GINGRICH ON JUDICIAL REVIEW. On the one hand, everybody’s dumping on Gingrich, for mostly good reason. On the other hand, who can seriously argue that the constitutional law that comes from the Supreme Court is in fact very closely related to the text of the Constitution itself? I mean, if the Court were doing such a great job, would we see strange bedfellows arguing for a constitutional reset? Indeed, I was talking to a fellow lawprof the other day, and one who’s certainly no right-winger, who said he’d hate to have to teach Constitutional Law because of the hash the Supreme Court has made of things over the past 50 years or so. I was surprised to hear that, but it suggests a certain shakiness to current foundations.
Gingrich is very good at tossing a stinkbomb over the transom, and letting the ensuing reaction demonstrate that there’s something rotten about the status quo. It’s not so clear that this talent is desirable in a President, however. And, even if it is, it’s even less clear that it’s conducive to being elected President. What’s more, I’d say that Gingrich, if elected President, will share one of Barack Obama’s flaws: The tendency to say things that might be interesting if said by a professor, but that have a lot more impact than is desirable when said by a President.
HERE’S A CHEERY TAKE: “While certainly humorous, entertaining and very, very childish, the recent war of words between France and Britain has the potential to become the worst thing to ever happen to Europe. Actually, make that the world and modern civilization.”
As I’ve said before, if you’re a civil libertarian you should always want a Republican in the White House because they face so much more press scrutiny.
That’s not the only way in which heavily Democratic Fairfax sounds sympathetic to the Tea Party rabble. Like those grassroots conservatives in tricorner hats, the county also thinks it is Taxed Enough Already.
Fairfax is one of the richest counties in America. With a median household income in six figures, it comes in second only to the nation’s richest county, next-door Loudoun. And yet, as reported recently in The Washington Post, the county’s wish list “includes other perennial desires: that Northern Virginia taxpayers see more of the money they send to Richmond, for example.”
“Overall, the county would be pleased if the Virginia General Assembly would stop using Northern Virginia as its piggybank,” continues The Post. Translation: Fairfax does not want to “spread the wealth around,” as Barack Obama put it to Joe the Plumber. But wait – Obama says spreading the wealth around is “good for everybody.” Does the county disagree?
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied that that’s where the money is. Same goes for Northern Virginia: The heavily populated, high-income region generates a big chunk of the state’s wealth. Where else should legislators look for revenue – Pearisburg (population 2,700, median household income $40,000)?
What happened to making the rich pay their fair share?
MORE CRITICISM: National Transportation Safety Board, home of the road nannies. “Is there an epidemic of fatal crashes caused by texting and talking on cell phones? NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman implied as much. She noted that cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants are ubiquitous. She cited a study suggesting that 21 percent of drivers in the Washington, D.C. area admit to texting while driving, and she stated flatly that 3,000 people lost their lives last year due to texting in the driver’s seat. Is that true? No. In a detailed report on distracted driving issued earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that only 995 deaths resulted from distraction by cell phones in 2010. The 3,000-person figure refers to all distracted driving. The Chicken Littles in D.C. notwithstanding, the roads are getting safer, not more dangerous.”
UPDATE: Wow, when I posted this the Noco was $50.95. When I went back to buy one it was up to $60.95. I guess that’s more of the dynamic-pricing thing. . . . Next time I’ll order before I post. Or at least shortly thereafter.
MARRIAGE EQUALITY: Why Not A Marriage Tax? “The educated and rich are marrying more and getting richer; the uneducated and poor are marrying less and falling further behind. ‘Family structure,’ Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution told Marcus, ‘is a new dividing line in American society.’ . . . This new marriage gap seems tailor-made for the Democrats’ tax-and-share approach to all social problems. If about half the adults are married, and are getting richer as a result, and half are not and are thus falling further behind, how long can it be before Obama calls for a marriage tax in the name of “fairness”? In fact, he could make it a progressive, graduated tax by including a Graduate Tax: couples where both spouses have college degrees pay more, those who both have graduate degrees pay even more, etc. Why should some be allowed to make out like bandits while others are condemned to leading miserable lives when their conditions could be equalized, in the name of fairness, by some simple tweaks to the tax code?”
