Quotable
From a commenter at Hot Air:
I think Chris Hitchens just may well be God. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
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July 31, 2007
Pelosi might seek Bush's impeachment if Republicans didn't mind
The Nation reports that Speaker Nancy Pelosi “would probably advocate” impeaching Mr. Bush were she not head of the only body in the world that can impeach Mr. Bush:
But given her current role as party leader, at a breakfast with progressive journalists today … Pelosi sketched her case against impeachment.
“The question of impeachment is something that would divide the country,” Pelosi said this morning during a wide-ranging discussion in the ornate Speaker’s office. Her top priorities are ending the war in Iraq, expanding health care, creating jobs and preserving the environment. “I know what our success can be on those issues. I don’t know what our success can be on impeaching the president.” [Emphasis added.]
What her “success can be” is nonexistent. Assuming she held Joe Lieberman and every Democrat, she’d still need seventeen Republican senators to convict. The odds of getting them are precisely zero. And in the process, she’d light a fire under the GOP’s otherwise dispirited and lethargic ass. In fact, an attempt to impeach the president is probably the only thing that can prevent a Democratic landslide in 2008.
Her claim of ignorance notwithstanding, Ms. Pelosi knows this. Which is why, even though she’s duty-bound to impeach the president if she believes there’s actually a case for it, she will leave Mr. Bush alone.
We can’t credit Nancy Pelosi with being principled. But we must credit her with being practical.
July 30, 2007
Worth reading ...
Democrats vs. President Bush: To the courts or not, and how?
McClatchy
… with little precedent and thin legislative jurisdiction over how the president can hire and fire his appointees, Congress’ case looks weak to many experts.
Legal theory lexicon: the counter-majoritarian difficulty
Legal Theory Blog
The counter-majoritarian difficulty may be the best known problem in constitutional theory.
Supreme Court chief suffers a seizure
Washington Post
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suffered a seizure and fell near his summer home in Maine today and was taken to an area hospital, where he will remain overnight, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said.
Roberts, 52, has “fully recovered” from the 2 p.m. incident except for “minor scrapes” sustained in the fall …
Why are we so scared of offending Muslims?
Christopher Hitchens
Many distinguished authors, Muslim and non-Muslim, are dead or in hiding because of the words they have put on pages concerning the unbelievable claims of Islam. And it is to appease such a spirit of persecution and intolerance that a student in New York City has been arrested for an expression, however vulgar, of an opinion.
This has to stop, and it has to stop right now.
(HT: Instapundit)
"The fear is gone, the curfew is ignored, tonight Iraq knows only joy ..."
July 29, 2007
What's happening to us?
Mark Steyn reports on two Oregon boys who face prosecution for … well, for being boys. I first blogged about their case here.
Steyn:
… upon being caught butt-swatting, [Cory] Mashburn and [Ryan] Cornelison were called to the principal’s office, where they were questioned for several hours by vice principal Steve Tillery and McMinnville Police officer Marshall Roache. At the end of the afternoon, two boys who’d never been in any kind of trouble before were read their Miranda rights and led off in handcuffs to spend five days in juvenile jail.
Tough, but I guess they learned their lesson, right?
Ha! The state of Oregon was only warming up. After a court appearance in shackles and prison garb, the defendants were charged with multiple counts of felony sexual abuse, banned from school and forbidden any contact with their friends.
• Is that true? Were these boys “questioned for several hours” outside the presence of their parents or counsel before being Mirandized? And if so, what’s the legal significance of that, if any? [Added: I sent e-mail to a law professor who specializes in criminal procedure and asked him to comment on this. If he answers, I’ll let you know.]
• For more than two days following their arrest, Cory and Ryan, both 13, were not allowed to see their parents, or even to speak to them by phone.
• Watch the Oregonian’s interview with the boys and their parents.
• Here’s a partial transcript from juvenile court in which two of the “victims” say they did not feel threatened by the boys, whom they describe as friends, but did feel pressured to make false statements during interrogation.
• Both families are already out $10K each in legal fees. One family has lost its car and had its phone shut off.
• I have what I think is accurate contact information for Cory and Ryan’s defense fund. But I want to call and verify before posting it. Once I’ve confirmed the information, I’ll share it with you. These boys and their parents are up against the resources of the state. We have to help them.
Again, Steyn:
Mashburn and Cornelison do not believe they’ve committed a crime, so they would like to exercise their right to the presumption of innocence — a bedrock principle of the English legal tradition now in great peril from American prosecutorial excess. Instead of letting the state bully them into a grubby, shaming deal, the boys would like it to do what justice systems in civilized societies are required to do: prove the crime. It’s a gamble: Those 10 charges each command a one-year sentence, plus lifelong sex-offender registration.
District Attorney [Bradley] Berry told reporter Susan Goldsmith of the Oregonian that his department “aggressively” pursues sex crimes. “These cases are devastating to children,” he said. “They are life-altering cases.”
No, sir. The only one devastating children’s lives is you.
Did you know that the governor of Texas runs the CIA?
Ministers insisted that British secret agents would only be allowed to pass intelligence to the CIA to help it capture Osama bin Laden if the agency promised he would not be tortured, it has emerged.
