Barak. The old civics course updated for the modern era. Who cares about that musty old constitution, anyway?
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Is The “Slaughter Rule” Constitutional?
I don’t think so. A lot of discussion over at Volokh’s place. I’m pretty sure that if they do this, the courts will get involved.
I Won’t Miss The Bomber
But I hope there’s not a lot of collateral damage.
Gotta love Ramirez. I was always amazed that he lasted at the LA Times as long as he did.
[Via Hot Air]
Woodrow Wilson’s Third Term
Thoughts from George Will on the parallels between Wilson and the current president.
How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls “the hubris of reason”? Beinart writes: “He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic rules, he suggested; ‘then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.’ It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.”
Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said: “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a Calder mobile — touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.
So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved” rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people,” aka politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. President who first was president of the American Political Science Association.
It’s worth noting that Wilson was the first fascist dictator we ever had as president, and a model for much of Mussolini’s program. We’ll never know what he might have done had he failed in his bid for a third term — the nation was saved by his stroke.
Five Lies
1. Bold government action staved off a Depression, saving or creating 1.5 million jobs.
“Just remember,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said on November 1, 2009, “a year ago today, last year, you had markets around the world come to a stop. Economic activity just stopped, came to a standstill, like flipping a switch.”
Geithner implies that the American business climate improved substantially in the first year of the Obama administration. In fact, nearly every indicator, from employment to freight transport to rents to retail sales to real estate, has headed steadily south. In some cases, such as unemployment, the numbers have been far worse than the Obama economic team’s worst-case projections. In others, such as real estate, the weakness of the market is masked by expensive government support, including but not limited to the unkillable First-Time Homebuyer Credit, an assault on loan underwriting standards (see Lie No. 2) by the Federal Housing Authority and the government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the completely opaque $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).
The $787 billion in stimulus spending authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is now best known for its inflated and unsupportable job creation numbers. At press time, Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina D. Romer (who, confusingly, made her academic reputation proving that fiscal stimulus did not help the U.S. economy during the Great Depression and World War II) was giving the stimulus credit for 1.5 million American jobs in 2009. All efforts at checking her claims, however, have turned up very different numbers.
There’s a lot more.
Et Tu, Mary Ann?
Dawn Wells thinks that a Gilligan’s Island remake has to have diversity.
She is roundly and justly mocked at Free Republic. With a bonus Biden/Obama photoshop.
She just lost my vote in the next “Mary Ann or Ginger?” poll.
End The Slaughter
Mark Levin is calling for her to be expelled from Congress. Good luck with that.
And Dan Riehl says that the president is on the verge of an impeachable offense. Good luck with that, too.
For what it’s worth, I thought that George Bush should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold. In doing so, he failed to keep his oath of office to defend the Constitution. It’s politically craven to sign a bill while saying that you think that it’s unconstitutional, and hope that the Supreme Court will fix it (they didn’t, at least not until recently). If a president believes that a bill is unconstitutional, it is his constitutional duty to veto it, and say why. It is the job of all three branches of government to obey and protect it, not just the judiciary. I’ve long given up any hope of Congress giving a damn about it, but I expected more of a Republican president. Silly me.
Pot-Kettle Alert
A Colorado politician accuses Amazon.com of “tyranny.”
As the old British expression goes, their problem is that they lack a sense of irony.
Civil Disobedience
Check “other race” and write in “American.”
[Early afternoon update]
As a response to some commenters, here’s an explanation by Mark Krikorian why you should write “American,” and not “human”:
The most common response from readers was that you should put “human” as your race, or even “100 yard dash.” The problem is that those responses will be written off as cutesy, like answering “frequent” when asked about your sex, and won’t be reported by the Census Bureau. “American,” on the other hand, is clearly a political protest against government race laws, and is included when the Bureau reports the results, or was in 2000. In fact, the number of people answering “American” grew from 12.4 million in the 1990 census to 20.2 million in 2000, “the largest numerical growth of any ancestry group,” according to Wikipedia.
Join the crowd.
The Economic Ignorance
…of Pat Buchanan. Some thoughts:
True, the United States imports a lot of stuff, particularly stuff made by low-wage, low-skilled workers. Everybody’s got a comparative advantage, and sweatshops aren’t ours. I can live with that. But here’s a shocker: The majority of the stuff we import is not consumer goods. The majority of what we import is stuff we use for manufacturing. As Daniel Ikenson reports, as recently as 2006, 55 percent of our imports were industrial components, i.e. stuff that goes into our factories as inputs and comes out as products. Ikenson: “Meanwhile, U.S. factories remain the world’s most prolific, accounting for more than 20 percent of the world’s added manufacturing value. By comparison, Chinese plants account for about 8 percent. And manufacturing is thriving in large measure because of international trade. Manufacturing exports and imports hit records in 2006.”
These kinds of arguments aren’t academic. When implemented as policy, protectionism can destroy, or prevent the creation of, trillions of dollars worth of wealth. It was one of the few areas of policy that Bill Clinton got right.