Don’t give ‘em any ideas. Irony is lost on this crowd.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS:Eric Holder’s continued obfuscation on Fast and Furious. “You’ve seen people who did it and didn’t in your life. Is this how an innocent person behaves? Is it plausible that the attorney general of the United States had no idea what was going on in Arizona within his own shifting time parameters? . . . At some point, one might think, Holder becomes more of a liability to the Obama re-election campaign than a 50-50 incumbent can stand.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Doha: Dead As The Dodo, Dead As Kyoto. “The Doha Round is dying for some of the same reasons the green negotiations are going nowhere: the agreements cover so many countries and so many subjects that the process is breaking down under the weight of complexity and competing interests. There are too many parties negotiating too many topics that touch too deeply on too many domestic interests for agreement to be easy to find. . . . Worse, the low hanging fruit have been picked. The easy win-win agreements were reached in earlier trade rounds; the topics left are mostly contentious and the gains in some cases are less dramatic than in the past.” We’re long past the point of diminishing returns on international organizations generally.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich came out swinging Saturday against the nation’s legal system, pledging if elected to defy Supreme Court rulings with which he disagrees and declaring that a 200-year-old principle of American government, judicial review to ensure that the political branches obey the Constitution, had been “grossly overstated.”
Courts “are forcing us into a constitutional crisis because of their arrogant overreach,” Mr. Gingrich told reporters in a Saturday conference call. He repeatedly blasted federal judges for imposing “elitist opinion” on the rest of the country.
FDR could get away with this because he was much more popular than the Supreme Court. No politician or official today is more popular than the Supreme Court. I doubt a President Gingrich will be either.
Three weeks ago, when we warned in this space that conservatives should think twice before succumbing to the sudden appeal of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, we were, quite frankly, out on a limb. For all his faults, Gingrich occupies a special place in the Republican pantheon, thanks to the electoral success made possible by the Contract with America in 1994. But with his surge in popularity as an alternative to Mitt Romney, we believed it important to speak up. Essentially, our warning was that his flaws “make it difficult not to view Gingrich as an exemplar of Washington’s professional Republican politicians who talk the talk to get elected, but often don’t walk it once in office.”
A lot has happened since that Nov. 29 editorial appeared. As Gingrich built a double-digit lead over Romney, it appeared that perhaps our warning came too late. But last week it became evident that a lot of people — including many of our media colleagues on the Right and, more importantly, conservative Republican primary voters in Iowa and across the nation — were indeed thinking twice about the former speaker.
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UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE:Christopher Hitchens and Newt Gingrich together, from 2002. “The interview is fascinating for any number of reasons (we can’t get over that set — a sort of proto poli-sci man cave), but most interestingly, it captures the two men reflecting and debating the then still fresh horror of 9/11 and what they predicted it meant for our future.”
If you want a diploma blessed by the A.B.A. — and you don’t have rich parents, a plum scholarship or an in-state public law school with lots of taxpayer support — you are pretty much out of luck. And that is not just a problem for would-be attorneys. The lack of affordable law school options, scholars say, helps explain why so many Americans don’t hire lawyers.
“People like to say there are too many lawyers,” says Prof. Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “There are too many lawyers who charge $300 an hour. There aren’t too many lawyers who will handle a divorce at a reasonable rate, or handle a bankruptcy at a reasonable rate. But there is no way to be that lawyer and service $150,000 worth of debt.”
Well, it’s a cartel, and those tend to raise costs.
First, regulating cellphone use is not a federal responsibility, even on federal roads. This is not an issue that Washington has the authority to address.
Second, there’s no compelling reason for it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 3,092 traffic deaths last year involved distracted drivers. But using a cell phone is only one of many driver distractions. Eating and drinking while behind the wheel are two others, and they are far more dangerous than yapping on a phone.
In fact, a 2009 NHTSA study found that 80% of all car wrecks are caused by drivers eating or drinking — not cellphone use — with coffee-guzzling the top offender.
Then there’s this. According to federal data, traffic deaths have fallen from 2.1 per 100 million vehicle miles in 1990, when virtually no one had a cellphone, to 1.1 in 2009, when almost everyone does.
MICHAEL BARONE: WaPo’s Marcus: marriage gap produces income gap. “Lower-income people aren’t marrying nearly as often as higher-income people or, to put it another way, income disparities are to a large extent the result of decisions people make in their personal lives.” Plus the impact of assortative mating.
‘Why would anyone want to live in Illinois?” So muses Curt Wooters, who works for the state and helps his dad run the family’s sporting-goods store in Findlay, 200 miles south of Chicago. Imagine California without the sunshine, New York without the cultural elan, New Jersey without Chris Christie. That’s Illinois.
