It Can Now Be Revealed

Ted Kennedy died and made the long trip South. After his many years in the Senate, he expected as much. Beelzebub greeted him, and asked which sector of Hades he would like to enter.

“Whichever one has the hottest women and the coldest Scotch”, answered the Lion of the Senate.

“OK, but that’s a long way away, in the circle for Envy”, replied the Father of Lies.

Unfamiliar with the territory and unaccustomed to making his own arrangements, the liberal royal family member ordered “Call me a car”.

“Of course, Mr. Kennedy,” Satan said, and dialed his phone. “Oh Mary Jo … our bargain is complete. Your fare is here.”

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Permissive Parents, Leftist Children?

I have an hypothesis. It is that children of permissive parents grow up to be liberals, while children of strict parents grow up to be conservative.

I'm sure, before I even start, that if my hypothesis is true it is only a matter of degree, a question of percentages and leanings.

What I know for certain is that liberals generally act like spoiled children, and never want anyone to suffer consequences for their actions (nor to be rewarded for hard work).

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Hotaru Is An American

He can't speak English, and doesn't know anything about our history, customs, or way of life. In fact, up until now in his life he has allowed others to care for his every need and want. He has lived his entire life thousands of miles distant from the United States.

But Michael has one thing that above all entitles him to American citizenship: the blood of a hero in his veins.

That's him, there on the right.


Because Michael H Ferschke III is the infant son of Sgt Michael H. Ferschke, Jr., a Marine killed in Iraq in 2008. He ought to grow to maturity among those who appreciate the sacrifice his father made for liberty.

And his mother Hotaru Ferschke is just the one to teach him.

[Originally posted at 20090114.0902, updated 20090116.1040
Thanks to FM in comments, I fixed the stupid name SNAFU.]


w/t Dan Collins

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And They Say Liberals Are Humorless Curmudgeons

There is an ongoing series of posts at Talking Points Memo about which State is the leader in the important Government Corruption category.

Illinois, New Jersey, Nevada -- all of these are nicely corrupt little places, it's true. But one State towers over the others as a jackal stands among mere rats:

Look, if you want, the New Orleans bloggers can put together a comprehensive file for you. But you need to know it will be thick.

In the many categories that people argue for (cash involved, historical entrenchment, recent scandal, profile, fed/state/local), each of your wannabe states points out that the category they happen to be strongest in really matters the most. And that's why they're wannabes...they need special consideration.

Louisiana will let any state in the union pick the turf and the time. You want state level corruption? Local? Bring it. Historical tradition? Game on. Recent scandal? Easy money. You name the category, any category, and we'll have a big dog in that fight. And that is why Louisiana is the all time champ.

Speaking for the citizens of Illinois: we are not worthy.

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Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Chicago) Frog-Marched

He should have hid in Springfield. No one would ever have found him.

I was formulating a post on his idiotic insistence that the State of Illinois would not do business with Bank of America unless the Bank of America paid off one of his unions, but it appears I don't have to worry about posting that.

The corruption in Illinois is systemic and pervasive. Will it ever be cleaned up? Only when the citizens of this State decide that they're tired of it.

Which implies that they first become tired of it, which may be a long time coming.

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This is Not The Governor Rod Blajojevich (D-Chicago) I Knew

The problem: protect Barack Obama from the stink of Illinois politics.

The answer: claim that Barack Obama helped put Rod Blagojevich away.

Nice, neat, tidy, and like everything else Obama, a half truth.

Obama knew these guys were dirty (pdf), and used their dirtiness to further his own advancement, without doing anything to bring them to justice until he'd already been elected President. At that point, they became a liability.

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Murtha Attorney: Congressman Above The Law

Legal counsel for aged Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) claimed in open court that his client is immune from laws which limit ordinary citizens.

Murtha is being sued for saying that Marines involved in an incident at Haditha, Iraq, were "murderers" guilty of "war crimes".

From the via Malkin:

Assistant U.S Attorney Darrell Valdez, who represents Murtha, argued that a member of Congress is “absolutely immune” from a defamation suit because there’s no circumstance in which speaking to the media is not within the scope of a lawmaker’s employment.

That is, a lawyer representing the United States Government asserted that his client is above the law.

It's not clear from the claims if the Congressman claims immunity for all defamation, or only that against members of the Armed Services in time of war. In particular, the question of whether members of Congress are free to say that government lawyers are guilty of malpractice will have to go unanswered.

