Odd Takeaway.

"Why Same-Sex Catholic Schools -- despite offering outstanding educations -- are Not Recommended for Your Boys..."


They never learn to work well with women.
Either overly confident in their innate superiority, or (like I think what happened here) overly deferential to the views of women as a collective, not wanting to be seen as a cold heart.

I have no doubt that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsberg (likely Stephen Breyer too) used their feminine wiles, and empathatic personal stories (think of the suffering, John, in need of our help.  Only we can save them now...) like the ones the president's been pushing.

When you resort to emotion over logic,
when you're wishy washy and not sure of your own legal moorings, let's just say I think those women did a number on his head.

Send your sons to public, or private co-ed schools.
They need to learn how to work with the (alleged) ... fairer sex as soon as possible.

No more of this special deferential stuff, not when it's going to be so costly to so many unconsuming others down the line...

Come again?

More on John Roberts' reputational downfall:

Quin Hillyer:
Jed Babbin is right that the Supreme Court has contradicted itself.
John Roberts has ruled that the penalty is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act, but IS a tax for constitutional purposes.

(As a side note, even the lower courts or judges that semi-accepted the "tax" argument had it exactly the opposite: that it was a tax for AIA purposes but NOT for constitutional purposes. Then, not a single lawyer argued before the high court itself that it was a tax for constitutional purposes. Roberts basically made it up out of thin air.)

He has ruled that Congress can't mandate that an individual must choose economic activity over inactivity -- but then that Congress CAN tax the inactivity itself and give IRS powers (other than criminal prosecution, but presumably including wage garnishment, etcetera) to penalize the refusal to pay "taxes" on that inactivity.
...
Even Roberts described this as "a tax on going without health insurance." I challenge anybody to give a single other example of there being "a tax on going without...anything." This blows aparts every notion of what a tax is. Governments tax things or actions; they do not tax that which is nonexistent.
...
He has conflated the authority to tax with the authority to exempt people from taxes via what he calls "tax incentives." See here:

Congress’s use of the Taxing Clause to encourage buying something
is, by contrast, not new. Tax incentives already promote,
for example, purchasing homes and professional educations.

What sheer nonsense this is. Government taxes real property, and it taxes services. To decide to lessen the tax on home ownership and on the service known as professional education is completely different from deciding to tax the refusal to buy a home or to pursue professional education. Again, a tax break and a tax are not at all the same thing.

Finally, he has ruled that Congress can create a penalty and call it a penalty but have it considered for constitutional purposes as a tax -- thus overriding congressional intent to engage in what the dissent rightly called "judicial tax-writing" -- but that the court should nevertheless do back flips to defer to congressional intent overall (by not ruling a law unconstitutional) because "The question is not whether that is the most natural interpretation of the mandate, but only whether it is a 'fairly possible' one." So we see this justice who otherwise insists on the "plain meaning" of the Constitution or statute now insisting that judges should impose an artificial meaning on it if it is remotely plausible, if doing so will allow a law to stand.

Boggles the mind.

ADDED:

YET -- this is rich -- in dicta in the same decision, he basically ridiculed Justice Ginsburg for using the "fifth alternative definition" of one word "which was itself the second alternative definition" of another.

How many alternative definitions, pray tell, did he need to search before he concluded that what Congress called a penalty and that what acts like a penalty (in that it is only imposed on those who do not do what the goverment wants to dictate) is nevertheless a tax even though under other circumstances (the Anti-Injunction Act) it can't be construed as a tax no matter what???

If this isn't result-oriented jurisprudence -- searching for a way, any way at all, to uphold a law and eep the court out of Obama's campaign-related cross-hairs -- then I don't know what is.

This is why I think Justice Roberts won't have that long-lasting SCOTUS career he once dreamed of. (Yes, I know he's got lifetime tenure...)

It will eat at him.
If you can read, and you have a basic understanding of legislation and the law, you see the ... trick he pulled here.

George Will applauds. Those Volokh law professors think they've won the Commerce war, just lost this here battle...

Reread his legal trickery. Jesuit sophistication more worthy of Scalia. (Think he regrets his Raich ruling, where he sold out his federalism principles on behalf of drug-law pragmatism? I do...)

Roberts simply got this one wrong. Politically, you might pick up the crumbs and say he helped things. Thing is: that's not his role. He knows it. It doesn't add up.

He should never have sliced into that baby. They called it a mandate, denied it was a tax, the mandate is constitutionally illegal. Let the political gamesmanship start afresh in Congress then: let them call it a tax, and Pass It as a Tax. That's the separation of branches.

Where we got the idea that "a good guy must swoop in and save the Congressional legislation for the good of the country" (or to trigger some electorate uprising in November) is beyond me...

He's been reading too much George Will, I suspect. Perhaps he never had all that much courage in his judicial convictions in the first place. Maybe (god help us, but he is a Catholic) he really indeed thought he was helping the nation, putting pragmatic justification ahead of what he knew the law required him to do...

Either way,
there's no takebacks now, Chief Justice.
We can read, some of us out here, and think independently.

This is a low mark on your reputation scholastically, even if the respected pundits, scholars and professors are going to be too polite, civil and politically correct these days to call you out on it.

We know,
and most of all, friend:
You know.

Cowardly Lyin.

Lol.
Who says I can't find humor in this newfound ... tax?

Commenter iconotastic here sums up the Chief's reasoning:
(So much for a neutral umpire, eh?)

 June 28, 2012 at 4:34 pm

The mandate is only a tax when a mandate is unconstitutional. It is a mandate when a tax is unconstitutional. Similarly, it is a mandate when the Democrats want to fillibuster and it is a tax when they want to pass it without worrying about cloture.
Heads they win, tails we lose. Pretty simple

Now, that's funny.
Funnier than this:

Depression
Send Mitt Romney money in an envelope with a sad face on it. Adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. Take up smoking. Forswear kale. Drink heavily, garnishing your beverages with smoked hams. Eat cupcakes smeared in butter. Murmur, “That’ll show ‘em.” If possible, transform into a giant cockroach and go banging around your apartment hissing and alarming your neighbors.

(Yeah, I got the Kafka reference; still don't see the funny...)

Benedict Robbers.

Justice Scalia schools Chief Justice John "we hardly knew ye..." Roberts on why what he did in this opion was simply so wrong.  You want to play politics, Mr. Roberts?  Run for office yourself.

For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling.  Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Act of 765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution  requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives.  See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off. The Federalist No. 58 “defend[ed] the decision to give the origination power to the House on the ground that the Chamber that is more accountable to the people should have the primary role in raising revenue.” United States v. Munoz-Flores, 495 U. S. 385, 395 (1990). We have no  doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty. See Affordable Health Care for America Act, H. R. 3962, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §501 (2009); America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, S. 1796, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §1301. Imposing a tax through judicial legislation inverts the constitutional scheme, and places the power to tax in the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry.  (pp. 24-25, emphasis added)

Besides, if Obama told us again and again and again that the "mandate" to purchase insurance was NOT a tax, then how could anybody take him at his word now when he tells us this whole reform/overthrow will NOT cost the country money, and will NOT affect your very own personal insurance plan?

It's sick enough the game-playing politicians.  Now we've got a Chief Justice at the helm who decides he'd be more popular sitting in the ladies section, like one of the View group, and decides to rewrite the legislation to characterise it as  tax, just so he can blow in and save the day...

