RIP Antonin Scalia, and the U.S. Constitution

RIP Antonin Scalia, who died today.  So did the U.S. Constitution.  The Constitution, however, has been sick for many years.  Here's what I wrote back in 2010:      

In 2008, the Supreme Court barely upheld the second amendment by a narrow 5-4 decision in DC v. Heller. The second amendment is all of ONE SENTENCE LONG and we’ve been debating its meaning for 220 years. It couldn’t be simpler. Yet it barely squeaked by with nary a vote to spare. A similar case, McDonald v. Chicago, is in the court right now and as usual, all bets are off despite that one, single, simple, clear, sentence. 

Now we have a new “right to healthcare”.  This week the president rewired 17% of the US economy with the stroke of a pen and a new 3000 page law.  Remember, the second amendment is one sentence long! How are we going to interpret our new 3000 page right to healthcare? Of course, unlike the right to bear arms, which hangs from a thread, the right to healthcare is not in the constitution. 

Nor is the “right” to Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare, but the court has never done anything about them either. These programs are like “deem and pass” amendments, unofficial changes to the constitution that we have selfishly agreed to allow because, hey, we like free stuff. All the while, we shamelessly stick our kids and grandkids with the bill, but we’re worth it, right? 

Roe v. Wade is based on another non-existent right, the so-called “right to privacy”. This right was based on a “penumbra” or weak shadow, cast by the bill of rights. Seriously, that’s how they justified it. The imaginary right to privacy was conjured-up by lawyers looking to find exactly what they needed in the constitution.  It is made-up. Yet that hasn’t stopped this law from surviving for some 26 years. 

We just watched the spectacle of the President berating the Supreme Court in his State of the Union Speech because they had the temerity to uphold the first amendment in Citizens United v. FEC.  Again, that was a narrow 5-4 decision on the really complicated first amendment, which is another behemoth at one sentence long! 

In short, rights that really are there, in clear language, must fight to within an inch of their lives, while imaginary rights, like the latest one, are cheered through with parades and marching bands. 

So I ask: If the constitution can mean anything, is it not really meaningless? Picture an orchestra warming up. There is no rhythm, no melody, no key, no limits, and no beauty. Just avant-garde progressive noise. That is the music of our modern US constitution.

Trump does Caddyshack!

Ready for Hillary!

There is zero chance Barack Obama will allow his DOJ to indict Hillary Clinton.  No, punishments for jeopardizing national security are for opponents only.  The rule of law under Barack Obama is that there is no rule or law that applies to his political allies.  But we can pretend... 

Ted Cruz is Awesome! XI

saw this tonight and had to repost:

  

DON SURBER: Thank You, Ted Cruz, For Helping Flint Out. How many bottles of water did Bernie Sanders send?
Well, none, but he has a new ad with Simon and Garfunkel music.
Posted at 11:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds   (from Glenn Reynolds www.instapundit.com)
Here's the Don Surber piece below:  
Thank you, Cruz, for helping out Flint

Having spent much time in January 2014 trying to score bottled water when the local water system went down, my heart is with those in Flint, Michigan, who are without safe water. Ours was from an industrial alcohol that smelled like licorice and within weeks it disappeared. They have lead in theirs, so the problem is a real nightmare.

Ted Cruz came to the rescue with 600 gallons of water. That does not sound like much, until you consider that is 600 people who got a gallon of water when their water was out.

From WJRT:

Senator Ted Cruz's Michigan office spent the day handing out gallons of water to the Flint community.

We caught up with them as they dropped off gallons of water at Carriage Town Ministries.

They dropped off around 600 gallons and cases of water throughout the area, delivering to expectant mothers at crisis centers.

Volunteers say it's the least they can do to help out residents in need of clean water.

"Senator Cruz has already made a very strong statement on this issue in support of the people of Flint, in acknowledging what's happened with the government failure on basically every level. And we believe it's our civic duty to reach out. We have to be willing to step up. And here we are putting our money and time where our mouth is," said Wendy Day, state director for the Ted Cruz campaign.

