A Four-Year Echo

It's saddening to admit that I finished reading Minette Marrin's "Confronted with our own decadence," in the London Times, with a mordant smirk. I recall, just about four years ago, having the very thought with which she ends:

Despite all this, I do, now for the first time, feel a faint glimmer of optimism. One of the responses to the bombings might be a new awareness of what matters most, and how best to defend it. If that means a new sense of purpose and a new sense of conviction, then perhaps some good will have come out of this evil.

Perhaps the intervening years have in actuality been marked by the death-throes frenzy of the faction whose demise would represent the "some good" of my own bittersweet optimism. But even if that proves to be the case, I'm increasingly disheartened to conclude that we may have no respite before evil finds ways to reassert itself, having been thwarted by the collision of its current manifestations in decadence and tyrannical extremism.

Polygamy by the Numbers

Mickey Kaus has an item on Kausfiles related to the possible relationship between terrorism and -- polygamy. Kaus quotes William Tucker in the American Enterprise Online...

Today polygamy is not practiced widely in Islamic countries, and only accounts for about ten percent of all marriages. The country where the distribution of wives is most unequal—Saudi Arabia—seems to be the best at producing roving jihadists who roam the world in search of conflict.

...then goes on to comment...

But if polygamy isn't widely practiced in Islamic countries, can it really be so important that violent jihad is "unlikely to disappear until it is eliminated"?

Speaking completely from a dry-statistical perspective, we need more information to answer Kaus' question!

Is the 10% “10% of men who are married”? In that case, the number of women in the society involved in polygamy could be much higher.

Here’s an oversimplified but clear analysis. Say the average number of wives-per-marriage is 4. Then 40% of the women who are married are involved in polygamy (assuming an equal male-female ratio in the population), and you’ve got 90% of the remaining men fighting for 60% of the women, leaving 30% of your male population with no hope of getting married. And that’s best-case, assuming none of the remaining 90% opt for polygamy at some point in the future.

The above assumes that everyone in the society either was (which obviously can’t be true in a polygamous society) or wants to get married. The next step would be to build in a factor related to the percentage of the society that actually is married. According to wording of the excerpt, 10% is not actually 10% of the total population; it is 10% of all marriages.

Assume 60% of the men are married. Then you have 6% of your men and 24% of the women (if you assume 4 wives per marriage) involved in polygamous marriages. Another 54% of both men and women are in monogamous marriages. The percentage of married women (monogamous + polygamous) with respect to the total population is 78%, leaving the 40% of unmarried men are fighting for 22% of the women, and 18% of the total male population permanently locked out of marriage.

Conclusion: Data on a) the average number of wives per marriage, and b) the percentage of the male Saudi population actually married is needed to further this discussion.

What is the Federalist Society?

Manuel Miranda's discusses the Federalist Society in an editorial entitled The 'Evil Cabal' Of Conservative Lawyers:

Three years ago Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) stood on the floor of the Senate and said: "Mr. President, I take the opportunity today to right a wrong. Over the past two years, members of the Federalist Society have been much maligned by some of my Democrat colleagues, no doubt because they see political advantage in doing so. The Federalist Society has even been presented as an 'evil cabal' of conservative lawyers. Its members have been subjected to questions that remind one of the McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. Detractors have painted a picture which is surreal, twisted and untrue."

Here we go again.

Before I proceed, let me join the view...that the left looks pretty silly in making a big deal of Judge Roberts's association--whatever it is--with the Federalist Society. It is more than amusing; it is sophomoric. (See the three-page talking points issued yesterday by Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee on the Roberts-Federalist cover-up.)

Judge Roberts's ties with the Federalist Society are not the story. If Judge Roberts is not a member, he's not a member. But the White House should not be in the business of appearing to disassociate itself from its friends. By running to correct media reports last week that Judge Roberts was a member of the Federalist Society, the White House created an issue where none existed. It should have left it to the press or Democrats to unveil this great mystery. To add injury to insult, the move now has the appearance of having been bungled with the Washington Post's discovery of Judge Roberts's name on a Federalist Society list from 1997-98...

There is no Federalist Society handshake and there is no Federalist Society group think. Some years ago the Washington Monthly published an article titled "The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law." It cited a 1999 decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as the "network's most far-reaching victory in recent years.'' The decision overturned some of the EPA's clean-air standards on the grounds that it was unconstitutional for Congress to delegate legislative authority to the executive branch.

Oh, really? In this case two prominent individuals closely associated with the Federalist Society were of differing opinions. C. Boyden Gray, former White House Counsel for the first President Bush and a member of the Federalist Society's Board of Visitors, filed an amicus brief making the winning argument. Yet the case was overturned by the Supreme Court in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, a frequent participant in the society's activities.

The Washington Monthly also attacked Mr. Gray as a water carrier for the Federalist Society in advancing Microsoft's effort against antitrust enforcement. Yet Robert Bork, who also served on the Federalist Society's Advisory Board, was Microsoft's chief intellectual adversary.

Rather than assist the left in creating a conservative bogeyman, here is a user-friendly defense of the Federalist Society: Again, the words are Orrin Hatch's. The Federalist Society stands for three propositions, he said: "that government's essential purpose is the preservation of freedom; that our Constitution embraces and requires separation of governmental powers; and that judges should interpret the law, not write it. For the vast majority of Americans, these are not controversial issues."

As Orrin Hatch concluded in his speech three years ago: The Federalist Society is "not quite the vast right-wing conspiracy hobgoblin some [Democrats] would have the American people believe."...

Here is the link to the Federalist Society website.

They define their purpose here:

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors. In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.

You can read more about them here, including these points:

Q. Does the Federalist Society take positions on legal or policy issues or engage in other forms of political advocacy? A. No. The Society is about ideas. We do not lobby for legislation, take policy positions, or sponsor or endorse nominees and candidates for public service. While overall the Society believes in limited government, its members are diverse and often hold conflicting views on a broad range of issues such as tort reform, privacy rights, and criminal justice.

Q. Who joins the Federalist Society?
A. ...Membership is open to anyone who wishes to join the Society, and the organization often attracts people who share a desire for public service.

Q. Who can attend Federalist Society meetings?
A. Everyone is welcome to the programs of our 180 law school chapters, 60 metropolitan lawyers chapters, and 15 nationwide practice groups. The several hundred events sponsored each year by the Federalist Society are publicly advertised and are open to the press and the general public. A number of our events are on television or are webcast.

Q. Who are some of the Federalist Society's participants and speakers?
A. The Society has a strong reputation for hosting speakers on all sides of the ideological spectrum. A number of the Society's most frequent and prominent speakers - from the Left as well as the Right - attest to the fact that the Society has contributed a great deal to free speech, free debate, and the public understanding of the Constitution...

Sounds like a threatening group, doesn't it?

