Obama didn’t kill Osama.

“Obama didn’t kill Osama. A Navy SEAL did, who, less than a month ago, Obama was debating whether to pay at all.” – a Marine

Oh, Mason

I cannot get enough of this car parked in Mason’s student lot.  Yesterday my Contracts seminar devolved into a discussion of which was the “best” apostle.  Today these bumper stickers.  My law school is special.

My law school is special!

Leash SoSo Tight

Does anyone else feel a little violated to learn that the White House chose Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation outfits?

Says the WSJ blawg, citing the New Haven Register (which culled from Sotomayor’s private speech by interviewing reunion attendees):

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whom we’ve learned likes to talk, gave a speech Saturday night saying her nomination process was so tightly scripted that the White House picked out her dress.

Obvi Sonia, J.’s confirmation was just a formality.  Still, isn’t choosing her clothes a leeetle bit too much?  I get that the White House <3’s her, but when does inter-branch meddling cross the line?

Of the nomination:

Meyer recalled that Sotomayor grew teary at moments when discussing the nomination process, but kept the crowd laughing. Sotomayor even explained that she’d gone shopping for clothes to wear to her acceptance ceremony, but government officials instead told her to bring five suits, one of which they would recommend for her to wear, Meyer said.

I feel a little like this administration is a grand hand holding the Ouija guide.  We’re spelling out a message the White House assures us comes organically from beyond. But the clearer the messages gets it’s becoming patently obvious it’s not coming from anywhere but that omnipresent hand.

Deference and Decay

Top ten signs the press is overly deferential:

The President bails out the newspapers.

Ahem.  Obama is like Self-Serving Smurf.  What’s frustrating is that rather than drown in his reflection like Narcissus he’ll just pass the buck forward.

It’ll be our children’s children who wonder: What did those old dudes mean when they kept talking about this “shining city on a hill”?

The Flaccid Fourth Estate

Last year I asked myself repeatedly why we kept talking about Britney Spears’s ladyparts.  I wondered how an ungraceful limo entrance heard round the world could supplant everything more urgent, if not more critical, than Britney’s hoochie-cooch.

The answer, of course, is obvious: We pay for it.  Why would we seek out nebulous concepts buried in spin when Britney’s right there?  And she’s underdressed! And now she’s shaving her head!

I’m fortunate to live in a place where I have instant access to the viewpoint I prefer.  There’s no question we have some response to what’s up in this country.  There’s simply not enough of it to counter the oppressive “act first, think later” attitude that prevails.

Right now we’re looking at a unified Executive-Legislative one-two punch.  Legal scholars have added their collective voice to this collective thinking, calling for the Supreme Court to move further to the left.  Indeed, a few major left-leaning Constitutional scholars have begun to call for a Rooseveltian Court-packing scheme to “prolong [their] majority.”  Even without packing, the Judiciary may well move substantially to the left before Obama’s first term ends.

Traditionally the media provides a sort of “fourth check” to balance the government.  Arguments in the First Congress surrounding the passage of the First Amendment suggest that maintaining an objective media is a huge part of why the Bill of Rights passed at all.  The first of few enumerated rights, critical to our structure of government, is our ability to criticize.

Checks and balances have more to do with sharing powers than distributing them.  But in this past year the fourth branch has utterly failed to keep the government (“Big G”) in check.

Start with the legislature.  We’re seeing some massive bills rammed through the works.  Our unified Congress has brazenly expressed its determination to pass as much legislation as possible before 2010.  If you check Drudge this morning there is a list of pork included in the health care bill that includes actual pork: $1,191,200 for “2 pound frozen ham sliced”; $16,784,272 for — no joke! — “canned pork.”  Not only are these government-expansion measures blatant, encounter little complaint from the media.

In fact, the filibuster-proof legislature has been using the fourth estate to hasten its expansion.  Right before the first (or second, if you count Bush’s 2008 stimulus) bail-out we saw a flurry of fear-mongering propaganda among the major left-leaning news sources to stir up reactionary responses to the recession.  Without that propaganda, popular resistance would likely have hindered the bail-out from passing.  Markets may have found their way back to their feet by now.  But because so much main stream emphatically backs our otherwise-unchecked government, we see deference where there should be skepticism from the press.

Failure to check the Executive proves even more dangerous.  Honduras (Zelaya) coverage [last summer] represented perhaps the most egregious example of the media’s failure to perform its “check” duty as Fourth Branch.  Countless networks continued for months to refer to military action in Honduras as a “coup”!

If anything, that was President Obama’s greatest coup yet.  Honduras merely attempted to maintain its constitutional government and dignity abroad.  But the American president sided with such revolutionaries as Chavez and Castro to quash the rule of law in Honduras with one rhetorical fell swoop.

