FREE SPEECH IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: A man holding a Trump sign is interviewed and, as he speaks, someone creeps up and calmly rips the Trump sign in half. “On Twitter, much tittering.”
Archive for 2016
March 13, 2016
VIDEO: Jaguar fishing.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1039.
STEPHEN CARTER: The Next Supreme Court Justice Shouldn’t Be A Judge:
What difference does background make? Amar is concerned about diversity in several important senses. It’s notorious that every sitting justice attended either Yale or Harvard. But he’s also concerned for a lack of diversity in styles of argument. Those who have spent their careers on the bench tend to think that “judges are more right than they really are.” There are more ways to think about the Constitution than the ways we think about it in the cases. Part of the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education is the richness of its understanding of politics. Amar implies that this is in part because nobody on the Brown court had spent a career in the judiciary. On the other hand, he attributes John Roberts’s vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act in part to the chief justice’s extensive earlier experience in the intricacies of executive-branch policymaking, including four years in the White House counsel’s office.
There’s something very Jacksonian about this argument — and I refer not to Justice Robert Jackson, one of the heroes of Amar’s fine book, but to President Andrew Jackson, who campaigned against both the judiciary and the rule of lawyers. But although Jackson is in bad odor these days, on this point I think the seventh president was mostly right. He worried that judges were becoming an aristocracy in the new nation.
Amar doesn’t go quite so far, but perhaps he should. Both major parties are facing Jacksonian moments, with their bases believing — with reason, I would say — that their views are rarely reflected or even seriously solicited in the making of policy. More and more they see what goes on in the power centers they mistrust (Washington and Wall Street) as an ever-heavier burden of impositions. One needn’t share this opinion to see that it exists.
I note that there’s nothing in the Constitution requiring that Supreme Court justices be lawyers. I believe that in the Reagan Administration they considered appointing Thomas Sowell at one point. A presidential candidate wanting to ride the populist wave might want to announce that he/she would consider non-lawyers for the Court.
ROGER KIMBALL: May You Live in Interesting Times (Redux).
THIS IS MORIBUND, THE BURGERMEISTER, I’M GONNA KEEP THIS MONSTER DOWN.
Shot: “The Cologne police added that they had received 90 complaints from victims, including one who said she had been raped. No arrests have been made. In Hamburg, the police said 10 women had reported that they were sexually assaulted and robbed in a similar fashion on the same night.”
—“Reports of Attacks on Women in Germany Heighten Tension Over Migrants,” the New York Times, January. 5, 2016.
Chaser: “Hamburg bans [single use] coffee pods in state-run buildings.”
—Digital Journal, February 21st, 2016.
Back in early 2011, when New York City was hip deep in a foot and a half or more of white powdery global warming (no doubt it was all Keurig’s fault) and snow removal was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, Victor Davis Hanson coined “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
Since political correctness was born in Europe nearly a century ago, the contagion is far worse there than it’s infected America, though it’s spreading rapidly here as well. (See also: most college campuses, New York, and San Francisco.) But as Glenn recently noted, “Virtue-signaling is not a policy…Virtue-signaling is never about real world consequences. And the more people virtue-signal, the less virtuous they tend to be.”
WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Anti-foreigner rally in Berlin draws ten times more protesters than expected.
WAPO FLASHBACK: Have black protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party? “Examining county-level voting patterns, I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote-share.”
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GOING OUT ON A LIMB HERE — ONE OR BOTH OF THESE PREDICTIONS WILL BE ACCURATE:
● “Hillary can’t win. She’s the establishment candidate in year of insurgency.”
—John Kass, the Chicago Tribune.
We are going to get our asses kicked unholy by Hillary Clinton in November. Those of you who think that this act is going to be super-popular and attract all of these “new voters”… I know you want to think that, but at some point, your theories really ought to begin evidencing their reality in the polls.
Instead, Hillary’s lead continues to grow. It will keep on growing.
Because America does not like authoritarians. And yes, Hillary is herself an authoritarian. But she’s pretending to not be one, and Trump is… well, Trump is “authentic” on that score I guess.
—Ace of Spades, in a post titled, “The Fact That Trump is Provocative Does Not Excuse Left-Wing Crybullies Rioting in the Streets.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE*: Here Are The Radical Leftist Anti-Tump Groups Behind The Chicago Protest.
