2008 June | Hoystory

Archive for June, 2008

Jun

What's the matter with California?

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Categories: Democrats, Oil and Republicans

This issue isn’t specific to California, but it’s in the same vein as the popular book “What’s the matter with Kansas?” that posited that the middle class votes against its economic interests (read: Democrats) because Republicans use religion and societal issues as wedges.

My short answer to that is: So what? Every election requires voters to weigh a wide variety of issues. There hasn’t been a candidate in the history of the world where any honest, informed voter can say that the candidated is right-on on everything (aside from the candidate himself).

Which brings us to this election and voters voting their economic interest and $4 a gallon gasoline.

Like lotteries and sin taxes, high energy prices are a tax on the poor. Ed Begley Jr. can throw out his shoulder patting himself on the back because he drives a Prius, but Begley could easily afford to drive a Hummer. Blue collar workers who need a good-sized pickup to do their work can’t switch to a Prius — and $4 a gallon gasoline can cause a dire financial hardship.

What are the two major political parties offering as a solution?

Democrats are going to make those evil automobile manufacturers make new cars that use less gas. They may be less-safe (the easiest way to make a car use less gas is to make it lighter and a new car versus a tractor-trailer, well you were going to lose anyway, but you might survive in a bigger car), but they’ll solve that problem by lowering the highway speed limit to 35.

Unfortunately, for most people, those new cars Detroit puts out won’t do them any good, because they won’t be able to afford a new car since they’ve been spending $4 a gallon on gas.

Democrats are also promising pie-in-the-sky estimates of what alternative energy can accomplish. Heck, they may be right. When gasoline starts costing $7 a gallon, then solar farms and wind turbines may become economical — but that’s not bringing the price down. It’s just at that point the price differential between the methods disappears.

In short, Democrats are all for methods to wean us off of oil — but they are genuinely unconcerned with bringing the price down — ever. Sen. Barack Obama said in an interview that he was dismayed that gas prices had reached $4 a gallon “this quickly,” not that they reached that mark in the first place.

Republicans, on the other hand, are willing to use a scatter-gun approach. Oil? Yes. Nuclear? Yes. Solar? Yes. Ethanol? Yes. Wind turbines? Yes, especially if they ruin Teddy Kennedy’s view.

This method has the advantage of creating a probability that gas prices may eventually go down — or if not down, they won’t continue to rise.

While Democrats are working exclusively on the demand side of the curve, Republicans are willing to work on both supply and demand.

So, has this translated into votes yet?

No.

Will it? It should, but then again, people don’t always vote their economic interests.

Maybe it will happen at $5 a gallon.

Jun

Our rulers' whims

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Categories: Gun control and Judges

The Supreme Court yesterday, thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy getting up on the right side of the bed, affirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says. For some insightful analysis of the case, I refer you to Dave Kopel, who was one of the lawyers sitting at the counsel table when the case was argued before the Supreme Court.

Also, there’s this excellent bit of analysis from National Review:

What’s more, the opinion explicitly recognizes the difference between legislating and judging. In the ruling’s final paragraph, Scalia writes that the majority takes “seriously the concerns raised by the amici who believe that prohibition handgun ownership is a solution” to gun violence. However, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.” Scalia’s opinion, which is in many ways quite narrow, leaves ample room for legislation regulating concealed-carry, the types of firearms that are permissible, and the conditions under which firearms are sold. Scalia reaffirms that the Supreme Court determines not whether policies are good, but whether policies are consistent with the Constitution.

This is exactly why today’s opinion is jurisprudence and yesterday’s child-molester case was legislating. The constitution specifically addresses gun ownership and recognizes the attendent rights that go along with it. The constitution says nothing about which crimes are death-penalty-worthy and which are not — that’s a public policy decision.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren refers to Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent as “self-refuting.” Breyer suggested the court subject the Second Amendment right to a balancing test. The enumerated right to “keep and bear arms” on one hand would be balanced against the benefits of gun control laws. Lindgren points out that Breyer’s balancing of those two positions is incredibly dishonest — because he gives the right nearly no weight and gives a lot of weight to the perceived (not actual) benefits of gun control.

Breyer’s dissent is far more worrying than Lindgren makes it out to be. The mere idea that a justice would advocate a balancing test (as opposed to a standard of strict scrutiny) is outrageous. Read Breyer’s dissent and substitute the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” for the Second Amendment and be shocked. Do we really want courts deciding if allowing your speech (political or otherwise) should be balanced against some arbitrary standard of the public good?

Again today, both senators John McCain and Barack Obama were on the same side in their analysis of the court’s opinion.