It has also “emerged” that then-Governor Bush was in charge of the CIA:
The report criticises the Bush administration’s approval of practices which would be illegal if carried out by British agents. It shows that in 1998, the year Bin Laden was indicted in the US, Britain insisted that the policy of treating prisoners humanely should include him. But the CIA never gave the assurances.
I bet you didn’t know that Texas’ governor runs the CIA. See, you learn something new everyday!
(Note to the Guardian: Don’t expect any assurances from Governor Perry, either!)
Clever ...
HT: Jason Swadley
They can thank Bill Gates and Vista
Sales of Macintosh are up an astonishing 33% over the same quarter last year:
Apple reported that blazing sales of iPods and Macintosh computers sent its profits rocketing to a record high in the recent quarter and that its iPhone is “off to a great start.”
Apple said Wednesday that it had revenue of $5.41 billion and net profit of $818 million in the quarter ending June 30 …
And that was before Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the 30 hours following the gadget’s debut.
I bought my iMac in May, presumably making me part of Steve Jobs’ happy quarter.
If you’re thinking of switching platforms, two points of advice.
• Come on in. The water is fine.
• But wait until October, when new Macs will ship with OS 10.5, also known as Leopard.
July 28, 2007
Gingrich: U.S. in "phony war," and in "greater danger than you can imagine"
Rudy remains the GOP front-runner
The notion that he’s too socially liberal to win over Republicans is false:
A recent Gallup poll found that 74 percent of Republicans surveyed said Giuliani would be an acceptable GOP presidential nominee. Among self-described “born again or evangelical” Christian Republicans, 69 percent said Giuliani would be acceptable. Leaving a restaurant in Le Mars, Iowa, after Giuliani had spent an hour taking questions, I overheard one man enthusiastically say to another, “How’d you like to see him debate Hillary!”
And had it been a Bible?
Would that be a “hate crime”?
Hot Republican says something
Mesmerizing blue eyes and a hurt-puppy look, interrupted only by the flash of an adorable smile:
After five replays, it finally hit me that boo is speaking in this video. So I dimmed the monitor — how else to concentrate on his words? — and listened to the audio. He’s talking about this, which is a source of consternation in some quarters.
Myself, I say Tube it, or don’t Tube it. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
July 27, 2007
Worth reading ...
Subprime coming home to roost?
Financial Times
Fear now rules the credit markets, where the effective cost of ensuring against a default, in both Europe and the US, has increased by more than half in barely a month. A steady drip of bad news has prompted fears that the subprime debacle could trigger a credit crunch, raising the cost of financing worldwide as investors are forced to sell healthy investments to make good their losses.
The liberal edge
John Podhoretz
… what if what we’re seeing is something larger — something more interesting and more threatening to conservative ideas of governance and GOP ideas of holding onto power?
Flaring tempers put a dent in Senate’s sense of etiquette
CQ Today
Partisan discord on the Senate floor became so pronounced Thursday that at one point a Republican leader sided with the opposition to try to settle frayed senators.
Sheikh delays plane over seating
Reuters
… the pilot ordered him and his traveling companions, the three women, two men, a cook and a servant, off the plane.
July 26, 2007
Liberal: time to pack it on at the Supreme Court
See if you can quit laughing, because I couldn’t.
Monkey spanking and butt slapping: your government at work
Pardon the pun, but this is nuts:
A Broward County jail inmate accused of masturbating in his cell while a female deputy saw him from another room was convicted of indecent exposure Wednesday.
[…]
[Terry Lee] Alexander, 20, was sitting on his bunk alone in his cell masturbating in November when a female deputy, monitoring his cell from a nearby control room, took offense. [Emphasis added.]
For his “crime,” the judge sentenced Mr. Alexander to 60 days in the county jail. No word yet on whether the jurors face prosecution:
The case drew snickers in the courtroom, especially during jury selection, when prospective jurors were quizzed about their own habits.
Defense attorney Kathleen McHugh faced 17 prospective jurors and asked point-blank who among them had never done that particular sex act.
No hands went up.
Well, imagine that.
Meanwhile, two boys in Oregon face prosecution for the admittedly crude and juvenile, but hardly felonious, act of butt slapping:
The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran — what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.
But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.
After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.
Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?
Here’s a better question: How is it that the adults in this case — a teacher’s aide, a vice principal, a police officer and a prosecutor — remain in positions of authority following the loss of their minds?
Incidentally, “[t]wo of the girls identified as victims have recanted, saying they felt pressured and gave false statements to interrogators.”
(HT: Volokh Conspiracy and Opinion Journal)
July 23, 2007
Do you ever worry that we're well and truly screwed?
Ponder it:
Humanity is approaching an unprecedented crisis when not enough oil and gas will be produced to keep industrial civilisation running, the world’s top oilmen warned last week.
The warning – which is being hailed as a “tipping point” on both sides of the Atlantic – marks the first time that the industry has accepted that it may soon no longer be able to meet demand for its products. In Facing the Hard Truths about Energy, it gives authoritative support to concern about impending shortages, following a similar alert by the International Energy Agency less than two weeks ago.
[…]
Though vast amounts of oil and gas remain underground, “complex challenges” and “global uncertainties” are likely to put an end to “the sufficient, reliable and economic energy supplies upon which people depend.” And the crunch could come sooner, with oil production becoming “a significant challenge as early as 2015.” This chimes with the International Energy Agency’s prediction that oil supplies could become “extremely tight” in five years.