Clearly, according to the United States Government lawyer, Murtha would be free to allege that the lawyer in question were guilty of murder and crimes against humanity, but alleging malpractice and incompetence may be a line even a Congressman must not cross.

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LA Times Suppresses Obama-Ayers-Khaliki Tape - Cites Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

It has been known since April that the LA Times had a videotape (or recording) of Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn at a party for Jew-hater Rashid Khalidi. The Times story said

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

First the Times refused to release the tape because they said they didn't want to unduly influence the election.

They said they would not reveal their sources. Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

Then they told readers who inquired about the tape that they'd already written a whole story about it -- wasn't that enough? Journalistic integrity, and all of that.


But the story is changing.

Now the Times reports that it received the tape from a source on condition that it not be released. Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

If they release it, why, their sources for tapes of messiahs heaping praise on anti-semites would just dry right up.

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What Year Is It In Your World?

For months, we've hear everyone from Rush Limbaugh to CNN talk about the supposed "Bradley Effect", in which people tell pollsters they'll vote for a candidate of color, then don't.

We've heard questions put more directly: will Americans vote for a black man for President?

We've heard Barack Obama claim not to look like other candidates, not to look like the guys on the money.

We've heard Barack Obama warn us that other people would tell us that he's black.

The white Americans I know are sick of talk about people's skin color, especially when that talk is designed to make us feel as though it's still 1958 and the intervening 50 years never happened.

Look, white America is largely over the race thing. We got it a long time ago: people are people, some looking one way, some looking another. But still the Obamas of the world drag race into every discussion as if Governor Wallace (D-AL) were still standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse.

As for the Bradley Effect, I think it's a more general question of Ouija polling: the pollster asks the question and gets the desired answer.

But what do I know -- I think it's 2008 already.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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Hair of The Dog That Bit Us

The financial crisis: companies with lots of bad mortgage paper can't get loans, and the fear is that will spread to other companies, with no exposure to tricked-out crap mortgages.

But it's not happening. Anecdotal evidence says that people are still getting mortgages, people are still delivering supplies on net 30 terms.

The whole thing is a sham and a trick to avoid short-term pain.

Well, Washington and Wall Street had their party. Liberals made sure that people who didn't deserve to get loans got them, and got to live in places they couldn't afford. But that party is now over: the oil price run-up and the real estate bubble burst have signaled the keg running dry. Now people in homes they can't afford are realizing that they've been had.

Now the people who got us into this mess want to have the government buy up all of those bad mortgages, to keep the party going. What we need to do instead is suffer our collective hangover, and remember why it is you're not supposed to drink so much.

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Voting For Economic Self-Interest

Benjamin Franklin said"When the people find they can vote themselves money,
that will herald the end of the republic."

Commentators are astonished that middle-class conservatives seem to vote against their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans. Let's break it down.

First, we believe that, as the cliche goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The economy is not, as Marxists believe, a zero-sum game, in which some get rich only when others get poor. More often, either everyone prospers or no one does.

Suppose two people acquire wealth at different rates, one becoming only a little better off while another becomes filthy rich. The social justice crowd would have us believe that the people who are only a little better off are actually worse off, because their envy blinds them to reality. The gap has widened, which they take as conclusive evidence of injustice.

If you have no car, and someone sells you his clunker at a bargain price, you are happy. Then, when the former owner of your clunker drives up in a Certified Pre-owned Lexus, you're envious: you have a clunker, and he has a Certified Pre-owned Lexus. When is your car going to break down? Yet before you had to walk to work in the snow and rain, and now you can drive. You're not driving a Certified Pre-Owned Lexus, but you're not driving Certified Pre-Owned Nikes, either. You're better off, not worse off, and the circumstances of that other fellow are irrelevant except to your own envy.

And thus is it in general.

But back to voting: a person's vote indicates his mindset: is he voting for what's best for him, or is she voting for what's best for her country? To the extent that a single vote matters, a person ought to cast it in favor of something larger than his own petty interests, if that is defined as what the government is going to give him.

We have public schools. They should be teaching that Franklin quote, and from it the principle it conveys, which is as old as democracy. Perhaps then the people would know that their vote is an important choice between the health of the Republic the satisfaction of their own envy.

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Supreme Court Flunks Civics Test

This post is for those who are glad that the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay are going to be allowed habeas corpus hearings in U.S. Federal Court. Boumedine vs Bush (pdf) was an awful decision. And even if you believe that on the merits that this particular case was decided correctly, none of us should be happy at all about the way it came to be decided. The Supreme Court overstepped its bounds on emotional grounds, and it is doubtful that either of the other branches have the will to tell them so.