Which presents us with a quandry for both of the candidates.

For Barack Obama, for two days in a row, he has found himself on the opposite side of his “model judges.” I’m sure this is part of his march to the middle for the general election, but it would be nice if our mainstream media would ask him how committed he is to the Breyer-Ginsburg-Souter model considering what’s happened the past two days.

Sen. John McCain doesn’t get a pass here either, because today the same 5-4 majority ruled part of McCain’s campaign finance reform legislation — the so-called “millionaire’s amendment” — was unconstitutional. All four of McCain’s models — Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts — came down against the campaign finance law.

I predict that Washington Post columnist George Will will make a big deal out of this disconnect on McCain’s part in this Sunday’s column. (It came over the wire yesterday, so don’t be too impressed by my psychic abilities.) I think what it comes down to is who are the people whom each potential president is going to have help with the vetting of Supreme Court nominees. McCain has tapped former solicitor general Theodore Olsen for that role — a fact that I think conservatives can take a lot of solace in. As far as Obama goes, there is little doubt that he will tap anyone who isn’t an ultraliberal to the court — fully expecting him or her to reverse the Heller decision or act as another vote to further restrict the decisions of the people’s representatives when it comes to the use of the death penalty.

Jun

Inconvenient truths

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Categories: Environment

CNN’s top story right now is another one of those Al Gore specials: “North Pole could be ice-free this summer, scientists say”

By Alan Duke
CNN

(CNN) — The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Scientists say it’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole.

Scientists say it’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole.

“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist Mark Serreze.

It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen last autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.

The ice retreated to a record level in September when the Northwest Passage — the sea route through the Arctic Ocean — opened up briefly for the first time in recorded history.

“What we’ve seen through the past few decades is the Arctic sea ice cover is becoming thinner and thinner as the system warms up,” Serreze said.

Specific weather patterns will determine whether the North Pole’s ice cover melts completely this summer, he said.

Not mentioned anywhere in that story is this inconvenient fact from earlier this week. (via Watts Up With That)

An international team of researchers was able to provide evidence of explosive volcanism in the deeps of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean for the first time. Researchers from an expedition to the Gakkel Ridge, led by the American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), report in the current issue of the journal Nature that they discovered, with a specially developed camera, extensive layers of volcanic ash on the seafloor, which indicates a gigantic volcanic eruption.

“Explosive volcanic eruptions on land are nothing unusual and pose a great threat for whole areas,” explains Dr Vera Schlindwein of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. She participated in the expedition as a geophysicist and has been, together with her team, examining the earthquake activity of the Arctic Ocean for many years. “The Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and buried thriving Pompeii under a layer of ash and pumice. Far away in the Arctic Ocean, at 85° N 85° E, a similarly violent volcanic eruption happened almost undetected in 1999 – in this case, however, under a water layer of 4,000 m thickness.” So far, researchers have assumed that explosive volcanism cannot happen in water depths exceeding 3 kilometres because of high ambient pressure. “These are the first pyroclastic deposits we’ve ever found in such deep water, at oppressive pressures that inhibit the formation of steam, and many people thought this was not possible,” says Robert Reves-Sohn, staff member of the WHOI and lead scientist of the expedition carried out on the Swedish icebreaker Oden in 2007.

A major part of Earth’s volcanism happens at the so-called mid-ocean ridges and, therefore, completely undetected on the seafloor. There, the continental plates drift apart; liquid magma intrudes into the gap and constantly forms new seafloor through countless volcanic eruptions. Accompanied by smaller earthquakes, which go unregistered on land, lava flows onto the seafloor. These unspectacular eruptions usually last for only a few days or weeks.

Of course, hot magma beneath the Arctic ice has absolutely nothing to do with ice melting — it’s got to be you and your SUV.

Jun

Evolving standards of decency

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Categories: Death Penalty and Judges

On Wednesday, the Supreme ~~Court~~ Legislature took an impromptu survey of the states and decided that since a bunch of them hadn’t rushed to extend the death penalty to child rapists in the past few years, that the nation’s “evolving standards of decency” prohibits the death penalty for those most despicable people. [PDF of the ruling is here.]

Ever since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty more than 30 years ago, justices have been finding ways to limit it.

The court has ruled that even among murderers, only those who commit a “narrow category of the most serious crimes” are eligible for death in states that allow it. In recent years, the court has said it was following the evolving standards of society in ruling that the mentally retarded and those who commit murder as juveniles cannot be executed. No such national consensus exists for putting child-rapists to death, Kennedy said. Six of the 36 jurisdictions that authorize the death penalty — states and the federal government — extend it to those convicted of raping a child, he wrote.