The predictions should send a shiver down humanity’s collective spine as a shortage of oil and gas has been predicted to cause industrial collapse, market crashes, resource wars and a rise in poverty. [Emphasis added.]
So by 2015, only eight years from now, and perhaps sooner, we’ll face exploding energy costs. Three years later, in 2018, we’ll face exploding taxes, necessitated by a gap between revenue and entitlement spending.
Those are strikes one and two. For strike three, I nominate the unfunded pension liabilities that needle local governments all across the country.
Yes, I’m a worrywart. But like a stopped clock, a worrywart is right part of the time!
Question: If we vote for any of the many demagogues now running for president — see, for example, this despicable asshole — can we make it all go away?
The owner of this blog is "some clown"
That’s the word from some of the best real estate in the blogosphere.
And so what if the guy who calls me “some clown” is himself full of shit. It’s still a fair description, as I have been known to ass clown here on the Internets. True, in the interest of accuracy, he should have referred to me as “some ass clown,” and not merely as “some clown,” but I won’t quibble. And in any case, I am grateful for the link, and I’ve updated the post that inspired it.
If you care to read more about all this than any normal person should, a fellow ass clown has extensive, related commentary. (Gawd damn, Ace! Breathe, guy, breathe!)
July 22, 2007
Video: This is a riot
Found via Bryan, here’s a submission to the CNN/YouTube Debates, wherein ordinary Americans ask questions of the presidential candidates:
[RSS and e-mail subscribers: Video appears here. Click to watch.]
ADDED —
I didn’t watch Monday night’s debate, but those who did say CNN actually used this clip! (It’s not “crap,” Allah! It’s funny. Geez.)
"Heterosexual men are the ones whose ox is being gored"
Ron Garber knew his former wife was living with another woman — and had taken her last name — when he agreed to pay her $1,250 a month in alimony.
What he didn’t know was that the two women had registered with the state as domestic partners under a law that was supposed to mirror marriage law, Garber said.
State marriage laws say that alimony ends when the former spouse remarries, and Garber reasons he should be off the hook, given that domestic partnership is akin to marriage. But an Orange County judge has decided that registered partnership is cohabitation, not marriage, and that Garber must pay.
The reporter doesn’t ask Garber’s ex-wife the question I would ask: Why do you think you’re entitled to have your muffin and eat it, too? As a lawyer for Lambda Legal notes, this isn’t unequal treatment. “It is better treatment …”
And does the ex-wife’s new partner have no pride? She can’t provide for her woman?
Is John Edwards the sexiest woman alive?
I know this: John Edwards has the potential to be one of the sexiest bottoms alive. For while he’s morally vain, and slightly bigoted, he’s also a cutie pie, of the sort that top men enjoy putting the blocks to. Just watch the boi fuss over his hair. He’s adorable.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes, politics notwithstanding, I’d tap it.
(Campaigning for the White House is hard on the body, and Edwards isn’t as hot today as he was four years ago. But still.)
Can Congress arrest the president's aides?
Rutgers law professor Frank Askin writes that if the Bush Administration won’t prosecute officials who refuse to testify before Congress on the U.S. attorneys kerfuffle, then Congress itself should take the officials into custody:
Instead of referring a contempt citation to the U.S. attorney, a house of Congress can order the sergeant-at-arms to take recalcitrant witnesses into custody and have them held until they agree to cooperate — i.e., an order of civil contempt. Technically, the witness could be imprisoned somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol, but historically the sergeant-at-arms has turned defendants over to the custody of the warden of the D.C. jail.
[…]
So, far from being defenseless against the president’s refusal to prosecute or the threat of presidential pardon, Congress could take into its own custody defiant administration officials who refuse to cooperate with legitimate inquiries into executive malfeasance. Those targets would have the right to seek writs of habeas corpus from the federal courts, but as long as Congress could show a legitimate need for the information it was seeking pursuant to its legislative oversight functions, it would be standing on solid legal ground.
• Congress isn’t performing a legitimate oversight function. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. He can dismiss them at will. There is nothing for Congress to oversee. All the Democrats are doing here is schmoozing their base and separating it from its money, hardly a permissible basis for depriving people of their liberty.
• Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers won’t testify before Congress because the president, citing executive privilege, has told them not to testify before Congress. What makes Professor Askin think that Mr. Bush would allow the arrest of officials who are following his lawful orders? No president could tolerate that. It would undermine his (soon, her) authoratha. Yes, both houses of Congress have a sergeant-at-arms. But the president has the Secret Service, renown for its ability to provide protective custody. As even one liberal blogger observes:
The most obvious benefit of inherent contempt is that it’s conducted entirely “in-house,” that is, entirely on the authority of the legislative branch. The most obvious drawback? Spending time on a trial. Well, that and the scene of having the Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol Police physically barred from entering the White House to arrest those who’ve defied subpoenas.
In which case, the sergeant-at-arms — and by extension, Congress — walks away looking silly and impotent. The Democrats have already been made daft by Republicans blocking their every move. It’s not nice of Professor Askin to egg them over the edge.