The government of the Unitied States is built on a system of checks and balances. One of the balances is that while Congress passes laws, the Courts get to decide how those laws are applied. Since early in the history of the republic, the courts have decided if laws are in accord with the Constitution.

Another of the checks and balance is that Congress gets to decide the makeup of the Judiciary, within limits. In particular, Congress, as set forth in Article III section 2, gets to decide jurisdiction (emphasis mine):

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and
those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original
Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall
have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

This is not a matter for the courts to judge. If Congress passes a bill and the President signs into law a measure exempting some class of cases from Supreme Court jurisdiction, then by the plain text of the Constitution the Court cannot exert authority over that class of cases. Professor Bainbridge agrees.

Although the law here is not well developed, I have always assumed that Congress could strip the courts of jurisidiction to hear even claims that constitutional rights were being violated. Not that that’s a good idea. But it does seem to be what the framers intended.

And yet Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority(pdf), says:

Our basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply.

But as noted, Congress does have the power to limit the Court's jurisdiction, and with the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Tribunals Act, Congress did exactly that.

To illustrate some of the arguments in this matter, and to show why those who side with the Court got it wrong, we take a little side trip to Geneva. A story in the Jun 23, 2008 issue of Newsweek makes some fundamental errors in its analysis, I think primarily because of its full-throttle Bush Derangement. The story says the Bush team "overplayed a winning hand" by, among other things, not giving enough rights to detainees.

Historically, prisoners of war have no rights in U.S. courts. But even so, they are released when the war ends. The War on Terror has no foreseeable end. What's more, since the terrorists don't wear uniforms, it can be hard to discern who the real enemies are. Under the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war have some rights. But after 9/11, hard-liners in the administration decided that terror suspects brought to Guantánamo and various secret prisons around the world lacked any of the protections of the Geneva accords because they were "unlawful combatants."

The Geneva Conventions are supposed to reflect how we treat prisoners we capture in war. At least, we should not be in violation of the Conventions.

The Conventions are multinational treaties adopted among nations desiring to retain a modicum of civilization, even in time of war. To that end, the signatory nations have agreed to treat four classes of people differently when captured during war:

1. Noncombatants - individuals neither wearing a uniform nor engaging in hostilities
   
2. Lawful Combatants - individuals in uniform and subject to chain of command, whether engaging in hostilities or not
   
3. Unlawful Combatants - individuals engaging in hostilities but either not wearing a mark or uniform or not subject to command, and in any case, disguising their combatant status
   
4. War criminals - those who attack noncombatants or use banned weapons or tactics

Noncombatants are not to be harmed or detained, except as unavoidable in the prosecution of war.

Lawful combatants may be detained to prevent them from engaging in hostilities, but must be provided with food, clothing, medical care, and be permitted to abide by their rank structure. They may not forced to answer questions other than to identify themselves.

Unlawful combatants are 'not to be afforded the same protection as lawful ones, so as to encourage the wearing of uniforms. As Toni Pfanner, Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of the Red Cross, said in his 2004 Military Uniforms and the Law of War:

The legal history of Article 4 (A) of the Third Geneva Convention shows clearly that only irregular forces must fulfil the four criteria in order to qualify as prisoners of war, and that the two categories were separated deliberately. Early on, the Rapporteur of the Special Committee dealing with the question of definition of prisoners of war specified that only militias and volunteers not forming part of the regular armed forces should be subject to thefour criteria [...]

"A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly (…). Fighters, who attempt to take advantage of civilians by hiding among them in civilian dress, with their weapons out of view, lose their claim to be treated as soldiers. The law thus attempts to encourage fighters to avoid placing civilians in unconscionable jeopardy."

Two years ago, the Bush Administration responded to criticism from Congress and Court decisions by granting Geneva rights to all prisoners, no matter if they were captured in or out of uniform. This fundamental error, disregarding the very purpose of the Geneva Conventions, led directly to the current situation.

The implications of the Court's decision in Boumedine are ominous. The Supreme Court has arrogated to itself the right to decide its own jurisdiction, contrary to the Constitution. The Court inserted itself into the conduct of our national defense, clearly the prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief. It did it in such a way as to extend the rights reserved for citizens not only to prisoners of war, but to those who by the Geneva Conventions are not even supposed to have the rights accorded POWs. And they did it in disregard of their own precedent.

