The terrible choice

Reading Iron Curtain.

Considering what Stalin had already done to them before the war, you can't blame the Ukrainians who thought, "Better the devil we don't know," and fought with the Nazis on that account.

The Finns, after all, played each side against the other and came out of it well.

Little did the Ukrainians realize Hitler was no merely ordinary anti-Semitic fascist.

Rather, as euro-white racists go, he and his Nazis were in a class by themselves.

Far too many people, all over the world, failed to take Mein Kampf seriously enough.

Not least those Ukrainians.

So, was this it?

He knew his girlfriend was sleeping around with an assortment of black guys and, in a quarrel, demanded she at least not humiliate him by bringing those bed mates to his games.

She, vindictive minx, leaked a recording with precious little context.

The media, as always preferring revenue to accuracy, mass sales to integrity, willingly spun it for maximum scandal, without the least concern for damage done.

And liberals and anti-white race propagandists seized the opportunity for another lynching to display their power.

Is that what just happened?

Maybe.

So you thought Obama was a Democrat?

White House opens door to tolls on interstate highways, removing long-standing prohibition

So did they figure out the burden would fall almost entirely on white people, or what?

Obama chains another anchor to America's neck

Obama hails Philippines defence pact

And yet he gave a speech, defensive in tone, complaining of bellicose critics who would have had us at war with Libya, Syria, Iran, Russia, North Korea, or God knows who else.

This globo-interventionist president has undone not a single cold war alliance, reaffirmed them all, and pushed some right up Russia's nose, all the while incoherently vilified as weak, as a traitor, as a secret Muslim, and as a near-dictator by the crackpot warmongers of the political right.

In foreign military and trade policy he is a neoliberal and only slightly left of the admittedly worse neoconservatives.

The only things he seems especially leftist about are sociolib and race issues.

His signature accomplishment, Obamacare, was a Republican plan from the beginning, much like the Medicare Advantage plans and Part D.

And then we have the occasional meaningless rhetorical sop to the left like his remarks about Ho Chi Minh and the American Revolution.

Who is this guy, anyway?

I don't know.

Global warming not the biggest problem

But they can blame it on white civilization and use it for extortion.

Unlike this.

Megacities contend with sinking land

Pour encourager les autres

Sterling

Getting a solid bruising, day after day, he is.

And this is quite something.

Punishment to fit the crime?

A lifetime ban and a $2.5 million fine, says the NBA Commissioner.

Why would he pay, since they're forcing him to sell the team, anyway?

Americans have gone bonkers.

Al Sharpton did much worse, and he now pontificates on this matter with all the moral authority you could wish.

Nobody else was allowed a two-state solution

Not South Africa.

Not Rhodesia.

Not Algeria.

Not anybody.

Don't call it Apartheid

Everybody else was pushed into a one-state, majority rule (meaning native rule) situation.

Would the Jews of Israel be at any greater risk in a Greater Palestine under majority (Arab) rule than the whites who remained behind in all those other ex-colonial, ex-white-ruled states?

So why are the liberals mostly (but by no means only) in favor of the two-state solution that preserves a Jewish State in Palestine?

Why a double-standard for Israel and for the Jews?

Lunacy in the White House

Obama in the Far East

I have no idea what would be a sensible way for America to withdraw from its far-flung, global over-commitments.

But reinforcing our current, impossible commitments is probably not the way to go about it.

Free speech under threat, again, in the US, from the left

The lawsuit against Mark Steyn

A very, very good piece by Conrad Black.

Peruse relevant left venues on the topic of “global warming denialism,” and you will see how frightfully true it is that, having failed to convince enough people in the right places with free speech, fair and square, the global warmers in America now are consumed with a desire to silence their opponents by simply criminalizing disagreement.

If this works you can imagine what they will do about opposition to immigration, affirmative action, or a great many other things.

They will seek to criminalize it all as “hate speech.”

The attitude of the left, aptly characterized.

Charles Murray

Bill Zeiser writes,

In summarizing the views of Voltaire, biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote the famous words: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

How far we have drifted from that pithy and principled description of free speech.

A more apt version for our time might be “I disapprove of what you say, and I will make it my personal mission to make sure you have no venue to say it, and I will snidely point out that I have not violated your freedom of speech because the rabble I have joined with to restrict what you say is not an arm of the government, and anyhow, you are a hate monger and hate mongers shouldn’t be entitled to their say.”

Always another target, thrown out in front by somebody for personal motives

NBA Owner To Girlfriend: Don't Bring Black People To My Games

Seems an odd relationship he has with her.

Seems like he ticked her off a bit too much.

“Race-whipped”

A raft for racists: The National Review, from Buckley through Derbyshire and beyond

The woman is a loon and her self-righteous hatred is only too apparent and utterly repulsive.

But she reminds us of a significant feature of WFB’s conservatism that has been, near as I can tell, completely omitted from the celebratory collections of his columns, speeches, and utterances now in publication and popular with contemporary conservatives.

Buckley was, indeed, a white supremacist and a believer in black inferiority, and made no bones about it, declaiming fervently against the national and even global rebellion against white rule.

All mention of that has been suppressed from the Buckley of sainted conservative memory.

No one even mentions it but those who hate him and the conservatism of his age most fervently for it, along with the conservatism of today and euro-whites of all ages.

Reading "Iron Curtain"

Despite the dedication to her book, lying is neither a unique nor the worst feature of communism.

She offers two definitions of "totalitarianism" in her introduction that are both no better than bumper stickers and immediately, pointlessly tars fascism, Nazism, and communism with that brush, not seeing that if the term is broad enough for all three it obscures rather than illuminates the distinctive natures and horrors of each.

Anne Applebaum.

Her book on the Gulag seemed, a few hundred pages in, like so much repetitive, undigested research material.

We'll see about this one.

Obama, as crazy as you please

Obama: We Will Go To War For Other Nations’ Petty Territorial Disputes

War with China over some rocks.

How Quemoy/Matsu of him.

Eisenhower/Cold War.

Would he pause for an OK from Congress, or just jump in with the excuse that pacta sunt servanda?

Do we really agree, and would Congress really agree, that in such a case either (a) Obama would not need their OK to go to war on the side of Japan or (b) though Obama would need their OK the Congress would be legally or morally (or both) obliged to give it, to go to war on the side of Japan?