July 21, 2007
"The Real Rudy?" Gawd, I hope so
Here’s old video in which Rudy Giuliani calls “bullshit” on former New York Mayor David Dinkins. Among other inanities,* liberal Greg Sargent implies that Rudy’s diction could get him in trouble with the GOP’s conservative base.
Where does Sargent get such a dippy, reductionist notion? If anything, this sort of stuff attracts conservatives to Rudy. Accordingly, I’m happy to embed it here:
[RSS and e-mail subscribers: Video appears here. Click to watch.]
*Sargent stupidly suggests that Rudy’s utterance of the word “bullshit” tells us something about the man’s “reliability and temperament” as a potential commander in chief.
UPDATE —
Welcome TPM readers! I’m your host, “some clown.” Thanks for stopping by.
And Greg, thanks for the link, bud! I appreciate it. But your reply is as lame as your original post. As Professor Althouse puts it, “Your post wasn’t about the larger context. You know damned well that you just thought you could make conservatives tremble because the guy yelled ‘bullshit.’ We called bullshit on you for that.” Precisely.
Now, after your ass has been handed to you, you say there’s a larger story here. Okay, fine. I commend it to the reader’s attention. But a larger story isn’t what your original post was about, Greg. And it isn’t what your critics were responding to. I know you know that.
WaPo: Documents fight favors Bush
Among other things, precedent is on the president’s side:
“… experts cautioned that complaints by Democratic lawmakers about the administration’s legal stance are undercut by a Justice Department legal opinion issued during the Clinton administration.”
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy explains:
U.S. attorneys have no power of their own. The power they exercise is executive power, which the Constitution vests entirely in the president. They are his delegates, not independent actors, and he may fire them for any reason or no reason. If he fires them for a stupid reason, that is a political blunder for which the president and his Justice Department will be politically damaged — as has certainly happened here. But it is not a crime.
Congressional Democrats have tried to investigate it as if it were a crime. They’ve violated constitutional separation-of-powers principles by issuing subpoenas to some of the president’s top aides. The White House wisely declined to comply, and Congress’s next step is to try to hold them in contempt of Congress.
Only there’s a small problem. The Constitution vests Congress with no authority to prosecute. That is an executive power. Congress can say “prosecute” all it wants. It needs a U.S. attorney to do it. But the U.S. attorneys work for the president. Flexing its constitutional muscles, the executive branch is not going to prosecute any contempt urged by Congress. Checkmate.
Lawyer comes to court drunk
Wow. Just wow. Part One is below; Ace has links to Parts Two, Three and Four.
The judge is a model of judicial temperament. She’s dealing with a drunk who’s lying to her, repeatedly, and yet she remains calm and professional.
July 20, 2007
Messiah: Don't let genocide stop us
The prospect of it, he says, isn’t a good enough reason to keep us in Iraq:
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Except, of course, that we didn’t invade the Congo and topple its government, which means our moral obligations there aren’t the same as they are in Iraq.
The Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. makes the salient points:
To have created a mess and to turn around and walk way from it, apart from the fact that it is immoral in my view, it is not without a price. The price will be a destabilized Middle East, rampant international terrorism, which is bound to visit you here at home sooner or later. So, some clear thinking has to be made about the price.
Frustrated by Republicans, Democrats relent on Iraq
For now, anyway. But look at these faces. Remember when we wore ones just like them? Those are the faces of the majority, beset and bedeviled by the minority.
The Democrats taught us well, didn’t they? I’m just glad to see we were taking notes.
ADDED —
Mercy. Republican senators have decided they’ll not be ordinary bitches. They’ll be royal bitches:
Right now, at 9:18 [Thursday evening], Republicans have the clerk of the Senate reading the names and crimes of every person Bill Clinton pardoned …
Judge to Plame: get out
Sweet:
Former CIA operative Valerie Plame lost a lawsuit Thursday that demanded money from Bush administration officials whom she blamed for leaking her agency identity.
Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had accused Vice President Dick Cheney and others of conspiring to disclose her identity in 2003. Plame said that violated her privacy rights and was illegal retribution for her husband’s criticism of the administration.
Dismissed.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds and said he would not express an opinion on the constitutional arguments.
That last paragraph is highly misleading. The judge didn’t express an opinion on the “constitutional arguments” because there were no arguments to express an opinion on:
For the reasons given above, plaintiffs have failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted with respect to their four causes of action asserted directly under the Constitution.
July 19, 2007
4th Circuit now evenly divided between conservatives and liberals
Judge H. Emory Widener Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has waited six years for the confirmation of a replacement. He will wait no longer. Today, he took senior status, effective immediately.
That leaves the Fourth Circuit, once a reliably conservative court, evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. The court has five vacancies.
I predict that not until the 20th year of the Bush-Clinton Dynasty will those vacancies get filled. (Bush I took office in 1989; Clinton II will take office in 2009.)
July 18, 2007
Is our children learning?
And if not, can we blame them?
The attorney for the Billy Fischer family, whose daughter was cut from the Yorktown High School junior varsity cheerleading squad, says her clients have no other option but to sue the school district.
(HT: Overlawyered)
July 17, 2007
Will unlocking the iPhone get you successfully sued?
