AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on TVs.
Archive for 2016
January 12, 2016
MOONSHOT — DRINK!
Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade. Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.
“All you need to know about the SotU speech: Barack Obama intends to put Joe Biden in charge of curing cancer.”
Earlier: “‘Moonshot’ Medicine Will Let Us Down,” says…The New York Times?
A doubly-interesting source, considering that Thomas Friedman was the origin of Obama’s other favorite outer space State of the Union cliche, “The Sputnik Moment.”
UPDATE: Steve Green concludes his SOTU drunkblogging with a quick one (appropriately enough):
This was Obama’s Al Bundy speech, the lowly shoes salesman desperately trying to get everyone to remember that time he scored four touchdowns in the one game.
Er, that is President Obama wanted us to forget most of the last seven years he’s actually been President, and instead remember that time Candidate Obama gave those big speeches everybody loved.
I’d say even by that modest measure, tonight’s speech was worth of an Al Bundy nap.
But like Al Bundy, Obama will be perpetually on cable TV starting next year, when he’s finally free to be what he’s always dreamed of being, a host on MSNBC.
Exit Quote: “I’m really touched by a soliloquy on cynicism by a guy who doesn’t acknowledge 10 US sailors in Iranian custody.”
THE JOYS OF WORKING FOR PLAYBOY. “If there is a better opening line for a journalist on the road than ‘Hi, I work for Playboy magazine,’ I have yet to encounter it.”
GENTLEMEN, GIRD YOUR LIVERS: Steve Green is Drunkblogging the Final Obama State of the Union Address.
YES, HE’S THE REAL VICTIM HERE: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Frets Iran Seizing Sailors Has Created ‘Frantic’ Scene for Obama’s SOTU.
Why do these bad things keep happening to him — him — of all people?
WELL PLAYED: Speaker Paul Ryan invites nuns to Rep. Keith Ellison’s ‘Bring Your Own Muslim’ night. “Ryan instead chose as his guests the Little Sisters of the Poor, the nuns who have been alternatively winning and losing their fight against the Obamacare mandate that they provide, against their religious beliefs, birth control (including abortifacients) as part of their health plan.”
ANDREW McCARTHY on Obama’s Insane Iran Policy.
Khamenei’s consistent message? Death to America. Obama’s consistent message to Khamenei? “Hey, we can work it out.”
CUBA: North Korea With Palm Trees. “Like North Korea, Cuba maintains a distribution system in which citizens pay a low cost for inadequate rations of staple foods. (At one state shop, the provisions, listed on the blackboard, were grains, washing soap, bathing soap, toothpaste, sugar, salt, coffee, evaporated milk, eggs, and oil.) As in North Korea, archaic laws prevent the private sale of commodities that have been deemed strategic to the nation. Fishing is limited in both countries on the grounds that the bounty of the seas is the exclusive property of the state.”
Hang your rulers, and live a better life.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Have Shed 1,206 Full-Time Faculty (13.3%) Since 2010.
EXCLUSIVE: BOMBSHELL: EXPOSED: Donald Trump Played Soccer in High School.
“Most patriotic Americans stop playing soccer at around age nine, because it’s lame and rewards weakness. It’s also very popular in Mexico.” It really is a low-energy game. The scoring opportunities aren’t very yuge, either.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Free Play Creates Emotionally Stable Children in an Unstable World.
I WAS HOPING FOR AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy. “The B61 Model 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.”
The way things are going, I fear we’ll be wanting the large, the obvious, and the indiscriminate.
JAMES TARANTO: Brooks Borks Cruz:
Yesterday we had a mischievous thought: What if Donald Trump, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, were to announce (or merely suggest) that if elected, he would nominate Ted Cruz to the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court? Such a move would give some Cruz supporters a reason to switch while reassuring other conservatives nervous about the soundness of a President Trump’s judicial nominees.
Trump could even use the occasion to reinforce his current Cruz-directed mischief. After all, nobody can claim that Cruz’s Canadian birth would pose an obstacle to a Supreme Court appointment. Several early justices were born in England and vicinity; Justice Felix Frankfurter was a naturalized immigrant from Vienna; and Justice David Brewer was born as far away as Turkey.
Is David Brooks thinking along similar lines? We ask because his New York Times column today looks an awful lot like a pre-emptive borking.
Read the whole thing.
LYNDON B. OBAMA: “When it comes to offering progress reports on his war against ISIS, Barack Obama is beginning to sound like a previous wartime Democratic president. It is not a flattering comparison,” Richard Benedetto recently noted at Real Clear Politics:
Over the past few weeks, Obama has issued several upbeat statements crafted to assure an uneasy American people that the fight against terror is going well, only to have the facts come back and bite him.
