Larry Tribe was in great form in yesterday’s New York Times.
Nothing in his hands, nothing up his sleeve, now pay close attention as the law professor takes the interstate commerce clause and the American citizen sitting at home doing nothing at all and a federal mandate compelling Americans to purchase health insurance policies and magically causes the last two to fit within the former.
[P]redictions of a partisan 5-4 split rest on a misunderstanding of the court and the Constitution. The constitutionality of the health care law is not one of those novel, one-off issues, like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, that have at times created the impression of Supreme Court justices as political actors rather than legal analysts.
Since the New Deal, the court has consistently held that Congress has broad constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. This includes authority over not just goods moving across state lines, but also the economic choices of individuals within states that have significant effects on interstate markets. By that standard, this law’s constitutionality is open and shut. Does anyone doubt that the multitrillion-dollar health insurance industry is an interstate market that Congress has the power to regulate?
Mr. Tribe fails to consider that perhaps key New Deal era decisions, like Wickard v. Filburn, which reached beyond actual interstate activity to assert federal authority over private activity which might affect interstate commerce, were unfaithful to the intent of the framers, casuistical, and wrong to begin with.
Mr. Tribe also simply discounts as irrelevant the fact that in recent years, the modern court has become considerably more serious and more respectful of the Constitution. The United States v. Lopez decision in 1995 represented a major change of direction.
Liberal constitutional jurisprudence has an interested double-joined quality. The actual language, meaning, and intent of the Constitution are to be looked upon as inherently factually unknowable, as cryptic apothegms from a distant and fundamentally alien civilization, open to creative interpretation and subject to being overruled by the privileged moral insights of the contemporary elect at will. But the windy and vaporous decisions of the New Deal court, ah! they are sacred and immovable compass points of Constitutionality. As Robert H. Jackson writes, so it must be forever.
Larry Tribe is clearly whistling in the dark, repeating a happy liberal fantasy offered by Sam Stein over at HuffPo last week, that Antonin Scalia will apply the same statism that went into his concurrence with the decision in Gonzales v. Raiches upholding federal criminalization of home-grown marijuana. Personally, I think Messrs. Stein and Tribe are mistaken.
Even if the Necessary and Proper clause can be adduced to support a federal system of interstate regulation in the case of marijuana prohibition, a federal law prohibiting a particular activity like the use of marijuana differs distinctly from a federal law imposing an obligation to perform an affirmative act, from a law making Americans purchase something. Upholding a federal power to forbid does not necessarily imply a belief in a further federal power to compel.
Mr. Tribe, I suspect, apprehends himself that distinction, since he finds it desirable to use his literary powers to transform the passive state of American citizens living their lives prior to the imposition of Obamacare into an active assertion of an innovative right.
Only a crude prediction that justices will vote based on politics rather than principle would lead anybody to imagine that Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Samuel Alito would agree with the judges in Florida and Virginia who have ruled against the health care law. Those judges made the confused assertion that what is at stake here is a matter of personal liberty — the right not to purchase what one wishes not to purchase — rather than the reach of national legislative power in a world where no man is an island.
It would be asking a lot to expect conservative jurists to smuggle into the commerce clause an unenumerated federal “right†to opt out of the social contract.
In reality, Americans have a social contract. It is a written one called the Constitution of the United States. That social contract forbids Obamacare.
The New York Times has an amusing item about the professional bias investigators of the modern academic world finding themselves confronted with powerful evidence of a very large beam in their own collective eye.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.â€
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,†Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community†united by “sacred values†that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,†said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.â€
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The social sciences are build around left-wing assumptions and perspectives, so it isn’t all that surprising to me that Sociology and Anthro departments are overwhelmingly populated by left-wing democrats, but lack of political diversity in American colleges and universities notoriously extends far beyond the social sciences. English and History departments are scarcely more diverse in their political representation.
Steven Hayward, at Power-Line, describes the well-known phenomenon of conservative fear and isolation on the modern university faculty.
I have a good friend–I won’t name out him here though–who is a tenured faculty member in a premier humanities department at a leading east coast university, and he’s . . . a conservative! How did he slip by the PC police? Simple: he kept his head down in graduate school and as a junior faculty member, practicing self-censorship and publishing boring journal articles that said little or nothing. When he finally got tenure review, he told his closest friend on the faculty, sotto voce, that “Actually I’m a Republican.” His faculty friend, similarly sotto voce, said, “Really? I’m a Republican, too!”
That’s the scandalous state of things in American universities today. Here and there–Hillsdale College, George Mason Law School, Ashland University come to mind–the administration is able to hire first rate conservative scholars at below market rates because they are actively discriminated against at probably 90 percent of American colleges and universities. Other universities will tolerate a token conservative, but having a second conservative in a department is beyond the pale.