Leaving us to wonder, perhaps not for the first time, how and when treaties, under the US constitution, are to be repudiated.

And certainly not for the first time, I say there are many treaties obliging the US to go to war on behalf of others that for sure ought to be disobeyed far sooner than the US constitution.

Though if we must disobey the latter to disobey the former then, by all means, disobey!

The view from the left

If so and so is a racist that both explains and discredits whatever in his politics displeases liberals.

IKE's last year

According to Newton, he sent aid to Laos, under attack from communists.

He told the CIA to kill Patrice Lumumba, a "flaky" Congolese politician a little too friendly with the Soviets.

He undermined Nixon.

Kennedy, who perfectly well knew better, campaigned on fear of fictitious Russian nuclear superiority.

The Cold War was such baloney.

Which is not to say people didn't believe in it with the utmost sincerity.

Like so much else.

The comedy of tyranny

Why is Kim Jong-un always surrounded by people taking notes?

Next he'll name his horse to the senate.

Looks like they've gone bonkers, to me.

What happens in the Nanny State when Nanny just freaks out.

US seeks e-cigarette restrictions

So what, exactly, was unprecedented?

The Supreme Court's Unprecedented Public Clash Over Race

Sotomayor going off like that into the la-la land of racial animus.

Her agenda is to improve the lot of non-whites.

And the law?

What the Constitution actually says?

Not so big a concern, for her.

Nor all that much for Roberts and Scalia, I suppose, come to that.

Bunch of fakers.

S wrote this, by the way, in an effort to justify the claim that the voters changing their state constitution to outlaw affirmative action was unconstitutional, per the NY Daily News.

The Constitution, she wrote, “guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently, forcing the minority alone to surmount unique obstacles in pursuit of its goals — here, educational diversity that cannot reasonably be accomplished through race-neutral measures.”

Where does the Constitution do that?

What majority?

What minority?

May not win what?

The customary political bullshit, in other words. 

Sotomayor

Berlin, 1958

Newton's Eisenhower.

Khrushchev threatened to overrun West Berlin.

Eisenhower made it clear to everyone America's response would be a nuclear attack.

Macmillan of Britain wanted to surrender.

IKE was having none of it.

IKE won the standoff, but this was when Newton should surely have asked what the Hell he was doing, risking the deaths of half our people and the destruction of American and European civilization for a Europe that did not want to be defended at such risk, and could not have been defended otherwise.

The question would arise again in Reagan's time.

No one ever had a good enough answer, IMHO.

Their plan for America

Liberals and Wall Street conservatives.

Also libertarians.

Flood the country with non-white, cheap labor.

Export investment to China and other parts of the Third World.

So, when China is not only the most populous but the richest and most powerful country in the world - and it won't be all that long - how will that work out for Americans?

Oh, before that happens, use the American military to keep the world safe for American capital outside the US.

After that happens, well, won't China be the richest and most powerful capitalist country in the world?

And if not, well, apres nous, le deluge.

A conservative Jewish columnist says O is a sissy in the Middle East

I am just so surprised this guy is basically an agent of a foreign power.

New York Times’ David Brooks Says Obama Has ‘A Manhood Problem In The Middle East’

Much like the Jewish Anne Applebaum, whose husband is a Polish diplomat.

She has written some wonderful history, but she is not really thinking of American interests when she urges us to push NATO, with us still in it, to the east and right up against Russia's borders of today.

No more than Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole born in Warsaw with a very big chip on his shoulder about Russia.

Nor Henry Kissinger, a German born Jew, his family refugees from the Nazis.

Nor Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright, a Czech-born Jew, her family also refugees from the Nazis.

Way too many people who want to use America as a weapon for their European, Asian, or Middle Eastern wars have way too much power in the US foreign policy establishment.

A very high percentage of foreign born immigrants think exactly that way.

Actually, every immigrant I know from outside the Americas is like that.

That is really their only interest in US foreign policy and in many cases their only interest in America, at all.

(This, by the way, is why determined interventionists want to amend the US Constitution to allow foreign born presidents. Those for whom America is not just a club for use in fighting everyone else's battles strongly oppose that change, and would rather see a change that would diminish the power of the foreign born over US foreign policy.)

Pat Buchanan is thinking about American interests and he has been saying for years the US should get out of NATO, Europe, and the Far East.

Ron and Rand Paul and a few others have said as much, too.

But theirs is a viewpoint that would put Israel at risk at least of losing American support.

Hence the accusations of anti-Semitism.

How brutally corrupt can it get?

Billionaire Liberal Donor Gets Way on Keystone Pipeline

Ashamed of the system, yet?

The essence of liberty

Work out your own salvation?

That or go to Hell in your own way.

Be selfish, be an ass, or throw your life away.

Something out of Fitzgerald, maybe, or perhaps Jane Austen.

Fame as a philosopher, composer, financier, self-made billionaire, or novelist.

Or the obscure life of a country farmer, and perhaps a poet.

Or a pipe-fitter, mechanic, or electrician.

Architect, engineer, or bank president.

Whatever works for you.

A world of such lives, chosen or fallen into, planned or serendipitous or even damned bad luck, is free.

The fundamental freedom, the first freedom, is not freedom of speech, freedom of thought, or even freedom to go armed.

It is freedom to live for yourself, as you damned well please, rather than at someone else's behest, for someone else's good, or according to someone else's design.

The society that affords the greatest variety of interesting possibilities along those lines or shows the greatest multiplicity of such choices is most free.

IMHO, just now.

Precious little to any of this of altruism, of living for others.

Not a lot of the greatest good of the greatest number.

And even that little only voluntary.

Slaves don't have this liberty.

Nor do wage-slaves.

Nor, indeed, do draftees, whether digging foxholes or building habitats for humanity.

On the other hand, the conditions of slavery are not always and for everyone equally rigorous.

One thinks of Epictetus.

And the same is true of wage labor, obviously.

But the Greeks were not silly to think no man is free who has to work for a living.

The two worst offspring of the 20th Century

Nuclear power.

The Internet.

No one will back away until it's too late.

With any luck, I'll be already gone.

NASA, illegitimate offspring of Werner von Braun and the Sputnik scare

No constitutional basis exists for NASA.

Congress didn't care.

IKE probably didn't even realize.

Newton's Eisenhower reports the Cold War panic.

Update.