Alito said the tally is disingenuous in light of a 1977 decision by the court that many had interpreted as saying that capital punishment could not be applied to a rapist.

Even though Coker v. Georgia concerned a 16-year-old “adult woman,” Alito said the decision “posed a very high hurdle” for states that wanted to impose capital punishment for those who rape children.
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Louisiana was the first, in 1995, and has been followed by Montana, South Carolina, Oklahoma and most recently Texas. (Florida and Georgia have older laws that have been called into question by state courts.) They might have been the start of a “strong new evolutionary line” forming a national consensus for executing child-rapists, Alito said, but “we will never know, because the court today snuffs out the line in its incipient stage.”

Superlegislator Kennedy also noted in his opinion that if the court upheld the death penalty as an option for child rapists that it might encourage rapists to go ahead and kill the child. That is certainly a valid question … that should be decided by legislators — not judges.

Some more thoughts:

From Ed Whelan of NRO’s “Bench Memos:”

Specifically, Kennedy observes, “It is not at all evident that the child rape victim’s hurt is lessened when the law permits the death of the perpetrator.” For, you see, the victim will have to testify and meet with law enforcement personnel, and “society … by enlisting the child victim to assist it over the course of years in asking for capital punishment forces a moral choice on the child, who is not of mature age to make that choice.”

How galling. Set aside that child victims face similar burdens in non-capital cases and that Kennedy doesn’t meaningfully measure the incremental burden that capital cases impose. Why shouldn’t prosecutors and the child’s family be trusted to work out sensible arrangements? How does Kennedy’s concern give him any basis for overriding Louisiana’s law?

As happens throughout the opinion, Kennedy couches his decision on whether the death penalty for child rape violates the constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in policy terms rather than in legal terms.

That’s not your job. It’s not your place. Knock it off.

Orin Kerr over at the Volokh Conspiracy starts off a lengthy discussion. I want to highlight this post by “Orion.”

As a firm opponent of the death penalty, I wish I could feel vindicated by this decision, but instead I just feel nauseated. So first, we engage in this ridiculous exercise in state counting. So what the federal constitution says depends on what the state legislatures do, and if enough states pass unconstitutional laws, suddenly they become constitutional. I cannot believe that opinions endorsing this absurdity continue to gain the support of five justices of the supreme court.

Then, of course, we must weigh in with “our own judgment” on the issue — ugh, don’t even want to go there.

I’ve long considered myself a believer in the idea of the “living constitution”, but as time goes on, I become more and more convinced that Scalia-style originalism is the only principled philosophy of Constitutional interpretation (as much as the results might often be unpalatable to me as a matter of policy).

Exactly! And if the results are unpalatable to you, the result isn’t to get judges who share your same ideology on the court, but it is to get the legislative and executive branches — as a reflection of the popular will — to change the laws. That’s how a representative democracy is supposed to work. But we’ve got five justices on the Supreme Court who have decided that they know best.

Both senators John McCain and Barack Obama condemned the ruling. What no one has yet bothered to ask Sen. Obama is why he would expect to get anything different considering that at least four of the judges in the majority are models for those he’d nominate. Sorry, but “I condemn this ruling” shouldn’t be enough. Unfortunately, the press has decided that they’re not going to ask tough questions of Obama.

On a related note: That’s why last week’s ruling in the Gitmo habeus case was so anti-democratic. The judicial branch had said that the executive and legislative branches needed to create some process for handling these terrorist detainees. The Congress and President got together and passed a law doing just that. The court’s response was to say: “That’s not good enough” and gave the terrorists more rights and directed district judges to come up with rules (read: laws) on how to proceed on their own.

Jun

Bush administration tries affirmative action

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Categories: Lawyers, Politics and Republicans

The Bush administration got caught using ideological criteria for the hiring of career (not political) lawyers in the Justice Department in the years 2002 and 2006.

Justice Department officials illegally used “political or ideological” factors in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school graduates with Federalist Society membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberal-sounding résumés, an internal report found Tuesday.

The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s own inspector general and its ethics office, portrays a clumsy effort by senior Justice Department screeners to weed out candidates for career positions whom they considered “leftists,” using Internet search engines to look for incriminating information or evidence of possible liberal bias.

One rejected candidate from Harvard Law School worked for Planned Parenthood. Another wrote opinion pieces critical of the USA Patriot Act and the nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. A third applicant worked for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and posted an unflattering cartoon of President Bush on his MySpace page.