Cruz talked about Flint's water emergency on the campaign trail. While in New Hampshire, he said, "What has happened in Flint, Michigan is an absolute travesty. The men and women have been betrayed. Every one of us is entitled to have clean water. And to all the children who have been poisoned...by government officials, by their negligence, their ineptitude, there needs to be accountability as to why dirty water, poisoned water was given to a community that did not deserve this. Need to ensure there is accountability, clean water and clean air. Prayers for people of Flint, Michigan that health affects aren't as long-lasting as many think they will be. Needs to be accountability from the city government all the way up."

The EPA knew about this problem and did nothing.

And Washington pundits wonder why the people are against everything Washington stands for?

By the way, where was Bernie? Hillary? O'Malley? Any of the staffs of the other Republicans?

Hell, where was Barack Obama?

Socialists, Progressives, Communists, and Democrats; What are the differences?

Bernie Sanders is a socialist.  Hillary swears she's no socialist, she's a progressive democrat. Barack Obama swears he's no socialist either.  No one openly admits to being a communist.  What are the differences between these philosophies?

I maintain the above question is the wrong question.  The correct question is, "what unites these philosophies?"  The differences all relate to tactics and emphasis, not philosophy.  The underlying philosophy is the same in all cases.

Socialists, progressives, communists, and modern democrats in the U.S. are all Marxists.  They all believe as their foundational tenet in government coerced egalitarianism (equality of stuff).  The Marxist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.", applies in all cases.  This is not organic egalitarianism.  It is imposed by the government through force.

Democrats and progressives want to impose this Marxist utopia gradually and nominally through the political process, but they cannot reveal their intentions.  Socialists want exactly the same thing, only they are willing to reveal their intentions.  Communists are different only in that not only are they willing to reveal their intentions, they hope to achieve their utopia through revolution.

But in all cases utopia is the goal and it is the same vision despite some differences in detail.  Never is there a limiting principle.  In other words, how would a progressive know when the work is done? How would they know when the utopian dream has been achieved?  They cannot tell us.  

Progressivism and progressive democrats in the U.S. are unique.  That's because those terms relate specifically to our constitution.  The constitution is a formidable roadblock to Marxism.  Therefore, it must be relegated to the dustbin of history.  Progressivism means progressively dismantling the constitution.  Where will this progress end? Only when the constitution is completely dead.  It must be destroyed because it alone stands in the way of the Marxist utopia.

What makes America exceptional are the ideas on which it was founded.   Primary among them are the ideas that we are all equal in our rights, our relationship to the law, and the governments job is to protect the rights of the individual.  Marxism turns those ideas upside-down and puts the government over the individual in order to impose equality of outcomes.

So this is what it means when you hear a politician claim, "I'm no socialist/communist/Marxist, etc. I'm a progressive democrat!"  There is no difference.    

      

Ted Cruz is Awesome! X

Donald Trump won hands-down over Ted Cruz on the "New York Values" exchange during Thursday's debate when he invoked 9/11.  It was evidence of Trump's evolving genius as a politician. Yet, I'm a constitutionalist, and therefore a natural supporter of the less skilled Cruz.  Hence, this post is not about Trump's victory, but Cruz's adept "apology" to the people of NY after the debate.  He did an awesome job of turning lemons into lemonade.

Barack Obama - A Legacy of Deception and Destruction

I wish I could spend the aftermath of Barack Obama's final State Of The Union Address praising him for his public service.  Even I, a Classical Liberal, had high hopes for our first black president.  But I had studied him before he took his oath.  I knew his tactics would be Alinsky, his economics Demand Side, his government totalitarian, and his national security policy appeasement.  I have not been surprised these last seven years by Barack Obama.  What has surprised me is the degree to which the country has turned a blind eye and ignored Obama's deceptions and destruction.