Common defense, general welfare.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.

The Mentalist’s best season, yet

Different writers?

Creative juices flowing, now that Red John is over?

I don’t know, but the show seems both funnier and better written.

In Allyson Schwartz’s latest commercial she is running against men

Just saw it.

Annoying, but there it is.

Too, she is Jewish and, absent contrary evidence, that creates a weak presumption she is too pro-Israeli, pro-illegal immigrant, and anti-Christian for my taste.

Tom Wolf is also Jewish.

Vote for state treasurer Rob McCord, almost certainly some sort of Christian and most likely a Catholic, ye masses who came here for guidance.

Katie McGinty is an Irish Catholic environmentalist feminist who never held elective office and worked in Bill Clinton's White House.

Has anybody asked these guys about gay marriage, abortion, pornography, sex education, education vouchers, and all that sort of thing?

Any of them, of course, would be better than any Republican. 

A Marxism without the classless society at the end of history? Humbug.

Marx Rises Again

OK, the children read Marx and praise his critique of capitalism.

But if they don’t espouse the classless society at the end history’s rainbow, brought about by the proletariat, or anyway the peasantry, or at last by the starving, exploited masses of the Third Word via revolution or evolution, this is not Marxism, nor even any of the various betrayals of Marx that lived by his name.

Many are those who know well they are not Marxists who nevertheless cherish his attacks on the beast, unfettered bourgeois capitalism.

Heck, you needn’t even be a socialist, for that.

It’s Wolf’s own money?

Pa. Dems Keep the Gloves on in Gubernatorial Primary

Actually, that speaks against him much as self-publishing generally speaks against one’s talents as a writer and the quality of one’s book.

Says the piece,

Wolf has reason to feel good about the sunny tone the campaign has taken.

A first-time candidate, he has impressed Pennsylvania political watchers with his nearly flawless performance thus far, outmaneuvering his better-known rivals to establish himself as an appealing new face in state politics. 

Wolf used his significant financial edge to begin airing TV ads long before any of the other Democrats, focusing on biographical spots and issue messages bursting with positivity, including promises to boost funding for public schools, rebuild the state’s manufacturing base, and fight for equal pay for women.  

Even if, as the article says, the 4 candidates are ideologically identical their resumes are not.

3 have actual government experience and one (the front-runner who simply bought his lead, Wolf) is a mere “successful businessman,” outspending all the others combined with his own money, who wants to leap straight into the governor’s mansion.

And as to that assertion of ideological uniformity, I don’t find it encouraging that the other 3 are apparently indistinguishable from Wolf.

I cannot believe, for example, that a labor lawyer or union official would be the same in his politics as a liberal capitalist.

I would expect the latter to be more of a bourgeois sociolib and the former to be more of a progressive class warrior.

So all of the other 3 think and feel like this liberal capitalist?

And yet the agenda they all agree on, per this article, has large items that are traditionally progressive.

Says the piece,

With a month to go before the May 20 primary, each of them is traveling the state to tout his or her plan to expand Medicaid, boost the minimum wage and impose a tax on the state’s booming natural gas industry. 

Nice change from recent elections in which the Democrats have sounded like they were running on the Republican ticket, what with all the talk about tax cuts and wasteful spending.

But I have seen the ads and other news about Wolf and the others.

The social agenda is absolutely there, with the 77 cents lie, global warming, immigration, and gay rights.

Wolf has personally spent $10 million on his campaign, of which $4.5 million he borrowed as a personal loan.

If he wins he will have bought the governorship.

I wonder how many of the white, working class folk who hate Obama and voted for Romney will vote for Corbett?

After all, his ideas were no secret when he ran the first time, and they went for him then.

They do realize it wasn’t supposed to be a popularity contest, don’t they?

Aghast at the Electoral College

Unhappiness with the Electoral College is being encouraged by progressive venues everywhere.

So why not ask Congress to urge an amendment to get rid of it?

Because that has been repeatedly tried and the senate regularly refuses to go along, since the EC inflates the power of smaller states rather as does the senate, itself, though not as much.

Not to mention the unspoken thought that the constitution fairly read empowers the Electors to vote for whomever they please, still regarded by many whose enthusiasm for democracy is not boundless as an important escape hatch from popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

And what progressive, rejoicing in the still on-going sexual revolution in the law brought about in America entirely by runaway courts out of the reach of democracy, does not agree, in his heart of hearts, that too much deference to the will of the people might be a bad idea?

Anyway, there have been attempts to bind the choices of Electors by state law and even by the Supremes, but the truth is what it is and they are not bound by a blessed thing.

It is, according to the constitution, they who choose the president and the vice president, each Elector choosing in near-complete freedom, and nobody else.

See Article II, Section 1, this bit especially.

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:  but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

See also Amendments XII and XXIII.

The people have no constitutionally prescribed role in the selection of the president at all, and the men of Philadelphia likely could not have found a majority of states willing to accept any particular manner of assigning them one.

Electors are appointed by the states in a number that is a compromise between the equality of all the states in the senate and representation proportional to population as in the house.

No amendment has taken from the states the power to appoint their Electors in whatever manners they may choose.

The people have a role only so far as the states have chosen to use elections to select their Electors.

Wikipedia reports,

During the first presidential election in 1789, only 6 of the 13 original states chose electors by any form of popular vote.

Gradually throughout the years, the states began conducting popular elections to help choose their slate of electors, resulting in the overall, nationwide indirect election system that it is today.

The truth is the manner of selection of federal judges and especially the Supremes is far, far more undemocratic than the manner of selection of the president.

And that is a piece of undemocracy and even anti-democracy far, far more consequential and outrageous than the trivial gap in practice between our current indirect election of the president and direct election by national, popular vote.

But yelling about the latter is a good way to distract the people and defuse chronic popular outrage, not at the presidency, but at the judicial despotism of the Supremes.

And liberals enjoy accusing Republicans of using “shiny objects” – in their judgment, phony issues – to distract the people from, again in their judgment, real issues.

From the article in The Week, quoting the New Yorker,

Here's how it works:

Suppose you could get a bunch of states to pledge that once there are enough of them to possess at least 270 electoral votes — a majority of the Electoral College — they will thenceforth cast all their electoral votes for whatever candidate gets the most popular votes in the entire country.

As soon as that happens, presto change-o: the next time you go to the polls, you'll be voting in a true national election.

