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President Obama? Hillary’s people aren’t feeling it.
Added. Here’s video of another Clinton supporter, this one from Manhattan no less, who vows to back McCain in November. But this one has lost it:
Added. This Clinton supporter was set upon and has the bruises to prove it:
Don’t you hate it when waiters insinuate themselves into your dinner conversation to pour more wine? So does Christopher Hitchens. He let’s it rip.
But only because the doctors are Christians. Were they Muslims with a rusty scythe and a misshapen coat hanger, they’d win:
Two weeks after deciding same-sex couples are entitled to marry, the California Supreme Court appeared ready Wednesday to rule that physicians have no constitutional right to refuse medical treatment to gays on grounds it would violate their religious beliefs.
The justices’ inclination emerged as the state high court heard arguments in a case that pits the religious freedom of physicians against the right of gays to be free from discrimination.
Several justices suggested during Wednesday’s hearing that they would rule that religion was not a legal justification for two Christian physicians in San Diego County who declined to perform an intrauterine insemination for Lupita Benitez, a lesbian who sought to become pregnant in 1999.
If the court sides with the lesbian, her case will be remanded for trial. But even if she wins the suit, as an RN here’s my advice: Don’t seek treatment from physicians who’d rather not provide it.
Gitmo:
Another mental health worker described the coliseum where the children were staying after being seized by the state as “like a Nazi concentration camp,” saying the children were given inadequate food and lived in cramped quarters.
But if the victims want help from the ACLU or anybody else on the anti-torture Left, they’ll have to threaten to lop off American heads.
He’s just told the world — including employers, friends and intimates — that he can’t be trusted to keep a confidence, that he’s a backstabber. So he can hope he makes enough money from book sells to a) avoid job-hunting and b) afford hookers.
This is an arresting admission:
On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.
Does Obama know what Memorial Day is? What a fallen hero is? Or is he claiming paranormal capacity?
This is why I haven’t written off John McCain, though I won’t vote for him myself. Like many leftists, Barack Obama is a cultural alien. And I’m not sure the American people will choose an alien as their leader.
File this under nail-on-the-head:
As congressional Republicans contemplate the prospect of an electoral disaster this November, much is being written about the supposed soul-searching in the Republican Party. A more accurate description of our state is paralysis and denial.
He’s crusty and dour, and he can’t win. But he’s my guy. My own party nominated John McCain, and I wish to register my dissent.
A technical glitch left his plane unresponsive to Israeli air traffic controllers, causing the IAF to suspect terrorism:
The executive jet being used by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was just minutes away from being shot down by the Israeli Air Force.
Blair, who is now the international community’s special envoy to the Middle East, was traveling earlier this week to a special economic conference in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem from Egyptian airspace when two Israeli fighter jets were scrambled to intercept his plane.
When Blair’s pilot saw the IAF taking up attack positions, he quickly found a way to contact the tower. All is well.
No, bud, John McCain is not “a liar;” he is not “a man without honor, without integrity.” He said nothing yesterday that he hasn’t been saying for months. You’re just listening, finally. Had you been listening all along, you would have known that John McCain is not to be trusted.
Clean yourself up and put on some fresh drawers. You’re a mess.
You have to wonder about people who think like Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-NE; happily, he’s retiring from the Senate:
Hagel, speaking to a small gathering at the residence of the Italian ambassador, took umbrage with several positions taken by the McCain campaign, including the Arizona Senator’s criticism of Obama for pledging to engage with Iran. Engagement is not, and should not be confused for, capitulation, he argued.
“I never understand how anyone in any realm of civilized discourse could sort through the big issues and challenges and threats and figure out how to deal with those without engaging in some way …”
Perhaps McCain figures that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric doesn’t fall within the realm of civilized discourse.
Ahmadinejad’s bottom line is the destruction of Israel. Does Hagel think that negotiable?
If the ruling stands, it would cost $3.5 billion just to retool vending machines:
The Treasury Department discriminates against millions of Americans who are blind or have poor vision by printing paper money that makes it impossible for them to distinguish between denominations, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
By a 2-1 vote, the court upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in a lawsuit filed by the American Council of the Blind seeking to force the department to redesign the U.S. paper currency.
Essential reading. Here’s an excerpt of a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, ranking member of the House Budget Committee:
Under current law, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to rise substantially as a share of the economy.