But my guess is that no one will call them to account.

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Fisking the Obama Rezko Response

I’m saddened by today’s verdict. This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew, but now he has been convicted by a jury on multiple charges that once again shine a spotlight on the need for reform. I encourage the General Assembly to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent these kinds of abuses in the future.

I’m saddened by today’s verdict.

Why? As Ace says, a jury of his peers has found him guilty. The Obama should be happy that a criminal is out of Illinois politics.

This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew,

Oh, no? Not the one whose office the Obama would drop by just as -- by sheer coincidence -- Middle Eastern money men would be visiting ol' Tony? The Obama helped Rezko rake in donor cash, for which the Obama's campaign was handsomely rewarded. And that help buying his house -- in the real world, people don't do that without some ulterior motive. This is exactly the same guy the Obama knew. Liar.

but now he has been convicted by a jury on multiple charges that once again shine a spotlight on the need for reform.

"Reform" -- I don't think that word means what the Obama thinks it means. This spotlights the need to clean house in Illinois government, starting with the Cook County Board, proceeding through the State Senate and its corrupt President Emil Jones, and on through its U.S. Senators and Governor.

I encourage the General Assembly to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent these kinds of abuses in the future.

The first step they could take is to impeach the malfeasant Blagojevich. The second step they could take is to refuse to give Tony Rezko's associates the Electoral College votes from Illinois.

And how about Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fizgerald? Are there any steps he could take "to prevent these kinds of abuses in the future", such as prosecuting those who benefited from Rezko's crimes?

But then, convicting more criminals would make the Obama sad. Especially if it were the Obama himself frog-marching off to Joliet.

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Marine Acquitted of Haditha Charges

[Updated: w/t Gateway Pundit, via Ace]
Lt. Andrew Grayson, accused of ordering evidence destroyed in the Haditha case, has been acquitted. It turns out that the Marine Corps has a policy of not allowing images of corpses to be kept on personal cameras. Grayson was following the book by ordering them deleted.

The Court Martial must also have decided that Grayson did not believe a war crime to have been committed, because evidence of a war crime would have trumped the rules against carrying "trophy" images.

Congressman Jack Murther (D-PA) could not be reached for comment.

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The Fowl Return, Make Nest

Afters years of preaching a certain kind of "fairness", the Democratic Party faithful have seen the results. Barack Obama, whose name was not on the ballot in Michigan, was awarded 46% of that State's delegates to the Democratic National Convention, by the convention's Rules and Bylaws Committee. The committee decided that the results of the Florida election should stand, but that the delegates for each State would get half a vote at the national convention.

It was almost justice. It was almost the right decision. But in attempting to achieve fairness, the committee forgot to be fair to the voters. They also acceded to the threats of violence by Obama supporters should the Party "steal" the election from him.

At the root of the problem is the Fallacy of the Golden Mean: if two people disagree, then the truth is somewhere between what each says. But that is clearly not always the case; sometimes people are just wrong.

Fairness, likewise, has come to mean the absence of unpleasant consequences. But justice demands that we receive the consequences of our actions.

The Democratic Party has a means for making the difficult decision over which of their candidates should be their nominee. It's the nominating convention. The process leading up to the convention is not supposed to be manipulated, though no one with an ounce of sense would suppose it not to be manipulated. On Saturday we saw just such manipulation.

Rather than allowing the Florida and Michigan results to stand as the voters cast their ballots, the committee shifted votes around in an attempt to achieve consensus ahead of the convention and avoid violence in the streets. Hillary supporters were deemed less prone to tantrum, it seems.

It is doubtful that the shifting reflects the will of the voters in Michigan and Florida. But it should never have been done at all.

Because the primary process is supposed to win delegates for each candidate, who then go to the convention pledged to that candidate. Candidates are free to drop out and pledge their delegates to another, but those pledges are not binding on the delegates at the convention. After the first round, none of the pledged delegates are bound to the candidates at all, in fact. In subsequent rounds, all of the backroom deals and politicking can be made and delegate votes cast in full accordance with both rules and fairness. Eventually, consensus develops.

But by shifting delegates from one candidate to another, and from "uncommitted" to the front runner, the Democratic party has shown itself to be undemocratic, unjust, unfair, and unable to perform the most basic duty to which it is assigned: picking a nominee.

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Is Obama Trying to Steal the Nomination?