No more ten or so battleground states, no more forty or so spectator states, just the United States — all of them, and all of the voters who live in them.

But the pledge is unenforceable since the Electors cannot be bound.

Which does not mean that everyone in the country who knows better cannot participate in this national exercise in deceiving the people, if not all of America’s classe politique, then anyway much of its chattering classes.

Who knows?

Even federal judges – even the Supremes – might join in with this particular, willful deception, self-deception, and egregious act of constitutional disobedience.

By the way, the author of the article seems to find it odd that the class of eligible voters is not the same as the class of persons counted in the census for purposes of determining representation in the house and hence the numbers of Electors to which states are entitled.

Non-citizens and large numbers of citizens not eligible to vote account for a large part of the latter class.

Always have.

Women, children, felons, the insane, etc.

Women?

Oh, wait.

Now that the Russians aren’t communists the left doesn’t like them

They fell all over themselves making excuses for Stalin’s domination of half of Europe at the end of the Second World War.

And now?

Hostile, hostile.

Anything Russian 'in czarist times' is fair game in Putin's mind

Reifowitz - a Polish name? Jewish? Both? - exaggerates.

Poles hate Russia (which, despite Brzezinski, is not a reason why Americans should), and Jews hate the very aspects of the old Russia that Putin seems to emphasize and wish to, in some measure, revive.

But maybe, at least figuratively, Putin does consider "fair game" anything that was Russian at the end of The Great War.

That would not include the Baltic States or Poland, for instance.

But it would include the Ukraine.

In any event, none of our affair.

NATO, today, is a mistake and the argument for ignoring that treaty altogether is much better than Seidman’s argument for ignoring the US Constitution.

Ma Joad for president?

Abbreviated pundit roundup

Ma Joad was a stupid, fat, good-hearted but profoundly ignorant Oklahoma hillbilly.

They love her at KOS.

The failure of constitutionalism

Constitutional government failed in America, long ago.

It is not certain that Eisenhower ever read the Constitution.

Might as well expect illiterate Goths without even spoken Latin to govern by Roman law.

And the lawyers of the courts, alone literate in the sacred language and many of them stupid, dishonest, or both, have long joined the office-holders of the political branches in succumbing to the irresistible temptation to lie about the Constitution or ignore it altogether.

Reading Newton's Eisenhower.

Reading Seidman.

It does not follow that the government is less free for being less constitutionally legitimate. 

Actually, in many ways it is more free.

And it is at once more national, more secularist, more liberal, more social-democratic, and more monarchist than the document provides for, in large part but not entirely owing to a powerful judicial dictatorship of lies.

But the Constitution still plays a role in our politics, in some ways like the role of the Bible in popular Christianity.

Everyone feels obliged to insist his views are Biblical.

And lawyers and politicians are like theologians and preachers whose tendentious interpretations are sometimes coincidentally accurate and in no case valued the more for that, except as that is a propaganda advantage.

Mr Will is not that stupid. He thinks his readers are.

Criminalizing false statements is not criminalizing what some bureau thinks are false statements.

Will.

Riding to victory on a lie

77¢ on the dollar

Tom Wolf says it’s an outrage and his daughter says he tells them all the time there is noting a man can do that a woman can’t.

One stupid lie on top of another.

6 year old granddaughter wants to be Princess Leia the Slave, when she grows up.

Have you seen the dolls?

There's even a leggo figure.

Jeez.

"But it's patriarchy that forces women into all that."

Uh-huh.

IKE turns chicken. Or sacrifices a pawn.

1956, incited by the Administration's rhetoric of rollback, IKE'S very own irresponsible blather, Hungarians revolt, fully expecting American military action, war, to save them.

An expectation IKE and the American government had urgently encouraged.

But the prospect was too much for the American hero.

He watched as the Russians drowned the rebellion in blood.

Or else he had been lying all along, intentionally sacrificing Hungary to claw, a little, at Russia's Warsaw Pact.

Take your pick.

Khrushchev bragged, "We will bury you."

IKE fought only the easiest battles with little or no risk.

He got out of Korea, after all that bloodshed, with nothing better than the status quo ante, and to do that well he had to threaten atomic war.

A problem of judgment?

Yes, but not his.

Theirs.

UN envoy and Israel in Easter row

The wisdom of Mandeville, in a nutshell

"The moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride."

The Fable of the Bees.

Though, really, he overlooks a crucial aspect, putting it thus.

This is truer to the facts, I think.

"The moral virtues are the political offspring that intimidation and violence begot upon fear."

Brandenburg Concerto number 2

Every time I hear it I think of Buckley's Firing Line.

Very annoying.

The Louisiana Purchase

Jefferson did it constitutionally by negotiating a treaty with Napoleon, ratified by the Senate.

But he thought he was cheating.

Jefferson and others felt that, absent an express grant of power, the federal government could not acquire territory.

However, the federal government was given express and exclusive power to make treaties, and history testifies that the purchase of territory is a perfectly banal use of that power, as are the acquisition of territory through victorious war and the surrender of territory to end a lost one.

So they were mistaken.

On the other hand, when the Congress set about erecting a government for the new territories it exceeded its powers.

The grant of power in Article IV, Section 3 applies to the Northwest Territory and existing US property, and does not appear to contemplate new territories. 

While on the subject of widespread constitutional error, even among officials and even from the beginning, consider this.

Some people, some of them government officials, have believed or claimed to believe, or merely claimed, throughout  much of the life of the Republic, that the judicial power lodged by the constitution in the federal courts contains intrinsically and inherently the power to nullify laws or other acts of government that conflict with the constitution.

History does not support that claim, that I am aware.

Jefferson's outraged incredulity was in that case entirely justified.

IMHO.

Update 12062014.

I now see the treaty power as restricted so that it can commit the government to doing only what the constitution elsewhere empowers it to do.

But I also now read both the first and 18th clauses of Article I, Section 8, as real grants of real powers.

The Supremacy Clause

Are judges in every state bound by unconstitutional federal laws as the supreme law of the land, as well as constitutional ones?

Does this clause in Article VI say they are?

Looks it.

It says they are bound by the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties, anything in the state laws or constitutions notwithstanding.

Article II Section 3 says the president is to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Not just the constitutional ones and not just the ones he thinks are constitutional.

Much less just those he thinks prudent or just.

