Archive for 2012
April 4, 2012
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: 4 Indiana Dems charged with election fraud in 2008 presidential race. “Prosecutors in South Bend, Ind., filed charges Monday against four St. Joseph County Democratic officials and deputies as part of a multiple-felony case involving the alleged forging of Democratic presidential primary petitions in the 2008 election, which put then-candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Indiana ballot. The officials are accused of taking part in a scheme to fake signatures and names on the primary petitions needed to run for president. Court papers say the plan was hatched by local Democratic Party officials inside the local party headquarters.”
DIRECTIONS TO THE SYCOPHANTS: Obama Instructs Journalists On How To Report His Positions.
WELL, WOULD YOU? Bad news: Jay Carney doesn’t like questions about Obama’s budget. “To cleanse the palate, a simple question: Since only 51 votes are needed to pass a budget in the Senate and there are 53 Democratic and left-leaning independent senators, why doesn’t smilin’ Harry Reid ram through O’s latest spending blowout? The White House gets awfully fidgety when the media presses them on this, to the point where even former OMB director Jack Lew was forced to play dumb about how many votes are needed for Democrats to pass this thing. Any theories? Any hypotheses for why The One might be nervous about vulnerable red-state Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Jon Tester taking a vote on a budget that calls for another $1.3 trillion deficit this year and a cool $901 billion deficit next year?”
April 3, 2012
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Why my posts have gotten shorter.
AARON WORTHING: Obama Stumbles Badly on Judicial Review (Update: Audio Link Added). Love the Bart Simpson image.
UPDATE: Paul Ryan: Obama’s getting “more partisan and desperate by the day.” Yep.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, well, he’s still got the sycophants: Associated Press Chief Offers Lavish Praise for Obama. He’d better hope that’s enough.
STEVEN HAYWARD ON Obama’s Assault on Judicial Review:
I’m grateful for the favor Obama did for us yesterday of exposing his extreme constitutional ignorance, with his comments on how it would be “unprecedented” for the Court to strike down a law passed by a “strong majority” in Congress. (As if a House margin of seven votes is a “strong” majority.) True, he walked back the comment today, but surely because his statement was not merely indefensible but outright embarrassing to his media defenders.
I’ve been growing weary of hearing people mention that he’s a “constitutional scholar,” since he never published a single thing on the subject either as editor of the Harvard Law Review or as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School. But hey—he taught constitutional law, didn’t he?
Not really.
Meanwhile, the judiciary is not amused: Fifth Circuit calls out DOJ lawyer: Is your boss now claiming that courts don’t have the power to strike down laws? “The courts may choose take Obama at his word, unless he explains that it was just a campaign speech and not intended to represent the position of the Executive Branch on the matter. The Fifth Circuit’s ‘homework assignment’ is a fairly gentle reminder to the President that he actually leads the United States government and not just the campaign for his reelection.”
Related: Obama Walks Back Supreme Court Threat, Still Gets It Wrong.
Hey, Obama’s so bad on this that Ruth Marcus is complaining. “Obama’s assault on ‘an unelected group of people’ stopped me cold. Because, as the former constitutional law professor certainly understands, it is the essence of our governmental system to vest in the court the ultimate power to decide the meaning of the constitution. Even if, as the president said, it means overturning ‘a duly constituted and passed law.'”
As I said earlier, if I were in Congress I’d introduce a proposed Constitutional amendment providing for elected Supreme Court Justices, and ask for the President’s support . . . .
UPDATE: Former Obama Student Thom Lambert: My Professor, My Judge, and the Doctrine of Judicial Review.
Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun. Or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise. Or maybe your high school math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 + 2 = 5. You’d be a little embarrassed, right? You’d worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, or mathematical literacy.
Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to “overturn[] a law [i.e., the Affordable Care Act] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Putting aside the “strong majority” nonsense (the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act got through the Senate with the minimum number of votes needed to survive a filibuster and passed 219-212 in the House), saying that it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that violates the Constitution is like saying that Kansas City is the capital of Kansas. Thus, a Wall Street Journal editorial queried this about the President who “famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago”: “[D]id he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?”
I actually know the answer to that question. It’s no (well, technically yes…he didn’t). President Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago. Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers — the old “structural Constitution” stuff — is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student). Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment. (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Romer v. Evans, etc.) Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks.
Fortunately, another bit of my educational background somewhat mitigates the reputational damage inflicted by the President’s unfortunate comments. This morning, the judge for whom I clerked, Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, called the President’s bluff.
More at the link.
Plus, B.O. Don’t Know Lochner.
More: Glass Ceiling, Glass Jaw. “Many have commented that last week was the worst week (so far) for the Obama administration, but I don’t think the apparatchiks have quite yet realized how bad things are going to get for them.”
SCIENCE: Novel compound halts tumor spread, improves brain cancer treatment in animal studies. “Treating invasive brain tumors with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation has improved clinical outcomes, but few patients survive longer than two years after diagnosis. The effectiveness of the treatment is limited by the tumor’s aggressive invasion of healthy brain tissue, which restricts chemotherapy access to the cancer cells and complicates surgical removal of the tumor. To address this challenge, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have designed a new treatment approach that appears to halt the spread of cancer cells into normal brain tissue in animal models. The researchers treated animals possessing an invasive tumor with a vesicle carrying a molecule called imipramine blue, followed by conventional doxorubicin chemotherapy. The tumors ceased their invasion of healthy tissue and the animals survived longer than animals treated with chemotherapy alone.”
