- Obama as Gorbachev.
- Who lacks standing to diss Herman Cain?
- Obama should suspend habeus corpus.
- The Great Gerrymander.
- Norway.
- An exhibit in the libertarian case for abandoning regulatory bodies.
- What’s Wrong with Benevolence?
- Ouch! That argument makes too much sense!
- Today’s Gospel reading rocks!
- Am I one sick puppy?
1
When George Will has something nice to say about a disorderly, entirely not-buttoned-down movement like the Tea Party, it’s worth a read. (I think he intended “the most welcome political development since the Goldwater insurgency in 1964” as something nice.”)
Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.
Except for the jarring “tax eaters,” that’s a nicely succinct wrap up to a thought-provoking column. Pat Buchanan makes substantially the same point, predicting imminent Tea Party victory:
And so, today, it is Democrats who are in rebellion. For Obama has reportedly signed on to specific and real reductions, $3 trillion worth, that include cuts in future costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
America’s hirsute welfare state may be about to get a haircut.
“Who dares, wins,” is the motto of the Special Air Service, the Brits’ answer to America’s Navy SEALs. While no final deal has been cut, House Republicans have made significant gains.
(Emphasis added) Buchanan’s “hirsute welfare state” sounds to me a lot like Will’s “reactionary liberalism.”
I think I’ll put a sock in it about “Republican intransigence on tax increases” until we see how this plays out by August 2.
Spoiler: Roughly half the country will be unhappy. I’ll not be entirely happy, since some of my clients likely will have it harder.
2
I don’t think Carson Holloway agrees with Herman Cain’s anti-Muslim views or thinks them consistent with the Constitution. But he doesn’t think that fans of the “living Constitution” have standing to fault Cain.
After all,
the Constitution is a living document. We have to update our interpretation to meet new circumstances, and today offers circumstances that the Founders could never have envisioned. After all, they never contemplated the possibility of significant immigration into America from non-Christian nations. And why, in any case, should we be governed by the “dead hand of the past ….”
I assume you either “get it” or will “go get it.”
3
Obama should raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, by executive order, as Lincoln so suspended habeus corpus, argue two law professors in a New York Times Op Ed.
When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, he said that it was necessary to violate one law, lest all the laws but one fall into ruin.
The two are apparently proponents of the Imperial Presidency, having authored as well a tome with the telling title “The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic.”
If not “Madisonian,” gentleman, what adjective would you use for your new “Republic”?
And what do you think of Herman Cain’s addled assessment of the need to suspend the Religion Clause of the First Amendment to avoid all our other laws falling into ruin by the insidious insinuation of sharia into the body politic?
4
The most lasting legacy of last year’s elections may be redistricting, especially if Obama is the new Gorbachev. Ann Althouse has salient comments about the more pejorative term for redistricting.
5
I didn’t have much to say about Norway because so little was known. But late-breaking news as I type this Friday night is that they have made an arrest, of one Anders Behring Breivik, a nationalist of some sort who looks like a buff, outdoorsy Julian Assange.
I’ll bet if the suspicions stick and Breivik’s put on trial, it will be very heavily covered because of his good looks. (Pasty, consumptive Julian Assange, on the other hand, looks like John Hurt playing Caligula in I, Claudius, as I’ve noted before somewhere.)
6
Here’s a nice example of why Libertarians ask “could no regulation be worse than corrupt regulation?” Benedictine Monks in Louisiana took lemons (trees felled by Hurricane Katrina) and made lemonade (inexpensive simple pine caskets), and for their trouble were threatened with fines and jail time by Louisiana’s powerful funeral industry.
Thank goodness a federal judge found for them in the lawsuit they brought. (Benedictine Monks Allowed to Run Casket Business, WSJ – likely pay wall).
Benedictine Monks add a certain cachet to the kerfuffle, but it would be the same difference, it seems to me, if Bo and Joe, a couple of rednecks (“Coonass” is a distinct Louisiana subspecies, if memory serves) were trying to make lemonade from those lemons.
It’s quite common for a trade group (used loosely) to try to elevate their status to that of a profession (read: “cartel”) through “consumer protection” arguments. As a member of a learned profession that does enjoy a monopoly on a few things (fewer every decade, it seems), I’m not unsympathetic to the basic premise, but it obviously can be abused.
What better example of abuse than a monopoly on a product for containing and interring the body of someone whose soul has left, and who is beyond all possibility of temporal harm?
7
I’m really not on a radical, libertarian rant against government, but John Derbyshire, writing at the American [Paleo]Conservative, reviews What’s Wrong With Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment.
There’s a political as well as a person application to “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
8
John Payne at the American Conservative blog says bondholders are enablers of government irresponsibility and are either motivated by culpable greed or are recklessly stupid and credulous. In either event, he thinks they should take the first hit when fiscal judgment day comes.
In other words, “Default? Serves ’em right!”
9
By lovely coincidence, today’s Gospel reading in the Orthodox Church includes Matthew 9: 20-22, Matthew’s account of the healing of the woman with an issue of blood, who will officially become Name Saint (Patron Saint) of my granddaughter, Veronica, to be baptized today. (Here’s a meditation on the passage, not focused on the later life of the Saint.)
10
I love this poem. Does that make me a bad person?
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 