Publius does a nice job summing up what’s at the heart of the liberal/conservative divide on “social conservative” issues:

The social conservatives’ positions tend to empower government over individuals. If they got their way, the public would be forced to submit to the government’s decision-making. The more liberal position, by contrast, allocates power to individuals – no one is forced to do anything. (Admittedly, this is not really a constitutional argument – just an additional explanation for why the Christian Right tends to scare people).

Take, for instance, the granddaddy issue of them all – abortion. The Christian Right position would require every single person in a given jurisdiction to give birth. (Yes, some would argue that it’s simply about letting the states decide – but still, they prefer this position because many states, and virtually the entire South, would ban abortion). Thus, the decision-making power here would belong to the government. Individuals would no longer be free to decide.

The pro-choice position, by contrast, ensures that individuals – not the government – will ultimately make these private decisions. Individuals remain free to have, or not have, abortions as they and their God see fit. And everyone remains free to persuade their fellow citizens of the values of bringing all pregnancies to term. But in the end, the individual – and not the state – would make the final call.

This pattern repeats itself across a number of issues. For example, gay marriage doesn’t require anyone to do anything. It merely allows consenting gay adults to be married. Gay marriage bans, by contrast, grant that decision-making power to the state.

Similarly, rights to contraception don’t require anyone to do anything – the ultimate decision remains with the individual. Contraception bans, by contrast, allocate the decision-making power to the government.

Same deal with school prayer. Banning school prayer in public classes doesn’t prevent anyone from praying privately at the school. But allowing public prayer, by contrast, would force non-Christians to sit through prayer sessions in a publicly funded school. Again, the decision to participate in prayer would be made by the state, not the individual.

The larger point is that these examples illustrate why many people fear social conservatives – simply put, many of the latter’s preferred positions would use the state to intrude on people’s lives and dictate very private and personal decisions to them.

Now, I think this is largely true. But at the same time, if you expand beyond the so-called “social conservative” issues, there are plenty of places where it’s the liberals who would be doing the forcing. Environmental issues, for example, or gun control.

That said, I think the fact that compliance is somehow enforced is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing. It depends upon your view of the thing being enforced.

In the debate about whether to bail out the Big Three automakers or let them go into Chapter 11 (an issue about which I’m still genuinely on the fence), one of the commonly-repeated talking points I keep hearing from the anti-bailout crowd is that Chapter 11 would allow the automakers to “dispose of legacy costs.” It’s pretty clear what that actually means, however, and why the Chapter 11 proponents don’t want to call it what it is: Screwing the pensioners.

Now some will doubtless object that the federal pension insurance will cover the pensioners, but there are two problems with this. First, this insurance will only pay a fraction of what the pensioners are currently receiving, and secondly, it makes those payments on the taxpayer dime, which means that from that perspective, we’re screwing both the pensioners and the taxpayers.

Now maybe this is unavoidable at this point — maybe the pensioners can’t fully be saved. I don’t know. But when we’re talking about real people, real benefits, and real jobs, we should at least be honest about what it is we’re talking about doing.

Seems to me that both parties are demagoguing the holy shit out of GM’s woes and what, if anything, to do about them. Speaking for myself, I’m open to being convinced in any direction. On the one hand, I’m not in love with the idea of bailing out a company that has made mistake after mistake after mistake and whose business model is almost certainly unsustainable; on the other hand, I’m not eager to screw a bunch of workers and pensioners out of their retirements or do away with the country’s 8th largest employer, either. So what to do?

Blindly partisan crap from either side need not apply. I’m looking for even-handed, well-reasoned arguments about what to do, not demagoguery. Anyone aware of some good essays?

UPDATE: The consensus here, unsurprisingly, has been to let GM fail. Kevin at Lean Left argues in favor of a GM bailout. Check it out.

Rich: Because I acknowledge that the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin, I am intolerant, even though I support civil unions for gay couples as being fair and just under the law of man, and even though I drove an hour and a half to demonstrate my opposition to an anti gay hate group.

To my conservative/libertarian friends: Chill the fuck out. It’s a bad day for you — and believe me, after 2000, 2002, and 2004, I know exactly how you feel — but the world doesn’t end because of this election. Remember how you told us, upon the expiration of the AWB, that there wouldn’t be blood in the streets because of that? And remember how you were right? Well, I can tell you: You’re going to get to keep your guns. You’re probably not even going to see a renewal of the AWB — you’ve got enough Senators for a filibuster, and you’ve got Feingold. So you’re going to be fine.