This was wrong and shouldn’t have happened, but there’s a big donkey in the room that isn’t addressed in this report. Instead of this being the Justice Department, imagine it was a large university — or a newspaper. Then imagine we aren’t talking about ideology, but race.

If you assume that conservatives are a minority — and they typically are among the self-selecting group that goes into public service.

So, what was the Bush administration doing? Affirmative action.

What I want to know is the ideological balance of Justice Department lawyers as a whole. After 7 1/2 years of a conservative administration, is the Justice Department excessively conservative? Excessively liberal? Because if we’re really concerned about getting balanced opinions on the law out of career lawyers, an overwhelmingly liberal employee pool — like an overwhelmingly conservative one — will not serve the executive branch well.

For those who say that lawyers can set aside their biases and do an excellent job on something they personally oppose — well, journalists say the same thing too. It’s not the same.

There’s one other part of that story I wanted to note for a different reason.

Another applicant, a student at the top of his class at Harvard who was fluent in Arabic, was relegated to the “questionable” pile because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that advocates civil liberties.

CAIR is also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror-funding case. I’d put this student in the “questionable” pile too.

Jun

James Fagan is evil

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Categories: Democrats and Lawyers

There’s no other way to say it. James Fagan is a defense attorney by trade and a Massachusetts lawmaker because there’s people out there that support Democrats like him. In a recent debate on “Jessica’s Law,” which would require a mandatory minimum of 20 years for the rape of a child under 12, Fagan made the following insightful observations:

Fagan, a defense attorney, infuriated victims’ rights advocates during a recent House debate when he said he would “rip apart” 6-year-old victims on the witness stand and “make sure the rest of their life is ruined.”

In a fiery soliloquy on the House floor, Fagan said he’d grill victims so that, “when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.”

Fagan’s contact information is here.

The fact that Fagan hasn’t been run over by a truck proves that God is merciful. However, if he’s re-elected, this time around, it goes to show you that just about everything is acceptable if you’ve got a “D” after your name.

Jun

The headline was all the warning you needed

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Categories: Media

I’m not sure the head-honchos at NBC are stupid enough to destroy “Meet the Press” by following this suggestion.

Huffington Thinks Olbermann Would Be A Good Fit for MTP

The first two words of the headline tell you the rest of it is garbage.

Jun

Obama's race … card

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Categories: Democrats and Racism

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama put the Republicans on notice: He and his surrogates are going to link criticism of him to racism — both overt and covert.

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Obama’s making a mistake here; it was the Clintons, not the Republicans that made those insinuations.

But it doesn’t matter. As I’ve chronicled before, you can’t criticize a black person without being tarred with the racist label.

John J. Pitney over at National Review makes the case with constructive use of LexisNexis databases.

An even more audacious accusation came after Obama spoke of “bitter” working people who “cling to guns or religion.” Critics slammed him as an elitist, and many conservatives noted that he was the latest in a long line of liberal snobs. One may think that that likening Obama to Adlai Ewing Stevenson II and John Forbes Kerry is about as un-racist as you can get. Yet journalist David K. Shipler wrote: “‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”

And “outlandish” is another word for “absurd,” which is another word for “preposterous.”

Get ready for the first post-racial presidential candidate to demonstrate he’s anything but.

Jun

The reason he rejected public financing

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Categories: Funny and Politics

After so many years of touting public financing of elections, Barack Obama last week decided that the system he supported was for other people. He said that he needed a lot of money to counter the “smears” that the right would level at him.

Like this one:

Now that’s funny.

Jun

Hot, hot, hot

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Categories: Environment

It’s been sweltering the past few days here in sunny San Diego. When I arrived home Saturday night after having my Escondido condo sealed up for several days I expected to walk into a sauna. Instead, it was merely a little too uncomfortably warm. I had put the A/C up to a level that I thought it wouldn’t reach easily last the winter. I could tell by the smell in the air, that the A/C had turned on at some point — it was set at 87 degrees.

Of course, this is evidence of global warming.

Or not.

That chart, via Anthony Watts and Tilo Reber, reveals that global temperature has been flat for the past 11 years.

Follow the link and you’ll also discover that CO2 has continued to rise during that time.

Here’s a couple more links that you should read:

McQ over at Q & O explains why I spent $68 Sunday to fill up my tank.

Anthony Watts highlights a Guardian newspaper report that James “the Bush administration is censoring me” Hansen of NASA is calling on energy company executives to be put on trial for crimes against the planet. I’ll probably be swept out in the second round for questioning the groupthink.