Nothing in the Constitution says the Supremes or anyone else can nullify a law, whether federal or state, or anything else that is, or that they think is, unconstitutional.

A president can veto a bill he thinks unconstitutional, and the Congress can override the veto if they think best. 

During the convention in Philadelphia the same veto power, but only for unconstitutionality, was considered and grew into the more general power in Article I, Section 7.

That was the only manner in which the convention expressly thought to deal with the possibility.

And that is all.

So much for Judicial Review, and so much for Nullificationism.

A perfect example

Seidman says there are no approaches to interpretation on which something permitted by the Constitution at one time is forbidden at another.

But on a straightforward reading the Constitution forbids to the federal government imposition of punishments that are both cruel and unusual.

Flogging was always cruel, but it was not unusual in the 18th Century.

It is now.

Seidman's On Constitutional Disobedience

He reports oddities.

The Constitution prescribes six year terms for senators.

It prescribes departure from that rule only  for senators elected to the first Congress, to achieve staggering of the six year terms of their successors.

But when new states are admitted the terms of their senators are customarily not both of six years, though this is actually unconstitutional, again for the sake of staggering.

The Constitution says the vice president presides in the Senate except when the president is impeached.

So he is to preside at his own impeachment?

Seidman dryly doubts that would be allowed.

Amusing.

The point of the book is that we have no duty of fidelity to the Constitution.

Neither we, the people, nor we government officials, nor we federal judges, nor, especially, we justices of the Supreme Court.

Many, though not all, liberals lustily applauded his book when it first appeared, laughing with delight.

No known conservatives were pleased or amused.

The arguments for his claim, as well as those for many related claims, are brutally fallacious and even egregiously obtuse.

Fallacies in apparently limitless abundance.

Perfect for a popular polemic.

The liberal fan base found all that especially delightful.

The last sensible politician

"If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."

Or words to that effect, though not so well chosen.

BBC, voice of the Establishment

Humanizing the illegals.

On a hill, in sight of Europe

Your government got us into this

NATO sends more troops, ships, etc to surround Russia

OK, for 60 years the reason Europe was our problem was Communism.

And now?

If those jackasses want another European war, why do we have to be involved?

Because the kinds of people who run our politics want us always to be the most important player, no matter what the game, no matter where in the world.

Eisenhower and Brown v. Board of Education

IKE dragged his feet on any effort at enforcement not because he thought Brown wrongly decided - as it was, both by claiming the constitution forbade compulsory segregation and by claiming it required compulsory integration - but because his sympathies were with the people who wanted segregation to continue.

He gets more credit than he deserves as an anti-segregationist, say, from the likes of Ann Coulter.  

Newton thinks segregation a terrible moral injustice America had a duty to end.

He thinks Brown a dazzling moral victory.

But then, who today could write otherwise in a mainstream history and expect to keep his job?

Of course, if you wrote otherwise, yours could never be accepted as a mainstream history. 

And no mainstream publisher would touch it.

Reading Eisenhower, The White House Years.

Making excuses for Eisenhower

In Eisenhower, The White House Years, Jim Newton briefly narrates the America-engineered coup in Guatemala of 1954, to get rid of President Arbenz.

The story as he tells it, particularly the highlights concerning the interest in the matter of United Fruit and that company's influence in the US government, is a disgrace to America and especially to Eisenhower and the Cold Warriors he had surrounded himself with.

All the more reason to reject the Cold War, altogether.

All the same, Newton makes excuses for him.

Surprisingly.

In truth, the only two important decisions IKE made about the Cold War for which we ought to be relieved, if not grateful, that I know of, were the decisions not to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu and not to commit the US to continental war with China in the event that the Chinese helped Ho Chi Minh and other Communists overrun Southeast Asia.

Update.

No, there were others every time he refused the repeated urgings of the Joint Chiefs to go to war, apparently often with China, just in his first term.

Another update.

So Eisenhower took out Arbenz and Mossadegh, neither of them a communist and neither aligned with the Russians but left unmolested Castro, both a communist and aligned with the Russians.

Sure signs of a great president and unsurpassed Cold War leader.

Eventually, other Cold War leaders would have us fighting a desperate 10 years war against communism half a world away in Southeast Asia - the very war Eisenhower had rejected - while refusing to do so 90 miles offshore.

Why do men marry bipolar women?

Catherine and Michael, for instance.

I know several such couples.

Always sheer hell on the men, and the children run away from mom just as soon as they can.

Is this to go on forever?

When will Europe be free?

Nazi memorabilia auction cancelled

Liberalism. My last word on Newton's view of the law, maybe.

Reading Eisenhower, The White House Years.

Newton is a great admirer of those who decide cases liberally based on hokum and bombast.

He quotes with admiration Robert Jackson's majority opinion in a 1943 decision upholding the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag in school.

You might wonder why this was anybody's idea of a federal issue, at all.

But never mind.

Newton quotes Jackson.

The first sentence is false as history, the concern for limiting the power of popular majorities being an issue for the men of the Philadelphia convention.

The Bill of Rights was adopted against Madison's urging after the constitution was ratified, and the point was to limit the power of the federal government.

Too, the power of judicial review to which the sentence alludes is in fact not granted in the constitution, and was not even asserted to exist until 1803, when it was immediately and correctly denied, though many might argue not ultimately opportunely, by Jefferson and a great many others.

File that in the drawer marked "Whoppers" in the cabinet of constitutional lacunae.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. . . . 

The second sentence apparently alludes to an inflated understanding of the First Amendment, conflating a questionable assessment of the effects of the amendment with the amendment itself.

And then again it, as well as the first sentence, also supposes that the same amendment binds the states and not, as the amendment says, the federal congress.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

This is how liberals write when they decide to claim that the constitution forbids or requires something, though they can find nothing in the constitution that actually does so.

Too, Newton was (of course!) a great admirer of Hugo Black's insistence again and again in his opinions that the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th Amendment "incorporates" the Bill of Rights and means that state law can no more violate its constraints on government than can federal law.

The clause, cut and pasted from the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV, itself cut and pasted from the Articles of Confederation where it had a reasonably clear meaning and real significance, reads as follows in the 14th Amendment.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States

This is how it looks in the US constitution's Article IV, already commonly misread.

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

And this is how it originally looked in the Articles of Confederation, Article IV.

The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them.