Go home, John.
Let this one eat at your heart and soul, and understand:  this was the hill to fight and die on.  You blew it in trying to split the baby, and down deep, despite all the accolades about losing the battle but winning the war, and the lib pundits saying:  "Gee, he's not such a straight-shooter legally after all.  I kinda like the guy... how he can be influenced so easily like that..." you threw away a scholarly reputation for a little political popularity and love.

That's like guaranteeing free contraception to some,
and passing the bill onto others who have no need for it, nor any desire to purchase it.

Congrats, man.  Betcha Scalia doesn't let you live this one down...
Plus, I'm thinking:  that predicted long career ahead on the Court?  Not so promising now... you know, when you do wrong, and you know it, and it tends to eat away -- after the fanboys need you not and move on -- at your heart and soul, well ... they say that can have negative health impacts.

Good luck to you, though.
So sorry you sold out your principles though.   Enjoy the rest of the term, just don't expect anybody much to take your opinions seriously anymore.  We'll look to the non-popular thinkers on the Court for legal guidance;  you get yourself booked on the View asap, and strike while the iron's hot...

John Roberts ... Splits the Baby.

So, if we're in good shape physically,
with no outstanding healthcare needs nor bills,
and we simply choose to spend our money ourselves, rather than investing in the bloated insurance game, then we're penalized with a tax of up to $600 per year for starters...

Law Professor Orin Kerr has a post up:

So Everybody Gets Something

Orin Kerr • June 28, 2012 10:38 am

Based on the thread at SCOTUSblog, it sounds like everybody gets something from the Health Care Cases. Liberals get the law being upheld 5-4 under the taxing power; conservatives get the mandate being held beyond the Commerce Clause power.
------------------------

Not everyone, Orin.  The young and the healthy get ... screwed.  We pay a penalty for taking care of ourselves, and investing wisely in our health, rather than in other people's misfortunes.

There's a line in Planes, Trains and Automobiles that gets this one right:  "You're going ... the WRONG ... way!!!"

So, Chief Justice Roberts steps into the political fray to correct the politicians who have assured us since Day 1:  this is not a tax.  this is not a tax. this is not a tax.

But... since it's a tax that won't affect law professors (winners, and yet again:  losers.  Sorry to call 'em as I see 'em, Randy...  I'm sure career publicity-wise, this is a win for you, striking down the "mandate", even though for the paying suckers out here, the distinction financially means squat), and surely won't cost any "extra" funds in the fully insured Robers household, then let's just toss the healthy conservative pay-as-you-go'ers overboard.

They think they got us.
Roping us into their pool, or asking us to pay a penalty.

Trouble is:  plenty of us healthy?  We can swim...


Keep trying, old folk.  You want to rope us into paying for all these entitlements (social security, health insurance bailouts, bank bailouts, remedial slavery actions ...)  but you'll simply never have what we do:

Our Health is Our Wealth.
Tax away, if you must, but remember:  you can never ... redistribute good health.    Now let's all toss back a drink for Ted Kennedy, and whoop it up while there's still time... 

Tomorrow awaits.
Good luck taxing the life out of us.


And a special shout out to Chief Justice John Roberts on behalf of the dissent:  COW-ARD.
(Not sure who got to you, or how, but your legal scholar reputation just bit the dust, surely no surprise you understood that going in, choosing to ... "split the harlot's baby" in a way no Solomon could ever approve.  Hope it pays off for you, the loss of reputation but make-nice compromise in political circles.  You're surely a hero to Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and that Kagan woman.  Hey, some say, if that's the way you're going to play the legal decisionmaking game, she could run circles around you as Chief Justice.  Too bad at this late date in your career, you decided to be radical in embracing a novel argument that was ... pragmatic.  This is your Roe v. Wade -- making it come out the way you want, despite the flimsy legal underpinnings.  A tax, my ass.)

Strawberries.

They've been advertising at the u-pick patches for weeks now, but I finally made it there this morning.  Good crop, almost past peak, owing to all the rain lately...

Did I mention I ran into my old boss last week, delivering newspapers at the Turtle Lake convenience store where I'd stopped for gas?  His son was out that day, and I inquired if they'd perhaps had the baby.  They had, earlier in the year, small fellow, Jim said.  

Named him Walker.
------------------------


Make it a great mid week.
Freeze that sweetness, if you can...

How We Got Here.

It's a Richard Hatch Survivor style world out there in the financial trenches...  (reminds me of the brief "break" between WWI and WWII, when nothing from the first conflict had been solved really.)

Joe Nocera of the NYTimes tells us about walking away from the efforts to clean up the Bernie Madoff stink:

Still, in all the fighting between net winners and net losers, what tends to get overlooked is that the big boys — the “deep pockets” who could actually afford to compensate the Madoff victims — are being allowed to walk away from the fraud.

Early on, the trustee made an enormous effort to investigate the roles of HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions that were in one way or another linked to the Madoff fraud. (JPMorgan was Madoff’s banker, for instance.) It found various HSBC due diligence reports, to cite one example, that clearly showed bank executives declining to look too deeply into Madoff — even though internally they had acknowledged that his returns were too good to be true.

At one point, the trustee had up to $100 billion worth of lawsuits, most of them against some of the biggest financial firms in the world. But those cases are starting to be tossed out of court. Though the trustee is appealing, the odds of him gaining a reversal — and thus being able to claw back from Madoff’s enablers — are not high.

The crux of the problem is a longstanding legal doctrine called in pari delicto. What it essentially means is that “thieves can’t sue thieves,” says Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University who writes about white-collar crime for DealBook in The Times.

That’s all well and good, I suppose, except that in the view of the law, Irving Picard is a thief. Even though he is trying to get money back for victims, the fact that he is representing the Madoff estate in bankruptcy court means that, in the eyes of the law, he is standing in the shoes of a very bad man. So when he alleges that the big banks played a role in the fraud, he has no legal standing to do so, the courts have ruled. A thief can’t sue a thief.

Nor is Madoff the only time in pari dilecto has been trotted out in recent years. According to Frederick Feldkamp, a retired lawyer who has dug into its implications, it has become a common tactic to shield lawyers, accountants, banks and other enablers of fraud that winds up in bankruptcy court. “It’s being used everywhere,” he told me. Bankruptcy trustees can’t overcome the hurdle it poses, and thus are stuck with clawing back money from victims.

If Picard can’t sue the big banks for wrongdoing in the Madoff case, then who can? You might think the answer would be the Madoff victims themselves. When Colleen McMahon, a federal judge, threw out Picard’s lawsuit against JPMorgan last year, she suggested that, indeed, only the victims had the standing to sue.

Sure enough, a group of Madoff victims decided to file a class-action lawsuit against the bank. Guess what. It’s probably not going anywhere either — thanks to a law, passed in the mid-1990s, that drastically limits the ability to sue companies for securities fraud.

You can’t blame the judges for making these rulings. They are doing what the law plainly tells them to do. But it does make you wonder who the law is supposed to serve: huge institutions that can hide behind legal niceties, or victims of fraud.

Sadly, these days, the answer seems obvious.

Heading...

Monday Morning.

Stick with me -- I was a Title IX girl, so not cheerleader material, but...

Hibbert, Hibbert, he's our man
if he can't do it, Rondo can.

Rondo, Rondo, he's our man
if he can't do it, Westbrook can. 