He is starting to develop a “credibility gap,” faced by Lyndon Baines Johnson during the Vietnam War. LBJ and his commanders kept telling the nation that the war was going well when it really was not.
“We are pleased with the results we are getting,” Johnson said in an impassioned November 1967 press conference. “We are inflicting greater losses than we are taking.”
Johnson added that it was “an encouraging sign” that decreasing numbers of Vietnamese were living under Communist control. “Overall, we’re making progress,” he added. “We’re satisfied with that progress.”
Sound familiar?
Very much so, especially today, when the capture of two Navy ships by Iran sounds eerily reminiscent of the Pueblo incident, which took place this month in 1968, when the North Koreans temporarily captured the USS Pueblo, “a Navy intelligence vessel…engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it [was] intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender.”
No word yet if the US sailors detained in Iran will be flashing “the Hawaiian good luck sign” at their captors, but it would certainly have double meaning this time around.
Related: Report: Obama Ordered the CIA Not to Support Green Movement in Iran in 2009.
And this is the thanks we get today from the mullahs — why it’s as if they mean it when they say they’re really America’s enemies or something.
REVIEW: The Lexus LC500 Coupe.
NEW YORK TIMES USEFUL IDIOT DAVID BROOKS: TED CRUZ ISN’T JESUS-Y ENOUGH AT WORK:
Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.
Of course, if his speeches — or even those of his mentors — really were filled with “pagan brutalism,” Brooks would be a true admirer of Cruz and/or his pants.
Related: Four Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture.
HEADLINES FROM 1942: Young woman visiting Paris receives number tattooed on arm: “Why I left the Paris Climate Summit with an activist tattoo.”
I never imagined I would get a tattoo during the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris. Yet here it is, newly healed and permanently inked on the inside of my right wrist.
The tattoo is three numbers and a symbol: “355<” in 25-point font, styled as if from a typewriter. It’s my commitment to the people of the climate movement, to listening to and sharing their stories of climate justice.
When I was born in October 1991, the concentration of carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activity — in our atmosphere was 355 parts per million. In the early 20th century, we topped 300 ppm for the first time in 800,000 years, beginning the destabilization of our climate and society through rising planetary temperatures.
I never knew these exact numbers before, but now that they’re printed on my wrist, I will never forget.
Huh — in the past, a lot of people with numbers tattooed on their arms uttered those last two words.
STEPHEN GREEN WILL BE Drunkblogging The State Of The Union. If I were Obama, I’d be drinking just as hard.
PENTAGON: Two Navy boats in Iranian custody but Iran tells US that crew will be returned ‘promptly.’
Huh — why would they impound our boats when we’ve become such buddies with them under Obama?
UPDATE: “US officials tell NBC that Iranian forces have seized 10 American sailors,” CNBC reports.
MORE: Glenn Reynolds tweets, “Obama’s Carterization is complete” — and on the day of his final SOTU, to boot.
THAT ’70s SHOW:
Shot:
A feeling of constant and imminent menace pervaded the country, and especially its big cities. The 1974 movie, Death Wish, captures the mood of dread. Charles Bronson plays a New York architect, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal,” whose wife is murdered and whose daughter is raped by three thugs who force their way into the family’s apartment. The police do not catch the killers. They do not much try. They fill out forms, make some routine inquiries—and then forget about it. As a precinct captain explains, the city is suffering thirty murders a week. How could anyone investigate them all? A friend gives Bronson a gun, and he begins to prowl the streets and subways at night. Never has Manhattan looked more terrifying. The wind is chill; the streets are empty; the few law-abiding pedestrians pull their collars up around their ears, and hear and see nothing. At first by accident, then deliberately, Bronson tempts muggers to attack him. It seldom takes him long. The criminals are lurking everywhere. They approach their victims in total arrogance, without even a glance over their shoulder for the police. They know the police aren’t coming. And in fact, the only police action we see in the movie is a furious manhunt to capture Bronson, the vigilante killer.
—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.
Chaser: EU Gun Control: After Terrorism And Sex Assaults, European Union Cracks Down On Firearms Ownership.
Hangover: “Alain Ghozland, 73, a French Jewish politician from outside of Paris, was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday, with his body showing multiple lacerations that appeared to be stab wounds, according to reports.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Electron tomography reveals precise positions of individual atoms in aperiodic material.