I'm sure no on on the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Convention will read this, but it's been on my mind lately.

I don't see why there is a problem with Florida or Michigan.

Either don't count them, hold another primary, or count them as they are, exactly, without trying to guess what would have happened if Obama's name were on the ballot.

Because once you start asking what the voters would have done if such and such hypothetical event were the case, there is no end to the questions that inexorably arise. If the candidates were on the ballots, there would have been more campaigning in Florida and Michigan. How would that have affected the result? Since even messianic candidates can't be in two places at once, there would then have been less time in the other States. But which other States? Given the amount of strategizing that goes into campaign resource allocation, it's not clear at all that resources would have come from the other States equally.

In fact, the question is wholly dependent on when the primaries would have taken place. With Florida and Michigan coming up, would candidate Obama have spent as much effort on tiny Iowa or New Hampshire?

And with the results of Florida and Michigan in hand, the candidates almost certainly would have approached the rest of the primary season differently, in terms of fundraising, advertising, and campaign emphasis.

And what if the States had not moved their primaries forward to January, but had moved them to February, or simply had left them as they were? When you start retroactively guessing what would have happened, there's no convenient stopping place.

Divvying up the delegates without regard to how the voters in Florida and Michigan actually voted is a grave injustice. Granted, it fits with the Democratic Party's practice of the use of superdelegates to ignore the will of the rank and file, but it's just not right.

Barack Obama didn't put his name on the ballot in Michigan, and took it off the ballot in Florida. He didn't have to do that. It was a political calculation with the intent of allying himself with Howard Dean, and against the people of Michigan and Florida. For him to now demand the support of those people is hypocrisy. He didn't want their votes before, but they're good enough for him now.

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More on Obama, Ayers, and Coburn

At the recent televised debate between Democrat Republican Hillary Clinton (of the New York Clintons) and Obamunist Party nominee Barack Obama, Mr. Obama tried to put his relationship with admitted former (but wistful) terrorist William Ayers.

Obama minimized the connection between the two, but then said something that still bothers me.

He did detestable acts when I was eight years old."

I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, a man who has suggested the death penalty may be appropriate for those who perform abortions.

The first fallacy here is overloading the word "friendly" by claiming that the two relationships are anything alike. Tom Coburn did not launch Obama's career in Illinois politics; William Ayers did.

Obama is trying to establish that the questions of his relationship with Ayers are designed to imply guilt by association, and to a certain extent they are. But no one is saying that Obama is a terrorist because Ayers is or was; they are only saying that Obama shouldn't hang around with Ayers at all.

The biggest problem takes a little thought. Ayers says he set off bombs (and not enough of them, he maintains) to call attention to the war in Viet Nam. Tom Coburn holds an opinion, and no matter what Senator Obama thinks of Coburn's opinion, Coburn has never once planned or set off a bomb to gain attention to his cause. That Senator Obama thinks that the two equivalent means only one thing.

Obama believes that terrorism and discussion are equally tolerable.

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Torture, again? Yawn.

The Washington Post is aghast that the President should assert the power, in time of war, not to allow the use of torture to defend us against foreign enemies. They point to a declassied memo, the text of which they may or may not have in full, justifying such methods as do not "shock the conscience".

There's a problem with that, of course, in that consciences differ.

But neither was the author of the memo writing a tutorial.

No sane person likes torture. No patriot wants to see his country defeated. So if we can avoid techniques which "shock the conscience", as the memo insists we must, we can avoid both torture and defeat.

And that is everyone's goal.

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A Human Pendulum

Fool me once, shame on me.
Fool me twice, the full weight of the law and multinational military force on you.

An editorial at NRO details the current, predictable situation caused by the continued power grab made by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends). Unable to win political support for himself, al-Sadr has attempted to use violence to get his way. But his amateurish and repeated efforts show that his real intent is to win power for himself, not to establish a secure Iraq. He swings back and forth, sometimes suing for peace, but only when his prosecution of war has failed.

The Dhimmocrats and their coconspirators in the liberal main scheme media has tried to spin the latest effort by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) as some general setback for the Administration's policy in Iraq, rather than simply a result of the continued power grab by this one guy. Now that he is standing down his forces, otherwise known as giving up, it's time to finish him.

For his latest round of rebellion against the legitimate, duly elected governing authority of his country, I think it would be a beneficial step for all humanity of Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) were made into a human pendulum, or otherwise were made to assume room temperature.

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