"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Oh, come on:

Democrat Al Franken has gained 37 votes on Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in the U.S. Senate recount, after Ramsey County found 171 ballots that weren’t counted on election night.

Ramsey County elections chief Joe Mansky says the ballots were in a machine that broke down early on Election Day in Maplewood’s 6th precinct.

“The election judges apparently didn’t run some ballots through the ballot counter after their ballot counter had gone down during the day. So, we had apparently more ballots in the box than we had on the tape,” said Mansky.

Mansky says the ballots were never lost, just not counted the first time through. He says they have been secure all along.

Franken gained 91 votes from the crop of ballots, and Coleman gained 54.

Fritz Knaak, an attorney for Coleman, says the campaign sent a lawyer to look into the situation. He says they’ll likely accept Mansky’s explanation, as long as a tabulation of the number of people who voted turns out to be 171 more than the number of votes counted. The deadline for local officials to complete their recount is Friday.

538 estimates the race is essentially a dead heat.  If Saxby Chambliss holds onto this Georgia seat, expect the Democrats to take this all the way to the Senate.

Who said Federalism was dead:

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a landmark decision today in which California state courts found that its medical marijuana law was not preempted by federal law.

The state appellate court decision from November 28th 2007, ruled that “it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws.” The case, involving Felix Kha, a medical marijuana patient from Garden Grove, was the result of a wrongful seizure of medical marijuana by local police in June 2005.

Medical marijuana advocates hailed today’s decision as a huge victory in clarifying law enforcement’s obligation to uphold state law. Advocates assert that better adherence to state medical marijuana laws by local police will result in fewer needless arrests and seizures.

In turn, this will allow for better implementation of medical marijuana laws not only in California, but also in Oregon and Washington and other states that have adopted such laws.

“It’s now settled that state law enforcement officers cannot arrest medical marijuana patients or seize their medicine simply because they prefer the contrary federal law,” said Joe Elford, Chief Counsel with Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the medical marijuana advocacy organization that represented the defendant Felix Kha in a case that the City of Garden Grove appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Perhaps, in the future local government will think twice about expending significant time and resources to defy a law that is overwhelmingly supported by the people of our state.”

The whole issue revolves around what local authorities are Constitutionally permitted to do. In other words, they can’t simply bust patients because they think they’re breaking the law.  The authority of federal law needs to be defined here, and this is an important first step.

You know it’s bad out there when the first line of CNN’s story about the governors’ meeting with Obama is categorical bullshit:

Plagued by rising unemployment, falling tax revenue and increased demand for state services, the nation’s governors met with President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday to press for federal money to ease their fiscal strain.

Reason has argued that this standard line is nonsense.  States like Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Washington are in much better fiscal positions because they control spending.  I understand that the governors are not exactly going to come out and say, “Hey! We’ve been reckless!”.  But you might expect some, just a smidgen, a tiny miniscule dose of objectivity from our so-called professional media when the stakes are so high:

The governors want about $136 billion to use for what they call “ready-to-go projects,” like water and sewer projects or building roads and bridges. They want another $40 billion to go toward Medicaid programs.

I don’t think our politicians understand that the mood on bailouts is getting ugly.  And part of the reason is that they’re insulated from the public by a media that smiles and nods and mindlessly repeats whatever they say.  At some point, I think we’re going to be needing some torches and pitchforks to cut through the wall of lies and distortions.  The media certainly isn’t going to do it for us.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was highly critical of the comparisons of bobby Jindal to Barack Obama.  McArdle makes a good point in defending the comparison:

Just to take an example that Ta-Nehisi uses, did Obama make some compromise on the Democratic Party’s no-restrictions-on-abortion-at-any-time-no-shut-up-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU-LALALALALA platform?  Because as far as I know, he’s still toeing the party line there.  And that’s just about as extreme, as far from the average American’s opinion on abortion, as Bobby Jindal’s.

Of course, to Democrats, there is no such thing an extreme pro-choice position.