NBC WHITEWASHES THE ZIMMERMAN DECEPTION. Hey, that sounds like a Robert Ludlum title: The Zimmerman Deception. But I think NBC is more worried that it might be a libel suit. And with reason.
UPDATE: Reader Dan Ruch sends this.
ANOTHER UPDATE: “That is the most outrageous, truly evil editing I’ve ever seen. . . . I hope Zimmerman sues.”
ROMNEY wins in Maryland.
UPDATE: Also in Wisconsin. And D.C.
KEVIN DRUM AT MOTHER JONES ON NBC’S ZIMMERMAN DECEPTION: “This is now fated to be Exhibit A in conservative charges of mainstream media bias for about the next century or so. And who can blame them? What a cockup.”
AN OBAMA-ERA CHANGE THAT EVEN BILL CLINTON WOULDN’T APPROVE. (Possibly NSFW).
DALLAS: Widespread Tornado Damage; Elementary & High Schools Damaged. “Multiple tornadoes threw tractor-trailers in the air, damaged both a Forney elementary school and high school, leveled houses and shut down airline traffic out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport as one of the worst storms in years hit North Texas Tuesday. Baseball-sized hail punched holes through car roofs, and a Red Cross spokeswoman warned the breadth of the destruction may not be cleared until well into Wednesday.”
EXPLOITED WORKERS: Interns, or Free Labor?
AT AMAZON, top deals in Patio, Lawn & Garden.
BOB ZUBRIN on why carbon emissions are good for us.
Also, his new book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, is out today.
DAVE FREER: Yes, You Can.
I’ve always avoided bringing politics into my posts, but it seems to me that publishing went wrong when they brought political philosophy into their strategy. The strategy essentially boils down to : You’re inferior. We know what is good for you. Trust us, we (the government) will look after you. Oddly enough every good communist or socialist I ever met (and yes, I have met some earnest good people believing in these philosophies), wanted to _help_ people, but assumed they’d be ones deciding what was good for those (inferior) people. Not them, of course. The first part of the philosophy is often left unstated but, hell, if I’m not inferior, why would ‘we’ know better than ‘me’ what is good for me?
And out of this Nanny-state-in-publishing spilled into a sequence of pro-their-political-outlook (because it is good for you) and anti anything that actually smelled of the individual triumphing, especially without authority helping. The core message, the mantra of ‘nanny’ is just “You CAN’T. We know what is best for you (and for readers) and you CAN’T DO THAT. If you try, it’ll all end in tears. And thus a lot of what they brought out was predictions of the misery those who didn’t sing their song (and march in time to their music) would bring. The BAD people, who weren’t good (the correct kind of) government…
Which, in a nutshell is why “Can-do” books are out of fashion. (which – as a South African, I was raised to believe was an intrinsic American value. My Dad picked it up from his dealing with ‘Yanks’ in the war. Do you know how weird I found the shattering of this illusion? It’s certainly still true of some… but there is an awful lot of ‘I can’t, nanny must. I’ll be good so she will’, which makes me want to puke in my breakfast.).
Read the whole thing.
PLUG: Reader Dr. Ken Strumpf writes:
You mentioned that you’re a friend of Prof. Vejas Liulevicius so perhaps you’d like to shamelessly plug his several college level courses available through The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) at http://www.thegreatcourses.com/. I’ve bought them all, most recently his course on Espionage and Covert Activities. His magnum opus remains, however, his magnificent 36 lecture survey on World War I.
My only affiliation with this company is as a satisfied customer of nearly 20 years. If a person wished to obtain a true Liberal Arts education he or she could do far worse than working their way through the Great Courses catalog. Actually, this ties into your Higher Education Bubble theme since this is far cheaper than four years at college, can be done at the student’s own pace and is available to people of all ages. This company has helped me get the education I should have gotten during my own time at college.
He mentioned that he had done something like this. And, yes. What colleges provide that these courses don’t is certification. But (1) people who just want to learn may not care about that; and (2) extra-collegiate certification is coming.
UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “Extra-collegiate certification is the nightmare haunting upper administration of the four-year publics: it represents the greatest threat to their business model.”
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does Your Vagina Really Need To Be “Rejuvenated”?
A BRIGHT SPOT FOR RETAIL: Ammunition Sales Soaring.
THE END OF EMPLOYMENT? Two Scary Graphs.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on videogames.
STILL MORE on the Obama Campaign’s acceptance of money from phony donors. “This isn’t the first time AVS protections have mysteriously disappeared from Team Hopenchange’s donations page, and it’s not just the missing security-code field that got them in trouble in 2008. Remember how they made a point of accepting money from untraceable prepaid credit cards then too? . . . I recommend re-reading that old WaPo piece in its entirety as it cites the case of a retired insurance manager whose name had been stolen to donate $174,800 to Obama. In reality, the manager had never donated a cent.”