Yes, you’re going to get some liberal social policies that you don’t approve of. Them’s the breaks. But I expect more of a return to the “horror” of the Clinton years than anything like the Carter years. And I expect Obama will waste no time moving to the center and disappointing his leftier base on some issues. So even that won’t be as bad as you might think.

Where to go from here? Use this as an opportunity to do what my party, the Democrats, wasted too much time not doing — you could argue from about 1994 to 2005 — cleaning up your own house. Get rid of the dead weight. Your side should be every bit as embarrassed by the Ted Stephenses as mine should be by the Robert Byrds. And while you’re at it, start lobbying the other party on the issues you care about — if guns are your thing (as they are for so many here), then angle for more Feingold Democrats.

And maybe — just maybe — we can actually see about finding some common ground. And maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.^*

Anyway, it’s not the end of the world, and this too shall pass. You’ll get over it. And if you wait long enough, the Democrats will screw themselves, as parties in power always do, and it will once again be your turn to fuck everything up royally.

Note to Uncle: Thanks to outstanding beer bets, we now officially owe each other a beer. I’ll have to make it a point to get to East Tennessee, so we can each drink two beers, and then keep right on a-drinking. And then, after several beers, in the true spirit of the South, go shootin’!
Gloat err, Note to Tam: Where’s your Palin now? “See ya at the polls,” indeed!

^* Bonus points for getting the reference without the benefit of Google.

This isn’t going to help Tennessee’s image any, and you can be sure the Brady Bunch will demagogue the holy shit out of it.

* - I should note that it’s very good news that the plot has been thwarted — the bad news is the inevitable spin that will come of it.

[AKA All Linky, No Thinky: Tgirsch Edition, AKA "What I'm reading today."]

Since Uncle’s on the beach enjoying his vacation, I figured I’d give you folks some blog fodder to get you all worked up:

• I voted today. Spoiler alert! I voted Democrat. *gasp!*
• The Guardian (UK): All the screaming you’re hearing about “voter fraud” is a bunch of crap. (FactCheck mostly agrees,as does PolitiFact.com.)
• Speaking of FactCheck.org and things that will get your dander up, they’re going after the NRA again. Sic’ ‘em!
• Larison briefly discusses elitism.
• A dyed-in-the-wool liberal endorses Murtha’s opponent
• Want to kill time with a stupid game? Try Truth Invaders.
• Nate Silver writes about why McCain isn’t doing so well right about now.
• Pattycakes is being screwed by The Man.
• xkcd weighs in on Scrabble. (For those of you not familiar with xkcd, it’s always important to read the hover text…)
• Vinny accuses Sarah Palin of socialism.
• Wondermark: Overthrow your corporate overlords, as long as it’s not too expensive… (xkcd hover text rule also applies here).

Have fun, and have a good weekend.

I know the Ayers issue is so three days ago, but for anyone still interested, NPR details the full extent of Obama’s relationship with Ayers over the years.

Of course, there are some who will always insist that this ought to be an issue, when there’s clearly no “there” there, but for anybody else, it’s worth checking out.

UPDATE: Vinny has more…

Earlier today, Uncle wrote:

I can’t find where taxes are lower for anyone under Obama’s plan.

If that’s true, then he’s not looking or not paying attention. See the non-partisan Tax Policy Center’s report (PDF) on the two candidates tax plans. In particular, note Figure 1 on page 41 — for the bottom four quintiles, both candidates cut taxes, but the average increase in after-tax income as compared to current law is much larger under Obama’s plan than it is under McCain’s:

Read the rest of this entry »

Slate has a good rundown of why Fannie and Freddie are symptoms of the current financial meltdown, not the cause.

To borrow from publius’ summation: essentially, “it’s not risky to lend to minority families, it’s risky to lend to rich white people.”

Taste the snark:

I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients’ money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can’t find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton’s fault?

Crossed everywhere.

Over at my other blog, I did a write-up of why I don’t expect the Ayers attacks to gain much traction, if anyone’s interested.

[For the hostile audience here at SayUncle, perhaps I should call it my "flaming bag of poo of the week."]

