For the GOP, this is more than just an opening; it’s a magical messaging moment, which, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, conservatives shouldn’t let go to waste. “This is a classic example of where they can walk the walk,” says Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute. This isn’t really a drug-legalization issue; it’s a states’ rights issue and a limited-powers issue. All conservatives have to agree on is that the federal government might have better things to do with its freshly printed money than try to enforce a nigh-unenforceable law that local voters and leaders think was a bad idea in the first place.
That’s how Clarence Thomas sees it, too. In his dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Raich — a case that decided that California couldn’t allow home-grown medical marijuana — Thomas wrote that “local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not ‘Commerce . . . among the several States.’” And, therefore, it’s not in the purview of the Feds. “Our federalist system,” he continued, “properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other States to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”
Just sub “Washington and Colorado” for “California,” and you have a constitutionally sound, politically popular, stupidly simple criticism of the White House. If the GOP is going to be competitive in 2016, it has to communicate to young people that intrusive federal government makes their lives worse. It has to communicate that it’s the party that respects personal choice and individual responsibility. And it would probably help to communicate that when in doubt, the GOP doesn’t automatically take the side of the insanely expensive branch of the federal government that breaks into people’s homes, shoots their dogs, and imprisons them because they added a funny ingredient to their brownies.
Memo to the New York Times, New York publishers, and other morally clueless individuals scratching their heads over the Petraeus scandal: If you are writing a biography and either you or your subject are married to a third person, and you have sex, you have done something wrong. No mystery, no dilemma, no agonizing introspection needed.
Of course, knowing what is right is the easy part. Doing it can be hard. But if you are genuinely confused about the morality of what presumably happened in this relationship, it’s time to get your moral compass reset.
The problem is that we’re not allowed moral compasses any more. It’s too judgmental.
And of course, what they did was wrong even if there was no biography involved. But we’re not supposed to talk about that, just as we’re not supposed to criticize women who have children out of wedlock. Because, you know.
Wayne Hale has an interesting excerpt from a recent speech by Admiral Gehman on the Columbia loss. I may incorporate this into my space safety book. Hard to believe that it will be ten years in February.
Absent a culture of liberal and particularly anglospheric values, democracy can be catastrophic. It’s why the Founders established a republic. Not to claim that Africa was well off under colonialism, but much of it was certainly better off. Just ask the residents of what used to be Rhodesia.
Note that, despite the derangement of some, this has almost nothing to do with the Tea Party, which was successful in 2010 because it pretty much ignored them. Unfortunately the Democratic operatives with bylines (like George Stephanopolous) wouldn’t allow that to happen this year.
And this is ridiculous, and one more sign of the decline of Old Blighty.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all those men died in Flanders’ fields so that this schmuck could burn a poppy on the Internet, but that’s certainly the sort of thing that Americans have died in battle for, and many of them did die at Ypres and other places for that right, even for non-Americans.
I’ll try to keep this at the top today, so keep scrolling.