In sum, as its context within the entire article substantiates, and with the noted exceptions, if you are a "free inhabitant" of state A passing through or sojourning in state B you shall have the privileges and immunities under the law of state B that belong to "free citizens" of state B.

You cannot be denied them, exceptions noted.

The meaning is the same in Article IV of the constitution.

Black's view of the clause in the 14th Amendment is today CATO's position and the position of many liberals, though that opinion and the entire notion of incorporation continue to be rejected by those who do not accept that this one amendment so radically altered, or was meant or even imagined to so radically alter, the character of the constitution and the union.

And there is no clear evidence that the originator, those who passed it in Congress, or those who ratified it in the states ever intended by it to make so great a constitutional revolution as to impose the huge, radical, and novel limitation on state power that would be entailed by forcing state law to comport with the restrictions imposed on the federal government by the Bill of Rights.

And that is really the point.

To read the clause as CATO wishes is to accept that it created very radical and new privileges and immunities for citizens of the United States, privileges and immunities that did not exist beforehand, for example, privileges or immunities from state laws establishing religion or abridging the freedom of the press, or state laws denying jury trials for state offenses.

And yet from its very wording we see the clause allegedly is concerned to protect citizens from abridgment of existing privileges or immunities.

Anyway, the earliest judicial interpreters rejected the view Black espoused and CATO now espouses, alongside numerous liberals.

If CATO is really right about what was meant by that clause you would expect a lot of people would have been howling about it, right then, leaving no doubt the court was full of beans.

As for me, I see the thing as basically gibberish, passed by group-think under the pressures of the Reconstruction Era, in keeping with the traditional, urgent political syllogism,

Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.

And were the civil war amendments actually adopted and ratified lawfully, in accord with Article V, fairly interpreted?

Update, for the record and in aid of understanding the significance of the Bill of Rights, here is what the federal congress sent to the states, minus the two that failed. 

Congress of the United States begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The above ten amendments were ratified December 15, 1791.

Update 2.

This is Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Since its passage and especially since about mid-20th Century and ever increasingly, the Supreme Court has erected upon the three clauses of its second sentence an awesome dictatorship over the states, with much spillover onto the federal government, entirely owing to astonishing fairy tales about their meaning.

The Congress has often followed the trail blazed by the courts.

The due process clause repeats that of the Fifth Amendment and insists upon the lawfulness of the most crucial exercises of fundamental executive power.

The equal protection clause was imposed to deal with the refusal of white-dominated state governments to afford the protection of the law, the literal protection of the law, to blacks against waves of terrorism and crime in which those governments, or officials of them, were often personally complicit.

It is about prosecuting and punishing crimes against blacks - against anyone - with the same rigor as those against whites - or other, and that is all it is about.

As to privileges or immunities, enough said, above.

IKE, Warren, and civil rights

Newton is an adherent of the liberal line on the 14th Amendment and equal protection.

Well, why not?

Even Plessy was halfway there.

Even Plessy, though rightly decided, was wrongly reasoned.

The equal protection clause is about the protection of the law against attacks on one's person or property.

The law and law enforcement in the states must protect all equally with others, regardless of race, etc.

It was written with an eye toward the white terrorism directed against blacks in the South in the immediate post-Civil War period that Southern states did little to prevent or prosecute, when they were not actually complicit.

And that has nothing to do with train service.

But that is not how even the Plessy court had seen it, and Newton finds fault with Fred Vinson that his Supreme Court did not decide that separate was per se unequal and so forbidden by the 14th.

An idea from which originates the myth of constitutionally mandatory integration.

Analogously, the due process guarantee means only that government cannot deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property except lawfully.

No small thing, this is the essential repudiation of executive absolutism.

But that is all it is.

IKE, the global Cold Warrior

Newton says he won the stalemate in Korea only by threatening Mao with nuclear war.

The threat was perfectly sincere.

Recall that the war happened in the first place only because Atchison publicly and clearly excluded Korea from the global perimeter within which America was pledged to contain communism.

And then Truman just freaked out in the event.

Though the charge was baseless, Churchill pushed IKE's anti-communist buttons to get him to depose Mossadegh and thus protect British oil interests in Iran, where Truman had refused his predecessor.

Nixon favored the move.

Newton reports IKE was delighted to do it.

To what extent did the Cold War happen because a lot of people found it a very compelling and exciting belief system?

Too much of America's leadership and permanent government came out of WW2 hooked on global crusade.

See the title of IKE's wartime memoirs.

Checkers speech incident

Reading Eisenhower, The White House Years.

What Nixon did was perfectly legal and very small beer.

IKE, who did not know him personally, was ready to dump him in a second if things had gone even a little wrong.

IKE rode a very high horse, morally, even in his memoirs.

But he was a crook (one count of serious tax fraud, at least), a hypocrite about that sort of thing and about women, and a bad-tempered dick.

Not a word in this book about why he wanted to be president.

Just the same old career ambition that had taken him so high in the army, I suppose.

Not getting it, please

People sometimes remark that the Archie Bunkers of America, far from seeing All in the Family as the biting satire it was, were delighted with the show, taking Archie as their beloved hero.

And then there was The Fifth Element, a brilliant, high speed satire of popular culture and even pop religion.

Luc Besson was a made man.

The right to an attorney

Do we need an amendment converting the negative right to an attorney into a positive one?

Or should we just accept that as a done deal?

A Right to Privacy Amendment

I think this would do.

Any privacy rights created or protected by this constitution do not in any way derogate from the powers of the Congress or of the states concerning the definition of marriage, the control of abortion, or the regulation of sexual conduct or relations.

A Progressive Government Amendment

How about this?

It permits but does not require both federal and state progressive government in the specific shapes of the regulatory and welfare states.

It also permits and again does not require much, but not all, civil rights legislation mistakenly based on the 14th Amendment equal protection clause.

Section 1.

The Congress shall have power concurrent with the states to regulate intra-state commerce, in addition to its powers elsewhere defined in this Constitution.

Section 2.

The Congress shall have power concurrent with the states to provide for the health, education, well-being, and retirement of some or all American citizens, or such other residents of the United States as it shall decide by law, in such manner as it shall decide by law.

An Incorporation Amendment

Would this do?

The protections afforded rights, liberties, and privileges of the people and citizens of the United States against federal encroachment by this Constitution are hereby extended to protect them as well against encroachment by the states, or any authority subject to them, or to the United States.