This week, it comes from NYT Columnist Thomas Friedman:

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes. I can understand someone saying we have no business in Iraq, but I can’t understand someone who advocates staying in Iraq until “victory” declaring that paying taxes to fund that is not patriotic.

How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?

H/T: KTK at Lean Left

This is an excellent read from The American Prospect on just how we got into the financial mess we’re in today. It’s from an explicitly liberal magazine, but it’s very well argued, I think, and goes into a lot of detail. The kicker? It was published over a year ago.

National Review’s Kathleen Parker on The Palin Problem:

Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain?s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood ? a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn?t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin?s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I?ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I?ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there?s not much content there. Here?s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: ?Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we?re talking about today. And that?s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.?

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama?s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: ?I?m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who?s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who?s actually done it??

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we?d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she?s a woman ? and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket ? we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can?t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP?s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

I thought it was the Left that was supposed to suffer from “PDS.”

I got a 94. But I misread a question. Still, a passing grade.

http://www.barackobamatest.com

I agree with Slacktivist on this, and I expect that many readers, from across the political spectrum will also agree:

I’ll gladly concede that Paulson knows more about the world’s rapidly collapsing finance system than I do. That doesn’t matter. Paulson’s request violates an inviolable principle, namely, to repeat, that if a public official demands $700 billion by week’s end, no strings attached, with no democratic or judicial review of that official’s unfettered discretion to spend that $700 billion as he chooses, then you say, “No.”

“No” is the only possible answer a free person can give to that request.

If you don’t answer “No,” then you have to answer “Yes, Your Majesty, screw that whole experiment-with-democracy thing, we think you’ll make a fine sovereign and king and please take our money as tribute from your loyal, unquestioning subjects.” I prefer the former answer, and not just because it’s shorter.

…snip…

Fortunately, crowning King Henry and doing nothing at all aren’t our only options. The events of the past week seem to prove that the American financial sector is in a full-blown panic. The Bush administration is now insisting that we fight panic with panic. That won’t work.

It may, in fact, be the case that something huge and unprecedented and Very, Very Expensive will be required to save the republic. But if we can’t manage to do that democratically — with accountability, oversight and the full participation of the people’s representatives — then the thing we are saving will no longer be a republic.

Aunt B.:

I’m going to close just on a note to Conservative Christian folks. A day is coming, and it is coming soon, when you will have to face that continuing to align yourselves with the Republicans will mean the ruination of evangelical Christianity. You cannot tie religion and politics so closely without religion being corrupted.

Well, thus far, it seems to be the other way around.

Back on Monday, we had a pretty good discussion going about hate crimes. Frequent Lean Left commenter LarryE expands on this theme:

The usual (flawed) understanding of “hate crimes” legislation is that it would make the hate itself, rather than any actions based on the hate, the crime. It’s that misunderstanding that leads people to fear that “hate crimes” will lead inexorably to “thought crimes,” to people being prosecuted strictly for their opinions.

The thing is, I don’t know of anyone who’s proposed anything approaching that, i.e., proposed a law to make hate itself illegal. “It’s now illegal to be a bigot.” Besides the Constitutional issues, it’s absurd on its face to seriously entertain the notion of being able to simply outlaw racism or ban sexist or homophobic remarks or whatever - or at least it’s absurd to think any such law would actually achieve any of those ends or even be enforceable. So let’s drop that particular misconception and focus on the real argument, one which, as is explicit in the very phrase “hate crimes,” refers to “crimes motivated by hate.”

The whole thing is worth a read.

Tom in comments:

Hate crimes are, in a very real sense, a form of terrorism, because the target is much wider than just the people you directly attack/harm. You’re attempting to intimidate or otherwise “send a message” to an entire group. In a certain sense, the people you kill are the collateral damage, while the survivors are the intended victims.

I concur. That said, you’ve established motive. Should be used as evidence to prosecute. Case closed.

Now, do I think a hate crime should carry excessive sentences? No. Because you’re then punishing thought. Look what the Hell is happening in Canada if you want to go down this road.

I don’t think Tom disagrees.

Another issue with hate crimes is they seem to be crimes that can only be committed by white men.

Aunt B. says it can be considered domestic terrorism.

And all you people who are saying the church shooting was Rush Limbaugh/Bill O’Reilly/Karl Rove/Insert Right Wing Bogeyman’s fault are morons. And you people seeking to reinstate the fairness doctrine for this reason are totalitarian morons.