David Chartier says iPhone hackers “could easily be susceptible to legal action from Apple.” Perhaps he’s right. I don’t know. But on principle, this doesn’t sound right:
While I’m just as unhappy about carrier lock-in as the next guy who would prefer to roam the wireless seas in any direction he choses, Apple and AT&T have still put a tremendous amount of collaborative effort into developing the iPhone (let’s not forget the alterations AT&T had to make to their network and software for features like Visual Voicemail), and outside of all the new contract signups, we really aren’t sure how else AT&T is getting compensated from this deal. The iPhone is still Apple’s product, and they chose to bind it to AT&T’s network (for now), and as much as I hate to say it, these companies get to decide how their products are used.
I don’t know how well AT&T is getting compensated from this deal, either. But I also don’t see why that’s our problem. iPhones sell for as much as $599, and for not less than $499. If those price points don’t cover Apple’s investment, or the investment of its collaborators, then the company can raise its prices (and see whether the market will bear them). But Steve Jobs’ business dealings are not our issue.
Apple made a deal with AT&T. The consumer didn’t. And once the consumer pays Apple’s asking price, the product ceases to be the company’s property and becomes the consumer’s property.
Again, the law may well be on Apple’s side for all I know. But if so, as a free marketeer, that doesn’t strike me as right. Am I missing something?
In any case, see why Apple still rules among gadget geeks:
(P.S. Although I’m in love with my iMac and iPod, I haven’t bought an iPhone, in part because it’s tethered to a single carrier.)
July 16, 2007
Isn't this "torture"? Democrats to subject Republicans to sleep deprivation
The details are sketchy, but it appears to be more of a publicity stunt than anything else:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he’ll force war supporters to stay in the chamber all night tomorrow and filibuster Iraq-withdrawal legislation unless Republicans agree to an up-or-down votes on the amendment.
They’ve even brought in roll-away beds, presumably for dramatic effect. But if Kevin Drum is right, Reid’s gambit amounts to a filibuster of a filibuster:
During the all-night session Democrats will (presumably) continue debating and will force Republicans to stay in the chamber via quorum calls. Result: a bunch of sleepy senators.
… Reid isn’t forcing Republicans to engage in a genuine filibuster. In fact, it’s Democrats who are going to be doing the talking. And when it’s all over on Wednesday, he’ll hold a vote and…..what? Probably he’ll get about 55 votes for Reed-Levin and the amendment will fail.
If Republican senators were smart — I said if — they’d ask Fox to set up a satellite link with pro-American, English-speaking Iraqi families and spend the night talking to them about the consequences of U.S. withdrawal. Ayaan Hirsi Ali could moderate.
Come Wednesday morning, who do you think would have the better footage? Democrats, exhausted from a night of bloviating at a lectern? Or Republicans, fortified from a night of listening to Iraqi parents plead for the lives and future of their children?
Please excuse us for a moment. We have to go vote.
Technorati Tags: Iraq, War in Iraq
Is this the same two-thirds that can't find Kansas on a map?
Newsweek:
President Bush may be trying to rally support for his strategy in Iraq, but his efforts are not faring well with the American public, according to the latest Newsweek Poll. Nearly two thirds of Americans believe that the president’s troop “surge” has been a failure, poll respondents said.
According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans can’t identify the secretary of defense. But they know enough to say whether a foreign military operation has been successful?
July 15, 2007
What's so bad about a "constitutional showdown"?
Law professor Carl Tobias on the U.S. attorneys kerfuffle:
If the legislative and executive branches want to avoid a constitutional showdown, they must decrease the rhetoric, limit accusations and recriminations, cooperate and find common ground.
• “Constitutional showdown” sounds serious, doesn’t it? But it’s just a dramatic term for litigation. Lawyers will write papers and submit them to judges; the judges will read these papers and then write one (or more) of their own. The media may cover it all with high energy music and an assist from Adobe Shockwave. But in the precincts where decisions are taken, the “showdown” will consist of lot of reading and writing, and a few minutes of oral argument. It’s not Oscar-worthy stuff.
• In this case, why would the executive “want to avoid a constitutional showdown”? It’s one he’s likely to win. Besides, the courts won’t resolve this before Mr. Bush leaves office. Does anyone think the Democrats in Congress will continue to fish these waters after Hillary’s boat rows ashore?
"Exposed: The Climate of Fear"
Via Simon, who writes:
It looks like Global Warming Scares have reached their sell by date and are now being discounted. People are starting to fall away from the old time religion.
Here is a video from CNN. Not exactly your most conservative station.
ADDED —
I had the video here, but Internet Explorer won’t play it. To see the video, click on the link above.
Ron Paul: nut case
I once respected the man, and still appreciate his congressional voting record. But he’s become a kook.
July 14, 2007
If the atheists are right, why are you thinking about morals?
Inquiring minds want to know:
If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?
Believers image that question — or more precisely, they image its axiom (without god, there is no basis for morality) — as a devastating retort to god’s critics. But for the non-believer, the question contains its own (obvious) answer: There is no god, and yet the questioner — in this case, Michael Gerson, the president’s former speechwriter — still evinces an interest in … morality. Why? Is he unique? Or is the empathy reflected in his question commonly felt?
If we want to know whether men in a godless world would concern themselves with questions of right and wrong, all we have to do is look around. They do.