Westbrook, Westbrook, he's our man
if he can't do it... no one can.

Sincere congratulations to LeBron James, et al. and the Miami Heat for winning the championship this year.  One down, what is it ... five to go?

My problem with "King James" never was that he left Cleveland in such a spectacle.  It was the -- very American -- dressing up and promising that the money bought the performance.  Well it did, this once.   So much for letting your work speak for itself...  I don't remember MJ being known so much for his performance off the court first... he got the job done, then did the victory prancing.

But that's to take nothing away from the championship win this year.  It was a strike-shortened season, but James managed to stay healthy long enough to bring home the title.  I'm just saying:  he set himself up, when you rate yourself so high, it's hard not to be overrated, no?

It will be interesting to see if they break up the trio, or lose the coach, for next season.   I'm obviously no Mr. Predictor, but I still don't see them having years left together to collect hardware, particularly if the competition is up to shape in coming years...

I think Michael can breathe easy for now.
--------------------------------------------------------

In other news,
I could fill this blog with cute dog stories, being that Buddy boy is a sharp one, and tends to do observably funny things... Smart things, of course.

Mal is a funny one himself -- great guy, spells phonetically (verbal communicator), and it's fun interpreting his written work.  This past week, I told him I read someplace that they were soliciting dogs to work as the new Benji.  There's a contest on Facebook seeking a lookalike to the original.  That's our Buddy -- in looks, and temperament.  In re-reading though, I see they're looking for rescue or shelter dogs, plus, our Bud doesn't much care for crowds so he wouldn't be handling the adoring fans well...

I sent the further info in an email to Malcolm, and his (spelling cleaned up) message came back:
"No bucks, no Buddy.  Nobody pimps our pup."

at least, that's how I translated it from the vernacular...
---------------------------


Make it a great week, this summer 2012.

Breaking news.

Wow.  One of Sandusky's adopted sons reveals now that he too was abused by his father.  Talk about bad timing... the jury is out, so there's no way of getting this new revelation into their hands now.

The jury's out: so there's still a chance at least one of the jurors could have doubts, and the jury be hung...

If the son waited this long, and didn't want his testimony to be a part of convicting his father, I wonder why he didn't wait until the "guilty" verdict was in, fully secured.  Then, his news would be but a footnote to the case...

Now, if the jury comes back with anything but a solid "guilty" conviction, we'll be haunted by the news that more could have been done, more voices heard, more testimony taken, and an opportunity to stop a sick man was lost.

Hold your breaths, friends,
and keep following the journalists who are there.  Not sensationalistic coverage, just a "you are there" sitting in that courtroom tone, letting us all out here in America, listen in on what happens -- finally -- when we attempt to serve justice...

Keep up the good work !

Meanwhile, over at the Volokh blog...

Eugene comments on suicide bombings at three churches Sunday in Nigeria:

Atrocity has, unsurprisingly, begun to lead to atrocity, though fortunately at this point at a smaller scale, and apparently just beginning (which suggests that it can more easily be stopped); the Christian Science Monitor reports:

Frustrated with the government’s inability to stop a string of such attacks in recent months, some Christians responded today with reprisals, killing at least 7 more people….

Until today, Christians living in the predominately-Muslim north have mostly resisted being provoked to violence, responding instead with calls on the government to suppress Boko Haram and reestablish security. Today’s retaliation from some Christians is raising concerns that a cycle of religious violence could start in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

Timing, babe.

Today, Andrew Sullivan's blog has a lengthy post about the AIDS plague:

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system - but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These "OI"s were something out of Dante's Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my "buddy" screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can't tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

In this immense catastrophe, you had an almost epic tale: no sooner had a critical mass of gay men actually come out, established themselves in urban ghettoes, and finally celebrated their humanity and sexuality than they were struck down in droves. But the next part of the story is the most amazing.  We could so easily have given up in shame or self-hatred or exhaustion. But somehow, we found the internal resources to fight back. We knew that the federal government would refuse to react as they would have had this disease occurred anywhere but among homosexuals. And so we were almost a model of self-help, activism and empowerment. We had nothing to lose any more - and that unleashed a kind of gay power that is the most powerful reason, in my view, for why we have made so much progress so quickly since.

Thanks Andrew*, for helping walk back the Will and Grace myth. 

I think if we weaned ourselves from this celebrity spokesman culture, we'd not only have more attention to the little people out here who help the world go-round day-to-day-to-day, bringing about incremental change, but we'd have better art as well...

Nevermind the separation of Church and State.  Let's work to separate the link between celebrity and substance.  People spend their lives working in their fields.  Celebrities ought to acknowledge that just because they can act, sing, or play ball --  and have a huge influential following -- they might not be the best educated spokesperson on intellectual, scientific or political issues. 

A little deference to the "little people" working permanently in those fields, instead of a swoop-in temporary expertise on all issues by the good-looking and the popular, might go farther in advancing the cause.  Some do stick around and work the issue through, when all the popularizers have moved on to the latest "hot" cause of the day.
---------------------

* When you write about what you know, you can't be beat. 
Plus, sometimes less writing is more... less of the substance gets lost in the nonsense posts.

"Price Tag" attacks.

Religious extremists in Israel are accused of striking again, this time burning a West Bank mosque.  What's that saying, "an eye for an eye leaves plenty blinded." *

Good thing we Americans can still see clearly, eh?

"At one o'clock we heard screaming from the people of the village and realized the mosque was on fire. More than 300 people awoke and we managed to put it out," said Abdul Karim Sharaf, mayor of Jaba village, where the attack occurred.

"After that we saw the writing, racist writing," he said. "This is great injustice clear to the world."

An Israeli police spokesman said investigators were "looking into the possibility that it was a 'Price Tag' attack" - referring to retribution settlers say they will exact for any attempt by the Israeli government to curb Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack, calling the assailants "intolerant and irresponsible lawbreakers" and said they would be brought to justice.

But the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas criticized the Israeli government's record in prosecuting "Price Tag" attackers, who have set fires in mosques in the past and damaged Israeli military installations in the West Bank.

"Condemnation is not enough. He must stop this aggression against our places of worship and people by holding those who perpetrate these acts accountable," Nabil Abu Rdaineh said.
According to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, the vandalizing of the mosque in Jaba was the 10th time since 2009 that settlers scrawled hostile graffiti or attempted arson on places of worship in the West Bank.

Though Israeli authorities made arrests in a few of the cases, there have been no prosecutions for the crimes.

...

Scrawled in Hebrew were the words "Ulpana War", referring to a neighborhood in a West Bank settlement where Israel's government is to dismantle five apartment houses deemed illegal under Israeli law because they were built on privately-owned Palestinian land.

Palestinians and the World Court consider all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal. Israel, which captured the territory in a 1967 war and cites Biblical and historical links to the area, disputes this.

--------------------------

* It's akin to that "No Justice. No Peace" chant that periodically goes up, no?

Say, do they grow apples in Israel, and understand how one bad apple can cause the spoil of so many others in the box?  You got to sort properly, or else you end up losing the whole batch. 

Grab and Go.

This discussion -- amongst aging, allegedly fiscal conservative commenters over at the althouse blog, kinda cracks me up, were it not so sad.

Did you ever wonder how so many folks there have time to talk away, criticising the welfare state and going on and on about how independent they are?