Mr. Wooters has another five years before he can retire, but he’s advising his kids to leave the state after college. He’s also talked with his dad about closing their shop because it costs too much to run a business in Illinois these days. Plus, “the customers are leaving town.”
Now two downstate Republican lawmakers think that they’ve found a solution for Mr. Wooters and other disgruntled Illinoisans who want to escape but can’t: Cut off the pesky tail that’s wagging the dog—separate Chicago from the rest of the state.
That’s the legislative initiative of State Reps. Adam Brown and Bill Mitchell, who think politicians from the Windy City have blown the state too far left. “At every town-hall meeting I hear, ‘Can’t we separate from Chicago?’” says Mr. Mitchell.
Plus this:
Mr. Wooters knows several people who are leaving the state. His neighbors are moving to Kentucky, his best friend to Tennessee. Another friend, who owns a chain of agricultural-supply stores, has moved to Florida and is expanding operations in other states. Most of the state’s business class appears bearish about their own future. In a Chicago Tribune survey of 45 chief executives of large, publicly held Illinois businesses, only two said they expected the state’s economic condition to improve in the next year.
If you want to come to Tennessee, fine. Just don’t come here and then vote for the same policies, and clowns, that ruined the state you came from.
IF YOU USE A NETI POT, YOU NEED TO USE DISTILLED WATER OR STERILE SALINE: Two deaths from brain-eating amoeba linked to sinus remedy for colds. “Tap water is safe for drinking, but not for irrigating your nose.” Plus this: “If you are irrigating, flushing, or rinsing your sinuses, for example, by using a neti pot, use distilled, sterile or previously boiled water to make up the irrigation solution. . . . He added that it is important to rinse the irrigation device after each use and leave open to air dry.”
I favor this sterile saline spray in a can instead. Works just as well, less trouble.
SHOULD THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE LAW REVIEW CLOSE ITS DOORS? I think that law reviews provide a valuable experience for the students. Their value to the professors who publish in them, on the other hand, has declined sharply in the Internet / SSRN era.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Angela Merkel: Herding Cats Over A Cliff. “Fitch, the ratings agency that infuriated Europe yesterday by saying that the continent lacks the political and technical tools to save the euro, is right — at least for now. The latest European plan to fix the euro is already falling apart, just like all its predecessors have done.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: ‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend.’ “Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact — a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality. . . . In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Plato’s Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom — and Socrates’ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that.”
IS THE DEMOCRATS’ ATTEMPT TO RECALL SCOTT WALKER a mistake? “I certainly hope so, but that is an awfully optimistic assessment. Much more money will be spent to unseat Governor Walker than to re-elect him. On the other hand, the Democrats don’t have a candidate, and it is very weird to recall a governor for doing exactly what he promised to do when he ran for office.”
THE HORROR: When half of all households are below the median income. I blame Barack Obama, and I want a president who won’t rest until everyone is above the median income! But how likely is that when most people are perfectly satisfied to live in a society where twenty percent are in the bottom quintile?
The Asian unrest, a much bigger deal long term than the over hyped Arab Spring or even the crisis of the euro, is spreading from China to Indonesia, as strikes pop up across the fourth most populous country in the world.
The Asian industrial revolution is the single most transformative social event on our planet today. Hundreds of millions of people are moving from agricultural jobs to urban life, and from farming to manufacturing. They are doing it faster than Europeans and North Americans did during the western industrial revolution, and they are doing it in much larger numbers.
In the first stages of this movement, labor has been relatively docile. As the peasants come out of the rice paddies, they are bewildered by urban life and are struggling to gain a toehold. They still have the deferential social habits and strong moral values of the villages from which they come. They are used to hard work and low pay and they are often grateful for poorly paid, dangerous and hard labor.
But this changes over time. They learn more about how the city works. They lose the social habits and discipline of the countryside. Seeing how the rich live in their urban environment, and living in the media saturated environment of the modern world, they begin to grasp the immense distance between their lives and those of the rich and the middle class. Their ambitions — for themselves and for their children — rise and their expectations grow.
They also become aware that as industrial workers they have more group power than they did as peasants.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How To Tell Your Date You’re Carrying A Gun. “I generally try to bring this subject up when the date – and the conversation – is going well. Filling an awkward silence in an already strained conversation with ‘I have a gun’ is probably not going to turn out well.”
UPDATE: Reader Tom Brosz writes: “Since my wi-fi is provided by an Apple AirPort Extreme for both PCs and Apples in my house, all I had to do was pick up a little Apple AirPort Express unit, plug it into an outlet in the middle of my house, and tell the AirPort Extreme to use it as an extender.”