Besides that, I’m willing to bet that Ta-Nehisi has never seen Jindal in person.  I have.  And while “swarthy” may play a small role in the Obama comparisons, it’s mostly along the lines of thinking that the Republican Party’s first non-white candidate would help heal the party’s image a bit.  The reason that they’re comparing Jindal to Obama is that, in person, he comes off a lot like Obama.  He’s extremely positive, he’s personally charming, and he’s kind of skinny and his ears stick out.  Like Obama, Jindal is something of an odd duck; he looks like the president of the Paramus, New Jersey High School Chess Club, and talks like a good old boy with a plantation somewhere back in the Bayou.  The combination is disconcerting for northern journalists, and a little bewitching.

But once you’re past that, well, the guy just has skills.  His message, like Obama’s, is one of hope and actual change; he tends to emphasize the work he’s done reforming Louisiana’s notoriously corrupt political culture.  And like Obama, he has the charisma to put it over.  Nearly all prominent politicians are extremely charismatic.  Being in a room with them is like being in a room with the sun; you can’t really look anywhere else.  But some have it more than others, and Jindal has a lot of it.

He’s also a really good political organizer, which is how a Republican carries Louisiana (to be sure, the Democratic governor’s monstrously incompetent performance during Hurricane Katrina helped quite a bit.) And on the other metrics by which Obama stands out--his academic chops, his meteoric rise--Jindal actually betters Obama.  The guy was accepted to both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but decided to go for a political career, and accepted his Rhodes Scholarship instead.  At 25 he was appointed Lousiana’s Secretary of Health and Hospitals; at 28, he became the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana system. 

You can say many things about him--he’s written some nutty things about Protestants, and participated in an exorcism, which means he’s gonna have some ‘splaining to do if he runs for President.  But he is not George W. Bush, or John Kerry, or Al Gore, or any of the other range of uninspired sons of the gentry who have graced our political landscape recently.  He is phenomenally smart, and phenomenally talented, and phenomenally likeable.  And I’m sure that complacent Democrats dismissing him as a goober with a God complex suits his current plans just fine.

Jindal is also a supporter of intelligent design.

I’m going to reserve any opinions about Jindal until he actually (a) enters the national stage and (b) doesn’t go Palin on us.  To be honest, I’m not thinking too much about 2012—I’d just like to stumble through the rest of 2008 in one piece, thank you.  But, living in Texas, I’m hearing good things out of Louisiana.  As I said in my “Golden Drumsticks” post, there are several Republican governors who are very promising for the political future.  For all his religious quackery, Jindal has to be included in that list.

Fred Thompson On the Economy:

Again, I find myself wishing he’d been the Republican nominee.

Monday, December 01, 2008

From The Onion:

“He may have flunked the ‘near-miss’ part of the high-speed aerobatic pass, caused the death of a man with 17 years’ flight experience when he sheared the wing off of Cmdr. Hickock’s plane, vomited into his helmet, panicked, inverted the aircraft with the throttles maxed, and hit Mach 1 just before crashing into bleachers full of spectators with almost a full load of fuel,” Blue Angels commanding officer Brock Saxon said. “But he nailed the steep climb and the steep dive, and he certainly had showmanship. If there’s one thing I keep telling my cadets, it’s that you can’t teach enthusiasm. I think we all learned a little something about the power of raw enthusiasm here today.”

I’m fucking howling.

Via Sulivan comes this gem.

A lawmaker says the state’s Homeland Security office should be crediting God with keeping the state safe.

State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister who was instrumental in establishing that requirement in 2006, disapproves of the fact that Homeland Security doesn’t currently mention God in its mission statement or on its Web site.

The law passed under former Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who prominently credited God in annual reports to state leaders. But Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration didn’t credit God in its 2008 Homeland Security report issued last month.

“We certainly expect it to be there, of course,” Riner, D-Louisville, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The law that organized the Homeland Security office first lists Homeland Security’s duty to recognize that government itself can’t secure the state without God, even before mentioning other duties, which include distributing millions of dollars in federal grants and analyzing possible threats.

I find it amusing that Kentucky even has a Homeland Security department to begin with, given the number of high-value terrorist targets in that state.  As for the rest of it, well, you can write your own jokes.  There’s just too many possibilities.

I wonder, though, if they realize that Iran’s national security documents probably mention God before any other consideration.

I believe the UN has its uses.  It’s work on health issues is good (it did wipe out smallpox after all).  It gives half-wit countries a venue in which to say nasty things about the country that’s funding their battles against AIDS and loaning them money.  That’s an improvement over doing nasty things to us.