Turns out ... they're all retiring early to grab their social security benefits while the grabbings good.  The hypocrisy of not realising that now they are permanently on the government payroll kills me.  You think they'd at least have the decency to cash the checks, shut their mouths, and pretend they're doing something productive until age 65, at least.

No, carping in comments sections all weekday doesn't count.

------------------------
Myself?  I like aging Boomers who are still doing productive work for society every day.  We need good talent, and hard workers, now more than ever out here...  

The generations still coming up, in my humble opinion, haven't been trained by family or the real world of hard knocks to fix, sustain, cover and create what our society will need in coming years.  (Too many were simply plunked in front of the tv, and live passively, to understand others and what is needed to make the world run.)

Especially when the workers of tomorrow will be expected to carry the burden of all these loud, still active (and capable of working), early retired Boomers.

I wonder though -- if professor althouse grabs what she can get and goes, overall will the taxpayers win if a new professor can be hired to do the same ... "work" (and then some) at a much lower rate of compensation?   Good riddance.

What Justics Scalia and I Have in Common.

No, not our bombastic intelligence. (I kid)
This:

Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn. 

(Mr. Filburn sued to overturn a 1938 federal law that told him how much wheat he could grow on his family farm and made him pay a penalty for every extra bushel.)

In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”

My thoughts here:

Thursday, October 7

So Just Overrule Wickard Already.

Mistakes happen, and to my law student mind, that stuck out as one of the Court's most inconsistent, poorly reasoned decisions.* Over-reaching for the conclusion you want -- in wartime nonetheless -- nevermind precedent.

I think I referred to it as the infamous Wickard in a Con Law paper once, drawing a word circle with a big question mark from the prof. No editorializing on law school papers -- strict rulebook styles to follow and all.

* A bit like Roe really which, even if you breathe a sigh of relief at the outcome, had to rely on penumbric reasoning to get there. Not a good sign.

----------------
Further blog references to the infamous case here. 
This was the follow-up post, a week later.

Wednesday, October 13

Nevermind Wickard then.

When I opined last week on the need for the Supreme Court to overrule Wickard, I'd forgotten how slowly those wheels of justice grind, and why.

Nobody likes to tell their elders they got it wrong.

We've seen reform in the Blue Brotherhood, breaking the traditions of silence that protect the bad apples. We've seen the Catholic clergy step up -- finally -- to address the fact that pedophiles are rarely reformed, despite what the psychological experts might have promised in recommending a career transfer, not outright retirement, or confinement.

But the boys in the Black Robes? Not sure if they're evolving as rapidly, though some say the inclusion of women helps -- because they presumably are better at admitting their error = less personally invested, not so driven to "save face" by never admitting you got one wrong.

Did you know, Korematsu and Dred Scott were never overturned by the Courts outright, as futher amendments and legislation voided the need. We talk down those decisions now, but the Court is still on record as having gotten it ... wrong.

So now here come the constitutional healthcare challenges. Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett says there's no need to address Wickard even -- they don't have to "correct" the robed eminences of the past, in order to stop at the pass this further economic grab by the federal government...

Requiring an individual to purchase a product (insurance) they don't use or need, solely on the poor prediction that statistics show one day they might need to consume healthcare services and not be able to afford them paying outright, is a gross overreach.

If you listen to Paul Krugman, you understand it's a cost shift. The only way the numbers add up is those currently not paying premiums and not consuming... continue not consuming but are forced to pay premiums to cover those with pre-existing conditions. But what if -- like so many insureds now -- behaviors change? Isn't that a big problem with the current system? People pay those premiums and want to get ... their monies worth. God help us if all those mandatorily required to support the system suddenly start making appointments and are now sharing those waiting room chairs. (Never underestimate psychology in strong-arming someone to pony up for a gift you are so generous as to provide to another.)

The Court can forsee the consequences of expanding the government's reach into our personal economic decisions here -- look at the effect of decades of entitlement promises now, the bills coming due, that has yet to be addressed before we promise more.

Professor Barnett, amongst others, urges the Court to shut the door on expanding the Commerce Clause reach, even if there's no will amongst the Justices as of yet, to correct the poorly reasoned Wickard decision.

Yet, like the government, Judge Steeh is silent on the radical implications of accepting this new doctrine. Imagine all the slippery slope questions in oral argument when the “economic decisions” doctrine is more seriously considered than it was by Judge Steeh.

Conversely, there are zero slippery slope objections to striking down all economic mandates that reach inactivity. Why? Because the individual insurance requirement is the only such economic mandate ever enacted.

So it is the only law that would be unconstitutional if the Supreme Court concludes that Congress has no such power to impose economic mandates under the Commerce and Necessary & Proper Clauses.

For all these reasons, Judge Steeh’s opinion yesterday serves to highlight for other judges, and Justices, the truly revolutionary implication of upholding this mandate without even attempting to deal with these implications. In this way, it actually contributes to the constitutional case against the individual mandate.

He's writing the way out -- should it come to that without political resolution -- for the conservative and moderate justices who understand the limiting role of government, and the need to protect individual interests from the promises, still to be fulfilled, of well-heeled "experts".

 

Remember When?

If you've heard talk that Andrew Sullivan seems to change his political mind more often than he changes his condom, you might be right. My theory?

It all depends whose weekend internet posts his intern underlings are reading, and cribbing their ideas from that particular day:

Survive? So how did we survive a contained nuclear Soviet Union and a contained nuclear Communist China? And yet this comparatively puny, creaking, theo-fascist regime threatens America's very survival? Well: no one can say we haven't been warned.  You want a return to Cheneyism in foreign policy? You know what to do. Vote Mitt Romney, for a real change.  (President Obama just reads what his people give him, off the teleprompter...)

Plus:

The video of the Daily Caller reporter interupting and arguing with Obama in the middle of his prepared Rose Garden remarks was a sad spectacle.  It also highlighted a core, positive attribute of Obama: his calm, adult and restrained responses to a number of indignities ranging from Joe Wilson yelling "You lie!" during his State of the Union speech, to Boehner's unprecedented rejection of a requested date to address a joint session, to the continuing demand that he "show his papers" and prove he is a citizen.

But, on a different tack, this episode reminds me of one of the biggest surprises and disappointments of the Obama presidency: how is it that Obama did not revive the JFK-style practice of frequent (and engaging) press conferences?  

and:

For two centuries people with every sort of idea have picked over Burke’s writings for their own benefit and justification; and the lesson of their success is not that Burke was mercurial and changeable, but that he was relentlessly interested only in what worked, what was best for the most, what was real and what was high-flown nonsense or worse.

Flattered, I am. (hat tip: Yoda)
Doubling down on the originality here, fresh -- not reprocessed -- thoughts, as always...

------------------
Btw:  I didn't mention this way back when, but VP Biden recently said clearly is wrong: people who weren't already inclined to support gay civil rights were not watching Will and Grace, who are now credited for being the...  change that mattered. (From what I know, the gayest character on that show was neither Will nor Grace, but the uber-femme male friend. I suspect many tv-watchers didn't waste time being convinced of anything by him and never tuned in.  And the white women, kids and gays who watched that show surely needed no further convincing to accept those types of men in their lives.)

No, it was something much bigger than a prime-time TV show.

It was the AIDS crisis, dummy.* 

It was the bodies being returned "home" to bury.  It was the photos, or real-life bedside visits, with dying sons, cousins and brothers who in the end took on the look of liver-spotted human skeletons.  It was the inability to continue hiding... people were forced to sit up and take notice.  You couldn't escape it if you tried.