True, human conduct is often immoral. But as Hitch was fast to point out, one reason for that is plain enough:
Implicit in this ancient chestnut of an argument is the further — and equally disagreeable — self-satisfaction that simply assumes, whether or not religion is metaphysically “true,” that at least it stands for morality. Those of us who disbelieve in the heavenly dictatorship also reject many of its immoral teachings, which have at different times included the slaughter of other “tribes,” the enslavement of the survivors, the mutilation of the genitalia of children, the burning of witches, the condemnation of sexual “deviants” and the eating of certain foods, the opposition to innovations in science and medicine, the mad doctrine of predestination, the deranged accusation against all Jews of the crime of “deicide,” the absurdity of “Limbo,” the horror of suicide-bombing and jihad, and the ethically dubious notion of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice.
I’ll add only that in our own lifetime, we have seen thousands of Americans murdered in the name of Allah, and the largest Christian church conspire to cover-up the rape of children by its clergy. A better question might be, “What is the effect of the idea of god on human morality?”
ADDED —
A teenage girl, who had no lawyer at trial and whose apparent “crime” was caring for an infant who choked on a bottle feeding, faces beheading: “… Saudi authorities insist they are simply enforcing God’s law.”
July 13, 2007
"Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World"
[CONTENT WARNING]
A clip from the first episode:
New episodes air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST. For more information, visit Logo. Rick and Steve wallpaper here.
(This video clip is a QuickTime file; if your browser won’t play it, you can download the file here and open it in a compatible player. Or you can watch it here.)
In other news, Barack Obama will not address Log Cabin convention
Please, Mary:
The one photo the GOP does not want anyone to see was snapped at yesterday’s NAACP GOP Presidential Candidate Forum. The NAACP invited all 9 Republican candidates to the forum, but only one showed up: Tom Tancredo. All the Democratic Presidential hopefuls showed up for their forum.
The excuses given by the Republican campaigns mostly had to do with scheduling conflicts—just too busy to make it.
The resulting photo of Tancredo—standing on a stage of empty podiums—sums up the Republican party’s commitment to civil rights in America: the only Republican interested is the guy running to deny immigrant workers their rights.
That from Jeffrey Feldman at Frameshop.
• Note that Mr. Feldman conflates today’s NAACP with civil rights. His presumption is, at a minimum, rebuttable.
• The “immigrant workers” to whom he refers are illegal aliens. Even for citizens, our law doesn’t treat its violation as a right.1
• No credible GOP candidate accepted the NAACP’s invitation for the same reason that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t accept one from College Republicans: It’s a waste of time, especially during the primaries, to appear before the other party’s auxiliaries. (The NAACP’s claim of non-partisanship is merely de rigueur.)
1I don’t know what Rep. Tancredo told the NAACP. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he stoked resentment of spunky newcomers.
Tick, tock: eight weeks to genocide
The president and the Democrats in Congress are about to throw down. But as we’ve know for some days now, however this round turns out, the clock is ticking. Come September, we start for the door.
Republican politicians are terrified. Unless we are largely gone from Iraq by November 2008, the GOP faces a rout of historic proportions. The president knows this, and he will, I predict, ultimately acquiesce. His party will leave him without a choice.
This is no longer about what we should or shouldn’t do. It’s now about what we will do. And we will leave. Our exit will be dangerous for us, and deadly for countless Iraqis. It will also be temporary. We’ll be back, perhaps as soon as the term of the next president, and at a cost in blood and treasure far greater than anything we bore here.
July 12, 2007
Judge okays Bush's order that Libby serve two years of supervised release
Although Mr. Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s thirty-month prison sentence, he left in place the trial court’s order that Libby serve two years of post-confinement supervision. (See Grant of Executive Clemency, “leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release.”) Federal law does not contemplate this. See 18 U.S.C. § 3583(a), which provides that a defendant may be “… placed on a term of supervised release after imprisonment …” [Italics added.]
Question: If the president forgives the prison sentence, must he (or the courts) also forgive the parole?1
The trial judge’s answer, in pdf, is here. Snippet: “… the Court is mindful that ‘pardon and commutation decisions have not traditionally been the business of courts … [and] are rarely, if ever, appropriate subjects for judicial review.’”
In essence, the judge says that even if federal law doesn’t provide for parole in the absence of a prison term, the president provided for it in his commutation order. Therefore, Scooter must “begin his period of supervision immediately.”
(Unsurprisingly, the judge is not happy with the president’s characterization of Scooter’s sentence as “excessive.” But that’s neither here nor there.)
1The prosecutor, the defendant and counsel to the president all agreed that the answer is “no.”
July 11, 2007
Anti-gun legislator shoots crook
Take a wild guess about which party he belongs to:
HOUSTON — A state lawmaker who opposed a bill giving Texans [a] stronger right to defend themselves with deadly force pulled a gun and shot a man he says was trying to steal copper wiring from a construction site, police said Monday.
Rep. Borris Miles told police he was fixing a leak on the second floor of the Houston house he’s building Sunday night when he heard a noise downstairs and saw two men trying to steal the copper. After Miles confronted the pair, one of the men threw a pocketknife at him, Houston Police spokesman Victor Senties.
Miles, a former law enforcement officer, shot the man in the left leg, police said.
Rep. Miles was one of only a handful of Texas legislators to vote against expansion of the castle doctrine.
