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Archive for 2010
June 28, 2010
WHAT’S WORSE than a politician who cheats?
IN MASSACHUSETTS: Scott Brown Outpolls Kerry, Obama. “US Senator Scott Brown, who only months ago was a little-known figure even within the tiny band of Republicans in the state Senate, not only catapulted to national stature with his upset US Senate victory, but is today the most popular officeholder in Massachusetts, according to a Boston Globe poll. After less than five months in Washington, Brown outpolls such Democratic stalwarts as President Obama and US Senator John F. Kerry in popularity, the poll indicates. He gets high marks not only from Republicans, but even a plurality of Democrats views him favorably.”
INDEED: “Not that being an environmentalist makes a guy a saint, but Gore seemed almost desperate to have us see him as more moral than the average Al. . . . The greenest of the green people I talked to felt betrayed. Gore was their leader and the movement is now, um, stained. The woman even said, according to the transcript of her interview with Portland, Ore., police made public on the Internet, that her ‘Birkenstock Tribe’ friends told her to ‘suck it up’ and not tell anyone or the ‘world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.'”
“Suzy, if you tell what Joe did to you after the dance, we’ll lose the big game!“
AT 3 PM: The Ed Morrissey Show.
MORE ECONOMIC NEWS: Consumer spending on goods drops in May. “The first event of Recovery Summer was the revaluation of Q1 GDP from a previously-announced annualized rate of 3.2% to 2.7%. New home sales dropped 33% last month, and existing home sales dropped 2.2% in May. The Commerce Department followed that with the news that consumer spending on goods dropped in May, while spending on services rose … mainly on energy costs. . . . Instead of improving, we’re sliding backwards. That’s not a Recovery Summer, it’s Relapse Season.”
A RETURN TO “regulation by deal?”
CAMILLE PAGLIA: No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class. “In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women.” Maybe this accounts for the “marriage strike.”
And it’s funny how all the lefty yammering was supposed to free us from “middle-class morality” — but, when they were done with it, somehow the chains were tighter than ever. I suspect the slow recognition of this fact is one reason for the popularity of Mad Men . . . .
MICHAEL TOTTEN INTERVIEWS MICHAEL YOUNG about his new book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle.
FROM JEFFREY GOLDBERG, An invitation for Glenn Greenwald. “As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique. I explained that Greenwald believes the invasion was a criminal act, to which Salih responded by asking if Greenwald had ever visited Iraqi Kurdistan. I said I didn’t know, not having too much contact with him, on account of him hating me. So Salih asked me to extend an invitation to Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. . . . Obviously, I think this is a good idea, because I view the subject of Iraq as a complicated one, and I think that Greenwald has an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of the situation.”
THE GRACE SLICK / GLENN BECK connection. In the future, we will all be Glenn Beck for 15 minutes. Or maybe that’s the past. . . .
“THE SEXIST NOTION THAT it’s better for women to marry up.”
OKAY, having quickly skimmed the McDonald opinion, a few thoughts.
First, it’s 5-4. Though a pro-gun-rights opinion may pacify the gun-rights crowd to a degree, the closeness of these decisions is likely to keep them active in upcoming elections.
Second, it shows how little influence legal academics have. Virtually all of us have been saying that Slaughter House is lousy and that privileges or immunities should be far more significant, but only Justice Thomas was willing to go that far.
Third, it really is interesting how much emphasis the majority, and Justice Thomas’s concurrence, put on the racist roots of gun control. See this article and this one by Bob Cottrol and Ray Diamond for more background. And isn’t it interesting that this is happening on the same day the Senate’s last Klansman went to his reward?
Fourth, the Chicago law, being virtually identical to the DC law, is very likely to go down. The big question is, what comes next?
Fifth, and personally, I’d like to note that a lot of “respectable” commentators were, just a few years ago, calling the individual-rights theory of the Second Amendment absurd, ridiculous, and something that only (probably paid) shills for the NRA would espouse. (I’m talking to you, Garry Wills and Robert Spitzer, among others). Yet it is impossible to read this opinion, and the Heller opinion, and conclude that the individual right is really just a “fraud” concocted by the NRA. So were those who were saying so until quite recently being dishonest, or merely inexcusably ignorant?
UPDATE: On the other hand, I should note what Bob Cottrol said to me at the NRA convention after Heller: “We owe this to the open-mindedness of liberal law professors.” That includes people like Larry Tribe, and Sandy Levinson, whose 1992 Yale Law Journal essay, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, really kicked things off by signaling to the legal academy that it was okay to write about this. Also William Van Alstyne, for his essay The Second Amendment And The Personal Right to Arms.
IN THE MAIL: From Stephen B. Waters, Individuals, Journalism, and Society.
NICK GILLESPIE: Let’s Not Forget Sen. Byrd’s Negative Legacy. “As the encomia mount like rotting, fly-buzzed piles of the pork-barrel spending he so systematically shoveled back to his West Virginia home, let’s not forget the late Sen. Robert Byrd’s most undeniable legacy: Undermining belief in politicians as little more than self-serving glad-handers on the hunt for more and more taxpayer money for their constituents.”
CHICAGO GUN CASE RULING: Second Amendment Binds State and Local Governments, via the Fourteenth Amendment. Still trying to download the opinion; will have thoughts later.
UPDATE: Got it now. Reading. Very interesting to see both the majority and Justice Thomas reference the racist roots of gun control so strongly. Also, while Alan Gura didn’t win on the privileges and immunities argument, he did better than he might have. And by arguing that way, he made due-process incorporation of the Second Amendment, which looked radical not too long ago, look moderate by comparison!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes: “The Overton window in action!”
MICHAEL BARONE: Americans Relate To Founders, Not Progressives. “The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats’ programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats’ policies comes from David Brooks’s ‘educated class’: people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us. Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today’s America.”
BYRON YORK: “One question that hasn’t received enough attention in the whole David Weigel/Washington Post brouhaha is whether the Post needs a reporter to cover the conservative beat in the first place. There’s been a lot of discussion of what kind of reporter would be best on the beat — a conservative, a liberal, or someone studiously uncommitted? — but there has been less talk about why such a reporter is needed at all, or whether there should even be a conservative beat. In the past several years, newspapers have assigned reporters to specifically cover conservatives, but they haven’t done the same thing for liberals.”
WELCOME TO East Germany On The Potomac?
SCOTUSBLOG will be live-blogging Supreme Court opinion releases today.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
ONE DAY ONLY: $79.99 Magellan GPS. The built-in AAA Tourbook info is a nice touch.