Tam in comments:

A government capable of keeping me perfectly safe is no government I’d wish to live under.

Might be a feminist? No, unlike feminists, you actually seek to empower women.

According to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama is the “conservative” when it comes to foreign policy, and McCain is the “liberal”:

Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.

…snip…

Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn’t divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.

Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda, preferring instead to talk about enhancing people’s economic prospects, civil society and—his key word—”dignity.” He rejects Bush’s obsession with elections and political rights, and argues that people’s aspirations are broader and more basic—including food, shelter, jobs. “Once these aspirations are met,” he told The New York Times’s James Traub, “it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes we want.” This is a view of democratic development that is slow, organic and incremental, usually held by conservatives.

Obama talks admiringly of men like Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were imbued with a sense of the limits of idealism and American power to transform the world. “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative,” wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in her profile of him for The New Yorker. “There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.”

…snip…

Ironically, the Republicans now seem to be the foreign-policy idealists, labeling countries as either good or evil, refusing to deal with nasty regimes, fixating on spreading democracy throughout the world and refusing to think in more historical and complex ways. “I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush told many visitors to the White House in the years after 9/11. John McCain has had his differences with Bush, but not on this broad thrust of policy. Indeed it is McCain, the Republican, who has put forward some fanciful plans, arguing that America should establish a “League of Democracies,” expel Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries and exclude China from both groups as well.

The whole thing is worth the read. Cross-posted at Lean Left and TennesseeFree.

Forty years ago the American society was told to tune in, turn on, and drop out. And that is just what they did. Somewhere during this long tuned in and turned on phase the America people became more than a little like lemmings. They believed what they read in the papers and what they saw on television. Especially if it was bad.

Those people had children and surprise; the children are second generation lemmings. Worst than first generation lemmings this new batch really believes if a story is bad they must believe it.

So how dire is the situation? People really believe a trace gas can cause Global Warming, Al Gore is the smartest man in the World, and Barrack Obama is the most qualified man out the over 300 million people in this entire country to be the next President of the United States.

They call this philosophy of the Chicken Little syndrome Liberalism. Need a few examples of this wayward tuned in turned on incoherent philosophy?

Don’t read this before a meal:
Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t really said too much on the Heller ruling to this point, in large part because gun rights and gun control aren’t the hot button issue for me that they are for most here (like Uncle). I will say that I think that the right decision was reached here, although I worry about the reasoning used to get there, and I worry even more about the growing tendency of Supreme Court justices — from both wings — to go on historical fishing expeditions to find legal justification for the outcomes they personally prefer. (Really, when was the last time you saw a SCOTUS justice — liberal, conservative, or otherwise — rule that “I hate this outcome, but this is what the law says,” or something along those lines?) On this note, I think Sandy Levinson hits it pretty squarely on the head:

Then there are the “internal” features of the opinions. I confess that I am equally dismayed by the Scalia and Stevens opinions (though, if absolutely forced to choose, I’d go with the Scalia opinion). One of the most remarkable features of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion (joined, of course, by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito) and Justice Stevens’s dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter) is the view that the Second Amendment means only what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification in 1789-91. Justice Scalia, of course, has long been identified with “originalism,” even though some of his critics, both liberal and conservative, note that he has been a most inconsistent one. But Justice Stevens has certainly not embraced originalism. Yet they spend a total of 110 pages debating arcane aspects of the purported original meaning of the Amendment.

If one had any reason to believe that either Scalia or Stevens was a competent historian, then perhaps it would be worth reading the pages they write. But they are not. Both opinions exhibit the worst kind of “law-office history,” in which each side engages in shamelessly (and shamefully) selective readings of the historical record in order to support what one strongly suspects are pre-determined positions. And both Scalia and Stevens treat each other—and, presumably, their colleagues who signed each of the opinions—with basic contempt, unable to accept the proposition, second nature to professional historians, that the historical record is complicated and, indeed, often contradictory. Justice Stevens, for example, writes that anyone who reads the text of the Second Amendment and its history, plus a murky 1939 decision of the Court, will find “a clear answer” to the question of whether the Second Amendment supports a “right to possess and use guns for nonmilitary purposes.” This is simply foolish. Justice Stevens pays no real attention to a plethora of first-rate historical work written over the past decade that challenges this kind of foolish self-confidence, as is true also of Justice Scalia. There is no serious discussion, for example, of Saul Cornell’s fine book A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control, but many other examples could be offered, from various sides of the ideological spectrum.