How the Left Blurs the Distinction Between Judging & Politicking

In an editorial entitled "The Inquisitor: Charles Schumer, leader of the anti-Bush crusade," John Miller writes these important words:

...[Schumer] has embarked on a careful strategy of blurring the fundamental distinction between judging and politicking. In 2001, he chaired Judiciary Committee hearings on whether ideology should play a more open role in confirmations. Previously, senators have focused on the professional qualifications of court nominees rather than their political beliefs, which is why a known liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to secure a spot on the Supreme Court with only three Republicans voting against her. With Bush in the White House, however, Schumer decided to try changing the ground rules. One of his mentors has been University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, author of the forthcoming book Radical in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America.

If Democrats want to evaluate nominees on their legal views, Republicans shouldn't object. What Schumer proposes doing, however, is evaluating nominees on their political preferences. This is something else entirely, and it is a natural outgrowth of legal realism, an academic movement that claims laws aren't neutral rules so much as tools of power. By the time Schumer sat in Harvard's lecture halls, variants of this idea were firmly entrenched there - and it is the chief intellectual doctrine behind the judicial activism that liberals applaud and conservatives abhor. It essentially says that judges are no less political than politicians. Therefore, confirmation hearings should not be dispassionate episodes of advice and consent, but raucous quasi-elections that engage the interests and urges of the public...

Schumer cloaks these views about ideology by saying he simply wants to avoid extremes. "People on the far left [and the] far right want to make law," he said on Meet the Press in July. "Neither of them should be on the bench." The presumption, of course, is that senators possess the impartiality to determine what's mainstream and what's not. "If he thinks that he can set aside his liberal ideology and make these choices," asks Republican senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, "then why can't judges do the same when they're ruling on the law?"...

Here are some previous postings on the Supreme Court nomination process, with an emphasis on the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Playing the Religious Bigotry Card, Again
Nothing But a Fishing Expedition
Senator Schumer's Double Standard
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
The Ginsburg Precedent
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

Nothing But a Fishing Expedition

Power Line highlights the contradictory beliefs and statements of the Left regarding judicial behaviors:

...The Democrats say they need more time so they can "learn more about Judge Roberts' judicial philosophy, especially on whether he will defer to precedent or seek to undo modern American jurisprudence that many conservatives say has been wrongly settled." We hear this a lot; the Democrats worry that Roberts and other nominees might not adhere to the doctrine of stare decisis, which, in general, holds that courts should follow their own precedents rather than revisiting settled principles.

But the Democrats' loyalty to the principle of stare decisis is highly selective. In fact, most of the decisions most beloved by liberals have overturned precedents that held the opposite. For example, in Lawrence v. Texas, which in 2003 discovered for the first time a Constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, the Court expressly overruled its own decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which was decided as recently as 1986. So as far as the Democrats are concerned, stare decisis applies only after the Court has made a liberal ruling. Liberal rulings are carved in stone, whereas "conservative" rulings--those that represent the traditional understanding of our Constitution and laws, as written--can and should be overturned freely.

As Paul has noted, we aren't sure exactly what Roberts' judicial philosophy is. But we're pretty certain it is more principled than the Democrats'.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
The Ginsburg Precedent
Senator Schumer's Double Standard
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

The Gory Details of the UN reform bills

No word today from my Senators on their positions on UN reform.

Here are some of the gory details. This is from Section 601 of the House version of UN reform.

(1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (4) and in accordance with paragraph (2), until such time as all certifications (or alternate certifications) are submitted in accordance with subsection (a), the United States shall appropriate, but withhold from expenditure, 50 percent of the contributions of the United States to the regular assessed budget of the United Nations for a biennial period.

I believe it is the Secretary of State doing the certifying. What types of things are being certified? Most are bureaucratic/personnel type matters. But a few are higher-level policy matters. Here is an example (from Section 201, paragraph (b)) related to the Human Rights Commission

(1) A Member State that fails to uphold the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body.
(2) A Member State shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body if such Member State is (A) subject to sanctions by the Security Council; or (B) under a Security Council-mandated investigation for human rights abuses.
(3) A Member State that is currently subject to an adopted country specific resolution, in the principal body in the United Nations for the promotion and protection of human rights, relating to human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of such country in such country, or has been the subject of such an adopted country specific resolution in such principal body within the previous 3 years, shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body. For purposes of this subsection, an adopted country specific resolution shall not include consensus resolutions on advisory services.
(4) A Member State that violates the principles of a United Nations human rights body to which it aspires to join shall be ineligible for membership on such body.

(1) and (4) are kind of fuzzy. But (2) and (3) are objective criteria. If a country under sanction from the Security Council is allowed on the Human rights Commission, then UN funding is withheld.

The Senate version adds an extra layer of procedure. This is from Section 12 of the Senate bill

(a) In General- The President is authorized to withhold 50 percent of United States contributions to the United Nations in a year if the President has determined in the most recent report submitted under section 11 that the United Nations is not making sufficient progress to implement the reforms described in this Act.

The Senate bill contains provisions about the Human Rights Committee similar to the House bill. The difference is, in the Senate bill, allowing a country under sanction from the security council does not trigger an automatic funding cut; it gives the President the right to withhold funds.

There are arguments for both approaches. Which option do you think is better? And which approach do Senator Reed and Senator Chafee think is better?

Rhode Island Senators on UN Reform - ???

I’ve put calls into both Senator Reed’s and Senator’s Chafee’s office inquiring about their positions on the UN reform proposals in Congress. There are basically 3 possible positions…

1. The “Hyde-Pence” position – Congress should pass a list of objective reform criteria and automatically cut some portion of UN funding if the criteria are not met.
2. The “Coleman-Lugar” position – Congress should pass a list of reform criteria, then leave it to the discretion of the President if funding is to be cut if the criteria are not met.
3. The position that tying funding cuts to reform is too harsh a position to be considered.

I will let you know our Senate delegation's position on this matter as soon as it becomes available to me.

Upheaval at the AFL-CIO: Nobody has a Vision for Competing in a Global Economy

An editorial entitled Very Old Labor: Unions need a vision for the new global economy discusses the underlying reason for the breakup of the AFL-CIO:

The AFL-CIO, the giant union consortium formed in 1955 by George Meany and Walter Reuther, is breaking apart this week in a dispute over how to revive labor's lagging fortunes. The tragedy is that neither faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Instead, we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement...

...Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left...and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5%...In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Service workers President Andy Stern wants to arrest this decline by diverting more labor resources into union organizing, especially at such large employers as Wal-Mart. One of his rebel allies, Terence O'Sullivan of the Laborers International Union, wants to more aggressively use union pension funds and financial assets to influence corporate decisions and gain seats on corporate boards. Mr. Sweeney doesn't oppose either idea, but he also wants to pour cash into Congressional lobbying and Democratic coffers. Mr. Stern replies that this money will largely be wasted until unions increase their member ranks, and for our non-union money he's probably right.