In response to your letter of May 15, 2008, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has prepared the attached analysis of the potential economic effects of … using higher income tax rates alone to finance the increases in spending …
With no economic feedbacks taken into account and under an assumption that raising marginal tax rates was the only mechanism used to balance the budget, tax rates would have to more than double. The tax rate for the lowest tax bracket would have to be increased from 10 percent to 25 percent; the tax rate on incomes in the current 25 percent bracket would have to be increased to 63 percent; and the tax rate of the highest bracket would have to be raised from 35 percent to 88 percent. The top corporate income tax rate would also increase from 35 percent to 88 percent.
Such tax rates would significantly reduce economic activity and would create serious problems with tax avoidance and tax evasion.
And these tax increases are separate from the tax increases that’ll be needed to cover the massive unfunded liabilities in state and local pension funds. Add it all up and we’re in deep hock:
The federal government’s long-term financial obligations grew by $2.5 trillion last year, a reflection of the mushrooming cost of Medicare and Social Security benefits as more baby boomers reach retirement.
That’s double the red ink of a year earlier.
Taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, a USA TODAY analysis found. That’s nearly $500,000 per household.
When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household. That is more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.
In 2017, only nine years from now, the United States will have to hit the reset button.
Good grief:
A New Jersey couple, whose son was struck in the chest with a line drive, is planning to sue the maker of a metal baseball bat used in the game.
Two years ago, Steven Domalewski was pitching when the ball slammed into his chest and stopped his heart. He was resuscitated but now has brain damage and is severely disabled.
The family contends metal baseball bats are inherently unsafe for youth games because the ball comes off them much faster than from wooden bats. The lawsuit will also be filed against Little League Baseball and a sporting goods chain that sold the bat. (Emphasis added.)
If the parents believe, however implausibly, that metal baseball bats are inherently unsafe, why did they let their child play in a game in which one was used? Do mom and dad plan to sue themselves?
Their son suffered a tragedy, and for that they deserve our sympathy. But suing the bat maker is ridiculous.
(HT: Amy)
The Los Angeles Times carries a sympathetic interview with Ronald M. George, a Republican and chief justice of the California Supreme Court, which this week overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The vote was 4-3, with George providing the decisive fourth vote. Key quote:
Rather than ignoring voters, “what you are doing is applying the Constitution, the ultimate expression of the people’s will,” George said.
But enforcing the people’s will is not what the court did here. You could argue that the court didn’t have to take account of the people’s will, or that the people’s will about same-sex marriage is illegitimate. (For a discussion of constitutional legitimacy, see Restoring the Lost Constitution by Randy Barnett.) But if the people’s will is the basis for law, and if their will is measured by statutory or constitutional text, then you can’t argue that California law required, or even permitted, the result the court reached.
Rather than admit what they’re up to, our judges often pretend to be mere technicians who mechanically apply the law, as written by others, to the facts of a case. Were our judges candid, the public might notice the ungrounded and antidemocratic nature of constitutional decision-making.
WaPo misses the point:
The ghosts of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had he not been prevented from entering the country. The decision has been widely reported as a serious setback for the administration’s quest to bring terrorists to justice.
al-Qahtani was “threatened,” “stressed,” “questioned” and “humiliated.” These are, we are told, “inhumane acts.” And though he lives, unlike the victims of 9/11, al-Qahtani is reportedly a “broken man.” Boo-hoo.
Let’s say we did break him. If the government is therefore unable to prosecute him, so what? We did not interrogate him to collect evidence for trial. We interrogated him to extract information that could be used to prevent another terrorist attack.
We have a market:
The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. Are we to assume that last year, when housing prices were, say, 10 percent higher than they are now, they were exactly right? If so, why is that so? Because the market had set those prices, therefore they were where they belonged? But if the market was the proper arbiter of value then, why is it not the proper arbiter now?
Can the Republican Party be saved?
The name of the agenda doesn’t matter, but the substance does. Voters no longer think lean government, smart and strong defense, and good old-fashioned family values when they think Republican. They think reckless spenders, misguided war and hypocrisy. Republicans “don’t have a vision,” says former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Their behavior is being governed by a bad political model, and we’re losing races.”
Republicans need to focus on cutting taxes, slashing spending and rediscovering their edge on national security matters. More important, they need to jump ahead of Democrats in thinking anew about entitlement programs, health care, technological innovation, global trade and new energy plans.