But as a serious institution for solving the world’s problem, it’s just a bad joke:

Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.

Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.

But while the draft’s sponsors say it and earlier similar measures are aimed at preventing violence against worshippers regardless of religion, religious tolerance advocates warn the resolutions are being accumulated for a more sinister goal.

...

Passage of the resolution is part of a 10-year action plan the 57-state Organization of Islamic Conference launched in 2005 to ensure “renaissance” of the “Muslim Ummah” or community.

While the current resolution is non-binding, Pakistan’s Ambassador Masood Khan reminded the UN’s Human Rights Council this year that the OIC ultimately seeks a “new instrument or convention” on the issue. Such a measure would impose its terms on signatory states

As the article points out, you can’t accuse someone of “defaming” religion unless you accept its tenets as absolute truth.  You would not be able to even question anyone’s belief under such a rule without risking criminal charges.

Actually, after typing that, I’m surprised that the smoldering remnant of the GOP isn’t getting behind this idea.

Well, it’s official:

The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy .

The NBER is a private group of leading economists charged with dating the start and end of economic downturns. It typically takes a long time after the start of a recession to declare its start because of the need to look at final readings of various economic measures.

The NBER said that the deterioration in the labor market throughout 2008 was one key reason why it decided to state that the recession began last year.

Employers have trimmed payrolls by 1.2 million jobs in the first 10 months of this year. On Friday, economists are predicting the government will report a loss of another 325,000 jobs for November.

The NBER also looks at real personal income, industrial production as well as wholesale and retail sales. All those measures reached a peak between November 2007 and June 2008, the NBER said.

In addition, the NBER also considers the gross domestic product, which is the reading most typically associated with a recession in the general public.

Many people erroneously believe that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of economic activity declining. That has yet to take place during this recession.

Predictably, the market got spooked and shed 680 points.

They’re not sure how long this recession is going to last.  They’re predicted it should reach bottom next quarter, which would bring us close to the post-Carter and mid-Nixon recessions as the longest since the Depression.  But until our GDP contracts by 1/3 and a quarter of us are out of work, I’m not prepared to accepted the New Depression moniker.  I think the ‘81-’82 comparison is apt.  That was caused by a massive hangover from a decade-long inflationary binge.  It took a while for us to recover.  This recession is being fueled by a ridiculous housing market.  It will take us a while to recover.  Sane fiscal policy out of Washington will be the first big step.

One point.  Just as it took a year to clarify that we are in a recession, it may take a year for us to realize that we’re out of one. Remember that the 1990’s recession ended almost two years before Bill Clinton took office but we didn’t “notice” it until after the election. I can’t explain why but I feel like things are starting to loosen up.  We just got offered a mortgage at a ridiculously low rate.  The stock market, for its plunge today, has been level for the last couple of months.  Home prices actually rose slightly here in Texas.  This could be a dead cat bounce.  Or it could indicate that we’re leveling off.

If I’m living in cardboard box next year, I guess I’ll know for sure.

Speaking of wingnut social conservatives (see below) some folks aren’t too happy about Michael Steele becoming the head of the RNC:

The Republican National Coalition for Life and the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association both have came out against Mr. Steele because he and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman were co-chairmen of the centrist Republican Leadership Council and because of his unclear comments about abortion on “Meet the Press.”

As Andrew Sullivan noted, these people have left a bad taste that will take a long time to get rid of. Or, as the Washington Times itself says:

Republicans who are questioning Mr. Steele’s credentials need to ask themselves why they find him so “threatening” and let his actual words speak for themselves.

The “Threat” is that the Republican leadership seems to be at least trying to move in a more moderate direction. But if they want to get cured of their fundamentalist fix, they need to go cold turkey. A stint in political rehab just isn’t enough.

There are crisis and conflicts going on all over that we don’t often hear about. The Congo is just one of them.

A mortality survey conducted by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and released earlier this year demonstrates that this conflict is the most deadly crisis since the second world war: an estimated 5.4m people have died as a consequence of the war and its lingering effects in the last decade. Today, a quarter of a million people are on the run, almost half of them on territory under rebel control and with almost no access to aid. They need food and shelter, clean water and latrines, medical care, and education. Women and girls need protection from sexual violence, which flares up when families are forcibly displaced.