What's missing on both sides, however, is a vision of economic opportunity that might actually make workers want to join a union in the first place. Tactics aside, both factions continue to believe in the idea of unions that arose in the Industrial Age: Greedy management versus the exploited working man, seniority over flexibility, fixed benefits and strike threats over working with management to keep a U.S.-based company profitable and innovative in a world of growing competition. On the political front, both factions favor trade protection, higher taxes and government help to enforce restrictive work rules. This is the agenda of Old Europe, where jobless rates are above 10%, and it merely offers more economic insecurity in the U.S. as well.

What the labor movement really needs is a new generation of leaders who understand the emerging competition to U.S. workers from the likes of India and China. Rather than oppose imports to protect textile jobs that can't be saved, such leaders would work to reform education so future Americans can compete in the knowledge industries that will grow the fastest. They'd also work to make pensions and health insurance transportable from company to company, so a worker wouldn't be trapped by benefits in a job or industry he didn't like. They'd be partners with management, not antagonists.

Without such a new vision, Big Labor will only continue its slide. All the more so given new Labor Department rules, recently upheld in court after an AFL-CIO challenge, requiring that unions disclose more details about how they spend hard-earned member dues. Some of the nation's largest unions will now have to disclose their spending by specific categories, such as political donations, grievance proceedings, or organizing. This sunshine will expose just how much labor money is being wasted on political activities that have little to do with improving workers' lives...

...their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline.

Other stories on the breakup can be read here and here.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Bankrupt pensions, extraordinary healthcare insurance benefits, outrageous demands by private and public sector unions, hidden union spending on politics, lousy decision-making by some management teams as well as misguided incentives and marketplace meddling by government have been discussed previously on Anchor Rising:

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform
"Shut Up & Teach"

Union Political Activity
Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent
Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities
Now Here is a Good Idea
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

Private Sector Issues
Government Meddling Creates Marketplace Distortions, Increasing Long-Term Costs
If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You
Underfunding Pensions, Public and Private, can Hurt Taxpayers
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?
Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail
Airline Industry: How Government Meddling in Marketplace Costs Taxpayers & Consumers
The Ongoing Squabble Between General Motors & the United Auto Workers Union
It Won't Work
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Andrew at TCS

Over at Tech Central Station, Andrew has some suggestions at to The Right Way to Reform the UN.

How Rank Partisanship Can Cloud the Sense of Common Decency

From Pennsylvania:

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.

She said he "died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country."

In a phone interview, Goodrich said the funeral service was packed with people "who wanted to tell his family how Joe had impacted their lives."

Then, suddenly, "one uninvited guest made an appearance, Catherine Baker Knoll."

She sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, "Who are you?" Then she handed the family member one of her business cards, which Goodrich said she still has.

"Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us," Goodrich said. "I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign."

Goodrich said she is positive that Knoll was not invited to the funeral, which was jammed with Marines in dress uniform and police officers, because the fallen Marine had been a policeman in McKeesport and Indiana County.

"Our family deserves an apology," Rhonda Goodrich said. "Here you have a soldier who was killed -- dying for his country -- in a church full of grieving family members and she shows up uninvited. It made a mockery of Joey's death."

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war,' " Goodrich said.

She said she is going to seek an answer from Gov. Ed Rendell's administration if it opposes the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, this is an extreme case, but it is illustrative of what can happen when one begins to view everything through partisan glasses. When we allow our political selves to be ginned up to the point where we begin to hate domestic political opponents to such a degree, we lose focus on the real enemies to our society. Of course, to too many liberals, the real enemy is not terrorists or belligerent nations: to them the enemy is President Bush and the Republican Party. To these, Michael Barrone's comments should be both read and heeded:

This summer, one big story is replaced by another--the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media--the New York Times, etc., etc.--to delegitimize yet another Republican administration. . .

. . . for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush. The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was denounced as an outrage, and Democrats noted, accurately, that Bush did not win a plurality of the popular vote in 2000. The nation rallied to his support after September 11, but Democrats held up his judicial and other nominations even if they had to violate Senate tradition to do so. Coverage of Bush during the 2004 campaign was heavily negative; for months the mainstream media mostly ignored the swift boat vets' charges against John Kerry and broadcast accusations against Bush based on forged documents eight weeks before the election. News of economic recovery in 2003 and 2004 was pitched far more negatively than it had been when Bill Clinton was president in 1995 and 1996.

Now the unsupported charges that "Bush lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar. A year after his famous article appeared in the New York Times in July 2003 accusing Bush of "twisting" intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan report, concluded that Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his dispatch to Niger and Chairman Pat Roberts said that his report bolstered rather than refuted the case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. So despite the continuing credulousness of much of the press, it appears inconceivable at this point that Karl Rove will be charged with violating the law prohibiting disclosure of the names of undercover agents. The case against Rove--ballyhooed by recent Time and Newsweek cover stories that paid little heed to the discrediting of Wilson--seems likely to end not with a bang but a whimper. . .

The bombings and attempted bombings in London have brought home to the American public that we face implacable enemies unwilling to be appeased by even the most emollient diplomacy. Yet, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has been mostly negative. But mainstream media no longer have a monopoly; Americans have other sources in talk radio, Fox News, and the blogosphere. Bush's presidency is still regarded as illegitimate by perhaps 20 percent of the electorate. But among the rest, the attempt to delegitimize him seems to be collapsing.

Democrats have to get off of their hell-bent-for-leather attempt to "get" Bush et al aka Nixon. This hyper-politicization of all things only exposes the dearth of ideas on the left. In fact, what has occurred is that those who purport to be "liberal" are actually conservative in their theory of government: they wish to extend or preserve the same failed programs of the past half-century: those started by Roosevelt and expanded by LBJ. They continue to criticize without solutions. This country needs two viable parties so that the best ideas can emerge. Right now, we don't. But at the bare minimum, would it be too much to ask of the opponents of the President that they discontinue the hyperbolic rhetoric concerning foreign affairs? Apparently, the answer is "yes."

Playing the Religious Bigotry Card, Again

As an American citizen who happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic, I am deeply offended by the Left's willingness to engage in anti-Catholic religious bigotry.

Hugh Hewitt tells the latest story in a Friday, July 22, at 7:50 a.m. posting entitled Preparing to play the "deeply held beliefs" card: Charles Schumer's New Test Act:

...But declarations of victory [about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts] are very premature given the obvious signs that the left is getting ready to mount a two-part campaign against [him].

Part I will be the conventional "give us the documents or we won't vote" blather that currently blocks Bolton and in the past was used to block Miguel Estrada. This is a delaying tactic, and nothing more. [See Power Line for more on this topic.]

The real assault is coming on Roberts --and his wife's-- Roman Catholicism.

It will be carefully coded, but there is no mistaking the set-up work underway to get the Demcrats' version of the Test Act established.

Four articles have appeared in two days that set-up the nominee's religious beliefs as a subject for conversation.

[Read the posting to get the particulars in each article.]