Both Scalia and Stevens manifest what is worst about Supreme Court rhetoric, which is precisely the tone of sublime confidence when addressing even the most complex of issues. The late Victoria Geng once wrote a marvelous parody of Supreme Court decisions in which, among other things, the Court announced that “nature is more important than nurture.” We wouldn’t take such a declaration seriously. It is not clear why we should take much more seriously the kinds of over-confident declarations as to historical meaning that both Scalia and Stevens indulge in.

What is especially ironic is that the strongest support for Scalia’s position comes from acknowledging that the Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, has been “dynamically” interpreted and has taken on some quite different meanings from those it originally had. Whatever might have been the case in 1787 with regard the linkage of guns to service in militias—and the historical record is far more mixed on this point than either Scalia or Stevens is willing to acknowledge—there can be almost no doubt that by the mid-19th century, an individual right to bear arms was widely accepted as a basic attribute of American citizenship. One of the reasons that the Court in Dred Scott denied that blacks could be citizens was precisely that Chief Justice Taney recognized that citizens could carry guns, and it was basically unthinkable that blacks could do so. Thus, in effect, they could not be citizens. Charles Sumner, who, unlike Taney is quoted by Scalia, strongly endorsed the rights of anti-slavery settlers in Kansas to have guns to protect themselves against their pro-slavery opponents. If one reads only Scalia and Stevens, one would believe that there is no dynamism to the Constitution, which is both stupid as a theory of interpretation and, more to the point, completely misleading as a way of understanding the American constitutional tradition.

Uber liberal editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel Jack McElroy prints the “you don’t need guns because America is so safe” liberal fantasy from Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado.

What Glenn Reynolds is to conservatives Paul Campos is to extremist liberal fanatics. I had a brief post on Der Professor Campos on SayUncle last week.

What do you make of a person who first writes, “The ongoing overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is only the most vivid example of how our leaders cynically exploit our fears by making wildly exaggerated claims, such as that Islamic terrorism poses an “existential threat” to America.” Then Professor Campus follows that inane derangement with this, “we should be more afraid of having our children stolen from us by Republicans than by kidnappers.”

Only Jack McElroy would find any value with Paul Campos’s disjointed ramblings.

I found this little gem at KnoxViews. It seems so innocuous and reasonable. Yet if you take the time to read it, you will find an important message.

What is that message? And more importantly, why should you care?

Via Wachel (who also fisked her own post) and Phelps, comes a fun game:

Suppose you were elected Temporary Supreme Dictator of America.

What are 10 laws you would pass/repeal or government programs you would create/tear down? (Assume that you are in office for however long it would take to do these things and that any changes you make will remain in place after you leave office.)

Kinda similar, but we played this game before only it was presidentin’ not dictatin’. But, here goes:

1 - Disband the ATF. All agents and employees will be allowed retain their current position and salary once they arrive at the border to guard. May as well do something useful.

2 - End social security, medicare, and medicaid. Yeah, we all like to feel good about helping people out and all but you’re bankrupting our country (in 2005, those three things were over 40% of the budget). Of course, we can’t just end it outright lest some people would be royally fucked. So, effective now, people entering the work force will stop contributing to all three. Begin the phase out thusly:

Everyone who has a supposed fund in social security will be paid their cash balance. At this point, I will point and laugh at Congress who will finally have to admit what I’ve been telling you since I started this blog which is that there ain’t no fucking money in an account for you.

Continue funding medicaid/medicare for those over the age of 30. Everyone else, put on your big boy pants and deal.

Sorry, thems the breaks but you’re killing us.

3 - End the war on drugs and release the prisoners. Ok, just the non-violent prisoners.

4 - Repeal the 17th amendment. Fire all senators, reps. Redraw district maps so they make sense (i.e., your district will probably be shaped like a damn square). Hold elections for senators and reps. Gerrymandering will be a crime punishable by death.

5 - Any law passed by congress and signed into law will automatically expire four years from its passage. All laws currently on the books expire four years from today. You want to keep them, you got work to do.

6 - Flat tax. All accountants/tax lawyers who suddenly lose marketable skills can report for border duty along side former ATF agents.

