Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Delhi Gang Rape

…has Indian women getting guns for protection.

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away:

Gun laws in India are very strict, but when a common citizen applies for a license, he is almost treated like a criminal… If you are a farmer living on an isolated farm or a woman in Delhi who is at risk … do you have to prove a specific threat? This is absurd. So you have to be raped, looted or killed to be given a license?

When will the UN take up self defense as a fundamental universal human right? I won’t hold my breath.

To Those Who Oppose The Constitution

A response:

…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.

But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.

Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.

It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.

…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.

The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.

Chuck Hagel

Just a note to his defenders: Being a Vietnam vet, even a decorated one, is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to be Secretary of Defense.

[Late afternoon update]

In response to Chris Gerrib’s question in comments, here’s why he would be a bad SecDef (not to mention difficult to confirm):

…isn’t Hagel’s statement a direct attack on the motives and honesty of those senators who supported the war—including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry? Indeed, what does it say about Chuck Hagel, who voted to authorize the war in October 2002? He knew it was a war for oil, didn’t say so at the time, but voted for it anyway? And then, a few years later, at the height of the fighting by American soldiers in Iraq, he proclaims with false braggadocio the alleged truth that it’s all just a war for oil?

Is President Obama really going to nominate this man as secretary of defense?

He’s done worse. And will.

The Left’s War On Science, Part …

It turns out that fracking is perfectly safe, and the New York state government tried to hide the evidence:

Greens are quick to defend their climate change position with scientific evidence and have positioned themselves as a movement wedded to science. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that evidence is a flag of convenience for a movement that is rooted in emotion and passion far more than it likes to admit.

Because it doesn’t like to admit it at all, even though it’s mostly that.

The Constitution

The Left is now quite open in its contempt for it, and the law.

Thomas More would have been appalled:

…And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Laws are for the little people.