Or when the Blue Helmets arrive...seriously, though, this is another instance of where something should be done, yet a humanitarian military mission would be frought with risk. In other words, interventionism might not work. Just as it is not necessarily our job to spread democracy through nation-building, we can’t, as Obama said he wants to, send in the troops to feed and protect everyone from the violence of a civil war. I’m all for doing what we can, but there needs to be a real international effort if we’re ever going to be serious about helping the displaced masses-and I don’t mean the just the U.N.

It seems that a goal of the Mumbai attacks was to stir up animosity between Indian and Pakistan, in order to take pressure off of the Taliban.  Even more alarmingly, it might be working:

Yet one can already see public anger in India leading political developments in a direction the terrorists wanted. Some Indian politicians have been less than careful in saying the terrorists were sent by Pakistan, the state, rather than that they came from Pakistan, the country (which hasn’t even been confirmed yet, anyway). India is considering halting talks over Kashmir and ending the five-year cease-fire along the Line of Control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to “go after” those responsible for the attacks, which could box him into the dangerous step of taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba within Pakistan-held territory.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s hackles are up, its military leaders raising the alert levels of their forces and threatening to divert troops from the Afghan border to the eastern border with India. Zardari’s about-face on sending ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha to New Delhi is clearly a response to domestic pressure after Indian newspapers said Pasha was being “summoned.” Similarly, the more vocally India calls on Zardari and Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani to crack down on militancy, the tougher politically it will be for them to do so lest they be seen as doing New Delhi’s bidding.

In India, the same sort of perverse dynamics are at work. Already, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is making political hay out of the terror in Mumbai. The party has been running newspaper ads saying, “Fight Terror. Vote B.J.P.” Instead of rallying behind Singh’s government, the BJP has instead called for its resignation and accused Singh of being soft on terror. These tactics may well backfire, but based on the BJP’s history of populist, anti-Muslim rhetoric, we should be concerned about its return to power.

Gee, it’s almost like I’ve seen this pattern before.  Balancing out the Indian subcontinent is going to be a huge (and unexpected) challenge to Obama.  I’ve said that we’ll get a real read on Obama’s domestic policy when he proposes his first budget; we’ll get the first read on his diplomatic skill with how he handles this.

van Bakel calls out the BBC:

The BBC consistently misrepresents and obfuscates the story of our time. That would be the spread of Islam that’s being brought about by a ragtag coalition of Muslim firebrands and their naive Western enablers. The gamut runs from various Islamic pressure groups whose raison d’être is to pretend to feel insulted at every turn, to their rainbow-worshipping fellow travelers in Europe and elsewhere, to gangs of Muslim terrorists inflicting mass murder on innocents in countless countries.

Examples of Auntie Beeb’s lily-livered attitude are here and here. (An aside: the organization has also decided that when its news staff mentions the prophet Mohammed, the letters PBUH — “peace be upon him” — will be appended to his name, as a “mark of respect”.)

Now, though, BBC News has outdone itself with an article about the Mumbai attacks entitled “The Age of ‘Celebrity Terrorism’.” The broadcaster’s respect for the esteemed prophet’s followers is so deep that every effort is made never to call a spade a spade (or a Muslim a Muslim, excepting positive mentions).

Follow along if you have the stomach:

[H]ostages and survivors reported that certain nationalities had been identified by their passports and taken away for execution.

“Certain nationalities.” That would be Americans and, oh yeah, the BBC’s own countrymen.

Perhaps we do not know enough about where the perpetrators are from, because they could have come from almost anywhere.

Really? Almost anywhere? They most assuredly didn’t come from Japan’s Shinto community, or from Mormon circles in Canada, or from atheist groups in the Netherlands. Nor were they spawned by Quaker quilting bees in Pennsylvania, or by evangelical church gatherings in the Congo, or by coteries of Romanian Rosicrucians.

Where they did come from, spiritually, is the much-vaunted religion of peace; where at least some of them did come from, geographically, is most likely Bradford or Leeds — just like the London subway bombers.

The BBC article never mentions this. In fact, neither the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ appear anywhere in the piece, presumably so as not to “offend” anyone.

...