Robert Novak's column from August 11, 2003 provides the key history to the expected assault on John Roberts:

On May 1 in a Senate Judiciary Committee session, Schumer raised religious questions in connection with the nomination of lawyer J. Leon Holmes as district judge from Arkansas. Holmes has the support of his state's two Democratic senators, but not Chuck Schumer. The New Yorker argued that the conservative religious views of Holmes, a devout Catholic, disqualified him because of disagreements interpreting the separation of church and state. Schumer contended that 'religious beliefs cannot dictate government policy, even though they can infuse our values.'

That was preparation for Schumer's opposition to Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor for the appellate bench, another conservative Catholic who is the most recent of the filibustered Bush nominees. In the Judiciary Committee June 11, Schumer said Pryor's beliefs 'are so well known, so deeply held that it's very hard to believe that they're not going to influence' him on the bench. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, another Judiciary member, also has cited the 'deeply held beliefs' standard.

It is going to get ugly, and how ugly depends upon how desperate the left is, and it looks pretty desperate.

Let's call this behavior by its real name: It is another form of religion called Liberal Fundamentalism.

And it reeks of intolerance, best explained by Richard John Neuhaus:

The conflict in American public life today then is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate...

And here is the full counter-argument to their attempts to enslave us with their intolerant secular religion.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Power Line continues the conversation here, a posting which highlights this editorial by Jonathan Turley and which led to discovering an updated editorial by Robert Novak.

Power Line has more as Senator Durbin, a man known in recent times for speaking only the truth! about the American military, denies what Turley wrote about in his editorial. Power Line has more here.

And be sure to check out Justin's thoughtful comment (#3) to this posting, a comment that inspires awe as he once again shows off his remarkable gift for clarity in written communication.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
The Ginsburg Precedent
Senator Schumer's Double Standard
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

Politically Correct Suicide

Paul Sperry has written an article entitled Politically Correct Suicide: Still No Subway Profiling, in which he says:

After a new series of subway bomb attacks in London, the mayor of New York announced yesterday that police will search backpacks and other bags carried by people boarding city subways.

But the passengers they single out will be picked at random without regard for their race or religion. There will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed.

Talk about politically correct exercises in futility.

Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked Bloomberg's own city with planes nearly four years earlier. Statistically, they fit the profile of the terrorist targeting the American transportation system.

And yet, still no profiling.

Authorities instead will single out people for special security screening as they do at the nation's airports. That means stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance for young Muslim men than protecting citizens from them.

At the same time, the NYPD is advising subway riders to be alert for "people" with bulky clothes or fiddling nervously with bags. Could they be more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? They're too PC to narrow it to a level where it can actually be useful to Americans trying to protect themselves and their loved ones...

Don't expect the feds to be any more serious about screening Muslim suicide bombers on Amtrak, which pulls into two of the biggest commuter train depots in the country: Penn Station and Union Station.

Asked after the London bombings if the fed-run trains were safe, White House terror czar Fran Townsend claimed: "They're safer than they were after 9/11, they're safer after the Madrid bombings ... It's a lot safer."

What a crock. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, there's no bag screening -- even after Madrid. The only restrictions on bags are a 50-pound weight limit, and that's no comfort at all. The London bombers used plastic explosives weighing less than 50 pounds.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his Muslim-sensitive civil-rights team act as a bulwark against profiling at airports and train stations. One of Mineta's top aides is the son of a Wahhabi mosque leader who raised money for Osama bin Laden's No. 2 in Santa Clara, Calif.

So don't hold your breath for any policy changes there -- even if, as experts predict, as many as 20,000 casualties result from London-type bombs detonated in the New York MTA.

And that's not the only al-Qaida threat to mass transit that authorities are worried about. According to a closely held DHS security advisory I obtained, the "terrorists have designed a crude chemical dispersal device fabricated from commonly available materials, which is designed to asphyxiate its victims."

"The device produces cyanogens chloride (CLCN) gas and/or hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas," continues the five-page document, first issued Nov. 21, 2003. "These gases are most effective when released in confined spaces such as subways."

And they are extremely deadly, experts say.

By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers, Bloomberg, Mineta and other leaders are not only unnecessarily inconveniencing millions of commuters, but unwittingly giving Muslim terrorists political cover to carry out their plans. Call it politically correct suicide.

Power Line writes:

Apparently lots of London Muslims think it's odd that people are looking at them funny:

[A spokesman for the Council] said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.

Gosh, why would that be? Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it seems to me that a great many Muslims are refusing to face reality. For their sake as well as everyone else's, they need to get serious about helping the authorities root out terrorism, in England and elsewhere.

Aussie Prime Minister Howard: Challenging Fanciful Thinking About Global War on Terror

Australian Prime Minister John Howard cuts through all the nonsensical, politically correct talk about the global war on terror with these words:

Could I start by saying the prime minister [Tony Blair] and I were having a discussion when we heard about it [July 7 attacks in London]. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don't want to add to what the prime minister has said. It's a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

Lance Armstrong

As the Tour de France comes to its end in the next few days and it looks like Lance Armstrong has a good chance to win his seventh straight race, I found the following excerpts from this older New Yorker profile article of Armstrong to contain many interesting insights into him:

Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than that of an average man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about thirty-two times a minute-slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a minute.) Physically, he was a prodigy...

Armstrong was an outstanding young swimmer, and as an adolescent he began to enter triathlons. By 1987, when he was sixteen, he was also winning bicycle races. That year, he was invited to the Cooper Institute, in Dallas, which was one of the first centers to recognize the relationship between fitness and aerobic conditioning. Everyone uses oxygen to break down food into the components that provide energy; the more oxygen you are able to use, the more energy you will produce, and the faster you can run, ride, or swim. Armstrong was given a test called the VO2 Max, which is commonly used to assess an athlete's aerobic ability: it measures the maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can consume during exercise. His levels were the highest ever recorded at the clinic. (Currently, they are about eighty-five millilitres per kilogram of body weight; a healthy man might have a VO2 Max of forty.)

Chris Carmichael, who became his coach when Armstrong was still a teen-ager, told me that even then Armstrong was among the most remarkable athletes he had ever seen. Not only has his cardiovascular strength always been exceptional; his body seems specially constructed for cycling. His thigh bones are unusually long, for example, which permits him to apply just the right amount of torque to the pedals...

Within a week, Armstrong had surgery to remove the cancerous testicle. By then, the disease had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. He needed brain surgery and the most aggressive type of chemotherapy. "At that point, he had a minority chance of living another year," Craig Nichols, who was Armstrong's principal oncologist, told me. "We cure at most a third of the people in situations like that." A professor at Oregon Health Sciences University who specializes in testicular cancer, Nichols has remained a friend and is an adviser to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which supports cancer research. Nichols described Armstrong as the "most willful person I have ever met." And, he said, "he wasn't willing to die." Armstrong underwent four rounds of chemotherapy so powerful that the chemicals destroyed his musculature and caused permanent kidney damage; in the final treatments, the chemicals left burns on his skin from the inside out. Cofidis, convinced that Armstrong's career (and perhaps his life) was over, told his agent while he was still in the hospital that it wanted to reconsider the terms of his contract. That may have turned out to be the worst bet in the history of sports...

