EARLY BIRDS: JOIN ME TOMORROW MORNING: For those of you who like to rise and shine early, I hope you’ll tune into Fox & Friends at around 6:45 am EST, to watch me debate the proposal for Supreme Court retention elections, and other possible means for reigning in a Supreme Court that appears increasingly unmoored by statutory or constitutional text.
Archive for 2015
June 28, 2015
THE “LEAST POLITICAL BRANCH” NO MORE: Andrew McCarthy: Let’s Drop the Charade: The Supreme Court is a Political Branch, Not a Judicial One.
Already, an ocean of ink has been spilled analyzing, lauding, and bemoaning the Supreme Court’s work this week: a second life line tossed to SCOTUScare in just three years; the location of a heretofore unknown constitutional right to same-sex marriage almost a century-and-a-half after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the refashioning of Congress’s Fair Housing Act to embrace legal academe’s loopy “disparate impact” theory of inducing discrimination.
Yet, for all the non-stop commentary, one detail goes nearly unmentioned — the omission that best explains this week’s Fundamental Transformation trifecta. Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote?There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.
McCarthy’s right. Leftists believe that “law is politics,” so they’re not particularly interested in how they get there: What matters, to the political left, is simply getting there. The ends justify the means.
Given this reality, proposals to reform the Supreme Court–to make it more politically accountable–are becoming increasingly attractive to conservatives. If Justices are going to act like politicians in robes, they ought to be more politically accountable to the people. Any of the proposals being floated–such as Senator Cruz’s proposal for Supreme Court retention elections, or perhaps term limits–would require a constitutional amendment.
Americans haven’t ratified any “new” amendments (and here I am excluding the 27th Amendment, which was proposed by Madison with the original Bill of Rights, but not ratified until 1992) since the 26th Amendment gave 18 year-olds the right to vote, back in 1971. We the People haven’t been very constitutionally active in my lifetime, and maybe it’s time to change that, as there are numerous important constitutional changes now worth considering.
AT AMAZON: Grills and Outdoor cooking.
OBAMA ALREADY CAME FOR THE AMERICAN FLAG–AND HE LOST, Joel Pollak writes at Big Government:
Obama himself targeted the American flag in October 2007, bizarrely, as his presidential campaign gained steam. He ostentatiously stopped wearing a U.S. flag pin in his lapel, dissenting from his fellow legislators, many of whom had begun wearing the pin in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The flag pin, he explained to ABC News, had become “a substitute for true patriotism,” which he defined as “speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.”
That stance–which implied that Obama’s colleagues were less patriotic than he–became a major flashpoint over the next few months.
A voter at a Democratic primary debate in April 2008 asked Obama why he did not wear a flag pin. Obama flat-out lied in response: “I have never said that I don’t wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins.” He argued that it was more important to speak out against the Iraq War, and about “economic fairness,” than it was to wear the flag on his suit jacket.
Voters were not convinced. Some even handed him flag pins to wear.
Finally, he gave in. By May 2008, he quietly pulled off what Time called a “flag pin flip-flop”:
On Tuesday, he was sans pin on the Senate floor, but then later donned it while speaking to working-class voters in Missouri during the evening. “I haven’t been making such a big deal about it. Others have. Sometimes I wear it, sometimes I don’t,” Obama said.
Obama fought the American flag, and the American flag won.
But there should be no doubt that Obama, and his ideological kin, would avoid the U.S. flag if they could, no matter how much they protest otherwise. Their hostility to American exceptionalism is deep.
Read the whole thing.
ROGER SIMON’S JULY 4 PROPOSAL: Republican Candidates Should Stand Together to Block Iran Deal.
OUR PRECIOUS LITTLE SNOWFLAKES: “This celebration of a child’s every accomplishment, however slight, is something new. By the time a kid reaches 18, she will have accumulated boxes and boxes of diplomas, medals, ribbons, trophies and certificates for just showing up – whether she’s any good at anything or not,” Margaret Wente writes in the Canadian Globe and Mail:
Sometimes you have to compromise in life, but we don’t want to break this crushing news to our children. Personally, I’ve met far too many young adults who graduate from university with plans to work in development/save the world/find a career in environmental sustainability. There’s nothing wrong with these noble aspirations. What’s amazing is that no adults have ever levelled with them.