Remember the travelling AIDS quilts, when the surviving friends, family and supportive others spent hours making, traveling and publicly showing remembrance tapestries, all to remember those whom they may not have every really known?  No possibility now of denying them; their horrific deaths "outed" thousands-- some who were co-workers, neighbors, brothers, sons, grandsons, cousins, friends, neighbors, priests, former school classmates, etc.

In their deaths, which touched rich and poor, black and white, gay and yes, even straight too, America as a whole was forced to accept their presence, and eventually, understand there was simply no going back to the old ways of denial.  Once people realized -- and ultimately came to accept -- the presence of real gay people in their midst, society (=real people) began to ... evolve.  Some people, and communities, more quickly than others.

How quickly we seem to forget, and ... trivialize, citing silly tv comedies instead of acknowledging what came before... 

Somebody tell Joe?*

-------------------------------

 * Nobody ever said old Joe was the sharpest pencil in the pack, but I didn't see anyone else write to set him straight...  (Probably the underlings were in preschool in those days?)


** I think he's been hanging with that loud Hollywood crowd so long now, he's lost touch with the reality of more quiet American life -- and why real people think, act, and yes, change their minds -- the way they do.

If you don't understand where real people are really coming from, why they decide the way they do, how are you going to effectively lead them anywhere in the future?  Serious question, btw.

Rubin again.

Like a female Jeff Goldberg,
she's more a one-trick advocacy pony for Israel's interests, rather than a well-rounded American political analyst.

Plus, she seems to confuse the desires of the U.S. Senatorial class* with the will of the American people.  Dangerous mistake, if she seriously believes anyone out here will once again accept the mindless march toward more killings.

On Friday, Congress spoke up to challenge the Obama administration’s participation in fruitless Iran talks. Even more important, multiple Senate offices told me it is full-stream ahead with the oil sanctions legislation.

...

Moreover, on the subject of sanctions, the Senate remains determined to move ahead. An adviser to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) was emphatic in a phone conversation Friday afternoon. She told me, “Senator Menendez is definitely pushing forward [with sanctions].” She told me that Menendez favors moving forward with negotiations but only if there is “genuine progress.” Sanctions are the means to accomplish this in his mind.
...
Bethany Lesser, communications director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), echoed this sentiment. She said bluntly that “everyone still wants the bill to go to conference.”Likewise, a spokeswoman for Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) confirmed that he is still insisting that the oil sanctions bill go to conference and be passed promptly.

The story then is three-fold. First, a bipartisan group of senators want to end the kabuki dance. Iran needs to pony up, or we should stop the negotiations charade. The president won’t draw a line in the sand, but the Senate has.

Second, the line is not as rigorous some would prefer, but given Iranian intransigence it is very likely the Moscow talks will fall short. Both Iran and Obama will lose the protective cover of being “engaged in meaningful talks.”

And third, oil sanctions are moving ahead. Not a single senator in my brief survey who signed onto the letter or who withheld signature on the grounds it was not forceful enough is willing to delay imposition of oil sanctions.

This week we will find out whether the administration comes up with a phony deal with the Iranians to give the appearance of progress and whether lawmakers blow the whistle after another unsatisfactory meeting. Then the onus will be on Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to convene a conference and produce a bill for the president’s signature.

But those crippling sanctions have come very late as Iran compiles a sufficient stockpile of enriched uranium to make multiple bombs.

We are drawing close to the point when Obama will face the choice he has tried to avoid: Act militarily, support the Israelis’ military action or accept the “unacceptable,” a nuclear-armed revolutionary state sponsor of terror?

And as we arrive at that point it becomes clear that the only reason for Israel (with fewer military capabilities than the United States) to act militarily rather than the United States would be that the president, even on the most critical national security threat of our time, won’t lead.

On this one, I say the American president is representing the needs of the American  people just fine, thank you very much.  If Israel's own military behavior has become overbearing in recent years because of the artificial imbalance of possessing nukes, then perhaps a bit more parity between opponents in the region is just the thing needed to keep the peace.   Israel is much less likely to take and act with force if they know there is a counter force nearby ready and willing to respond to defend their own people too. A Cold War at this time in the region would be welcome, compared to the status quo killing of innocents, land confiscations, and the continued expense to U.S. military "defense" to essentially protect neighborhood bullies.

Let's wait until Iran actually attacks say, instead of merely upping their stockpile to match the arms race the Israeli's unwittingly started by ignoring non-proliferation treaties meant to protect, especially, vulnerable little countries like theirs. 

Once they lose these special privileges and rules they play under, I suspect Israel won't much like the final outcome of the game, and will be begging for mercy, protection, or to return to a place where they simply were an equal in they eyes of God with other law-abiding nations.

Don't expect the Rubin's or Goldberg's of the world to have the mental chops, or pragmatic foresight, to get there themselves;  preferred treatment and special exceptions for your own are mighty attractive, up until the day such unfairness and injustice eventually catches up to your game-playing.

------------------------

*If you're into the polls thing,
I think most Americans believe Congress is even more "captured" by special interest and lobbying money than the executive office, and we've seen how money, money and more money poured into that campaign has distracted from working to solve America's growing problems here at home.

Change yourselves, before it's too late?  I'm not certain anything can be done at this point to erase the innocent deaths, crimes and bitter enemies the State of Israel has created via her ill-advised actions, but I do know one thing:  this is not America's fight.

We've paid enough in terms of time, treasure and bloodshed this past decade.  Not to mention real dollars.  Enough, say the people out here, even if the Israel advocates and the captured US Senate is puffing differently.  Soon enough, our public servants will learn to listen and wean themselves from the foreign dollars pushing these panics that only the killing of "other" innocents can  solve.

Fear not.

Meanwhile, at the U.S. Open...

those of us rooting for a true Tiger comeback were disappointed:

[Jim] Furyk, the only player who has not had a round over par in this championship, and [Grahme] McDowell played together in the opening two rounds. Both are similar players who appear to be a good fit for Olympic — control off the tee and a strong fight to avoid bogeys. McDowell referred to Furyk as a "plodder," which at the U.S. Open is a high compliment.

"It doesn't have to look or be fancy. It has to work," Furyk said. "And I think we have styles of games where we put the ball into play, we put the ball on the green and take our chance at the putt and then move on."

He'll be back one day, Tiger that is.

Once he forgives himself for his sexual transgressions, and gets rid of all the distractions in his head that keep him from returning to his game.

He's humbled, but he's still fighting.*  I like that.

Believe it or not, I'm in his corner.  He's paid for his sins, losing his children and wife, and the respect of many.  But again, I wouldn't count his game out...

He's a natural.  And our types always have it in us to produce at the highest levels. 

Sometimes, your timing simply gets off, and it takes years to return to top form.

But we always have it in us, we know, and I'm not talking golf here either.

"It doesn't have to look or be fancy.
It has to work."

Wise,  and timely, words from atop the current leaderboard...


--------------------------
*Luckily for him, there are no artificial, sympathetic "gimmes" in the world of sports.  It's a level playing field for all comers.

America is not Israel.

Another Jewish-American political pundit makes the mistake of confusing Israel's national security concerns with our own.

I think she mistakes non-Jewish-American's appetite for unending wars to fix Israel's growing problem in their region.  If the only persuasive tools you have are American-financed weaponry, perhaps it's time to reign in your own extremists and work in other ways for justice for all.