7 - No more immunity for government employees. Limited immunity for things that are normal course of business for them. For egregious violations of the public trust, these employees can be held personally liable (I’m looking at you, Nifong, who I think should be under the jail).

8 - Stealing from Phelps: jury trial for eminent domain and asset forfeiture proceedings.

9 - Pass a law mandating that judges inform all potential jurors that they have a right to nullify.

10 -Executive order repealing all executive orders.

That ought to be enough flame bait for ya.

Update: Either 11 or an addendum to number 4 - From jon in comments: let congress know that we mean that commerce clause shit. It means regulate commerce not regulate anything that happens to incidentally be a part of commerce.

PSH makes the news:

the many cultural and political forces pushing us to behave like a nation of hysterics.

As a nation, we will collectively shit our pants at the drop of hat. Often, for no real reason. Kinda like how we collectively lose our shit whenever a pretty white girl is abducted.

Related: Never tell me the odds:

Each year in the United States, there are 26-30,000 deaths by firearm. As of 2006, Roughly 55% of them are suicides (the number varies greatly year to year, between 40% and 60%).

Of the remaining 10,000 to 18,000, somewhere between 60% and 80% (depending on the year) are one felon killing another (according to the FBI).

The number of non-felons killed (other than suicides) using a gun in the US is anywhere from 2,000 to 7,000 a year (again, highly variable year to year). About 20% of those are accidents, and 80% are murders. Of those murders approximately 80% were committed by people with felony records.

Read it all.

I’ve been saying it for years.

I’d never though of it that way before but a good way to look at things: Confusing Action and Achievement.

Let’s mix a gun control debate with a semantic debate, and see what happens. At issue here: Whether a pro-gun ruling in Heller would recognize a “new” Constitutional right. I’m still slogging through the comments, but so far this one is among the best (after the fold):
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The Geek on The Left:

they do not understand that we oppose them for their means, not their ends, and many believe that we oppose the Good they seek to bring forth, and cannot understand why anyone (other than a reactionary degenerate seeking to preserve a position of oppression based privilege) would oppose such Goodness.

No, not guns (we’re winning that), those other things.

I mean, us small government, individualist, small l libertarian, whatever buzzword you want to use, sorts. It’s true. You see, I want less .gov influence in, well, everything. Your average American is the exact opposite. They want Free Federal Money^tm for pork projects in their district, they want free health care, they want social security, they actually think the $600 rebate they’re getting in a couple months is a good thing, they want the .gov to write a big check and bail out their mortgage company, they want a puppy, they want to suckle at the .gov tit. It’s true. Deal with it. We’re the minority and that is that. Put on your big boy pants and deal with it.

That said, there seems to be a bit of a conundrum over that.

Tam has given up:

I think the big difference between our points of view is that you haven’t given up the fight, while I have. I just don’t see even a tiny plurality of human beings that give a crap about freedom. They want to be led. They want free stuff. They want to tell other people what to do. They’d rather watch American Idol than read a book. And they outnumber me by a thousand to one. And I’ve come to the dawning realization over the past years that I’m the abnormal one.

And McArdle notes:

The reason that those of us on the fringe–libertarians, Greens, socialist workers, or what have you–do not have more representation in government is not because there is some structural problem with the American political system, like a lack of IRV or minority party candidates. The reason we don’t have more representation is that most people just don’t agree with us.

Indeed.

KDT wants to fight it. I find his recent support for McCain at odds with that unless he just thinks it gets him four years to buy ammo.

Gullible Sebastian thinks that the key is numbers in the teens of percentages have libertarian tendencies. Well, they’ve always been there and don’t seem to have much sway because you can’t tap that resource without giving up something. He concludes with this cheery bit:

Liberty is a never ending battle. We will never win. Like the game Whack-a-Mole, it’s frustrating, and sometimes it seems like you’re doing all you can to just hold the line. But giving up is a sure way to lose at Whack-a-Mole, so to libertarians, I offer this: “Keep whacking!”

The issue then becomes that, at some point, with life getting in the way people don’t have time to whack any more. Or the energy. We’re losing. As Donald Sensing said:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go.

