Tag: politics

Herein lies the problem

Nancy Pelosi, on the Kelo decision:

It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken. It’s an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision.
The Supreme Court is not the end-all, be-all of what is legal or not in this country. Does no one remember anything from their basic civics class? If the Supreme Court can willy-nilly declare whatever they like unconstitutional or constitutional, where is the system of “checks and balances” we all learned about? Yes, the Court is to act as a check and balance on the other two branches, but likewise, the executive and legislative branches act as checks and balances on the Supreme Court.
There shouldn’t have to be a constitutional amendment on the part of the legislature to overturn Kelo, Ms. Pelosi, because the Court’s decision is unconstitutional and wrong. It’s right there in Amendment number five of the Bill of Rights. New corporate structures to provide increased tax revenue fails to qualify in every way, shape, or form of the “public good” in the eyes of the Founding Fathers.

Geldof and friends miss the mark

I am quite proud to say I did not watch a single second of the incredibly vapid, colossal waste of time and public airwaves that was Live 8. Rick Moran, on the other hand, did watch it, and gets what Geldof and crew do not:

The idea that “raising awareness” of Africa’s plight will save starving children is absurd. In order to save those children, you don’t have to snap your fingers, what you need is wholesale regime changes in 2 dozen or more countries where governments use starvation as the weapon of choice against rebelious populations. Africa’s problem is not lack of food. It is not a lack of arable land, or water resources, or agricultural know-how (they’ve been farming in Africa since before the Egyptians got themselves organized). At bottom, Africa’s problem is, well, Africans. Embracing the socialist doctrines of the old Soviet Union and Cuba during the 1970’s and 80’s, the grandiose schemes and huge development projects undertaken with some of the $220 billion in western aid that has gone to the continent since the 1960’s proved to be boondoggles of the first magnitude.

Dam building for electricity that nobody needs or can use is just one small example. What isn’t known and probably can never be calculated is the out and out theivery of aid funds by African leaders, their families, their extended families, their cronies, and the western companies who are forced into kickback schemes in order to win contracts with this human daisy chain of graft and corruption.

[…]

Which makes Live 8 about as relevant to helping solve Africa’s problems as the activities of the masked anarchists who are gleefully running around Edinburgh smashing windows and torching automobiles as if to prove the efficacy of corporal punishment denied them when they were children.
All something like Live 8 does is alleviate whatever guilt those who organize and participate may be feeling about the problem. Personally, I’m making a difference in Africa, one child at a time. His name is Emmanuel, he lives in Tanzania, and though he is five years older, he shares a birthday with my son.
I don’t share this to get a pat on the back; I share it to say you don’t need a bunch of celebs cavorting on stage, “raising awareness,” to personally make a difference. Not to mention that Geldof and crew would never tell you about Compassion, World Vision, the Barnabas Fund, Mercy Ships, or myriad other organizations which have been making a difference for years.
How many meals could be provided, through organizations already on the ground, by the multi-carat diamond necklace Madonna was wearing, if she weren’t so busy flipping off the world? Angelina Jolie aside, when was the last time any of these spoiled celebrity brats spent time helping in a refugee camp? They are the ones with the supposed influence, and certainly the funds, and the best they can come up with is a concert to “raise awareness”? Let’s see Geldof, Madonna, McCartney, and the rest put their money where their mouths are.
[A wave of the fin to Jeff for pointing to Rick’s post.]

We, the Democratic Party, want it both ways

Senator Ted Kennedy, 1981:

“It is offensive to suggest that a potential justice of the Supreme Court must pass some presumed test of judicial philosophy. It is even more offensive to suggest that a potential justice must pass the litmus test of any single-issue interest group. The disturbing tactics of division and distortion and discrimination practiced by the extremists of the new right have no place in these hearings and no place in the nation’s democracy.”
Senator Ted Kennedy, 2005:
“Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement gives President Bush, elected by a divided nation that has become even more divided, a unique opportunity to unite us by choosing for the Supreme Court someone who can win support from a broad bipartisan majority in the Senate and whom the vast majority of Americans will be proud of.”
The enormous difference in the dates shown above–which should be enough to secure support for Congressional term limits–aside, where, dear Senator Kennedy, Democrats, and other members of the radical left, in the Constitution does it say the President of the United States must consult with the Senate on his choices for federal bench appointments? Rather than choosing someone “who can win support from a broad bipartisan majority,” the President should be choosing as a nominee a justice who will abide by the Constitution (aka, an “originalist”), versus one who will make up rights and law based on nothing found within the Constitution (aka, an “activist”).
Something tells me that if enough justices on the Supreme Court fit the former model, rather than the latter, the American people would be quite proud of them, Senator, because the Court wouldn’t be meddling in our lives and we would rarely hear from them.
Here’s hoping the President nominates another Scalia or Thomas. I want to see Kennedy’s face turn all red. Oh wait, too late.
[Thanks to today’s Best of the Web.]

Staying the course

Perhaps before she shows precisely how much she’s gone off the deep end, Helen Thomas should actually talk with the families and loved ones of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Crystal Owen:

“I know people are pushing you, but please don’t pull the guys out of Iraq too soon. Don’t let my husband — and 1,700-plus other deaths — be in vain. They were over there, fighting for a democratic nation, and I hope you’ll keep our service members over there until the mission can be accomplished.”
Mrs. Owen’s husband, Staff Sgt. Mike Owen, was killed in Iraq last year. She was part of the military family meeting with President Bush prior to his speech at Fort Bragg last Tuesday. She spoke the above words to the President, and gave him a blue bracelet with the name of her husband and another soldier on it. The President was wearing this bracelet during his speech.
I suppose we should be thankful that at least Ms. Thomas is now honestly editorializing in the open, given how she did so as an official White House “correspondent” for so many years.