Reality will bite soon enough, of course. The idea that your job should be your passion is a misguided romantic notion that only the upper-middle-class can afford to entertain. In fact, most people wind up in areas that nobody ever talks about. “Insurance is a very interesting field,” Mr. Laurie assured me. “But no one says ‘I want to go into insurance.’ ”
The trouble is, snowflakes are not very resilient. They tend to melt when they hit the pavement. How will our snowflake children handle the routine stresses of the grownup world – the obnoxious colleagues, pointless meetings, promotions that don’t come their way? How will they cope when no one thinks they’re special any more?
I’m afraid they could be in for a hard landing.
And how.
It’s an interesting essay and a great conclusion, but the author’s consistent use of “she” as a pronoun along the way, leapfrogging from the now doubleplus ungood crimethink use of “he” past “he or she” all the way to “she” makes one pause for a double-take. Particularly given, as Dr. Helen has noted, academia’s own war on young men over the past decade or so. In a chapter of his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed titled “The Crusades of the Anointed,” Thomas Sowell explored the thinking behind the crusade that drove what he called “The Generic ‘He’” out of first academic and then most MSM writing. By 2010, Theodore Dalrymple noted:
I get to review quite a number of books published by academic presses, British and American, and I have found that the use of the impersonal “she” is now almost universal, even when the writer is aged and is most unlikely to have chosen this locution for himself (or herself). It is therefore an imposed locution, and as such sinister.
But then in the 21st century, there are precious little snowflakes of all ages whom we don’t dare offend.
HAS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT EVER HAD SEX? “The act of sex is not illegal. But if two members of the American Law Institute have their way, it will be — unless you follow their rules.”
2 QUESTIONS FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE CASE. I’m extracting these questions from something Lindsey Graham said on “Meet the Press” this morning when he was asked what he thought about the same-sex marriage case:
I think it’s a transformational moment. There are a lot of upset people who believe in traditional marriage. They’re disappointed, they’re down right now. But, the court has ruled, so here’s where I stand. If I’m president of the United States, here’s what would happen. If you have a church, a mosque, or a synagogue, and you’re following your faith, and you refuse to perform a same-sex marriage, because it’s outside the tenets of your faith. In my presidency you will not lose your tax-exempt status. If you’re a gay person or a gay couple, if I’m president of the United States, you will be able to participate in commerce and be a full member of society, consistent with the religious beliefs of others who have rights also.
Here are the questions:
1. Will you pledge that religious organizations that refuse to perform same-sex marriages will not lose their tax-exempt status?
2. Who do you think should prevail if there is a conflict between the interests of gay people — as they engage in commerce and seek full membership in society — and the interests of religious people — as they try to frame their conduct to accord with the tenets of their religion?
SPACE IS HARD: SPACEX ROCKET EXPLODES AFTER TAKEOFF: “Today was Elon Musk’s forty-fourth birthday,” Rand Simberg writes. “I can’t know for sure, but it was probably the worst one of his life.”
ISIS ATTACKS IN AMERICA ARE COMING, Max Boot warns at Commentary:
By its own depraved standards, last Thursday and Friday were gruesomely successful days for ISIS. On Thursday, a suicide squad of ISIS fighters infiltrated Kobani, the Syrian town it had previously lost to Kurdish militia, and killed 145 residents. Then, on Friday, ISIS was linked to two massacres at different ends of the Middle East: in Tunisia a gunman armed with an Ak-47 killed at least 47 vacationers at a beach resort, while in Kuwait a suicide bomber killed at least 24 Shiites at a mosque. ISIS may also be connected to the French Muslim attacker who beheaded the manager of an American-owned chemical plant in France and tried to blow up the entire facility. All this only a few days after ISIS released another of its patented snuff films showing prisoners being drowned alive in a cage.
The exact connections between ISIS and the foreign attacks remains to be determined but the fact that ISIS claimed credit for the Kuwait and Tunisia attacks suggests that it is expanding its attention, from Syria and Iraq toward a more international wave of terror designed to better compete with Al Qaeda, which has long been focused on the “far enemy” (i.e., the U.S. and its allies). Already ISIS sympathizers have been linked to attacks in the U.S. such as the thwarted attempt to shoot up an exhibition of Mohammad cartoons in Texas. It’s a safe bet that the U.S. will not be exempt from ISIS’ growing foreign focus, and that some future attacks will succeed.
This current period really does have a summer of 2001 feel to it, doesn’t it?
GREECE RUNS OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: “In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: ‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.’ And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.”