When former President Bush toed the Rule of Law line the media immediately – and rightly! — pounced to demand adherence.  With Honduras we should have seen a monolithic media declaiming Obama’s actions and demanding that we respect the rule of law.  We don’t want an irreverent media; we just need a press corps that does not behave like the President’s deferential interns, making a Lewinski of the Fourth Estate.

President Obama repeatedly takes advantage of media deference.  Last month he penned a Washington Post op-ed filled with rhetoric and aimed directly at latte-sipping, arugula-eating elites.  Kudos to the President for acknowledging that the bail-out failed.  But a Sunday morning “fireside editorial” is NOT the way to address those most affected by government failure.  Karl Rove mocked the president’s rhetoric in a subsequent Wall Street Journal column.  This was the extent of the fall-out calling for more action than rhetoric.

Rather than spin feeble verbal circles, the Executive branch should release its death grip on industry and permit markets to work.  As long as President Obama continues to apologize even while persevering in using Big G as a reactionary tool we will only see more problems.  An active “fourth branch” media check could demand results and halt further disingenuous appeals to elites who don’t know and don’t care.

Finally, in the least dangerous branch, an overly deferential media failed to demand soon-to-be Justice Sotomayor’s perspective on legal policy.  For the duration of last month’s hearings we all waited with bated breath to hear Sotomayor betray her position on…anything!  She never revealed a single viewpoint, and her adoring fans in the press took it in stride.

Without a media check we will inevitably see the judiciary follow the rest of Big G to spin further and further from responsibility to the political process.  With the rest of the government so united, a weak Judiciary will be a huge detriment to the future of our constitutional republic, and indeed, to the future of our Constitution.

Now is not the time to nod sheepishly and admit that we have not read the bills.  The First Amendment may cover Britney’s ladyparts better than she covers them herself, but this was not why 1A was passed.  The media can keep the government responsible, but deference is not the way.

Here in Youngstown

In the 1952  “Steel Seizure” case, nearly every  Supreme Court Justice  weighed in on the state of Executive power.  Unionized steel workers realized they had unprecedented leverage to bring the country to its knees and scheduled a strike in the middle of the Korean war.  President Truman realized the invasion could not continue without steel, so he quickly nationalized the steel mills to keep production running.

The Supreme Court smacked the President for his decision when Justice Black determined that the President cannot act outside of his “aggregate” Article II powers (“the executive Power shall be vested in a President”; that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”; and that he “shall be Commander in Chief  of the Army and Navy of the United States”) absent explicit authority from either the Constitution or a Congressional grant of power.

Youngstown is a brilliant and beautiful case for a number of reasons, but at its core it’s a discussion on what the “separation of powers” means for our republic.  Perhaps the powers are better “shared” than “separated,” but two branches have declared in not-too-distant past that the President may do many things, but he should not be able to decide when and how to seize the factors of production.

Is it just me who’s getting major deja vu from this bill that would allow President Obama to take over the Internet during “Emergencies”?

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

The scary part is the President’s ability to determine when the “Emergency” begins and ends.  Privacy issues abound, but the scariest part of this bill is that we’re putting the “decider” power and the rewards in the same hands.  If I get to decide when to suspend private property law and I get to take that property when I decide it’s appropriate, won’t I be more prone to find the sky is falling?

It’s not a partisan issue.  Yes, I prefer a president who comes down hard on terrorists who want to blow us up, NOT on people who “spread disinformation” about White House pet projects.  All that being said, we’re asking for a lot of major emergencies.  Not only has the WH decided to micromanage information spreading on the web; we’re looking at potential H1N1 hypertransmission (that elicited executive classification as “emergency” in April 2009), and we keep baiting the bullies of the Middle East in ways I wouldn’t bait a bully.

Do we really want to nationalize the mills?  1952 was the time for steel, but now we’re working with information.  Three Justices, including the Chief Justice, dissented in Youngstown — taking away this presidential privilege was obviously a controversial move.

Executive power is a slippery beast, and more so in times when “emergency” stays so close to the surface.  With a united, non-separated government with a complacent media that refuses to exercise its external spank, are we really ready to hand over the last key to the city?

Health and the Postal Service

In an attempt to quell the uproar claiming that public health care will drive private providers out of market, Obama said:

[I]f the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about — if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems. (emphasis mine)

The error in this thinking almost speaks for itself.  Economist Milton Friedman famously observed: “The government solution to a problem is usually worse than the problem itself.”

Differentiating between right-leaning and left-leaning politics requires nothing more than determining how much each side trusts individuals to think for themselves.