Armstrong now says that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him. Before becoming ill, he didn't care about strategy or tactics or teamwork-and nobody (no matter what his abilities) becomes a great cyclist without mastering those aspects of the sport. Despite Armstrong's brilliant early start in the 1993 Tour, for example, he didn't even finish the race; he dropped out when the teams entered the most difficult mountain phase, in the Alps. (He also failed to finish in 1994 and 1996.)

As Carmichael pointed out to me, Armstrong had always been gifted, but "genetically he is not alone. He is near the top but not at the top. I have seen people better than Lance that never go anywhere. Before Lance had cancer, we argued all the time. He never trained right. He just relied on his gift. He would do what you asked for two weeks, then flake off and do his own thing for a month or two. And then a big race would be coming up and he would call me up, all tense, telling me, 'God, I have got to start training, and you guys better start sending me some programs.' I would say, 'Lance, you don't just start preparing things four weeks before a race. This is a long process.' "

Cycling is, above all, a team sport, and the tactics involved are as complicated as those of baseball or basketball. "Ever try to explain the infield-fly rule to somebody?" Armstrong asked me when we were in Texas, where he lives when he is not racing or training in Europe. "You have to watch it to get it. As soon as you pay some attention to the tactics, cycling makes a lot of sense."...

The physical demands on competitive cyclists are immense. One day, they will have to ride two hundred kilometres through the mountains; the next day there might be a long, flat sprint lasting seven hours. Because cyclists have such a low percentage of body fat, they are more susceptible to infections than other people. (At the beginning of the Tour, Armstrong's body fat is around four or five per cent; this season, Shaquille O'Neal, the most powerful player in the N.B.A., boasted that his body-fat level was sixteen per cent.)

The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days...

Looking at a wide range of physical activities, Saris and his colleagues measured the metabolic demands made on people engaged in each of them. "On average, the cyclists expend sixty-five hundred calories a day for three weeks, with peak days of ten thousand calories," he said. "If you are sedentary, you are burning perhaps twenty-five hundred calories a day. Active people might burn as many as thirty-five hundred."

Saris compared the metabolic rates of professional cyclists while they were riding with those of a variety of animal species, and he created a kind of energy index-dividing daily expenditure of energy by resting metabolic rate. This figure turned out to range from one to seven. An active male rates about two on Saris's index and an average professional cyclist four and a half. Almost no species can survive with a number that is greater than five. For example, the effort made by birds foraging for food sometimes kills them, and they scored a little more than five. In fact, only four species are known to have higher rates on Saris's energy index than the professional cyclists in his study: a small Australian possum, a macaroni penguin, a large seabird called a gannet, and one species of marsupial mouse...

Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong's body is regularly inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules. "Depends whether you want to win," he replied. "I do. The Tour is a two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less. One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn't that much. So the people who win are the ones willing to suffer the most." Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton, Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it...

Senator Schumer's Double Standard

Richard Epstein's editorial entitled Who Will Judge the Inquisitors? notes that Senator Schumer's behavior toward Supreme Court nominee John Roberts is hypocritical:

…Hence I should like to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Sen. Schumer to identify three recent Supreme Court cases that I disagree with…

…I think we have to play by a different set of ground rules. Hard debate is a two-way street. Every time I defend my views, I am rightly at risk for criticism and refutation. But Sen. Schumer thinks his views set the gold standard for constitutional interpretation. But he, too, should be at risk to questions about his deeply held beliefs. Here is how I would start.

From the get-go, I would insist that we view with suspicion the oft-hurled epithet of "judicial activism." Judicial review, which allows the Court to strike down federal and state legislation, is an indisputable part of the Constitution. The structural and substantive prohibitions the Constitution contains are large. One can be a "strict constructionist" and still believe that major legislative initiatives, executive orders, and administrative rules are unconstitutional. By the same token, the government should be accorded a wider degree of discretion in running its own affairs -- the military, courts, schools, etc. -- a view that is largely permissive of government affirmative action programs that parallel those which comparable private institutions adopt on a voluntary basis. In these cases the private benchmark offers a useful measuring rod for state discretion.

But for Sen. Schumer my questions address the coercive use of government power. What presumption should attach to the constitutionality of the use of state force? This vexed question of the "standard of review" is nowhere stated in the Constitution, and thus ultimately derives from a sense of its basic purposes, which I take to be the preservation of "ordered liberty" -- with a state strong enough to rule, but not so strong as to snuff out the liberties of ordinary people to own property, enter contracts, worship, and speak as they please.

Given that view, the proper response to all forms of state regulation of private activities should be to subject them to serious judicial scrutiny, in order to see that they achieve their legitimate objectives. Judged by this twin standard, many decisions come out badly...

[Epstein then goes on to comment about three specific cases, comments which are worth reading in detail for the full impact of his argument.]

Note that my three cases all involve situations in which responsible constitutional interpretation requires some strong acts of judicial intervention [which Sen. Schumer would oppose in the three cases]. Liberals like Sen. Schumer think that this presumption [of judicial intervention] works in cases like gay marriage (where they have a strong case) and abortion (where their case is far weaker, owing to the interest of the unborn child).

…My main point here is that Sen. Schumer's own views are subject to powerful intellectual counterattack, so that before he and his allies cast stones on John Roberts, he should recognize that he and his ilk also live in a glass house.

But, then again, we know what Senator Schumer's agenda has always been - even before John Roberts was nominated.

For the Left, this nomination battle is a raw power struggle focused on sustaining the recent practice of the Supreme Court to legislate on policy issues from the bench in ways that would never be endorsed by the public in state and local legislative bodies.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
The Ginsburg Precedent
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

The Ginsburg Precedent

In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled Who Will Judge the Inquisitors?, Richard Epstein discusses Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and Democratic Senator Schumer's initial comments:

...I have never met Judge Roberts, nor, for that matter, read a single one of his opinions. But I knew that he enjoyed the reputation as one of the keenest intellects and best Supreme Court advocates in the highly competitive Washington legal market. A glance at his gilt-edged resume -- his 1979-80 clerkship with the late Judge Henry Friendly on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals leaps out -- only increased my confidence in his nomination. His familiarity with complex business matters counts as a big added plus. Well done, I thought. This should be a cakewalk.

Then I heard Senator Charles Schumer, somber and self-righteous, reach, as he so often does, for the microphone, to announce that gilt-edged credentials are not enough. In his view, all nominees must be vetted for the soundness of their ideological positions. More pointedly, he observed that when John Roberts was up for a Circuit Court judge position, he refused, under questioning, to identify three Supreme Court decisions that he disagreed with. This time round, Sen. Schumer warned, that evasion will not work...