Admittedly, it would be prudent to turn down the First Amendment, a bit, beforehand.

And to abolish the Second, altogether.

But, with this adopted, judges could back away from the established lies about 14th Amendment due process and still defend as much of the sexual, anticlerical revolution of the 20th Century as can be based on that toned down First Amendment.

As for the equal protection clause, we should probably keep it, though it has never been entirely clear how the Congress - not the courts - could force the states to obey it.

Read honestly, significant violations by the states have disappeared with the reign of the Klan, and state law enforcement does appear to expend equal effort protecting all groups, though levels of crime victimization are not the same.

Sooner or later, judges may be willing to accept a role in government and society consistent with admitting that.

When that happens it will be quietly admitted that Brown and its progeny were wrong.

Also, pour encourager les autres

Why  Eich Matters.

Commenters agreed the Eich affair was a great victory.

Pour encourager les autres

The coward is the perfect military sacrifice.

Useless in battle, he makes his greatest contribution to the war effort by being shot pour encourager les autres.

Nothing is lost.

Something is gained.

It is far from true that the coward is more egoistic than others.

Threatened with death, he is unable to do what is asked of him, even to save his life, like an agoraphobe told to do high iron work or face execution.

So, through him, the threat that drives others over the top is made real.

The well-known story of the Patton incident, rehearsed in Eisenhower, called this to mind.

The crackpot but brilliant general, of course, personally loathed cowards whom he would well have shot, given the chance.

His attitude toward them stands to the traditional and still current moral and popular condemnation of cowardice as does violent homophobia to the traditional moral and lingering popular disapproval of homosexuality.

The concept of "the sissy" even unites them.

Personally, I find these beliefs and attitudes cruel and repugnant.

Morality, you will recall, is a tool of coercion and a license for violence.

Reading "Eisenhower, The White House Years"

First, democracy means mass propaganda.

Mass propaganda means money.

Democracy means money.

So, the age of powerful conventions choosing nominees in smoke-filled rooms was less corrupt, less plutocratic, than the age of primaries, the age of the money primary.

Second, IKE chose to keep the peace in Europe by refusing the development of tactical nukes and insisting America would defend Europe, even silly little Berlin, with strategic, global thermonuclear war.

That is, he thought he would save Berlin by letting Berlin hide behind Chicago.

That is a terrifying fact of history, only a little muted by the realization that neither Stalin nor anyone after him had all that much reason to care about Berlin, much less points west.

Stalin wanted a buffer and his troops had already occupied Eastern Europe and much of Germany. 

And after all that Hitler had done to Russia he had to punish Germany.

He took the low-hanging fruit.

But that was quite enough.

In Europe.

Heroes of liberty, they are, academic liberals

Not cowardice. Betrayal.

Bawer castigates the Western establishment for cowardice.

No cowardice about it.

It's betrayal, plain and simple.

Just BooMan, or is there a wave of liberal outrage out there?

Mass Cowardice

Congress unanimously agrees to refuse a visa to this fellow and BooMan can't stand it.

We should have gone to war with Iran when they did this, or at least bombed until they released those people.

That was a perfectly valid casus belli.

No forgiveness

They grossly humiliated the US for more than four hundred days and Carter got the country so used to it that even Reagan would not do the right thing.

Instead, he did the wrong thing and bought their freedom with contraband.

Iran needed to be hit, and hit hard.

To this day, their offense is unavenged.

The downside is actually the upside

The chief thing beer snobs deplore in American mass-market beer is actually its greatest virtue.

No hops.

Well, very little, anyway.

Dulce et decorum est . . . .

I have not the least doubt that some there are who could complete that line with unblemished sincerity.

Not Grace Slick, I think it was, in her younger days, who sang with shocking candor - if it was that - "I'd rather have my country die for me."

(Yes, she actually wrote the song. Rejoice)

And thus she voiced the true sentiment of the unpretentious egoist.

What?

Die for others?

You must be mad.

Too far out to come in from the cold

Cage them forever like their boss, or just kill them.

Shining Path arrests across Peru

To Hell with Iran

US Congress passes ban on Iran envoy

Couldn't agree more.

Free and popular government

A government is the more popular as it is the more democratic, the more immediately, thoroughly, and fully responsive to the will of the people.

So, the more popular as it is the more like an unlimited dictatorship of the whole people, assembled.

But a government is the more free as it is the less absolute, unchecked, and lawless.

As you see, the two are not the same.

In view of which we may say government is not necessarily less tyrannical, less despotic, or less oppressive for being more popular, though the identities of the tyrants and their victims may change.

But government is, necessarily, less tyrannical for being more free.

Hence the enormous importance of constitutionalism and lawful, constitutional government.

And hence the enormous imprudence, the enormous stupidity, and the enormous danger of the views of Louis Michael Seidman.

Points the more evident the more we consider not merely the ancient tyrannies but the far more devastating modern ones and, of those, the communist tyrannies.

Hobbes thought the greatest danger we face is the disorganized and sporadic violence of anarchy.

Our 20th Century proved him so very wrong.

The greatest threat, we know well, is Leviathan, the state itself.

On the other hand, a question both stupid and illuminating.

Supposing you were to be a nameless subject, which would you rather?

Be a subject of any Christian monarch of the 17th or 18th Centuries, the European Age of Absolutism, or be ruled by Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or even Castro?

I, an atheist, an amoralist, and an egoist, say without question or hesitation, I choose the Christian King.

Of two governments, both absolute, one can be much worse than the other.

It is partly a matter of will.

And partly a matter of capacity.

And yet another note.

A government can be free, but not the bulwark of freedom for all those subject to it.

Slaves, clearly, are left outside the scope of the state's complete solicitude.

And the same is true of any who, propertyless themselves, are pressed needlessly by that legal creation and its legal enforcement into the bitterness of wage-slavery or, worse yet, into hopeless destitution or even death by poverty.

Hence a regime of freedom for all must exclude both the one and the other.

We must not forget that harm suffered for lack of property is inflicted by the government in its defense of property, and is thus the most grievous oppression if it is unnecessary.

It is, after all, the same rule that makes one rich that makes the others poor.

Hence provision for the propertyless many from the surplus of the few is essential not only to the domestic tranquility but to the freedom itself of any free state.