* Particularly if you’re Trump’s army of lawyers.
CHICAGO: Emanuel thanks Chicago PD for keeping peace at Trump protest.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel commended the city’s police department Friday night for its commitment to protecting citizens during protests at a Chicago rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“I want to thank the men and women of the Chicago Police Department for their hard work tonight in unexpected circumstances, and their continued commitment to protecting people’s first amendment rights,” Emanuel said in a statement.
The embattled mayor has himself faced protests in the Windy City since October, when the city released video of an officer-involved shooting of a black man.
Residents have called for the mayor’s resignation, but he refused to step down in the wake of a Justice Department investigation into the city’s handling of multiple police shootings.
Perhaps some of the focus on Trump was displacement, by activists who haven’t been able to get rid of Rahm.
AND TO THINK, SHE WAS TIME MAGAZINE’S WOMAN OF THE YEAR FOR 2015: As Mama Merkel turns ‘toxic’, is this the beginning of the end for the German Chancellor?
BERNIE’S BROWNSHIRTS: How Bernie Sanders supporters shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago.
When Ja’Mal Green, a prominent black activist and Bernie Sanders supporter in Chicago, saw that Donald Trump was coming to the University of Illinois Chicago, he knew what he had to do. “Everyone, get your tickets to this. We’re all going in!!!! #SHUTITDOWN,” he posted on Facebook last week.
Little did he know they actually would shut it down.
Friday night, hundreds of protesters invaded Trump’s rally while thousands more marched outside, leading the candidate to abruptly cancel the event due to safety concerns. The night spun out from there, as angry Trump fans clashed with protesters, who saw the shutdown as a victory.
Protesters interrupt virtually every Trump speech. But what made Chicago different were its scale and the organization behind the effort. Hundreds of young, largely black and brown people poured in from across the city, taking over whole sections of the arena and bracing for trouble.
And as the repeated chants of “Ber-nie” demonstrated, it was largely organized by supporters of Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate who has struggled to win over black voters, but whose revolutionary streak has excited radicals of all colors.
“Remember the #TrumpRally wasn’t just luck. It took organizers from dozens of organizations and thousands of people to pull off. Great work,” tweeted People for Bernie, a large unofficial pro-Sanders organization founded by veterans of the Occupy movement and other lefty activists.
Organizing to shut down a campaign rally? Sounds like a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.
FASTER, PLEASE: Cruz Promises to Nuke the Dept. of Education.
‘SHE’S EASILY CONFUSED:’ Hillary Clinton calls out Bernie Sanders — and it backfires badly.
Related: “Dick Cheney heaps praise on Hillary Clinton.”
Even Dick Cheney can troll the left when he wants to!
NICK GILLESPIE: The Main Casualty of Canceled Trump Rally Is The *Idea* of Free Speech.
At the same time that at least some of Trump’s followers are cretinous goons, there’s an equally problematic counter-dynamic at work as well: The anti-free-speech mentality that’s extremely pervasive throughout the American left that is summed by the slogan of a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter who helped organize the anti-Trump show in Chicago: “Everyone, get your tickets to this. We’re all going in!!!! #SHUTITDOWN.”
Shut it down! How cool is that? It’s just like a college campus, where speakers aren’t challenged on unpopular viewpoints but simply disinvited or shouted down to a degree that a thug’s veto prevails.
Greg Lukianoff, head honcho at The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has articulated that, for some years now, we haven’t been debating about the conditions under which free speech might be allowed. Far more troubling, we are instead debating whether the idea of free speech can even be justified anymore. On both the left and the right (which has its own version of political correctness and has rarely been slow to try and stifle voices with which it disagrees), most people are pushing for what Lukianoff says is “freedom from speech.”
Public debate, it seems, is no longer a means by which to search for truth, knowledge, and common ground, but only a venue for speech that expresses unthinking solidarity with whatever you already believe.
Trump and his campaign should categorically disown violence among the candidate’s followers. And anti-Trumpers need to learn the difference between protesting and eradicating speech in the public square.
March 12, 2016
DON SURBER: Law And Order Is Not Just A TV Show.
THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH those silica desiccant packs that come with everything.
THERE’S A PUNCHLINE HERE SOMEWHERE: The FDA Looks To Crack Down On Manure.