Now, if you want to see a double standard at work, consider this posting from Hugh Hewitt entitled The Ginsburg Precedent:

"I prefer not to answer questions like that; again, to talk in grand terms about principles that have to be applied in concrete cases. I like to reason from the specific case," was the response of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Patrick Leahy's 1993 question to then nominee Judge Ginsburg on which of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment was subordinate to the other.

Judge Roberts will no doubt be spending a lot of time with the transcripts of the confirmation hearings, especially that part where Senator Leahy says "I understand. Just trying, Judge, just trying" in response to Justice Ginsburg refusal to engage in great debate over constitutional principles.

This article by Jay T. Jorgensen explains in detail the importance of the precedents established by the Ginsburg hearings. One of his many key findings:

"Justice Ginsburg declined to answer questions about her views on both prospective and many historical Supreme Court cases. She also declined to answer questions (or gave non-responsive answers to questions) involving a number of controversial issues, hypothetical facts, or areas in which she is not an expert."

Nothing has changed in 12 years, except that the president nominating the justice is George W. Bush and not Bill Clinton. The MSM will attempt to prop up the wild claims of Senators Leahy and Schumer about the duties of nominees, as the New York Times editorialists did this morning when they wrote "[t]he Senate has a duty to scrutinize his background and to question him closely at his confirmation hearings about substantive areas of the law." But when biased papers invent such "duties," or when Ted Kennedy makes the statement that "[n]o nominee, especially a nominee who is well known to have argued ideological positions on issues important to the American people, should be confirmed without full and candid disclosure and discussion of those positions and their importance to him," the Ginsburg precedent must be close at hand.

Useful activism: The Jorgensen article is easily linked and e-mailed. Bloggers should feature it prominently on their blogs, and activists should e-mail it to columnists and editorial writers at every level of the media. It will especially be useful if hundreds of activists e-mail it to D.C. talking heads so that they have no excuse for indulging the Schumers and the Leahys who hold forth on the duty of nominees to answer loaded questions...

Here is the list of questions Senator Schumer has for Judge Roberts.

Mark Levin comments:

Justice Scalia gave a speech about the Pledge of Allegiance, in which he took a position on the words "under God." As a result he was compelled ethically to recuse himself from the case. A nominee for the Court, giving answers under oath, is under a similar obligation. It would be irresponsible to give direct answers to inappropriate questions.

Robert Alt explains further:

During recent confirmation hearings, Senate Democrats have taken to asking candidates very specific questions about legal issues which are likely to come before their prospective courts. Such questions have presented the nominees with a Catch-22: If the nominees answer the questions, then they risk running afoul of the codes of judicial ethics, and may be required to take no part in cases raising that issue coming before the court. If, however, the nominees choose to point out that judicial cannons prohibit them from answering the question, then they face rejection by Senate Democrats for not being sufficiently forthcoming.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

The Social Engineering Beyond Challenge

"Breaking the Glass Taboo," my latest column for TheFactIs.org, responds to Providence Journal editorialist M.J. Anderson's nostalgia for the days of the Baby Boomers' youth and to recent research finding that removing men from the home can be part of a recipe for creating "exceptional" boys.

I didn't go into this in my column, but have you ever noticed that "progress" increasingly seems like a bend around the cultural track back to our primal days? Well, consider what it would imply for men's behavior if society accepted the notion that fathers needn't be bound to the children whom they beget.

"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"

The following words are written in a new Wall Street Journal editorial entitled No More Souters:

...the record across recent decades is that justices who join the High Court without a clear and confident jurisprudence eventually become part of what has been a longstanding liberal majority...

By "liberal majority," by the way, we aren't merely referring to such issues as abortion or gay rights. Our objection to Roe and to Lawrence, the Texas sodomy case, isn't on the underlying policy. It is that the Court has hijacked those social disputes from democratic debate, preventing the kind of legislative compromises that would allow a social and political consensus to form. As federal appeals court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson put it recently in an address at Duke University Law School, "In this sense, a restoration of [judicial] restraint assists the restoration of good will, because democratic governance gives everyone their say."

But there are many other issues on which the post-Warren justices have arrogated to themselves an almost legislative authority: overturning voter-passed Congressional term limits by 5-4, dictating racial and gender preferences in law, extending the Commerce Clause to encompass virtually any federal authority as in last term's Raich medical-marijuana decision, or expanding eminent domain in Kelo.

This is the history...

But the larger goal should be to pick someone who has the intellectual conviction and firepower to help restore the High Court to its more restrained historical role. In a phrase, this means putting an end at last to the judicial legislating that was unleashed in the Warren era and that has slowed only on occasion ever since.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

The Filibuster...Continued
The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain
The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry
Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee
Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster
The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School
A Power Line overview of the filibuster debate
Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality

In the first of five excerpts from It Takes a Family, Senator Rick Santorum has this to say about the debate regarding the proper role for the Supreme Court in our society:

The village elders (a.k.a. left-wing members of Congress) introduce very few bills — almost none that attract more than one or two cosponsors. There are no hearings where Congress and the public can hear arguments about the merits to society of changing its moral fabric. Did Congress pass a law that said it was illegal to display a Christmas crèche on public property, tell us we could not recite the pledge that we are "one nation under God" in schools, or legislate away displays of the Ten Commandments from public buildings? Did we pass a constitutional amendment that gave anyone a right to marry as many people of whatever gender they want? Did we pass an amendment that gave women the right to abort their children at any time, for any reason, during pregnancy? Did we pass a law that minors could undergo the surgical procedure of abortion without parental consent or notification? The answer to all of these questions is: No! Not in one state legislature, much less in the U.S. Congress, did the democratic branches of government, the people’s branches, pass such amendments or enact such laws. How could the moral fabric of America be so torn apart without so much as a single act of Congress duly signed by the president?

The answer is, of course, the courts — most particularly, the federal courts. A generation ago, liberals figured out something that most conservatives couldn’t have dreamed of in their worst nightmare. A few well-positioned autocrats can do what most Americans thought, and the Constitution says, takes two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures to do: namely, change the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean. The plan was simple. Put justices on the Supreme Court, backed up by lower court judges, to "modernize" our Constitution by fiat...

How often do we hear that our founding compact needs to be a living, breathing document whose meaning changes with the times? Never mind what the words of our Constitution actually say; never mind the clear intent of the Constitution’s writers and signers; never mind two hundred years of judicial interpretation; never mind the centuries-old wisdom of the common law: We are much wiser today than our predecessors. Or so goes the liberal boast...

I have been referring to the Left as the "village elders." Well, when it comes to the Court and its activist decisions, we have come to the high oligarchy of the village elders: accountable to no one, deciding the most important and troubling issues of our time, issues that speak to our very identity as a people and even as human beings. And all of this has been done undemocratically — even anti-democratically.