A Brit on Bush

“In person Mr. Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media” — Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the London Times, after meeting last week in the Oval Office with President Bush. (Via Political Diary.)

Grab a drop cloth and try not to get spattered

Like Jeff, I would like to see the Democratic Party come back to the roots it showed during the days of Truman and Kennedy, with regard to national security. If we can agree, for the most part, on this one area of policy, then all the domestic stuff we quibble over, such as Social Security, Medicare, et al, might get more attention.

Because I love our two-party system and I respect the members and leaders of the Democratic Party, I offer them this piece of advice at absolutely no charge: When you guys stand so close together, it’s easy to paint you all with the same brush. If you don’t like being accused of being weak on terrorism or of not being serious about the war — and based on your reactions to Karl Rove’s speech last week, it’s clear that you don’t — then take a cue from Senator Hagel of Nebraska. When somebody from the furthest extents of the far left says something ridiculous, don’t just sit there and let it happen. Stand up behind a podium tell America that that’s not what you stand for, that that’s not what you believe in, that those are not your ideas.

You’ll be better off as a party, and we’ll be better off as a country, if you stop letting groups like Move On speak for you.

Blinded with the Bush-hatred

Jeff calls it:

The conclusion is as heart-breaking as it is unavoidable: There are people out there —- reporters, pundits, Senators and Congressmen —- who hate the President and the Republican Party so deeply and with such passion that they would rather see the United States defeated and Iraq collapsed into a failed state than support what they see as George W. Bush’s war.
I don’t quite share Jeff’s pessimism regarding tonight’s speech, unless that pessimism means the expectation that the President will simply remind the American people that he has said all along that this war wouldn’t be finished overnight, that it was a long-haul project, that we should remember there are still people out there who want to hurt and kill us, but right now we are winning. The President has been consistent with regard to the prosecution of the war against terror in general, and in Iraq specifically. There is no timetable for withdrawal, because we have not yet achieved total victory. Which is something the left, and increasingly the Democratic Party specifically, cannot allow.

Are they reading the same Constitution as the rest of us?

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m too simple-minded to get it. Perhaps because I didn’t go to law school, spend years on a judicial bench, and have half a dozen clerks doing all of my research for me, I just don’t understand the intricacies and nuances of the Constitution of the United States of America. Or maybe there simply aren’t the intricacies and nuances the Supreme Court would have us believe there are.
Amendment I of the Bill of Rights says, in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”
Now, I challenge any legal scholar on the planet to explain how a monument to the Ten Commandments, or the posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of a courtroom, is Congress establishing a state religion. Or even a state government establishing a state religion. Religious aspects aside, the Ten Commandments are an important legal document, important to the legal history of Western civilization. Again, with religious aspects aside, the Ten Commandments contain some pretty healthy codes of conduct for everyone, believers and non-believers. What’s wrong with suggesting that people do not steal from one another?
Amendment V of the Bill of Rights states, in part: “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Kelo vs. New London is not about “public use.” Public use is a road, a school. Public use is not a new shopping mall, new condos, new office space. I have to disagree with Jeff on this decision; both sides of the Court are not right in their opinions. Simply because there is precedent leading up to the decision in Kelo doesn’t make the decision proper. It simply means that all of the precedent is itself unconstitutional. If the Court has, in the past, rejected the “narrow interpretation of the public use requirement,” then the Court was wrong. The Court was negligent in its duty to uphold the Constitution, and it was negligent in Kelo. If the town of New London can’t come up with enough tax revenue without confiscating people’s legally-purchased private property, then perhaps the town should dissolve its charter and let the county take over basic services.

Making health care more competitive, and cheaper

Jeff Jacoby:

Prices are advertised everywhere. From newspapers to billboards to websites, we are forever being told how much things cost. Want to buy contact lenses? A cruise to Alaska? A pedicure? The price of almost any product or service is readily available, and vendors vie for business by keeping their prices competitive.

But not when it comes to health care.
In this second part of his look at health care, the first part of which I noted on Thursday, Jacoby argues that by de-linking health care from employment, through tax reform, prices will be driven down. The tax reform in question is to make health care coverage one purchases oneself tax deductible; it currently is not. Here’s the kicker:
Based on RAND Corporation research, they estimate that making medical expenses deductible would reduce health care spending by $40 billion — all without forcing a single benefit cut on anyone.
[Emphasis added. –R]

Rethinking the killing of public broadcasting

Since my post on the subject, I’ve been thinking of Tom’s comments, and watching as TiVo snags Thomas the Tank Engine, Bob the Builder, and Clifford for my nearly-two-year-old’s viewing pleasure. Then Peggy Noonan comes along with brilliant commentary on the continued need for PBS, just without the politics. Her suggestions are certainly some I’m sure everyone could live with. Get PBS out of the news and opinion business, and back to what made it so vital in the first place: science and the arts.
I am man enough to admit it when I’m wrong. So let’s keep PBS and NPR around; so long as they dump the political angles, and stick to the classics.