ROGER SIMON: How Jeb Can (Still) Save His Reputation and Help America at the Same Time — If Jeb quits, he’s in a position to say the same to Hillary.
Sadly, I think Jeb would rather burn his campaign contributors’ money in a giant bonfire (QED) than admit that this isn’t his year.
IS TED CRUZ A “NATURAL BORN” U.S. CITIZEN?: According to Widener law school’s Mary Brigid McManamon, who has an oped in the Washington Post today, the answer is “no.” Her reasoning is a bit shaky:
On this subject, the common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.” . . .
Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the power to naturalize an alien. . . . But Article II of the Constitution expressly adopts the legal status of the natural-born citizen and requires that a president possess that status. . . . Congress simply does not have the power to convert someone born outside the United States into a natural-born citizen.
McManamon’s quotation from Blackstone’s Commentaries purposefully omits key language. Specifically, Blackstone stated:
Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance [sic] or as is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and alien such as are born out of it.
The key to this passage is the concept of “allegiance”–whether the individual has been born with allegiance to the king, or not. Individuals born with allegiance to the sovereign are “natural-born” subjects; those lacking such allegiance are not. It is not, as McManamon implies from her selective portion, a question merely of being born within the geographic confines of the country. McManamon’s citation to the James Madison passage confirms this, as Madison acknowledges that “place is the most certain criterion,” but he is not suggesting that it is the only criterion, as he states unequivocally that the “established maxim” is that the ultimate criterion is “allegiance,” of which the place of birth is but one (albeit “certain”) criterion.
Article I, section eight gives Congress the authority to “establish a uniform rule of Naturalization,” and thus identify, by statute, those who must to go through a naturalization process to obtain U.S. citizenship. Those citizens who do not need to go through the naturalization process are “natural born” citizens. As former Solicitors General Neil Katyal and Paul Clement have recently noted in the Harvard Law Review Forum,
All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States. . . .
The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law and enactments of the First Congress. Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.
McManamon asserts that Katyal and Clement behave in an “unforgivable” fashion by “equat[ing] the common law with statutory law.” But they do no such thing. Instead, Katyal and Clement correctly note that the longstanding British legal understanding–as evidenced both by its common and statutory law–was that children born abroad to British subjects were, themselves, “natural born” subjects at birth, without the need for naturalization proceedings. As Randy Barnett succinctly put it,
England had numerous and changing legal rules governing exactly who was and who was not a “natural born subject,” which can be used to muddy the waters. But one consistently applied rule is particularly germane: The offspring of the King were natural born subjects of the King regardless of where they were born, whether on English territory or not.
As We the People–both individually and collectively–posses the sovereignty in the U.S., our offspring are the functional equivalent of he King’s offspring in England–i.e., “natural born” citizens of the U.S., regardless of where they are born.
Indeed, by the time of Blackstone’s Commentaries (published beginning in 1765), Blackstone himself acknowledged that the law of England had evolved to recognize “that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance [sic] whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception.”
McManamon also criticizes Katyal and Clement for placing “much weight” on the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that “the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens: provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States . . . .”
Assuming that modern Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence would not permit any constitutional distinction of children based upon fathers versus mothers who are U.S. citizens (Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen at his birth; his father was not)–and there is no legal reason, today, to think that a mother who is a U.S. citizen owes less “allegiance” to the U.S. than would the father–the law existing at the time of the U.S. founding suggests that, in interpreting Article II’s phrase “natural born citizen,” children born abroad to U.S. citizens should be considered “natural born.”
McManamon dismisses this evidence of the founding generation’s understanding of “natural born” by asserting:
The debates on the matter reveal that the congressmen were aware that such children were not citizens and had to be naturalized; hence, Congress enacted a statute to provide for them. Moreover, that statute did not say the children were natural born, but only that they should “be considered as” such.
This is specious argument. The 1790 Act reveals that the members of Congress–many of whom were heavily involved in the writing and ratification of the Constitution–understood that children of U.S. citizens who were born abroad should be “considered” as “natural born” in the sense that they did not need to undergo any naturalization process and were accordingly legally entitled to be considered U.S. citizens at the time of their birth–the same as an individual born within U.S. borders. The fact that Congress memorialized this common understanding in the 1790 Act does not, in any way, suggest that such children born abroad “had to be naturalized”; quite the contrary.
In short, while Trump and Harvard Law prof Laurence Tribe are correct that the U.S. Supreme Court has not definitively grappled with the full meaning of “natural born citizen,” the available evidence suggests that if/when the Court ultimately must grapple with it, the evidence points strongly in Cruz’s favor.