And reader Dan Ballard writes: “The linked article refers to the Belkin F9K1106 which is a dual band range extender. Your Amazon link is to a very different product -the Belkin N600 dual band router. The first gets a one star rating while the N600 rates much better. No sure how well the N600 works as a range extender.” Oops — you’re right. Sorry! Fixed now.
ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails that this is the best range extender. “I bought one 3 weeks ago and it’s flawless. Very compact too. Look at the great reviews.” Well, except for the one about it not working with the Verizon FIOS router.
The National Transportation Safety Board wants a complete ban on cellphone use while driving, even on hands-free calls. Some will protest this as yet another government encroachment on freedom, but we should think twice before rocking the boat here.
After all, have you considered how lucky we are that the government lets us drive cars at all?
Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.
Even aside from pollution, the government wouldn’t allow the risks to safety. . . . Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.
We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement.
Face it: We’re just not those people anymore. We don’t do dangerous things where lots of people could be hurt . . . even if they’re really cool and fun ideas. You can say we value human life more now, but it’s probably more apt to say we’re much sissier.
Hi, my name is Paul, and I’m a small business owner. But my storefront isn’t quite of the traditional variety. Rather, it’s a virtual one, a website I built from scratch, and currently own and operate. . . . It’s a movie/tv/video game site that I started with a partner about three years ago. Since then, it’s grown to averaging between 2.8 and 3.2 million page views a month. Not a giant, but not bad for two people, and with ad revenue, it’s enough to live on.
But that might not be the case if the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) passes. My virtual small business, along with many others like it, might be history.
Why is this? Am I a pirate, who feeds my users stolen content every day and deserves to be slain by a new law like this? Not at all, and this is the fundamental problem with SOPA and other prospective laws like it (Protect IP most recently). . . . The fine print of the law says sites that distribute copyrighted content could be subject to summary censorship, ie Torrent sites and the like. But it also encompasses any sites that LINK to copyrighted content, which is the bomb that blows up any semblance of sense this bill might have had. . . . Watching the House debate this bill yesterday was beyond pathetic. These representatives, if they deserve to be called that, have no idea the amount of power they’re giving the entertainment industry. Or maybe they do, as most of their pockets are lined with donations from media behemoths, and have been for years in the hopes that someday, they might pass a law like this.
FACEBOOK’S HIDDEN MESSAGES. I’d never noticed the “Other” folder before, and sure enough, I’d missed some worthwhile stuff (though it was mostly spam).
MICKEY KAUS: Did Dems Secretly Punt on Light Bulb Ban? “Maybe Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats would just as soon that Congress put off the de facto ban on cheap, familiar incandescent bulbs until after the election. If the ban can drive the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker into the Tea Party, who knows how many other voters it will annnoy. This would explain the strange lack of strong Dem opposition to a GOP rider that defunds the incandescent ban until Sept. 30.”
Of course, this also keeps it alive as an election issue, which isn’t likely to help Dems.
UPDATE: Reader Michael Hess writes:
In re: to your post about the ‘light bulb nightmare being averted’ (http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/133627/)
The ban remains on the books. All Congress has done is zero out the money to enforce it. All it would take is for the funding to be restored as yet another publicity gimmick – or slipped it unobtrusively in yet another multi-thousand-page omnibus – and the ban could -immediately- drop into effect.
If you were a major retailer of incandescent light bulbs, how many would you keep in your warehouses? How many are there now?
If you were a manufacturer of incandescent light bulbs, would you keep your production lines humming? Are they shut down already?
This all seems like chicanery and grandstanding; the Republicans get to chalk up a PR win, the Dems get to claim they’re being compromising and flexible, while bulb availability may still take a nasty hit due to regulatory unpredictability.
It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.
Yeah, no shit? How…how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?
Well, only about 98% of the time, actually. I mean, nobody’s perfect.
Glenn, on that Thor Spotlight – when you first listed it, it was $39, a good deal. When I linked it, the price had mysteriously risen to $49. Now it’s over $51. What with the $7 shipping, it’s not really such a good deal any more.
Do you think the volume you sent to that item caused them to jack the price?
I’ve never run across this before.
It’s called “dynamic pricing,” and it’s happened to me on occasion. The exact workings are a mystery but basically more demand means a higher price. But sometimes a thirdparty seller runs out and it switches to another one, and that may have been what happened here, as I don’t think (though I could be wrong) that it was shipping from Mack’s Prairie Wings before.