If a Republican renaissance depends on fiscal probity, then all hope is lost.
From the court’s opinion:
Accordingly, in light of the conclusions we reach concerning the constitutional questions brought to us for resolution, we determine that the language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
Mayday! Mayday! The ship’s going down says Republican campaign chairman Tom Cole, and it’s every man for himself:
I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election.
Myself, I couldn’t quit laughing. I just kept thinking, “What if a gay boy showed up dressed like this, especially if they suspected he didn’t have any drawers on?”
[HT: Hot Air]
It changes nothing — Obama will still be the Democratic nominee — but give our gal credit. She blew that ass out.
The party has now lost three consecutive special elections, all of them in (formerly) Republican districts.
My friends, we’re going down like a $5 whore on Royal St. I predict a loss of 40 seats in the House and six in the Senate.
George F. Will has another series of his patented questions.
Comes now further evidence, from his days as host of Inside Edition, that the man is a hair hole:
Added. YouTube has disabled the video, but you can still watch it here.
To the mammoth deficit confronting federal entitlement programs, add the gargantuan deficit confronting state and local pension funds. But don’t worry. Your government is cooking the books:
The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.
But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.
State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.
Some analysts say public employees should brace for a “massive breach of faith.” For when you add these shortfalls to the ordinary care and feeding of the Leviathan, we will soon be unable to pay our bills even if we tax people at 100%.
What’s a polite synonym for “screwed”?
Already deep into GOP territory, the Democrats have ordered an advance. The battle is desperate.
Though not religious, I’m reminded of an observation from Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Los Angeles has become a pit:
A fight that broke out at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campus-wide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police in riot gear.
The melee, which students said started around noon Friday between rival black and Hispanic gangs, forced authorities to shut down Locke High School and keep students in their classrooms.
Where’s Joe Clark when you need him?
The bill was sponsored by the delightfully named Sen. Doug Stoner.
In an editorial on John McCain’s judicial philosophy, the editors of USA Today show themselves to be shallow and uninformed:
Social conservatives are a key part of the Republican coalition, and their top priority is control of the courts. They hope judges will implement social policy goals that have proved impossible to legislate, particularly reversing the court’s pivotal abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade.
Reversing Roe v. Wade is legislatively impossible, but only because you can’t legislatively override the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions. If the Court itself overruled Roe and returned the nation to the status quo ante, social conservatives could legislate easily in one state after another.
The judiciary is supposed to be an independent branch of government composed of serious jurists with the unenviable task of applying the law, legal precedent and constitutional principles to cases that are by their very nature ambiguous.
No one disagrees with that. The debate is about the nature of the constitutional principles to be applied. In other words, how shall we construe the constitution? The way Justice Scalia wants it construed, or the way Justice Ginsburg wants it construed? USA Today has a lot of resources. What can’t it keep up with the discussion?
The Supreme Court, in particular, is in need of fewer ideologues and more pragmatic consensus builders such as former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a role that has been filled to some degree by Anthony Kennedy after her retirement.
Every member of the Court, including Justice Kennedy, is an ideologue. You cannot avoid ideology, i.e. a system of ideas and ideals. Even the notion that the court should be “pragmatic” is ideological (ideological pragmatism). All USA Today is saying, in other words, is that it wants the court to adopt to its ideology, namely liberalism recast as pragmatism. We all want the court to adopt our ideology.
The kind of ideological conformity demanded by religious conservatives or their counterparts of the left threatens to undermine confidence in the courts as independent, unbiased finders of fact.
Here the editors are just ignorant. Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not triers of fact. The facts of a case are established at trial. Appellate courts resolve questions of law: How does the law apply to these facts?
Until they marshall an elementary understanding of its functions, the editors of USA Today should stop writing about the Supreme Court.
They don’t want the store owner raising his constitutional rights as a defense:
Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.
[…]
City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.
The correct answer is Banana Republic. But Barack Obama must receive partial credit for having answered “Abercrombie and Fitch.”
A racist informant gets a police officer shot to death and an innocent man sent to death row. This is the war on drugs:
Question: Does a foreign citizen have a right under the Fifth Amendment to just compensation for the U.S.-inspired taking of property in a foreign country?