Let’s get real. The terrorists who paid Mumbai a little visit demanded that other mujahideen be released from Indian jails. They attacked a Jewish Center and killed a rabbi and his wife. In between the spraying of bullets and the cutting of throats, they shouted about injustices done to Muslims. They released a Muslim Turkish couple they’d captured, but killed their other (non-Muslim) prey. One attacker now under arrest is a self-confessed member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic terror group operating out of Pakistan. And on and on.

In case you are in any doubt as to what was going on, read this:

“It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood,” one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.

Corroborating the doctors’ claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. “During his interrogation, Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis,” an IB source said.

The failure to recognize the enemy we face is a tremendous danger.  Recognizing that we are at war with evil does not mean you embrace everything we do against them, least of all everything George Bush says.  We can agree on the enemy even as we disagree on what to do with them.  But to not even acknowledge what happened in Mumbai because of political correctness is plain cowardice.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Andrew Sullivan (yeah I know, boo, hiss, et cetera) examines the politics of resentment that now dominate the conservative movement.

The American conservative era owes just as much to Goldwater’s libertarianism and Reagan’s pragmatic freedom agenda. It’s also bundled up with Buckley’s erudition, Gingrich’s populism, and the first Bush’s realism and prudence. But Gabler is surely onto something in seeing the McCarthyite strain in American conservatism being more tenacious and transmittable, because human resentment is more common and politically potent than agreement about limited government. The resentment theme also tends to get stronger when there is too little raw political talent around: when you have the limited grasp of the world of W and Palin, a resort to McCarthyism is often helpful, even necessary.
....

This year revealed how almost all the positive arguments in American politics have come from the left. The exception was Ron Paul. On the right, the collapse of governing coherence led to a campaign and a party of almost pure ressentiment.

I would disagree that all of the positive arguments came from the left, but the ones who tried to make a difference on the right (Chris Buckley and his late father, et al) were shunned by the Resentmanists, as they might be called, for breaking with the party line.

McCain lost (and lost big) partly because he tied himself to these people. The fact that they can’t or won’t see that they are part of the problem shows how limiting their resentment worldview really is. When all you’ve got left is anger and spite, you turn into what you used to be against. You turn into, well, angry Democrats circa 1980. After that loss, it took them a long time before they could get over it and get somebody electable in the White House again. It will probably take the conservative movement longer unless they start getting their act together.

George M. Docherty died this Thanksgiving. If you’ve never heard of Rev. George Docherty, he’s the one who gave us the “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegience.

On Feb. 7, 1954, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower sitting in Lincoln’s pew, Rev. Docherty urged that the pledge to the flag be amended, saying, “To omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life.”

He borrowed the phrase from the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln said, “this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

Rev. Docherty’s inspiration for the sermon came from his son’s schoolroom experience of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which was written in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy. When Rev. Docherty realized that it had no reference to God, he later said, “I had found my sermon.”

Without mentioning a deity, Rev. Docherty said, the pledge could just as easily apply to the communist Soviet Union: “I could hear little Muscovites recite a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity."…

But in 1954, with Eisenhower in the congregation and the threat of communism in the air, Rev. Docherty’s message immediately resounded on Capitol Hill. Bills were introduced in Congress that week, and Eisenhower signed the “under God” act into law within four months.

Then as now, legal scholars questioned whether a reference to a deity in a patriotic pledge violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. In recent years, there have been several court challenges to the phrase.

But Rev. Docherty remained unmoved. The phrase “under God” could include “the great Jewish community and the people of the Muslim faith,” in his view, but he drew the line at atheists.

“An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms,” he said in his sermon. “If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.”

But did he intend for it to be used by fundamentalists as part of their agenda to make America a “Christian First” society? And would he have been welcome in their circle now? After all, today’s social conservatives would probably have taken issue with Docherty in other areas:

During his 26 years as pastor, he became better known for his liberal social activism than for his quest to alter the Pledge of Allegiance. He promoted racial equality and led outreach efforts to feed and educate the city’s hungry and poor. His church was often a staging point for civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from its pulpit. Rev. Docherty was with King on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march in Selma, Ala., in 1965.

Rev. Docherty often spoke out against the Vietnam War in his sermons, even when Robert S. McNamara—defense secretary in the 1960s—was present for services.

I have to wonder if Docherty realized the influence that moment has had on the religious right. Would he have done the same thing today?