Despite his hypocrisy, I’m glad the man is safe. It is, still and yet, dangerous to screw with Texans, even when they’re Democrats.
(HT: Amy)
"Progressives" frustrated by GOP filibusters
Kevin Drum:
I wonder how many Americans understand that you can’t pass legislation in America with 50% of the votes in Congress? How many of them understand that, outside of budget resolutions, you need 60 votes in the Senate? That a filibuster isn’t a matter of Jimmy Stewart talking himself ragged for hours on end, but of merely declaring an intention to filibuster? And that this is done for all but the most routine matters? With the result that the 60-vote minimum is no longer reserved for occasional high-profile issues, but has been institutionalized for virtually all legislation of any consequence?
I figure maybe 2%. What’s your guess?
You can feel the frustration in many of Kevin’s readers:
The media almost never mentions the Republican filibuster (cloture) of damn near every bill passed by the House. The headlines always read “Congress fails to pass bill” with no explanation why.
Reading or watching news coverage of Congress, you’d never guess the Republicans have filibustered a dozen bills already.
Another:
I want to see overweight aging self-interested Senators on CSPAN3 at 4am reading from the bible. MAKE THEM FILIBUSTER. MAKE THEM LOOK OBSTRUCTIONIST WHEN THEY ARE OBSTRUCTIONIST. [Caps in original.]
(Where have I read that before?)
But this “progressive” expresses frustration of a different sort:
Wait, why wasn’t this ever an issue on this site when the Democrats were in the minority? Now that the roles are reversed we start to discuss the issue? Jeesh, come on guys aren’t we a little better than the average site?
Well, one fair and balanced question deserves another. Isn’t it true, my fellow Republicans, that we once found the filibuster more objectionable than we do now?
Pope: protestants cannot have churches
| NO CHURCH FOR YOU! ONE YEAR! Because they do not respect his authoratha, even the Orthodox suffer from a “defectus.” |
July 10, 2007
Government would raise threat level, but there's no point
If the threat level went from yellow to orange, would you do anything differently?
No?
The Government doesn’t think so either, which is why we remain at yellow. But the Men in Black are worried.
July 9, 2007
Democrats demand answer on Libby commutation; Bush should follow Clinton's example and give it to 'em
“House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) urged President Bush Sunday to waive executive privilege and let his lawyers testify in Congress on the commutation of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby’s prison sentence,” The Hill reports.
“We’re asking him to waive executive privilege and allow his pardon lawyers or other experts, whom it appears he did not consult, explain this in a little more detail,” Conyers said.
The lawmaker has scheduled a committee hearing for Wednesday to look into presidential powers with regard to pardons and commuting sentences.
Look into this, Rep. Conyers: “… and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States …” That’s from a document called the U.S. Constitution; as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, it’s one you may wish to get familiar with.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush should answer the Democrats as Mr. Clinton answered the Republicans:
Pursuant to the Constitution and the separation-of-powers doctrine, the president’s authority to grant clemency is not subject to legislative oversight.
Tick, tock: countdown to Iraq pull out
| Goodbye and good luck: “Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point” |
Yet to be settled upon: timing, speed and form. But the big decision is taken:
“President Bush has repeatedly said that he wants as much time as possible for his 30,000-troop increase to show results. And publicly, administration officials insist that the president has no plans for a precipitous withdrawal — but the key word seems to be ‘precipitous’ …”
ADDED —
I see where the Administration has ostensibly denied the Times’ report. But read carefully:
“There is no intensifying discussion about reducing troops,” said [White House press secretary Tony] Snow during his daily briefing for reporters.
Ok, so the discussion isn’t intensifying, perhaps because it was already so hot as to preclude further intensification. But notice that Snow doesn’t deny the discussion’s existence, or its outcome:
“The surge is not an open-ended commitment, it’s not an occupation,” said Snow. “It’s a surge … to create space so that we can achieve as swiftly as possible some of those basic necessities for the Iraqi people to be able to step up and stand in the lead. And then at that point, the Americans step back into less visible, more support positions.”
I’m confident the NYT’s story is substantially accurate. So is the Weekly Standard.
Meanwhile, a warning about consequences. And it won’t be just the Iraqis who suffer them.
July 8, 2007
"... a monumental clash between the executive and legislative branches of government"
The White House has the better argument here, but for Democrats in Congress that beside the point. They’re primping for the elections.
Poor Sara Taylor. On the one hand, the president says, “Don’t testify.” On the other hand, Congress says, “Testify.” What to do?
July 7, 2007
"One of the photo editors was sitting at her desk and maggots started falling from the ceiling tile on to her head"
Ugh! In more ways than one, the New York Times is disgusting.
HT: Patterico
The toilet ...
If the President feels bad about the nation’s opinion of him—a meager 25% of those surveyed in a June Gallup poll approve of Bush’s performance—all he needs to do is pick up that same poll and keep reading. According to Gallup, just 14% of people express confidence in the current Congress. That’s the lowest measure in the 34 years Gallup has been tracking government institutions.
"We expect suicide bombers to be uneducated social outcasts who have been twisted by fanatics. But the reality can be very different"
The British get a clue.
July 6, 2007
Appeals court overturns anti-spying decision; plaintiffs without leg to stand on
“A federal appeals court Friday ordered the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit challenging President Bush’s domestic surveillance program,” CNN reports.