Backstory:
According to her allegations, Ms. Atamirzayeva is a citizen of the Republic of Uzbekistan. She resides in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Prior to the events that are the subject of her claim, she was the sole owner of a cafeteria located on property next to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent. The property on which her cafeteria was located was owned by the Republic of Uzbekistan, but Ms. Atamirzayeva owned the buildings on the property.
Ms. Atamirzayeva alleges that in December 1999 officials at the U.S. Embassy made a verbal demand to local authorities in Tashkent that they destroy Ms. Atamirzayeva’s cafeteria in order to increase the security of the U.S. Embassy. The following day, local authorities forcibly expelled Ms. Atamirzayeva from her cafeteria, then destroyed it while officials from the U.S. Embassy oversaw the demolition. Ms. Atamirzayeva sought compensation from local authorities and from the U.S. Embassy, but those efforts were unsuccessful. She then initiated this takings action in the Court of Federal Claims.
Did Ms. Atamirzayeva prevail? Get the answer, in pdf, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Interestingly, only 375 gay couples are affected, which suggests the demand for benefits is not high:
Local governments and state universities in Michigan can’t offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
The court ruled 5-2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against gay marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers.
Do you have a privacy interest in the mere fact of your sexual orientation, especially if you’ve engaged in behavior that’s drawn your orientation to the attention of others? A student in Memphis say yes, but his case is unpersuasive:
A Memphis high school principal, fed up with public displays of affection in the hallways, allegedly displayed a list of couples — including some who are gay — in the school, publicly outing the boys and violating their privacy, according to one of the students involved.
Memphis Principal Daphne Beasley is being accused of posting a list naming the school’s teenage gay couples — without their O.K. — in an effort to combat public displays of affection.
“I really feel that my personal privacy was invaded,” Nicholas, one of the young men who claims his sexuality was exposed without his approval by his principal, told ABC News’ Memphis affiliate Eyewitness News Everywhere. “I mean, Principal Beasley called my mother and outted me to my mother!
Well, Nicholas, here’s a lesson for you: What you feel is neither here nor there. Others need not be governed by your feelings. You outed yourself. The principal remarked upon your public behavior. And you don’t have a privacy interest in your public behavior:
“The principal did not list any information other than students’ names on her personal call list, and she certainly did not specify the sexual orientation of any student,” said Van D. Turner, Jr., associate general counsel of the Memphis City Schools Board of Education, in a statement provided to ABCNEWS.com. “Additionally, the list was never posted publicly anywhere at the school.”
According to the statement, this “call list” was used by Beasley to “notify the parents of those children she knew to be involved romantically” after the school received “numerous complaints” of “explicit sexual behavior in public view.”
As made clear by his own statements and by the balance of the article, Nicholas is in fact gay. He has a boyfriend named Andrew. Had Nicholas wanted to keep his relationship with Andrew a secret, he should have exercised discretion. But having put it in the public domain, he can’t then turn around and say, “Oh, but that’s private.” No, it isn’t.
For Republicans, an omen:
A Louisiana Democrat captured a House seat held by Republicans for the previous 33 years, defeating a former GOP state legislator yesterday in a special election that Republicans tried to turn into a referendum on Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Not since the days following Richard Nixon’s resignation has the Republican brand been as repellant as it is today.
Monica Conyers is a member of the Detroit City Council and the wife of John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Here she’s called out, properly and forcefully, by a 13-year-old girl. It’s humiliating:
A clever mashup, sympathetic to Obama:
At least not yet:
A federal appeals court on Thursday left in place a lower court’s ruling that allowed Washington state pharmacists to refuse to sell emergency contraceptive “morning after” pills on religious grounds.
A federal judge in Seattle suspended state rules that required pharmacies to dispense “Plan B” and other emergency contraceptives that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting, which some people believe is the same as abortion.
[…]
State officials and several women had asked the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to suspend the judge’s preliminary injunction, which bars them from enforcing the law, while they appeal his ruling.
Oral argument in the appeal is set for June 3. The court’s order denying the application for stay is available in pdf.
By his own admission, John McCain knows little about economics. But what’s Mrs. Clinton’s excuse?
New York Sun:
Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun crusade suffered a defeat yesterday when a federal appellate court rebuffed his attempt to sue manufacturers of firearms.
[…]
In a 2-1 decision, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday said that the city’s suit against the gun manufacturers was precluded by a federal law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, that went into effect in 2005 and protects firearm manufacturers and distributors from being sued for the misuse of a firearm.
The court’s opinion is available in pdf.