Something tells me,
what was missing in action in the analysis that led us into the hot wars in Middle East will not be forgotten this time around:  an honest cost-benefit analysis as to what this is going to cost America, and whether it will pay off for us in the long run to commit U.S. dollars in this way. 

Attack Iran if you must, but please, no more confusing what is good for our alleged ally Israel with what is good for our country as a whole.  (Let's learn from the Cuban-Americans about financing the fight for freedoms in your alleged ancestral homelands?  Of course, we didn't have such a large Cuban lobby, comparatively, -- just enough personal lobbying to distort reasonable foreign policy objectives all these years later).

Also, I can't remember a time when so many Cuban-Americans were so over-represented in US media in analysing foreign policy objectives.  If there's a run up to war with Iran (now that would be the big macro-economic event needed to stimulate the US economy, eh?), I like to think the American people will be wiser this time around in evaluating the need to "protect" our allies from their own actions, and that not all of us buy into the "Might Makes Right" mentality we're all being exposed to and culturally conditioned to accept as the new normal.

Personally, I think I liked it better when the Jews were a less militaristic minority (thanks US taxpayers) and were forced to rely on their wits and creativity to safeguard their own futures.  Nevermind playing the ultimate-victim Holocaust card either -- too many ethnic cleanse killings since then to make us wise up that neither this victim group nor that trumps one another, despite all the special classes, movies, books and political columns dedicated to that speciality.

Do Unto Others... and don't whine too loudly when the killing consequences of what you do gets done unto you and yours.

ADDED:  The pushback continues in the comments...
I think outside of New York and the East Coast, Jewish-Americans seriously overestimate the support out here -- outside of fundamentalist religious circles -- for continuing to provide protection for Israel.

Plus, as we become more and more anti-religion and anti-Christian, this notion that the Jewish people have some promised birthright, and are somehow more special in the eyes of G-d, is likely to fall.  We are against predominately religious states in the Middle East, where religious extremists dictate family policy, womens' rights, or the rights of the non-respected religious majority.  Why give Israel's religious extremists a pass?

For those reasons, I expect American and Israeli interests to further part in the coming years.  It might take some time though, for these Jewish-American pundits to catch on, being isolated in their own communities, as some of the more religiously observant, like Rubin I suspect, are.

Perhaps that's why so many conservative voters are frightened by the prospect of an independent, non-fundamentalist Christian, moral Mormon leading the United States, particularly if he is able to think independently once elected and separate himself from the overrepresented lobby interests who have been so costly to our nation, of late.

The Horrors of War.

Nick Ut got the photo in VietNam of what napalm can do to the flesh of children and other living things.  Seeing in black and white what we were really doing there changed the course of a war we couldn't win...

Today in the WaPo, David Burnett tells about being there, a 25-year-old photographer with a camera, who was loading film into his "stubborn Leica" while Ut got the shot that ultimately had the most impact.

In one moment, when Ut’s Leica came up to his eye and he took a photograph of the badly burned children, he captured an image that would transcend politics and history and become emblematic of the horrors of war visited on the innocent. When a photograph is just right, it captures all those elements of time and emotion in an indelible way. Film and video treat every moment equally, yet those moments simply are not equal.

Within minutes, the children had been hustled into Nick’s car and were en route to a Saigon hospital. A couple of hours later, I found myself at the Associated Press darkroom, waiting to see what my own pictures looked like. Then, out from the darkroom stepped Nick Ut, holding a small, still-wet copy of his best picture: a 5-by-7 print of Kim Phuc running with her brothers to escape the burning napalm. We were the first eyes to see that picture; it would be another full day before the rest of the world would see it on virtually every newspaper’s Page 1.
...
I think often of that day, and of the unlikelihood of a picture from such a relatively minor military operation becoming one of the most iconic pictures from the entire war — or any war. For those of us who carry our cameras along the sidewalk of history for a living, it is comforting to know that even in today’s digitally overloaded world, a single photograph, whether our own or someone else’s, can still tell a story that rises above language, locale and time itself.

...
In the new digital age of 1,000-plus pictures on a memory card, running out of “film” is less likely. But being aware is still what photography is about. Being able to see that bigger world and your place in it.

Friedman Advises the Arabs, U.S. Taxpayers.

It's funny.
The diversity bug hasn't appeared yet to hit the NYTimes editorial board.  With at least 3 (count 'em) ethnically white Jewish male columnists -- writing on politics (Friedman), economics (Krugman) and sociology (Brooks), and two Irish Catholic American women (Dowd and Collins) writing, they often overlap on topics.

No religious (or non religious) Muslims, Persians or Arabs are given a twice-weekly voice, so today the Jewish-American columnist writing on global politics steps to the plate to tell us what his travels have personally learned him...

Like Brooks, Friedman's attention is captured by American outsiders who set up a non-profit (which often pay their employees handsomely, despite the "non profit" tax-exempt status), designed to educate their lessers.  Sadly, these community organizing campaigns rarely produce sustaining results, as the President saw in his temporary work to bring change to Chicago's South Side.  I guess you could argue the environment would be worse today had these educated folks not brought their time and talents, temporarily, to a depressed region.

Where I must call Friedman back though, is on his plans for the U.S. taxpayers to finance the remaking of the Middle East -- he specifically addresses Jordan in today's work, where his jetsetting brought him last month:

A FEW weeks ago, I was in Amman, Jordan, talking with educators, when I met a young American woman with the most remarkable job description. Her name was Shaylyn Romney Garrett. She introduced herself by saying that she and her husband, James, were former Peace Corps volunteers in Jordan who had stayed on to start a nonprofit, Think Unlimited. It helps Jordanian schoolteachers learn how to “teach creative thinking and problem solving” in their classrooms. “Now that,” I said, “would be the real Arab Spring.”
...
The Garretts, with some backing from Queen Rania of Jordan’s school-reform initiative, designed a program to enable and inspire Jordanian teachers to adopt a much more creative approach to education. They also conduct summer “Brain Camps” for young students to hone their problem-solving skills by creating solutions for water shortage. Garrett told me one story, though, that really stuck in my mind.

“There was a 16-year-old girl in our Peace Corps village in Jordan,” she said. “She came from a very conservative family, always wearing Islamic dress. When you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said ‘doctor,’ which is what they all say, because it is the most prestigious job. After completing our six-day summer camp, she realized, though, that she could do something else with her talent, that she could be a change-agent. So she started a girls’ club in the village. [At the camp,] we teach kids the concept of ‘brainstorming,’ and one day we were walking together and she was running ideas past me, and she said, ‘Miss Shaylyn, I stormed my brain last night to think of different ideas for what the theme of my club should be.’ She eventually made it a leadership club.”

It was an example, said Garrett, of taking a specific creative-thinking skill — brainstorming — and applying it to her community.

Now, I'm glad the Garrett's traveled abroad and created jobs for themselves  to help teenage girls plan their own social clubs.  These days, simply embracing the "leadership" mantra -- declaring that your mission -- goes a long way in America too.  We tend to silence those who ask honest questions/ look for real results on the ground, and it takes some time for the performance measuring tools to catch up to these self-nominated leaders' " boasts.