With Congress, if the people decide its representatives have made a mistake, the people can throw them out and bring in different ones to correct with new laws any errors perpetrated by the old. But the Supreme Court almost never has second thoughts: It certainly has not had second thoughts about its fundamental project of the past generation, the project of moral revolution enshrined in law. In fact, in the infamous Casey decision in 1992, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade and the abortion license, the Court’s majority opinion actually said that widespread popular opposition to Roe was an important reason for the Court to stick to its pro-abortion decision: To do otherwise would "subvert" the Court’s "legitimacy." In other words, the village elders have spoken, and it is up to the American people to shut up and obey.

...Could our founders...ever have imagined such judicial arrogance? Actually, some eventually did. Thomas Jefferson said in 1821:

The germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary, an irresponsible body — working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall render powerless the checks of one branch over the other and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

I often use the extended metaphor of various kinds of "capital." When it comes to what has happened to our moral capital in the past generation or two, I am stymied for a verb to use. It wasn’t "squandered" or "spent down"; it didn’t "trickle away." The verbs that come to mind are destroyed and replaced. Traditional morality is being destroyed, and being replaced by something that claims to be morality, but ultimately has little social benefit or ability to sustain the democratic experiment...What we Americans did with our moral capital over the last generation is...On government orders — in our case, on Court orders — we melted it down, for nothing.

Here are the subsequent excerpts from Senator Santorum:

The Constitutional Wrecking Ball - It all started with Griswold
Enter "Neutrality"- From accommodating separationism to Everson
A Perfect Storm: Privacy. Neutrality. Free Expression.
Mending Morality: Where do we stand? What comes next?

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

NEA in Damage Control Mode, Per Kaus

Thanks to Andrew for the heads-up about a posting in today's kausfiles:

Test Scores Improving, NEA In Full Damage-Control Mode! Want to know what to make of those recent encouraging NAEP test score results, which the Bush Administration promptly hailed as "proof that No Child Left Behind is working." As usual, Eduwonk is the place to start. ... Anti-NCLB groups (e.g. the National Education Association) argue that since the NCLB had only been in effect for a year prior to the test, it can't be credited with the results. But as Education Week noted:

...many states had already begun making such changes and focusing intensely on improving reading and math instruction after the 1999 national assessment and prior to the federal law's implementation.

There's a similar argument in the welfare debate: Why did all sorts of indicators (e.g., teen pregnancy, caseloads) start to improve in the years before the enactment of the 1996 federal reform? President Clinton attributed the results to state reform efforts that preceded the federal law. The case for a similar effect in education seems at least as strong, if not stronger. Weren't pre-NCLB state efforts to require more testing and accountability far more pervasive than pre-1996 state efforts to require more welfare recipients to work? ...

P.S.: The good news in education, of course, may in itself also be good news for welfare reform. One of the dreamier welfare reform theories, remember, was that kids whose parents worked (and who lived in neighborhoods in which more other kids' parents worked) would do better in school. Liberal writers have made big splashes by noting individual cases in which this dynamic did not seem to be at work, in part because welfare reform pushed poor single mothers to hold down jobs that took them away from their kids. All welfare reformers could say, in effect, was "Let's wait until we see how these big changes in neighborhoods play out across the whole population over many years." Well .... Certainly results like the NAEP's (which showed especially big gains for black 9-year-olds) make it harder to argue that the 1996 welfare law, by requiring mothers to take jobs and leave their kids, has had a negative overall effect on kids' school performance.

The Pacifist's Double Standard

The headline on today's Financial Times article about Iraq suffers from a double standard all too common in MSM reporting.

Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war.

For some reason, continuing violence directed against a population does not constitute a state of war. Only once the population fights back in a systematic way do the evils of war attach. So to avoid war, all you have to do is not fight back against organized killers.

A Brutal Fight to the Death Against Rabid Ideologues

Gordon Cucullu of Democracy Project writes about the recent London bombing, making these comments:

...Recite the dismal laundry list of terrorist attacks that have taken place globally since the late 1990s. We have read the names so many times that we have almost become jaded to them but we can’t let that happen. We need to remind ourselves of Lebanon, the Achille Lauro, Munich, Israel, the World Trade Center, Iraq, Oklahoma City, East Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Bali, Madrid, Holland, the USS Cole, Lockerbie, Philippines, Egypt, Libya, Teheran, Pakistan, India, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Now we can add London to that sad list. We must recognize a stark fact that too many of the self-styled intelligentsia seem not to comprehend: regardless of what we do the terrorists are coming after us. They are coming not to negotiate, not to seek accommodation or understanding, not to learn how to work together: they are coming to kill and destroy.

Unless we grasp the enormity of that fact, accept it, and hold it close we will lose this war. For war it is. Not crime, not misunderstanding, not something than can be resolved on a psychiatrist’s couch or with an anti-depressant medication. From time to time we drift away from our purpose, forget what started this war in the first place...

Worst of all, we pretend that this war is somehow a war against “terror” rather than a brutal war to the death against rabid ideologues who have declared the war against us and intend to destroy us and our way of life. This is not a war against Islam per se, but as Paul Marshall notes “the root of this wave of terrorism is extremist religion.” These terror leaders have said that they intend to impose their twisted version of Islam upon us. We need to listen to what these people say and be candid in our own thoughts and speech. No longer can we go to ridiculous lengths to avoid offense, or to deceive ourselves that we are dealing with a “religion of peace.” Ayatollah Khomeini said, back when all this began in earnest, “we did not create a revolution to lower the price of melon.” More recently Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, made terrorist intentions clear: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

The wave of attacks in London ought to have been a wake up call – again! How many of these will we require before we act against the root cause?...

...But how many wake up calls do we need to galvanize our will? Will it require a nuclear, poison gas, or biological attack before we at last have the moral courage to recognize our enemy for who and what he is? If the London attack can produce that result then the lives will not have been spent in vain.

Marc quotes Lee Harris in an earlier posting, with this additional perspective:

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past...

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal...

Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics. The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"

Casino Gambling is Destructive, Serving No Positive Social Purpose

Thanks to Chuck over at The Senescent Man, check out this website entitled Kay Coalition Against Casino Gambling (KAYCO), which is a statewide coordinating body helping local community groups to resist the spread of the gambling industry in their neighborhoods.

Casino gambling serves no positive social purpose. We must continue to oppose all attempts to impose it any further on our state.

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left

Here is how MoveOn.org describes the upcoming Supreme Court nomination process:

Just days after Justice O'Connor's resignation, the fight to protect our rights is in full swing. By all accounts, this will be a long, fierce campaign. The radical right is already pouring millions of dollars in large, secret contributions into the right wing spin machine, determined to ram through whomever Bush puts forward...

If Bush announces an extremist nominee we'll to need respond fast and hard with ads on the airwaves and in major newspapers that get our message out—and none of it comes cheap. So today we're launching our Emergency Fund to Protect our Rights with an initial goal of $500,000. If you can help us get there now, we can leap straight into action the moment we hear the news.

If keeping an extremist off the Supreme Court is important to you, this is a great time to chip in...