And that is the future unless Americans get off their collective ass and do something about it. But they won’t, American Idol is on. You see, a government that can do all of that stuff mentioned way up in the first paragraph is too big. And it will bring more of the nanny state. There are thousands of surveillance cameras and police armed with machine guns that look more like soldiers than Officer Friendly in our big cities. Governments are banning or trying to ban transfat, smoking, restaurants from serving fat people, and anything that is not made out of soft foam rubber. For your safety, of course. Police are routinely raiding the wrong houses, or raiding based on scant evidence (like your power usage for a particular month) and killing innocent people over drugs. Police routinely are caught beating the crap out of someone, and there are never adequate consequences for that. We lost Kelo. Your property is only yours until the .gov says they want it. They can tap your phones, read your email, and have all your financial information. And no one is doing anything about it except a few guys discussing it on the internet.

In my wallet, I have a business card. It has a gold emblem on it and across the top it says:

Department of Justice
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives

It came from an ATF agent. On the back, is written a phone number with the word Cell to indicate it’s the agents cell number. I keep that card in my wallet as a reminder that the federal government will knock on your door over shit you said on the internet.

Update: AC says buck-up little minority camper.

Joe Huffman:

To respect all opinions is to have no respect for the truth.

In a school, a bunch of eight year olds build a town of Lego’s. The town, as is the natural order of things, becomes capitalist with the kids trading Lego pieces and various kids owning various property and Lego’s and such. The teachers then freak out what with all this free market idealism and stuff. The teachers, as it always happens in these cases use the threat of authority to turn the kids into communists. I shit you not. The whole thing can be read here. Some themes they re-educated the kids about:

Collectivity is a good thing

Shared power is a valued goal

Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for

And that is how we create kids that will grow up and vote for Obama.

Staggering number.

So, Insty notes this really cool plan to get the US less dependent on foreign oil. It involves requiring (for about $100) new cars to be flex fuel vehicles. I’m torn because, well, it’s a good idea. But at the same time it makes my libertarianish side want to smack me about the head and neck area what with its free market idealism and all. The benefit of energy independence is huge. I mean, without a heavy need for oil, the world would treat the middle east like it does Africa. Which is to say that, generally, no one except Bono and Angelina Jolie would give a damn about it. Think that’s harsh? Not paying attention, then. Another benefit would be that the wealth of the region dries up and they have to find another means to sustain themselves, such as making our lead-coated toys for $0.05 an hour.

So, I’m really torn. I mean, if I buy this collective good nonsense this one time, when does it stop?

Full disclosure: I have a flex-fuel vehicle. And no one made me do it. The issue is, that, the only place in town that sells E85 is Pilot Oil. And I don’t shop there because Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam (whose family owns Pilot Oil) is a member of Mayors Against Guns. C’mon, Bill, quit the group. For the environment. And energy independence.

Over at Pattycakes.

Lemme ’splain. No, there is too much. Lemme sum up.

See, if you think that there is a rational and lawful basis for jury nullification, you’re retarded. If you think that judges should decide the law while juries decide the facts, you’re just following orders and a Nazi. Does that cover it?

Any way, my thoughts are that juries should be fully informed on matters of fact, law and, hell, legal strategy. But the courts don’t do that. In fact, if a lawyer looked at jury and said Guys, you can just decide this is bullshit then what’s going to happen to him? We can’t, after all, have the people judging the law. There’d be anarchy!

I refer you to this bit:

Yeah, the cops have discretion aplenty on whether to arrest or merely warn you. The Prosecutor’s office has discretion aplenty on whether to charge you for a crime or crimes (and what charges to bring, and what penalties to ask for). The judge is a tinpot god in his own courtroom.

But if the JURORS show the slightest bit of independent thought, civilization will collapse into flaming ruin.

I find jury nullification is a valid means of essentially countering particularly odious laws, like say prohibition or someone getting sentenced to 30 years for selling weed.

The other issue that gets bandied about by people who are not fans of jury nullification is that you, pesky troublemaker, took an oath to uphold the law! And if you renege on that then you’ve perjured yourself. Having read a sample oath, I don’t buy that argument. I see no prohibition in there stating that judging the law is verboten. Even if it did, taking an oath to uphold the law is not going to override my moral convictions. And I’m not saying I’d lie to get on jury.

Past ramblings here, here, and here.

The Geek explains why popular vote is bad.

To reduce law enforcement deaths, put two officers in each car. Where will these extra officers come from? Well, from the SWAT teams that are busy raiding the wrong house or the local home poker game.