In addition, Kirk* -- who appears headed for confirmation despite an admission that he mistakenly underpaid his taxes by $10,000 -- is viewed by many as a pragmatist who in the past has supported the notion of free trade.* - Ron Kirk, President Obama's nominee as U.S. trade representative
Steve Chapman puts an interesting twist on the subject in his Reason Magazine article:The D.C. House Voting Rights Act will give the District a full voting member in the House of Representatives. The problem is, or should be, that although the Constitution has provisions that allow various interpretations, the following is not one of those provisions:
The House shall be composed of members chosen "by the people of the several states."But the District is not a state. It is (as the Constitution says in Article I, Section 8) "the seat of the government of the United States." That is why, in 1978, the District's advocates sent to the states a constitutional amendment requiring that "for purposes of representation" the district would be "treated as though it were a state." Only 16 states ratified it, 22 short of the required number.
So the District's advocates decided that an amendment is unnecessary -- a statute will suffice because the Constitution empowers Congress "to exercise exclusive legislation" over the District. They argue that this power can be used to, in effect, amend the Constitution by nullifying Article I, Section 2's requirement that House members come from "the several states."
This argument, that Congress's legislative power trumps the Constitution, means that Congress could establish religion, abridge freedom of speech and of the press, and abolish the right of peaceful assembly in the District.
And, of course, Congress next could give the District two senators. Which probably is the main objective of the Democrats who are most of the supporters of this end run around the Constitution.
The rationale is that the Constitution, which provides for the capital, gives Congress the power "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District." Therefore, it may do just about anything it pleases, including give the District a vote in the House.Both Will and Chapman further explain that DC's predicament was not an oversight: The founders meant to leave the district with no senators or congressmen. If someone doesn't like that, then they need to pass a constitutional amendment.
But the argument proves too much. The same provision gives the national legislature "like authority over all places purchased ... for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards and other needful buildings."
If Congress can give the District a voting representative, it may give voting representatives to Fort Hood, the White Sands Missile Range and the Rock Island Arsenal. Which, obviously, it may not.
In 1850, California became a state. The State had no electricity and no money. Almost everyone spoke Spanish. There were gunfights in the streets.Victor Davis Hanson gives us some California history and catalogs its bounty: Silicon Valley, farmland, minerals, natural resources. On its own, it used to be the 6th largest economy in the world. He also analyzes what went wrong. Liberals have hijacked this land of plenty bequeathed to them by their hard working ancestors and turned it into a bankrupt third-world sewer.
So, basically, it was just like it is today, except the women had real breasts and the men didn't hold hands.
If we can agree that Californians have somehow squandered a rich natural and inherited wealth, what were the root causes of this collective suicide?Gaze upon California, America, a failed liberal experiment. Having destroyed this great state, progressive Utopians are now turning their attentions to the other 49. And that's no Joke.... less discussed is the common culprit: a weird sort of utopian mindset. Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright -- not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency.
Californians count on the wealth of farming but would prefer their rivers to remain wild rather than tapped. They like tasteful redwood decks but demand someone else fell their trees for the wood. Californians drive imported SUVs but would rather that you drill for oil off your shores rather than they off theirs. They pride themselves on their liberal welfare programs, but drive out with confiscatory taxes the few left to pay for them.
Californians expect cheap imported labor to tend their lawns and clean their houses, but are incensed at sky-high welfare and entitlement costs that accompany illegal immigration.
American consumers had been an engine global economic growth for much of the past two decades. For the slowdown that began with the U.S. subprime crisis -- itself an emblem of the American consumer culture -- to end, something will have to pick up the slack. A resumption of the U.S. retail buying binge seems not to be it.Either Americans will have to revert to their careless spending habits or other countries will have to pick up the slack. How twisted is that?
As for those who only read their news online, here's a news flash: News stories do not sprout up like Jack's beanstalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.
Reduced ad revenue and falling newspaper circulation mean that there will be fewer people to cover the same number of stories. In the middle of an economic crisis and President Obama's federal spending bonanza, there will be fewer watchdogs to guard the shop.
I'm with her so far, but she loses me with her defense of the press as it currently stands:
Newspapers are the public's referees as to which information is credible. ...when you read content in a newspaper, you consistently can rely on it.
As every conservative pundit knows, there is a special credibility that comes with being able to say, "as the New York Times reported," or "as the Washington Post reported." Even "as The Chronicle reported."
This is where she goes off track. Dan Rather's forged papers, NY Times' constant trashing of President Bush and Republicans and its eager horn blowing for President Obama and the Democrats have damaged the news media's credibility. That's the problem with newspapers: you can't rely on them. They have lost their exalted position as the reliable public referee.
That is one of the reasons people have eschewed papers for the internet. I know, internet news comes from those same despised newspapers and news organizations, but its a broader field. I'm not restricting myself to only what the San Fran Cornicle wants me to hear; I can go look everywhere and triangulate, picking up some guiding commentary along the way.
I don't think liberal bias is doing in the papers so much as our evolving reading habits. Getting snatches of breaking news throughout the day from the internet fits our lifestyle better than sitting for a half hour with a newspaper that was printed 12 hours ago (an eternity now). Most importantly, its hard to look like you were doing work when the boss catches you with a newspaper.
http://www.realclearpolitics.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96JROHG0&show_article=1
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.Krauthammer concludes, "Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core."
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Schizophrenic, practical joker, or just stupid?