The national press is already reporting that this will be the most expensive, ruthless Supreme Court nomination ever. They're calling this the "Presidential election of 2005" and estimating as much as $100 million will be spent in the fight.

Why are far-right leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson determined to spend so much? Because even with Republican control of Congress and the White House, our independent courts (not to mention the Constitution) still interfere with their drive to impose a narrow, far right agenda on the rest of America. After more than 10 years without an opening on the Supreme Court, this is the chance they've been waiting for to seize complete control...

Look again at the words they use: Radical right. Secret contributions. Right wing spin machine. Ram through. Extremist nominee. Ruthless. Impose a narrow, far right agenda on the rest of America. Seize complete control.

Now contrast those words with the words and substantive content of these previous postings:

Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning

It is worth repeating: The use of extreme language by the far left is an attempt to turn the nomination process into a raw power struggle that distracts everyone from having a truly open, public debate about the core question of whether judicial activism (i.e., legislating from the bench) or judicial restraint (i.e., legislatures, not courts, legislate) is the proper role for the judicial branch of our government.

Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Nothing is more unjust to the working families and retirees of America than to over-pay for under-performance. In other words, not to get fair value for our hard-earned monies.

It is in that context where this blogsite has been appropriately critical of both public sector unions and private sector unions. Follow all the links at the bottom of postings here and here for concrete examples. In some of the latter postings, the imbecilic actions of certain management teams have also been criticized.

No less of a problem in our society are the corporate welfare queens who exist like parasites living off their manipulation of a bloated federal government, thereby reducing many Americans' standard of living through hidden and completely unnecessary taxes.

The article entitled Sugar Daddies: How sugar interests rip off America and harm the national interest provides a classic example of a corporate welfare queen:

In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole…

The program allows sugar processors to take out loans from the USDA by pledging sugar as collateral. The loan rates — 18 cents per pound for cane sugar, 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar — are significantly higher than average world sugar prices. These loans must be repaid within nine months, but processors also have the option of forfeiting their sugar to the government in lieu of repaying their debt.

This arrangement effectively guarantees that the processors receive a price for their sugar that is no lower than the loan value: If prices fell below that level, they would simply forfeit their sugar and keep the government’s money. In order to avoid that scenario, the USDA must prop up the domestic price of sugar. It does this by controlling supply through two mechanisms. First, it sets quotas on how much foreign sugar can be imported without facing prohibitive tariffs; second, it regulates the amount of sugar that domestic processors can sell.

The consequence is that sugar in the U.S. has, over the past decade, cost two to three times the average world price. The sugar industry likes to point out that the program requires no government outlays, since processors repay their loans each year (assuming the government keeps sugar prices sufficiently high). This argument is sound if one regards the sugar program as a question of federal bookkeeping, but that is only because, in this case, the government does an uncharacteristically efficient job of plundering taxpayers to pay off a special interest: It simply cuts itself out as middleman. Each time you buy sugar or a product made with sugar, the difference between the price you pay and the lower price you would pay absent the sugar program’s dirigisme can be thought of as a sugar tax. Unlike most taxes, this tax never finds its way to government accounts. Instead, it passes directly from your pocket to the sugar industry’s profit statements.

A GAO study found that, between 1989 and 1991, the sugar tax cost American consumers an average of $1.4 billion per year. By 1998, that number had risen to $1.9 billion. Other costs are borne by manufacturers who use sugar as an input. Faced with high domestic prices, some confectioners have moved to countries without sugar price supports, such as Canada. Others have simply shut down…Without the program, resources currently devoted to sugar production would shift to more efficient sectors of the economy and create new jobs.

The sugar program is a case study in how small, concentrated interests can trump larger but more diffuse ones. By any measure, the U.S. sugar industry is minuscule. It employs only 62,000 people and comprises less than 0.5 percent of U.S. farms. But because it profits so richly from the current protectionist scheme, it has a powerful incentive to keep that scheme in place.

It does so by donating extravagantly to political candidates. One lobbyist who works with trade issues says, “[The sugar industry] is collecting monopoly rents. Any industry in a position of collecting monopoly rents will spend back a significant portion of those rents to maintain those monopolies.” Although sugar accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. farm receipts, 17 percent of all campaign contributions from the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2004 came from the sugar lobby.

Perhaps no political investment has brought a higher return. The GAO report found that sugar producers gain around $1 billion a year from the artificially high prices that the sugar program guarantees. Some growers have gotten exceedingly rich…

Nowhere does the sugar lobby pursue its interests more ferociously than in debates on free trade. Having successfully lobbied the Bush administration to exclude sugar from the recently ratified free-trade agreement with Australia, sugar producers are now determined to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, on which Congress will vote sometime this summer.

CAFTA, which would eliminate most trade barriers between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, is, if anything, embarrassingly deferential toward the sugar lobby. After its full implementation over a 15-year period, it would allow participating states to increase their sugar exports to the U.S. by only 1.7 percent of current U.S. sugar production. The sugar industry is nevertheless intransigently opposed to the pact, and has rejected every suggested compromise.

If the sugar lobby derails CAFTA, its success will, once again, represent the triumph of the few at the expense of the many. CAFTA would bring modest but not insignificant economic gains to both the U.S. and Central America. Perhaps more important, it would advance efforts to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and would strengthen the Central American middle class while making the economic and legal systems of participating states more open and transparent…

It is deeply exasperating that a tiny sector on which CAFTA’s effect would be almost negligible is within striking distance of scuttling the agreement. The obstinacy of sugar producers looks especially unreasonable when one considers that protectionism has increased their share of the domestic market from 55 percent in the late 1970s to 89 percent in 2002, and when one notes that population growth over the next decade is likely to increase demand for sugar, thereby offsetting any lost income to the industry…

…The United States has no reason to grow sugar, and every reason not to. It is a simple question of comparative advantage, as Dennis Avery, a former agriculture analyst for the Department of State, explains: “Yields of sugar in the tropics are twice as high and the costs half as high as growing sugar in temperate regions.” The U.S. sugar program thus defies both nature and economics; in guaranteeing an artificially high price for sugar, it encourages American farmers to plant sugar instead of crops they could grow more efficiently. Ending the domestic sugar program would require them to switch to the crops they should have been growing all along.

While liberalizing world farm trade would probably put a stop to domestic sugar production, it would also, according to Avery, mean that U.S. farmers who now grow sugar beets “could sell wheat to China and India, and make far more money than they do from this sugar.” Cane growers in Florida and Louisiana would have a somewhat harder time of it, since little else could grow on their lands…Smaller farmers could be compensated for their loss, and their transition eased by a gradual phase-out of the sugar program.

The benefits of ending domestic sugar production would not be merely economic; Avery sees liberalized farm trade as “both the leading environmental issue and the leading trade issue in the world.” Given long-term population trends, countries will have to specialize in crops for which they have a comparative advantage — or else undertake policies with disastrous environmental consequences…

…domestic producers will not acquiesce in the removal