A few weeks ago, I posted a link referred to in private email correspondence by a younger person from Yale, now teaching English at a major university. As is the custom, I mentioned his name as my source for the post in a final “hat tip.” A few hours later, I received an email from that university professor, thanking me for the courtesy, but asking me to remove his name from this blog for fear that the association with Never Yet Melted might possibly out his unacceptable personal political views and jeopardize his candidacy for tenure. Conservative faculty members all over America today live in real, and well-founded, fear of being victimized by discrimination on the basis of their political views.
This week, the Yale Glee Club is having its own reunion timed to coincide with the anniversary of the organization’s founding in February of 1861. The Midnight at Yale feature tries to put the Glee Club’s longevity into proper perspective.
If your only exposure to choral music has been listening to Carmina Burana in Super Bowl commercials, please allow us to point out that we existed 106 years prior to the first Super Bowl and 74 years before Carmina Burana was composed.
That got us thinking.
1861 was, of course, the beginning of the American Civil War.
Theodore Roosevelt turned three in 1861, and Sigmund Freud turned six.
The Pony Express was in full swing.
The flush toilet was patented.
Russian Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom.
Italy was unified.
Kansas was admitted as the 34th state in the Union
In 1862, the Internal Revenue Service was founded and Claude Debussy was born.
The Brahms Requiem is eight years younger than the Yale Glee Club.
Wagner’s Tristan is three years younger.
The entire planethood of Pluto, from discovery to dismissal, is a subset of the Glee Club’s existence.
The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009. …
Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.
The deal has the potential to create an enterprise that could reach more than 100 million visitors in the United States each month. … The Huffington Post.. began as a liberal blog with a small staff but now draws some 25 million visitors every month.
There must be several people connected with Pajamas Media reflecting ruefully on what might have been this morning.
Arianna Huffington is obviously a opportunist and a turncoat, but one does have to give her credit for organizational ability and initiative. She saw the opportunity for a large-scale aggregating site combining left-wing commentary with news and tabloid-style gossip and made it work. There’s the evil and immoral capitalist system that HuffPo so enthusiastically struggles against in operation.
According to the New York Times, Julian Assange’s disgruntled former collaborators objected to his self promotion and flamboyant left-wing politics.
As the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fights extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual wrongdoing, a dozen of his former colleagues are creating an alternative Web site for leaks to be governed by what they characterize as a revised vision of radical transparency.
The new organization, OpenLeaks, will begin work in earnest this summer, said Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic programmer who is involved. It aims, he said, to avoid the “influence of a single figurehead†by refusing to handle documents itself. Instead, it will act as a neutral conduit to connect leakers with media and human rights organizations.
OpenLeaks emerges from the ashes of a struggle between Mr. Assange and many of his closest associates last September. About a dozen members of WikiLeaks left that month, accusing Mr. Assange of imperious behavior and of jeopardizing the project by conflating the allegations of sexual wrongdoing, which he denies, with the site’s work. The defectors, Mr. Snorrason said, decided to start their own project.
“It’s no secret that we had disagreements with how WikiLeaks was being managed,†he said, “and a large part of what we hope to accomplish with OpenLeaks is to avoid those problems.†…
Though those behind OpenLeaks are at pains not to criticize Mr. Assange, and have repeatedly made it clear that they do not see themselves as his competitors, their aims address many of the barbs leveled at him, the man who has defined a new era of online mass leaks.
It is partly run by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a precise programmer from Berlin who was once Mr. Assange’s deputy. Since he left WikiLeaks in September, he has been working on a book which he promises will reveal “the evolution, finances and inner tensions†inside WikiLeaks.
At a recent gathering of the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker community in Berlin, Mr. Domscheit-Berg said OpenLeaks would be neutral and would not rely on secrecy as WikiLeaks does. Those who seek transparency, he said, should “stand in the sunlight ourselves and enjoy that we are creating a more transparent society, not create a transparent society while sneaking around in the shadows.â€
The new site must not, he added, “contain any politics and personal preferences or personal dislikes about whatever you’re going to publish or what you must not publish.â€
It is not obvious at all why a world that has the New York Times, the Washington Post, Spiegel, and the Guardian needs another venue for leaking official secrets. It also seems likely that any non-establishment media leaking venue would be highly likely to face criminal prosecution by Western governments. If genuinely neutral, the leakers would also be compromising state secrets from non-liberal Western governments, like Russia’s, which would not necessarily restrict negative responses to legal processes. Lots of luck with that, guys.
Ronald Reagan, who passed away 7 years ago, would have been 100 today.
Ironically today, Reagan’s spectacular accomplishments and political legacy of reduced government and enlarged liberty are being directly challenged by a representative of the school of politics directly opposed to everything Ronald Reagan stood for and believed. The mismanagement of government by Ronald Reagan’s adversaries has brought the country to a state of economic hardship and has produced a sense of pessimism resembling the era of the late 1970s, shortly before Ronald Reagan’s nomination and successful campaign for the presidency changed everything.
This short video tribute is an excellent reminder of how badly America needed Ronald Reagan then, and how much many of us wish he were here and available to run all over again.