Right-leaning politicians  believe that people are basically rational and will make choices based on what’s best for themselves.  Thus these right-leaners reject proposed insurance mandates as bordering on facsism, and fear that public health care will deal a deadly blow to the private market, decreasing the number of options available for individuals to realize their choices.

Left-leaning politicians believe that people are basically helpless and will not make proper choices without government assistance.  These politicans suggest that Government — personalize it by imagining Rahm Emmanuel at the helm and you and I keeping the system afloat — should help even sophisticated decision-makers.  Because after all, without the big, sloppy hand of government, who are we to know what’s best for us?

Indeed, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Even if an angel like Rahm Emmanuel takes the helm of a monolithic public health care system now, he will have to pass those reins on in the future.  The problem with the left-leaning vision of government is that the future always promises some man who is not an angel waiting to govern men.  To avoid leaving our well-being in the hands of someone who does not know better than we do, we should not concentrate that power into one man’s hands now.

Government, by its nature, makes mistakes.  I tend to lean right because I believe that people prefer to decide what they want than to be told what they will have.  Both sides have erred, and both will continue to err.  But to avoid turning our hospitals into a Postal Service, a Katrina, a $900 toilet seat, we should avoid permitting that kind of power to congeal into a mass tangible in one person’s hands.

Racism and “Whiteface”

Is the Obama/Joker poster racist?  The Washington Post says it is.  Here’s the argument:

Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.

The Joker’s makeup in “Dark Knight” — the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world — emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its “we need to talk this through” episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama’s association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.

Via Volokh.

I’ll be discussing a broader context for this in the next few days—I’d love to hear people’s take on this.  Here’s Reason on the same topic.

Hypocrisy and Politics

WSJ’s “developing news” headline right now:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke tells PBS town-hall forum that he’s “disgusted” by bailouts of institutions deemed too big to fail.

I adore Ben Bernanke—I even helped host him at Cato’s Monetary Policy conference two years ago.  But he endorsed then-candidate Obama when BHO was running in part on this (awful) bailout platform.

So, um . . . you only like bail-outs when you’re angling for a cabinet position? Keep it together, Ben.  Politicians may have a short memory, but investors don’t easily forget.

L’Affair Gates

Perhaps this has been said elsewhere, but leave it to Rich Lowry to make it both simple and obvious:

Here’s my column today. Basically, my take is that once you say race didn’t account for the initial call (as even Obama does), then it’s a question of how much obnoxious yelling Crowley should have been willing to put up with — and race probably didn’t figure into that either. It was Gates who racialized and blew up what otherwise would have been a brief, eventless interaction with a police officer responding to a mistaken call.

Obama’s getting involved was precisely the same thing. He racialized something that wasn’t racial to begin with. Even Gates’s account concedes that he came back out of the house to continue his altercation with the officer.

Call it “contempt of cop,” or call it pure provocation. Regardless, you can’t poke a commanding officer and expect him not to react. Two men squaring off in testosterone court is not a racial affair. To try to make it racial is just, well…stupid.

Rhetoric and Reform

An entreaty in the Sunday paper — a veritable fireside editorial — is not the best way to communicate with the American public.  Years ago I read a New Yorker article illustrating that “red” America is absolutely coincident with “hog” country.  Both have similar holes for blue, non-hog cities in the middle of vast, red, rural tracts of farmers whose livelihoods rely most of all on globalization but vote for the guns platform.

Editorials are fantastic, but there is more to this country than the paternalistic arugula set.  What we’d like to see isn’t a plea for latte sippers’ forgiveness; we’d like results.  Unemployment was at 7.6% in January, and we’re now at 9.5%.  This is not the change I was hoping to see.

Rather than quote at length from Obama’s essay (hint: Help me help you!), here’s the money closer from Rove’s appeal:

While in Moscow recently, Mr. Obama answered questions on whether his administration had misread the economy by saying “there’s nothing that we would have done differently.” Let me suggest two things: He could have proposed pro-growth policies rather than ones that retard economic recovery with a massive increase in deficit spending. And he could fulfill his promise to speak to us honestly rather than selling his proposals with promises and goals he rapidly discards.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote about words used in a “consciously dishonest way.” “That is,” Orwell wrote, “the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” Americans are right to wonder if their president is using his own private definitions for the words he uses to sell his policies.

Tom Palmer on the Honduras Coup

“Coup,” of course, being the only word for Obama’s ability to support the violent overthrow of democracy while maintaining his position as mouthpiece for America and President of the free world.  Unsurprisingly Tom Palmer summarizes the situation best:

Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?

This is another example of populist, dictatorial, anti-democratic thought parading as “democratic.”