In corporate circles, this is know as paying respect to the Jamie Dimons, compensating them handsomely for their failures -- even if it means using taxpayer bailout dollars -- then pretending these men  (think Donald Trump, who has played the system again and again for personal gain) -- are businessmen to be emulated.  The false commodification of values  ("IF I have money, I must be smart and successful, no matter my lack of results long term) is a lot of what's currently wrong in the world -- women's/girls' worth in many Western circles become reduced to pricey purchases, with women as flesh trophies to keep at home and pull out for respectability purposes (think, the Kennedy women) while our men's worth seems not so much character-driven, but "I got mine, more than you, so I win."

It's sad, and it's catching up with us -- take a look around.

Throw out the tests of character, the natural "morality" which indeed comes back to level plenty in the end, and the "scratch mine, I'll scratch yours" networking mindset, which causes so many of these repeat losers to turn up again and again proffering "advice", nevermind how many times they've been proven wrong in the pasts or needed bail outs.

Which brings us to Israel. 

Imagine if, instead of confiscating innocent Palestinian lands to compensate for the Holocaust, a section of Germany had been carved out for Europe's victimized Jews... what a different world it would be out there right now.  Instead, the Germans have successfully insulated themselves, having decades ago cast out their own potential Bernie Madoff's (and then some) who would work the system for their own gains, playing spoiler to those who respected the rules of the game, and essentially shorting the system in the process.

Now,
Mr. Friedman stands atop his soapbox, advising not Israel's taxpayers, but ironically America's, in how we can pony up to provide better opportunities to Arab youth.  Geopolitically of course, it would be wiser for Israel to take the lead in loving her neighbors;  Americans would be far better off caring about the futures of youth in Mexico, Central and Latin America -- our own shared neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, whose problems trickle across the borders affecting our own school systems and neighborhoods...

Friedman is one of those global  Americans, whose policy preferences for bettering the whole world have had definite impact here at home.  Negative impacts, financially.  It's great to want to share, of course, but if it means abdicating our own leadership and moral standing to lower ourself to the level of Israel's ultimately non-effective military measures of the past decades (violence begets violence, repeat ad naseum) ... well, I suspect we'll be looking to China's more successful government system very soon to learn how to care for own own people.  Forced abortions and planned family sizes to cull the entitlement mentality?  We simply can't continue breeding the government-dependent citizens at rate we've been going, not with the productive taxpaying base disappearing rapidly.

Still, Friedman is thinking of that teenage girl in Jordan, who wants to start her very own leadership club in her hometown, much like when school is out, the Boys and Girls Clubs in our own country step in to supervise, feed processed foods, and ... provide opportunities to children whose own parents are unable to provide these services at home.

According to the Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2012, “Earning a fair wage and owning a home are now the two highest priorities for young people in the Middle East — displacing living in a democracy as the greatest aspiration of regional youth.” Democracy is now third. And no wonder. If you are not properly educated, you can’t get a decent job and buy an apartment — and, without that, you can’t get married. Record numbers of Arab youth today are still living with their parents after college. Indeed, 25 percent of all young Arabs ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. What makes this cohort so dangerous, though, is that they are the educated unemployed — who are not really educated. Most Arab state public schools score very low on the international math/reading comparisons, thanks to a system that asks students to take notes, spew back what they learned and pay for private tutoring from the same teachers after school if they want anything remotely better.

The dominant trend in the Arab world today remains “education for unemployment” rather than “education for employment,” said Mona Mourshed, an Egyptian-American who leads McKinsey’s global education practice. “You have a teaching method that is centuries old and a curriculum that does not support students with the competencies they need.” It takes the average employer in the Arab world nine months to train a new worker to be proficient. The single most popular thing the U.S. could do right now to support the Arab Spring is to identify six or seven specific fields of work — in light manufacturing, textiles, services, word processing, etc. — and establish education programs that can impart real skills for those jobs.

Hmmm.
He concludes:

If we don’t storm our own brains and redirect our Arab foreign aid to education for employment, we’ll forever be killing the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda.

Only if the American people stand for it.  Something tells me though, the American public has had its fill of trying to make the world safe for Israel.  If we can exploit our own natural gas resources and end our reliance on Middle East energy supplies, perhaps Friedman might be more successful in convincing the Israeli people that it is in their best interests to love their own neighbors now, and work for justice and equality for all peoples in their region.* 

Leave the American taxpayers, and our children, out of it.  We have needs here at home;  we are primarily U.S. not global jetsetting citizens, and our business is here at home, not exploiting new unsophisticated foreign markets for profit. 

I wonder if perhaps hiring an educated Arab to the editorial board might be necessary to teach that to the predominance of Jewish pundits at the Times, who are all very well meaning, I am sure.
----------------------------

* I understand that even in these tight times worldwide, Israel's economy is booming.  Perhaps now might be a wise time to help them understand the American people cannot continue to spend our own tax dollars to protect them from the consequences of their own unilateral military actions, and they might indeed want to take the American Jew's advice to invest in people and peace, and not further targeted killings, settlement-building, land grabs, and unjust imprisonments.

I don't have much hope that the "teachers" will learn from their own past tragic history, but at least we can say they were given fair warning.  The buck, someday, will stop at our own borders, and eventually all will be called to account, not in shrouded secrecy either, on what they valued, what they invested in, and what the ultimate payoff was.  American independence -- despite some immoral episodes -- has stood the test of time.  We should allow our "little brother" Israel the opportunity to someday soon try to stand alone themselves, to decide if their brand of democracy is as strong as the rights all citizens here enjoy, regardless of their religious or ethic background.

We should have been using our American dollars all along to help educate Israel's Jews on how democracy really works, instead of adopting their "kill first, hold a trial later, if ever" brand of justice here.  We can talk till the cows come home about pushing this responsibility for peace, freedom and justice onto little girls in their little girl social clubs.

Or we can look in a mirror, Mr. Friedman, and ask ourselves:  Have I personally benefitted from injustice?  Have my values and policy prescriptions contributed to the injustice and killings of innocents?  Did I do more harm than good, as an outsider interfering into another people's religious, tribal and family practices?  Nevermind carving up their homelands and the arsenal of military products we've pumped into the region.

Since we've only the abundance of jet-setting, world-advising, book-selling Jewish-American columnists to advise us, with no Arab or Persian voices similarly represented, this woman asks:  When will the true changes come?  If not now, when?  If not our "leaders", then who?  The angry, uneducated children coming up who will inherit these injustices and ill-conceived values, and desperately unbalanced ledgers? 

That's an awfully big task to ask, don't you think, Mr. Friedman?
Back to the drawing board, because... after the brainstorms pass, it trickles down to the day-to-day workers, often soldiers and the lesser paid, to carry out these childlike fantasies that would have us forget past actions, pay off the right people, and lobby to continue this dangerous worldwide status quo.

We can't all  play at being victims to advance our own interests, afterall.  That falls to a very select, some say G-d chosen, set.  It's simply not in the majority of American DNA, as politically, I think we might be finally beginning to see...

ADDED:  A reader gently pushes back in the comments:

Mr. Friedman blithely states "..a U.S. drone had killed “the No. 2 man” in Al Qaeda. I am sure the world is a better place." what an abjectly ignorant and stupid statement, the same one used to ex-post-facto "justify" the insanity of the US attack on Iraq.

Wait until other countries get drones....

Lol.  So much for popular support for "death from above".  The bit about other countries obtaining similar technology and following our lead... I hope Friedman is listening.  The "Do Unto Others" spiel is found in the New Testament, not the Old, I believe, though I understand even Jewish law teaches that if you don't want actions taken against you and yours, you'd best not advocate them against even lesser others.

