BARRY RUBIN: Secrets Of The Soft-Core Obama Supporters. “If Obama wins, he will be elected by those who stayed home because they thought Romney not conservative enough. If Obama loses, it will be because of people who voted for Romney and then lied about it.”
Archive for 2012
April 21, 2012
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REX MURPHY: dog and president show, starring Romney and Obama. “So now the presidential campaign is down to basics. Americans are to be given a stark, unequivocal choice. Which is it to be? Dog in a Crate, or Dog on a Plate? I do not think we have seen such clarity of choice in any presidential race of our time.”
Say, remember back when Obama was complaining that “They talk about me like a dog?” Maybe he just didn’t want to be dinner. . . .
STANDING HER GROUND: “She-Hulk” Springs Into Action Against Subway Perv.
DAVID BERNSTEIN CORRECTS THE RECORD:
It seems that liberal commenters on constitutional law just can’t resist bringing of the issue of child labor, regardless of whether what they’re saying is historically accurate. The latest offender is Dahlia Lithwick. In criticizing Judge Janice Brown’s call for a return to pre-New Deal, Lochnerish concern for economic rights Lithwick writes, “Let’s put aside the extraordinary nature of Brown’s substantive argument, which holds so little regard for ‘democratic processes’ and would gladly upend such odious regulatory regimes like child labor laws.”
So let me repeat it one more time. In the middle of the so-called Lochner era, the Supreme Court upheld state regulation of child labor by a 9-0 vote (Sturges & Burn Mfg. Co. v. Beauchamp, 231 U.S. 320 (1913)). I’ve blogged before that I’m not aware of ANY court in any American jurisdiction ever holding that child labor laws violate a constitutional right to economic freedom or “liberty of contract”, and no one has written in to correct me (for examples of state courts upholding child labor laws within a few years of the Lochner decision, see Ex Parte Weber, 149 Cal. 392 (1906); United Steel Co. v. Yedinak, 87 N.E. 229 (Ind. 1909); Bryan v. Skillman Hardware Co., 76 N.J. 45 (1908); People v. Taylor, 192 N.Y. 398 (1908); State v. Shorey, 86 P. 881 (Ore. 1906)). All fifty states passed child labor laws before 1937, when Lochner was overruled. Economic liberty concerns were not a barrier to the spread of such legislation. . . .
Federal child labor laws before FDR’s appointees took over the Supreme Court: constitutionally questionable as an exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce. State and local child labor laws: clearly constitutional as within the police power. Doctrine did make a difference, and it’s high time that Lithwick and others stop relying on myths that could be quickly rebutted with a modicum of research.
Well, if it takes a “modicum of research” instead of simply repeating political cliches, don’t expect much change.
PHOTO GALLERY: The Professional Mermaids of Weekie Wachee.
FEMINISTS FIND NEW ENEMY: LEGOS.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, PRIVACY WOULD DISAPPEAR. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Whistleblower: NSA Has All of Your Email.
LIFE AS A professional roboticist.
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CHANGE: Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud.
As Thomas Ray has said, every successful system accumulates parasites. Here’s a piece I wrote on science fraud a while back.
TEA PARTY FORCES ORRIN HATCH INTO PRIMARY. That’s huge. More here.
#POLITIFACTFAIL: “Although the heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter, which they use to rate factual claims. author Louis Jacobson assigned no rating to the seemingly straightforward question of whether Obama ate dog.” That’s because they’d have to rate it “True,” and they don’t like to do that for things that might make Obama look bad. Plus this: “That this supposed Ministry of Truth is biased is not exactly news. A prior study by the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs found PolitiFact harbored a large bias against Republicans. But their double-standard is usually not so obvious and easily exposed.”
UPDATE: More on PolitiFact’s hackery:
The president ate dog when he lived in Indonesia, or at least there’s a passage in his book that says he did. It turns out, eating dog is not a common custom in Indonesia. You have to go out of your way to fetch a Scooby snack. A genuinely inquisitive media might whistle up a question or two to bring this question to heel.
This whole dog-eared story is a can of worms for Obama now. For PolitiFact, Barack Bites Dog represents a nasty dilemma: Rule “True” and confirm that POTUS ate Chow Chow Mein, rule “False” and suggest that he either embellished or didn’t even write his own book. Rule somewhere in between and you just muddy up the water bowl. So PolitiFact put its tail between its legs and didn’t chew on the Truth-O-Meter at all.
Politifact=Lapdog. Be careful guys. You don’t want to look too tasty . . . .
PEOPLE POWER 2.0: How civilians helped win the Libyan information war. “Some information warriors set up their own operations. For Rida Benfayed, an orthopedic surgeon then based in Denver, getting online was the first priority when he reached his hometown of Tobruk, 290 miles east of Benghazi. Benfayed got hold of the city’s only two-way satellite Internet connection and started accepting hundreds of requests to connect on Skype. He organized his contacts into six categories: English media, Arabic media, medical, ground information, politicians, and intelligence. His contacts included ambassadors and doctors, journalists and freedom fighters. A source of high-grade military intelligence soon turned his ad hoc operation into a control room. . . . After about a hundred hours of work, Martin had 250 or so direct contacts in Libya and elsewhere. He created, in effect, a private intelligence network. Initially, he expected only “ambient” or background information, but the intelligence he gathered soon proved useful for both strategy and tactics.”
IN THE VIRGINIA LAW WEEKLY, an interview with David Lat of Above The Law.
IN THE MAIL: The Occupy Handbook.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: It’s Never OK to Lie About Birth Control Because You Want a Baby.
As Tracy Quan asked some years ago: Why do women get away with “accidentally” getting pregnant — when if a man tried to pull the same manipulative stunt, he’d be Bobbitted?
Related item here. And be sure to read Michael Higdon’s article on the subject, which has just been published by the Georgia Law Review.
HOW AMERICANS LOST FAITH IN OUR GREATEST INSTITUTIONS. By being betrayed? . . .
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Bob Krumm: In nothing we trust: and that’s the way it should be. “The institutions are not what made America great. The American people, who according to the Constitution were to be largely unconstrained by those institutions, are what made this nation great. Over the years we’ve strayed from that notion.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Eric Schubert sends this from Walter Russell Mead. And while we’re at it, it’s worth pointing out Angelo Codevilla on the Ruling Class.
ELIZABETH RIDGEVIEW: My Creepy Hookup With A Secret Service Agent.
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