Let’s hope there are a lot of traitors there:

Brandishing a little red book listing his desired 69 revisions to Venezuela’s charter, Chavez exhorted his backers to redouble their efforts toward a victorious “yes” vote in the Dec. 2 ballot.

“He who says he supports Chavez but votes ‘no’ is a traitor, a true traitor,” the president told an arena packed with red-clad supporters. “He’s against me, against the revolution and against the people.”

People here who support this budding despot, like Jimmy Carter, should be ashamed of themselves. But I think they have no shame.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here are some of the potential traitors standing in food lines, waiting for milk.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

I wonder if the leche lines are why he’s lost his lead?

…the survey was the latest blow to Chavez. He has suffered a series of defections over his plan, including an ex-defense minister who had restored him to power after a brief 2002 putsch but who called Chavez’s reforms a new “coup.”

“The debate over voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ has burst into the very heart of Chavez’s support base,” Leon said in an interview. “We can see moderate Chavez backers ready to vote ‘no’ even though they like him.”

The question is, what will he do if he loses? Have the “traitors” shot?

This seems a worthy cause to me.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

It is, for example, absurd that we’ve decided the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of morality in this country and it is even more cockeyed that, having arrived at this absurd place, we continue to appoint lawyers to the court on the assumption they are the experts best qualified to adjudicate not merely the law (which is fine, of course) but right and wrong and all of the mysteries of metaphysics and meaning. Why lawyers? Why not priests, doctors and philosophers too

Glenn Reynolds has a column on DC v Heller at the New York Post today, and a podcast with the lawyer behind the lawsuit. He makes a pretty good case for why the court will have difficulty doing anything but upholding the appellate court decision, and the original meaning of the Second Amendment.

The SCOTUS is going to grant cert in DC v. Heller.

This is another huge story (two in one day, with the stem cell breakthrough). They are finally going to resolve, one way or the other, if the purpose clause can allow a government to deprive people of their civil rights. It will be a sad day for liberty if they overrule the appeals court, and essentially eviscerate the Bill of Rights of one of its most powerful one.

The pen is mightier than the sword, so they say, which may be why they made freedom of speech the first amendment, but the fact that the right to bear arms is number two is probably a good indication of the degree of importance attached to it by the Founders. Without that one, all the rest are ultimately at risk to a new tyranny.

The audio of the king of Spain telling Hugo Chavez to shut his pie hole is being downloaded as a ringtone:

In Venezuela, a group of students who oppose Mr Chavez’s government have also been downloading the ringtone, a US newspaper reported.

“It’s a form of protest,” a 21-year-old student in Caracas told the Miami Herald. “It’s something that a lot of people would like to tell the president.”

As that great philosopher, Nelson Muntz (more than) once said, “Ha ha!”

Here’s a cross-dressing “artist” with Islamaphobia:

Speaking at a meeting organised by the Art Fund, Perry said that it was simple fear which stopped him from addressing Islam in his work. ‘I don’t want my throat cut’, he said.

I’ll bet that dress he’s wearing won’t pass muster with the fashion police, let alone under Sharia law.

Mark Steyn writes that the world should be thankful for America:

…Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas

Mark Steyn writes that the world should be thankful for America:

…Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas

Mark Steyn writes that the world should be thankful for America:

…Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas