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Category Archives: Political Commentary
An Early Obama Letter
…confirms his inability to write:
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
I am completely unsurprised by this. I think it at least partially explains why we aren’t allowed to see his transcripts.
One In Four Democrats
…are racists:
In response to the question, “Do you think the Democratic party should renominate Barack Obama as the party’s candidate for president in 2012, or do you think the Democratic party should nominate a different candidate for president in 2012?” — 72 percent said they wanted to see Obama renominated. But 27 percent, slightly more than one in every four, said they wanted to see Democrats nominate a different candidate. One percent had no opinion.
Only one in four?
AGW Is Just The Latest
A brief history of hysterical environmental false alarms. Some of which have killed millions. Rachel Carson’s holocaust was bigger than Hitler’s.
But I Thought He Was A Dumb Uncle Tom
There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonio Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.
Kind of surprising that this would come from Toobin. I hope he’s right. I recall reading an interview with Thomas at Reason back in the eighties, and being pretty impressed with him at the time.
Hmmmm…[searching]…here it is.
[Update a few minutes later]
Now that I’m reading the whole thing, I’d urge everyone to read the whole thing. Really.
The prospect of a serious judicial rehabilitation of the Tenth Amendment is real, though perhaps not immediate. And change this sweeping is unlikely to come simply because a relative handful of judges and lawyers change their minds on an issue of constitutional interpretation. A broader change would need to take place in society so that the idea of transferring more activities from Washington to the states appeals to public opinion to the point where presidents appoint judges who share this philosophy, the Senate confirms them, and the new majority begins to set a new direction for the law.
Arguably, we are nearing a zone where something like that could happen. The apparent Republican front-runner Governor Rick Perry has strong views on the Constitution. His book Fed Up! Our Fight To Save America From Washington is essentially an essay calling for a return to the concept of a federal government limited to its enumerated powers. Let unemployment stay above 8 percent through November of 2012 and President Perry could be sending the names of judicial nominees to a Republican Senate. With a couple more allies on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas could get pretty close to the lava pits of Mount Doom.
I have to confess, I like the LOTR analogy.
The Telescope That Ate Space Science
I have some thoughts on Webb over at Pajamas Media this morning.
Why There Is No Jobs Growth
Boehner points to an even scarier fact about this Obama-inspired avalanche of new federal regulation: By the government’s own estimates, at least one of the multiple new major rules being proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could cost as much as $90 billion. Some independent analysts put the cost of new EPA regulations at more than $1 trillion. Boehner last year asked Obama to provide Congress with a list of all proposed regulations with estimated costs of $1 billion or more. Obama never produced the requested list, so Boehner is again asking the president to provide it to Congress. We hope the speaker isn’t holding his breath waiting.
The economy will recover after one or the other of two events: Barack Obama is no longer in the White House and is replaced by someone who will undo this madness by executive order, or the Republicans get veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can fix all of this atrocious law. Both options will be available fourteen months from now.
[Update a while later]
I’m glad that the White House doesn’t listen to Mickey Kaus. He could probably come up with more than ten things that Obama should have done differently. Of course, the president has put himself in a political pincher — he can’t support a real jobs program any more, because it will cost him his base, which is all that he has left after all the ineptness of the past two and a half years:
Obama cannot propose a real jobs program. His constituents would rebel. A real jobs program attacks too many of the core beliefs of his party, such as minimum wages and higher taxes on the better off. Even if his presidency rested on it, Obama couldn’t emulate Bill Clinton’s 1996 Welfare Reform Act that triangulated him from his own party. There is no way for Obama to enunciate the equivalent of Clinton’s “We must end welfare as we know it.” His core beliefs rule out such a dramatic move to the center.
…This laundry list suggests why President Obama will not announce a real jobs program. His constituents would launch a primary challenge. Some might even call for his impeachment. For these reasons, we can expect pabulum and platitudes in his jobs speech, despite projections that high unemployment is about to become our “new normal.”
But if some other president did them, the economy would start to recover almost immediately. In fact, make that immediately. Just announcing that these acts were going to be taken would kick start the economy, if the announcement was credible.
Speaking of losing his base, he’s in big trouble in must-win states:
Now, Democrats’ strongholds in states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia are quietly walking away from him.
Out here, the sting of dissatisfaction pulls people away from Obama. Yet it doesn’t exactly pull them to the far right; many have settled comfortably at center-right.
Washington’s blame-rhetoric could push Middle America further right, however.
Late last week, the president hit a new low in Gallup’s tracking poll, with 38 percent approval. He blamed “certain” members of Congress for that slide in popularity.
“I have to say, I am tired of the constant blame on everyone but himself,” said John Dattilio, strolling here on a summer evening with his wife and children as they balanced melting ice cream cones.
Obama took to pointing fingers when his poll numbers started to slip last fall.
So far, he has blamed the stagnant economy on ATMs, ditches, Slurpees, corporate-jet owners, the Tea Party, Republicans, Japan’s earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Arab Summer, George Bush, and “fat-cat” Wall Street something-or-others. The kitchen sink may be next.
His numbers are tumbling in the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and New Hampshire – states he must win in 2012.
Jeff Greenfield has a good question: “Will anyone vote for Obama in ’12 who did NOT in ’08. For GWB in ’04: women, (a few) more Jews, and evangelicals who stayed home in ’00.”
Hard to imagine who it would be. I imagine if the Republicans put up a candidate that some people find too odious, they’ll just stay home.
The Current State Of Play In Space Policy
Clark Lindsey has a nice summary, for those who want to catch up.
Another Bad Day For The Church Of AGW
Some more thoughts on those cosmic-ray studies. It is an interesting theory, and as he notes, it does have more explanatory power. However (as with the greenhouse theory) the science is far from “settled,” and will likely remain so for years.
You Can’t Pray In Public Schools
…but you can ostracize kids because they don’t adhere to the sacred rituals of the green religion:
“Ziplocs are the biggest misstep,” said Julie Corbett, a mother in Oakland, Calif., whose two girls attend a school with an eco-friendly lunch policy. In school years past, she said, many a morning came unhinged when the girls were sent to school with disposable sandwich bags.
“That’s when the kids have meltdowns, because they don’t want to be shamed at school,” Ms. Corbett said. “It’s a big deal.”
Someone should bring a First-Amendment suit.