AUSTIN BAY: MEANWHILE, BACK IN NORTH KOREA…:
In an interview last year on a Texas radio station, I was asked when China would “finally do something” about North Korea’s manic threats to launch a nuclear attack.
Perhaps an uneasy memory of spring 2013’s revelation that North Korea had Austin, Texas, on its ICBM target list spurred the question.
Nuclear war in your hometown courtesy of North Korean Stalinists is a legitimate worry, one shared by residents of Seoul and Tokyo. Achieving a political solution that avoids violence is most desirable; a solution that promotes long-term stability and peace, even more so.
However, no one can answer “when” something will happen. The future is the Land of If, inviting speculation but defying prediction.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON: Deep discounts on cameras.
CHRIS SQUIRE, YES BASSIST AND CO-FOUNDER, DEAD AT 67:
Chris Squire, the co-founder and longtime bassist of prog rock icons Yes and the only member of the group to feature on every studio album, has passed away just over a month after revealing that he was suffering from a rare form of leukemia. Squire was 67. Current Yes keyboardist Geoff Downes first tweeted the news, “Utterly devastated beyond words to have to report the sad news of the passing of my dear friend, bandmate and inspiration Chris Squire.”
Back in May of 2001, there was a history of the bass guitar up to that point with the modest title of How the Fender Bass Changed the World, but Leo Fender’s invention of a fretted bass guitar really did change popular music in radical ways. Listening to the first Beatles records, Paul McCartney was basically playing four to the bar oompah tuba-style rhythmic bass parts on bass guitar. By the mid-‘60s, he was playing melodies on bass, intricate mini-compositions in their own right. Numerous other bass players emerged during that period with a similar melodic style, including John Entwistle of the Who and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. All of these players took their cue from the brilliant Motown house bassist James Jamerson, who was arguably the first musician to realize the potential of the Fender bass, as the moving 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown explored.
Squire absorbed all of those influences, but happened to play in a band devoted to virtuosoism and flash for its own sake, which made Yes reviled by rock critics, particularly as the back-to-basics punk/new wave scene emerged in the mid-to-late ‘70s. (One of Rolling Stone’s early 1980s record guides edited by veteran rock journalist Dave Marsh just took a sledgehammer to the group’s reputation, dismissing them as “Classical rockers with hearts of cold… perhaps the epitome of uninvolved, pretentious and decidedly nonprogressive music, so flaccid and conservative that it became the symbol of uncaring platinum success, spawning more stylistic opponents than adherents.”)
All of which made the band’s reemergence with a tightly arranged Fairlight synthesizer dominated chart-topping production by Trevor Horn called “Owner of a Lonely Heart” so amazing in 1983, which also featured some tastefully melodic playing by Squire. RIP.
PITCH PERFECT: IS CELEMONY’S MELODYNE THE MOST VERSATILE PITCH CORRECTION SOFTWARE EVER? Over at the PJ Lifestyle blog, I have a review of Melodyne, the incredible pitch correction software for music recording that’s capable of so much more than just correcting the pitch of lead vocals, including pitch correction of harmonies, instruments, drum editing, and sound mangling in general. If you make it to the end of the article, you can hear how Melodyne performs on the toughest test of all: making my own singing voice sound in tune.
Update: Link corrected.
UNMANNED SPACEX ROCKET EXPLODES AFTER CAPE CANAVERAL LAUNCH:
A mission by an unmanned SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket has ended in failure after it exploded after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The rocket was supposed to despatch a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS).
The lower segment of the rocket was then meant to turn around and use its engines to bring itself down to a floating barge.
It was US company SpaceX’s third failed attempt at the manoeuvre.
Bids in January and April ended in explosive impacts in the Atlantic Ocean.
“The vehicle has broken up,” said Nasa commentator George Diller, after Nasa television broadcast images of the white rocket falling to pieces.
Video at link.
IT TAKES A LOT OF LOBBYISTS to do something new in America, at least if it involves atoms as well as bits. Here’s a (rather disapproving) account of how Uber became legal in Portland.
THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 780.
IN THE MAIL: What Pet Should I Get? (Classic Seuss).
AVOID DECISION FATIGUE – EAT THE SAME BREAKFAST EVERY DAY – I’ve had the same, relatively strange, breakfast (canned alaskan salmon on a rice cake, with a banana, and an apple on the side) every day for years. One decision eliminated at the start of the day.
YES. NEXT QUESTION: Should news outlets declare allegiances?