The plaintiffs — a group of journalists, scholars and legal advocates — had no legal standing to pursue their claims because they could not show they were targeted by the National Security Agency’s warrantless spying program, the court decided in a 2-1 vote.
[…]
The court ordered a federal judge in Detroit to formally dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed in January 2006. This was the first appeals ruling to address the program. The ruling did not address the larger constitutional questions of whether the NSA program is legal, or the limits on permissible warrantless surveillance.
[…]
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor struck down the program last August, saying it violated the rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth amendments. She said is also violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which Congress passed in 1978.
The opinion, issued by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, is here (pdf). The 6th Circuit includes Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.
Having concluded that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, the court did not reach the Government’s argument that the case is moot. “In January, not long before the appeal was argued, the White House announced that it would submit the N.S.A. program for supervision by a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” the New York Times reports.
The case, American Civil Liberties Union, et al. v. National Security Agency, et al., was decided by Judges Alice M. Batchelder, Julia Smith Gibbons and Ronald Lee Gilman.
Judges Batchelder and Gibbons voted to remand the case to district court with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. They also vacated the district court’s order enjoining the surveillance program. Judge Gilman dissented.
Law professor Orin Kerr:
As I understand it, the plaintiffs in the case had argued that they thought they might be covered by the TSP [Terrorist Surveillance Program], but had no particular reason (other than the apparent existence of the program) to think they in fact had been or were to be monitored. Their claimed injury-in-fact was that they were holding back on sending international communications out of fear that they were being monitored. The main question in the case was whether this claim was sufficient to establish standing to challenge the legality of the TSP program.
Judge Batchelder’s opinion goes through the complaint claim-by-claim, explaining her reasons why the plaintiffs either lacked standing for each claim in light of this alleged injury or why the plaintiffs lost on the merits (or both). I am no expert in standing doctrine, but based on my quick read I tend to think this was the right approach and that the result seems correct. (Link)
See also this informative post by Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.
ADDED —
Why, it’s as if we were in the Soviet Union!
So, how am I supposed to ever have standing to sue? It’s not like this is the Soviet Union, is it, where you pick up the phone in your hotel room and hear the heavy breathing of KGB agents.
Well, boo, it works like this: you’ll have standing to sue when you can show an injury-in-fact that’s redressable by judicial intervention. (“Standing is an aspect of justiciability, and ‘a plaintiff must demonstrate standing for each claim he seeks to press,’” pdf at 5. Internal citation omitted.)
You see, boo, the plaintiffs in this case have never been arrested or otherwise harassed by the NSA. In fact, the plaintiffs don’t even know whether the NSA has ever listened to their phone calls, or whether it ever would. For one reason or another, they’re just worried that it might.**
Now maybe the NSA will “tap” their lines, and maybe it won’t. In either case, the plaintiffs are unlikely to ever know. Why? Because the TSP isn’t a law enforcement program, boo; it’s a terrorism prevention program. The idea here isn’t for the NSA to crack your head open; rather, it’s to keep al Qaeda from blowing it off. Hmm, k? So even if you still don’t like the program, it is just a wee bit different from what the KGB was doing.
(**For this reason, the plaintiffs have quit making international calls.)
July 5, 2007
Will Rudy redefine the GOP?
Wall Street Journal:
He is a pro-choice, thrice-married New Yorker. So why is Rudy Giuliani the leading presidential candidate in a Republican Party long dominated by pro-life, family-values voters in the South and West?
[…]
Don’t look for the party to make a sudden leap to the middle, or to turn its back on its religious and social conservatives. But Mr. Giuliani’s lead in the polls — and in the latest round of fund raising, according to new reports Tuesday — may hint at the declining clout of those voters and their issues within the Republican party, and perhaps a shift back toward a more libertarian emphasis.
July 4, 2007
This July 4th, a reminder
Thomas Sowell:
There is nothing automatic about the way of life achieved in this country. It is very unusual among the nations of the world today and rarer than four-leaf clovers in the long view of history.
It didn’t just happen. People made it happen — and they and those who came after them paid a price in blood and treasure to create and preserve this nation that we now take for granted.
More important, this country’s survival is not automatic. What we do will determine that.
Married with children?
If you belong to a same-sex Republican couple with children and are interested in appearing on an Emmy Award-winning TV show, send e-mail. I’ll put you in touch with the producers. They’re looking for you.
July 3, 2007
America's prime minister
We’re going to miss him:
(RSS and e-mail subscribers: Video appears here. Click to watch.)
ADDED —
Oh, yes, we’re definitely going to miss him.
July 2, 2007
Well gawd damn: Bush shows a set, commutes Libby's sentence
To borrow from a diet commercial, Mr. President: I’m a little less disgusted by you than I used to be.
ADDED —
Just in time for the 4th of July, the moonbats’ heads are exploding.
ADDED II —
• Slate’s Timothy Noah, no conservative he: “What Bush did was just and fair. It was the right thing to do.”
• Meanwhile, LA County prosecutor Patrick Frey (aka Patterico), a Republican and otherwise sensible blogger, says the “Republican Party is going to pay a huge, huge price for this.” No, it won’t. It can’t. The GOP was already facing serious losses in 2008, making it impossible for the party to pay a