These pundits really aren't known for their foresight, as their championing America into costly and strategically ill-planned military excursions... over there in the past decade, has shown.  Doubt it's made Israel any safer or more secure in the long run, either.  Time will tell -- or show rather -- the results of so much snuffed out life and bloodshed for the survivors.  Actions have consequences afterall, even for the well meaning.
--------------------


Make it a great week out there, no matter what your work currently consists of or whose payroll you might be on.

What Our Current Leaders are Lacking.

Nevermind cheering successful drone strikes, or beating our chests at how we "got" bin Laden or Gaddafi (while turning our collective heads to the ... "situation" in Syria). 
If you want peace and justice, respect life.

Trust me, it will get us a lot closer in the long run.

Sergeant Dolfini said leaving Cody and his family was not one of the hardest thing he's ever done. That moment came a week later when he attended Cody's funeral.

"I went and went in front of the casket and saluted Cody," said Sgt. Dolfini. "I turned and before I left I stopped and I turned right to Tracy, Cody's mother. We looked straight into each other's eyes and I saluted her and that was so hard. That was the most difficult thing I've encountered in awhile, but I know for that moment in time that we were locked in each other's gaze, keeping your bearing at that point is a tough thing to do."

"Marines don't do this sort of thing for acclaim," said Sgt. Dolfini. "That's not how we're wired. It's not why we join. We didn't join the Marine Corps. to be rich, we didn't join it for fame, you don't do it for that reason."
"If we all did just something like that once a day or just something small just think of what an incredible legacy that would leave for Cody," said Sgt. Dolfini.

Upping His Game.

"What About American Workers Who Are Unemployed While You Import Foreigners?"

If I were working for President Obama, I'd be honest with him.  No sense in flattering the boss if it means ultimately the team loses, even if you're cashing in big now being paid for expertise...

Neil Munro's question might have been ill-timed, but it's surely a question on the minds of many outside the Beltway.  If the president is undertaking this policy move as yet another campaign calculation to win votes from a special interest group, he should be prepared to defend his policy.  Stay, take and answer questions.

He might have responded that these affected "children" are not imported foreigners, but essentially undocumented citizens.  He might have spent a moment or two with Munro -- they tell me this president is a smart man, can think on his feet, and has superior debate skills, so show me, don't tell me -- and effectively had a  conversation with the American people.  Why this move now?  Why in a down economy?  Is it simply a desperate move to counter Marco Rubio's appeal to conservative Hispanic Republicans?

The pundits will waste days debating whether Munro was rude or not.  What gets lost is ... who will pay for this policy?  Working class (especially white) young people, shoved to the back of the bus once again to make room for liberals preferred picks?  Face it:  a young illegal immigrant with a sad story to tell gets diversity points in hiring and college admissions similar to black students, whether their parents are working class, middle or even with professional-class privileges.

What of the white, ethnic (legal) first-generation immmigrant offspring?  They are paying, again and again, to support these diversity preferences.  By playing by the rules, by sacrificing for their own American dreams, paying for the sins of native slaveholders whose own white, professional offspring are largely segregated in their worlds, untouched by these remedial policy actions that deny working-class whites of merit today (even white ethnic immigrants*) to set aside spots for sad stories. 

Neil Munro asked a  good question.  I suspect, somewhere out there, there's a  very good answer to his question.  It would probably take someone experienced in reality to help the president craft an honest response.  Instead, he dictated and quickly retreated, leaving others to do the explaining.  There seems to be an awful lot of that type of leadership coming out of Washington lately, to the country's detriment.  Natives and newcomers alike...

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* We're all lumped into that "white privilege" thing, it seems.

Saturday Snapshot.

No idea why the remainder of last night's photos came out jumbo-sized*.  Blame the fertilizer, I guess...

(Just kidding.  Only the lettuce, celery and spillover neighbors were treated to the slow release pellets.)

Here's one from a better angle...


Rained all day Thursday.  We're supposed to be getting more today, maybe tonight.  Rain beats carried water any day, for quality as well as saved time.

So many things to do here these days, inside and out.  Hope it's drying out and things are growing where you're at, since it sounds like nobody in the nation is much hurting for rain these days. 

Make it a great weekend.

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* Figured out and fixed.

"Give Us the Gree-eens of Summer..."

That's collard, broccoli, tomatoes, onions, celery, brussels sprouts, lettuce, egg plant, dill, and parsley.

In that order.

Covering Crime.

Maureen Dowd of NYTimes and Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports are in Bellefonte, Pa. covering Jerry Sandusky's mass molestation trial.

Dowd:

The lead witness in Sandusky’s trial — the former defensive coach at Penn State is charged with molesting 10 boys over 15 years — was a nice-looking, short-haired 28-year-old in white shirt and tie, a narrow parenthesis of a man.

He seemed confident enough when he started, but, as he talked, he grew more and more agitated, running his hand and fist over his face, sliding glances at the 68-year-old, no-neck monster Sandusky at the defense table, staring at the pictures of himself as a young boy with a big grin and bowl cut, relishing the thrilling new world of football heroes that Sandusky had opened up to him. In the photos the prosecution put up on a screen, Sandusky’s hand was usually gripped, mano morta, on the boy’s shoulder.

By the end of his testimony, he looked haunted and acted jittery. His pain seemed fresh.

...

A string-bean who graduated from high school last week repeatedly broke down in sobs on Tuesday, recalling a similar pattern with Sandusky that would begin with blowing on his stomach. “I kind of thought he sees me as family, and this is just what his family does,” he said.

When he distanced himself, he said, Sandusky stalked him to his house and argued with his mother and grandfather about spending more time with him as he hid behind a bush. When he and his mother tried to tell authorities at his school, where Sandusky was a revered volunteer football coach who was routinely able to pull the boy out of classes and assemblies, they were met with skepticism. Sandusky, they were told, had a heart of gold.

Wetzel:

Tuesday, on the second floor of Centre County Courthouse, he [Mike McQueary] finally spoke publicly, under oath and in front of Sandusky, the man he stumbled upon showering and, McQueary alleges, sexually assaulting a boy in the Penn State locker room late one February night over a decade ago.

It came just as stories continue to break that the state attorney general is in possession of emails between some of the men McQueary told about the incident: Penn State's president, vice president and athletic director.

According to NBC, those emails not only show McQueary was clear in his reporting of the incident (the Penn State officials originally insinuated he wasn't) but that the officials made the potentially criminal decision to not turn the information over to social services or law enforcement in an effort to be "humane" to Sandusky.

That's what McQueary was unknowingly dealing with: a bankrupt culture he should've never trusted.
...
McQueary arrived at the court in a minivan driven by someone from the prosecutor's office. He was dressed sharply in a dark suit with a blue shirt and white collar and silver tie. He was accompanied by his wife and approached the witness stand with the intensity that made him a Penn State starting quarterback and high-level college assistant.

At one point, in the middle of McQueary's testimony, Judge John Cleland declared a 20-minute recess. The courtroom mostly cleared, but McQueary stayed in the witness box, holding the same posture, staring straight ahead, waiting intensely for his long-awaited chance to again speak.

McQueary is a key witness for the prosecution because it's almost impossible to believe he could have completely made up his allegation in 2001 only to have similar behavior later alleged against Sandusky by eight boys who are now grown men.