Earlier this week, Al Gore identified the reason we’ve been experiencing a bitter-cold, snow-filled winter recently.
[S]cientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.â€
“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.â€
Charles Krauthammer is clearly the winner of the subsequent week-long competition in ridiculing Gore.
Warmlist needs a new category for satirical proposed additions.
The Telegraph‘s perusal of the Wilkileaks leaked diplomatic documents finds that Barack Obama traded British defense secrets to Russia as part of the price for Russian agreement to the START Treaty.
Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationshipâ€, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website. …
A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START†deal.
Although the treaty was not supposed to have any impact on Britain, the leaked cables show that Russia used the talks to demand more information about the UK’s Trident missiles, which are manufactured and maintained in the US.
Washington lobbied London in 2009 for permission to supply Moscow with detailed data about the performance of UK missiles. The UK refused, but the US agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.
Professor Malcolm Chalmers said: “This appears to be significant because while the UK has announced how many missiles it possesses, there has been no way for the Russians to verify this. Over time, the unique identifiers will provide them with another data point to gauge the size of the British arsenal.â€
Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, said: “They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them.â€
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Anthony Calabrese, an American attorney working in London, felt obliged to remind his British friends that they had overwhelmingly rooted for Obama to win the presidency.
Well, you guys all wanted him and you got what you wanted. In my 18 months living in London (truly one of the World’s greatest cities BTW) I have met one person who did not want Obama to win the 2008 election (and most of my co-workers seem to be Tories). I have had these same Tories complain to me about something the administration has done (BP, the Churchill bust, the snubbing of the Queen) yet 15 seconds later react with horror when they find out I did not vote for him.
Look folks, you wanted him, you got him, now you are getting it good and hard. George Bush who you all revile would never have pulled that. John McCain would never have done that. But keep up your adulation of President Obama, maybe he will wave at you occasionally.
A 7-year-old child allegedly shot a Nerf-style toy gun in his Hammonton, N.J., school Jan. 18. No one was hurt, but the pint-size softshooter now faces misdemeanor criminal charges.
Hammonton Police began an investigation into the “suspicious activity†at the Hammonton Early Childhood Education Center Jan. 18 after school officials alerted them to the incident.
The “gun” the child brought to school was a $5 toy gun, similar to a Nerf gun, that shoots soft ping pong type balls, according to the school’s superintendent.
Officials also say that there was no evidence of anyone being threatened. The child’s mother told school officials that she didn’t know her son brought the toy to school.
Dr. Dan Blachford, the Hammonton Board of Education superintendent, said the school has a zero tolerance policy.
“We are just very vigilant and we feel that if we draw a very strict line then we have much less worry about someone bringing in something dangerous,” said Blachford. …
Police charged the 7-year-old with possessing an imitation firearm in or on an education institution – a misdemeanor and a minor juvenile offense in New Jersey.
It turns out that the recent silly custom of public officials play acting weather divination on February 2nd with the assistance of large cthonic rodents frequently results in the politician’s fingers paying a price for manhandling the marmot. And who would be a more deserving recipient of negative scuirid reaction than New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg?
The news of Bloomberg cheating this year even reached British Daily Mail:
Once bitten, twice not so shy, it seems, in the case of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his ongoing feud with Staten Island Chuck.
Two years after he got bitten by the woodchuck, the Mayor called the animal a ‘sonofab**ch’ on Wednesday, not realising he was being filmed.
Chuck lives at Staten Island Zoo and is the city’s official woodchuck for the Groundhog Day ceremony.
This year his new home featured a plunger-style device which pushed the furry fiend out into the cold.
‘I love the plunger. That was so much better than having to reach in and let the little sonofab**ch bite you,’ Bloomberg said.
His comments are clearly captured in a video by the New York Daily News.
The Telegraph also found in the Wikileaks leaked documents the account of the United States responding to China’s showing off its Star Wars capabilities by launching a ballistic missile to destroy one of its own weather satellites by promptly popping off a missile from a US Aegis missile cruiser and potting a US satellite. Message: “Not only can we do that, too. We have been able to for a long time, and we can even launch the missile from a ship. Guess what else we can do.”
The strike, which resulted in thousands of pieces of debris orbiting the earth, raised fears that the Chinese had the power to cause chaos by destroying US military and civilian satellites.
In February 2008, America launched its own “test†strike to destroy a malfunctioning American satellite, which demonstrated to the Chinese it also had the capability to strike in space.
America stated at the time that the strike was not a military test but a necessary mission to remove a faulty spy satellite.
The leaked documents appear to show its true intentions.
A&E’s cancellation of the high-budget historical drama “The Kennedys,” in response to protests from members of the Kennedy family, was bound to fail to keep the series off the air. It has probably already been shown in Europe, but American audiences will have an opportunity soon to see it, too. ReelzChannel purchased US broadcast rights, and will begin airing the series on April 3rd.