink that brought us to where we are today.

Still, might be worth picking up.

Kudos to The Seattle Times

Well this is unexpected. The Seattle Times editorial board has come out in support of the constitutional challenge to ObamaCare. Honesty is always refreshing.

*****
We think McKenna has a good case, and one the progressives who condemn him ought to appreciate. These critics are so often right about the dangers of corporate power, and particularly the rapacity of insurance companies.

But if it's federal power, and it's for a social purpose, and Barack Obama is presiding over it, they set their judgment aside. They accept a 2,000-page bill on its label only. They accept its promise, almost surely vacant, of cost savings. They overlook the deals cut with the insurance and pharmaceutical interests. They shrug off the "cornhusker kickback." And to those who invoke the Constitution, they become shrill.

This page supported Obama, and we still like him. But we also support checks and balances on federal power, and review of this law by the Supreme Court.

Classic New York Times

Just unbelievable.

The New York Times has posted this picture alongside an article titled "When Does Political Anger Turn to Violence?" It likens the Tea Party protesters to Bill Ayers and the Weathermen - a domestic terrorist organization that bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department in the early Seventies.

I suppose if one wanted to give the Times the benefit of the doubt, they would say that this is intended to illustrate a sliding scale of public anger (i.e. Tea Partiers represent harmless frustration, whereas the Weathermen represent dangerous, violent anger) and this fits nicely with the theme of the article. But as Laura Ingraham said, "We're smart here...we know what's going on."

"Free Speech" in Canada

This is an interesting interview (video embedded at the end of this post). Americans tend to assume that Western democracies share our views of basic human freedoms. That is simply not the case.

Susan G. Cole, interviewed by Megyn Kelly below, offers a very clear and measured account of the Canadian view of speech rights. She makes the case that "free speech absolutists" actually pose a threat to meaningful discourse, and thus that government has a role in restricting speech that it considers disruptive. It follows then, in her view, that people like Ann Coulter should not be welcome to speak in Canada, because Coulter engages in mere "provocation."

My honest assessment is that this calm, rational, thoughtful woman is more dangerous to civil discourse than a thousand Ann Coulters, Keith Olbermanns, Michael Savages or Michael Moores. We should listen to her patiently, and then mock her mercilessly for being ridiculous.

If Ms. Cole claims to believe that nations have a legitimate interest in silencing those whose views are inconsistent with their national values, isn't it remarkably cynical for her to appear on an American television network to oppose extensive rights of free speech - which we hold as dear as life itself?

Consider: Ms. Cole's viewpoint is completely antagonistic to the social fabric of our nation. She apparently thinks we would be right to say that she has no business spreading her ignorance among our people. If we were like Canada, her perspective would never be heard. But the irony of the situation doesn't even seem to occur to her.

But of course she's not talking about herself. She's one of the enlightened ones who should always have the right to say what they think. She's talking about all those other nasty people.

She says (emphasis added) "We're trying to create an environment which is a safe place to think and learn, and I don't think Ann Coulter contributes to that." And yet the University group that invited Coulter and the students who turned up to hear her apparently thought she would "contribute". Futhermore, I think that Ms. Cole's viewpoint is dangerous and squelches meaningful dialogue rather than contributing to it. How do we know who is right? Why does this woman assume that her own viewpoint is so unassailable that contrary views should be silenced? How is that anything but fascist?

People like Ms. Cole will always find ways to justify denying to others the very rights that they would fight to the death to protect for themselves. And that is the definition of tyranny.

The Constitutional Challenge to ObamaCare

I went to law school, but I'm certainly no expert on Commerce Clause jurisprudence. My knowledge on the subject doesn't go very far beyond Wickard and Lopez. That said, based on the current composition of the Court and the general trend away from an expansive reading of the Commerce power, I can't help but think that the individual mandate is ripe for rejection by the Court.

True, the smart money is always on the Court upholding a far-reaching piece of legislation. But an individual insurance mandate is so obviously distinguishable from previous Commerce Clause precedent (which is totally unpredictable as it is) that the arguments briefed in this case should carry a lot of weight. It'll be a close one.

For what it's worth, here are just a few analysts in support of a Constitutional challenge to the individual health insurance mandate under the Commerce Clause:

Randy Barnett via PJTV

Jonathan Turley (certainly no lockstep conservative) in USA Today.

Judge Andrew Napolitano via his Facebook page

Ilya Shapiro at CATO.

*****
Update: The Seattle Times is on board.