Equality before the law is not the goal. Nor equality of any sort, in the end.

On Civil Rights Anniversary, Obama Reflects On Progress

Well, it never was only about voting rights, the right to serve on a jury, the right to own property, and so on.

Mostly, blacks have had such rights, though in varying measures infringedin practice, since the passage of the Civil War Amendments.

And the pretense continues that this was and remains a significant issue.

Clinton: SCOTUS Ruling On Voting Rights A Step Backward

Yes, the real point of current Republican voter-ID efforts is to diminish Democratic turnout.

But the requirements involved are not unreasonable and in any case the purpose is not actually racial, though persons deterred from voting because, not unreasonably, they can’t be bothered to obtain the needed identification, are expected to be disproportionately black.

In the eyes of most of America, the civil rights struggle of the mid-20^th Century was actually about ending Jim Crow, the regime of segregation extending, if not in whole then in part, across most, though by no means all, of the country.

And that was an entirely successful struggle.

And in fact the successes extended beyond that target.

Recall that not only was legally mandated segregation abolished but integration was legally required, in schools, employment, public accommodations, private associations, and the public and private provision of goods and services, generally.

It started with Brown v Board of Education, really; but it did not end there; not nearly.

But that is still not enough for the liberal and Democratic champions of minorities.

In fact, from the very beginning, the use of the power of the law to achieve economic equality of outcomes as a minimum was always part of their agenda.

I say as a minimum since none of those who favor such things would mind any overshoot.

Are feminists complaining, after all, that for many years now graduating classes at medical schools have comprised more than half women, as I believe I have read somewhere or other?

Do Jews complain that they make up far more than their share of lawyers, doctors, and PhDs?

Nobody ever complains about minorities that do better than either the national average or the apparent benchmark for blacks, at least, American whites.

That is to say, whites, still the national majority, do not demand government action to ensure they catch up with East Asians, Jews, or whomever.

The project of the liberals, supported with less than perfect enthusiasm, has been and remains to advance everyone else’s power, prestige, and wealth at the expense of white people, without stint and without limit.

Equality is what they want to achieve, if necessary, by force of law.

But superiority is what they hope for and, if that should happen, they will fight relentlessly to defend it. 

Wow. Talk about looking for love in all the wrong places.

Hagel Seeks Tighter Bond With Mongolia

Hagel, the anti-interventionist?

Hagel, the little America man?

Anti-interventionists of all stripes and parties were supposed to rejoice in the appointment of this man?

Jesus, stick a thumb in China’s eye, and Russia’s too, why don’t we?

"Just doing my job, ma'am."

With laws like that, you should be ashamed to be in law enforcement.

Why would anybody want to be a cop?

Or a judge?

Sure, the street gang running the neighborhood could be worse.

Is that a reason to join the gang?

Is that an excuse?

Baptists and feminists join hands against vice, again

As they did in the progressive era against prostitution and demon rum.

Thank the alliance of suffragettes and evangelical preachers for women's votes, Comstockery, and Prohibition.

And now, a second wind against White Slavery.

Oh, my.

Jimmy Carter on the sin of prostitution.

This will do wonders for Americans' respect for the law, just as it did so many decades ago.

Just a reminder.

A few years back, the big thing was how illegals were being enslaved in the sweatshops of the Big Apple.

Nobody proposed the radical remedy of closing down the garment district.

Do you suppose the Supremes could be brought to regard this form of consensual sex as protected by that lovely right to privacy they first invented to protect Jack and Jill's right to use a safe,  and later announced protected a woman's right to kill the child growing within her and a man's right to be buggered?

Worth a try, anyway.

I say, decriminalize prostitution and move on.

Talk about a waste of taxpayer's money, this one is pretty blatant.

6 to 4 the Russians do it

Take the eastern Ukraine.

Crunch talks announced on Ukraine

And if it's not a mistake

World 'needs Plan B' on climate - UN

Still on the assumption the problem is real, how can the damage be limited, assuming the world can no more significantly cut carbon emissions than a 600 pound man can diet down to 180?

Climatologists are like doctors.

They get well paid and listened to with great respect for providing extensive and detailed but impossible advice.

Why deplore gay marriage?

Brendan Eich: First on the New Blacklist

It’s no skin off my own nose, of course.

And neither is the popularity of boxing or the rise of violence in hockey, but I disapprove of both, all the same.

Nor, for that matter, is abortion, or infanticide, or involuntary euthanasia.

There are lots of things that are not directly any of my concern but that, nevertheless, I abhor.

Which is not to say I would go very far out of my way to put an end to them, even supposing I personally could do such a thing.

But it is to say that, other things equal, I would rather an end were put to them, somehow.

Anyway, why disapprove of gay marriage?

First of all because it is, indeed, a ludicrous travesty and a shameful mockery of something real, vastly important, and deserving of enormous respect.

But much more importantly because it implies that gay couples have or should have the same rights as real marrieds and that others have or should have the same obligations toward them.

And that, I fear, though I do not know, puts children at greater risk of all sorts of bad things that can happen to children, at the hands of those to whose care they are delivered up.

Not a risk society should blindly take.

And yet, that is exactly what we are doing, and it is exactly what the masters of PC demand that we do.

Imagine that.

Anyway, on the other hand, I do favor legal creation of civil partnerships for the purpose of providing people in gay couples thus officially sanctioned specifically enumerated rights such as, for example, hospital visitation rights.

Rights without surprises.

And I do not favor criminalization of homosexuality per se, though it is none of the Supreme Court's business and I never rejoice when the Supremes lie their way to a result so transparently ideologically motivated.

Though, admittedly, sometimes I nevertheless prefer that to a more honest call.

Update.

To be clear, if the churches want to perform ceremonies they consider same-sex marriages, that is fine, and it would be fine for those ceremonies to have the legal force of creating an official civil union.

But it would be better if neither in that way nor in any other could persons of the same sex actually marry.

Still, as noted above, ultimately, no skin off my nose.

The Klan could never have taught anything more stupid

Five Percenters

Beyonce did the White House and, I think, the second inauguration.

Will this be a big scandal?

Will the White House be in a tizzy to apologize to the world for associating so closely with such wickedness?

Will they at least condemn the wickedness?

Will anyone?

Certainly not.

And if any conservatives point this out it will only prove that they, and white people in general, are stinking racists.