If you've ever tried to build something, you'd know that it is much harder to build than to destroy. Demolition is the quickest part of any project.  Construction and rebuilding are slow and arduous. Ever wonder how Obama can squeeze in hundreds of rounds of golf, nonstop fundraisers, constant non-working vacations, endless campaigning, globetrotting, partying with Hollywood celebrities, and appearances on lightweight entertainment shows?  It's easy.  His project is not about building.  It's about tearing things down.  Demolition is easy.  You can do it in your spare time.  And if you deceive enough people, they won't even know what you are up to.

Here are the four main areas of Obama's deceptions and destruction as highlighted by his SOTU speech yesterday:

The Economy - The central deception of Obama's economic crowing is that he inherited a mess from George W Bush, he fixed it, and now we are on a path towards building a stronger economy.   Deceptions all.  He and the Democrats created the mess by advocating Demand Side socialist housing policies in the 1990s.  Democrats under Bill Clinton with an assist from Community Organizers like Barack Obama instituted those policies which redistributed risk from home buyers to the federal government and created a massive housing bubble that Ben Bernanke violently burst in 2006 under the hapless George W Bush. In the wake of the deceptions about this, Obama was swept into office only to double down on the destruction of any semblance of a free market housing policy.  Dodd Frank put the government firmly in control of all credit allocation, and today Fannie and Freddie own a larger percent of mortgages than they did in 2008.  National debt has doubled, workforce participation is at an all time low, growth is anemic, business creation is at a standstill, wages are stagnant, the poor are poorer, the rich are richer, The Fed and central banks call all the shots in the global economy, commodities are collapsing, and the world is reeling.

Whats more, new socialist bubbles have been inflated.  Twelve and a half trillion dollars have been borrowed from our children,  all student loans have been socialized, new socialist housing policies are being instituted daily, and even car loans are subprimed and bubbled thanks in part to the same kind of government pressure that led to the subprime mortgage disaster.  In short, the destruction of our once free market system is well underway.

National Security - President Peace Prize likes to crow that he's ended wars, got bin Laden, made friends with old enemies, and brought about an era of peace around the globe.  Every one a massive deception.  Wars have not ended, but expanded.  Our involvement has been reduced, but at what cost? The Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than at any time since 9/11.  ISIS has an actual Caliphate in Iraq and Syria complete with revenue, an army, and advanced weapons.  Death and destruction from ISIS are everywhere, including in the U.S. on an almost weekly basis.  Refugees have overtaken Europe and are flooding here as well.  Putin is on the march.  Iran is flexing it's newfound hegemony thanks to Obama's tragic trade deal sold as a nuclear deal.  The only democracy in the mid-east, Israel, is now effectively an enemy.   Every semblance of stability in the world has been destroyed by Obama's policies.

And Obama didn't get bin Laden.  Every one of the policies and actions that led to getting bin Laden were put in place by George W Bush and opposed - OPPOSED -  by Barack Obama.  His only contribution was to be warming the seat in the oval office when it all went down.

Political Tone - Obama sold himself as a messianic figure sent here to unite us.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  The Alinsky tactics are "Divide and Conquer - 101".  This has always been Obama's playbook.  He taught Alinsky in college.  He was an Alinsky Community Organizer. He has never strayed from Alinsky, not for one minute.  As a result we got Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, Black Lives Matter, open season on Cops, a weaponized IRS, demagoguery about Fox News, Tea Baggers, the GOP, bitter clingers, the NRA, religious people, the rich, the successful, non-union companies, etc.  The country has not been this divided perhaps since 1865.

Obamacare, which restructured almost twenty percent of our economy, was shoved down the throats of the country over the unanimous objections of Republicans and a majority of all Americans. Major transformative legislation had never been imposed in such a way without bi-partisan support. Ever.  In the country's history.  But Obamacare was just the beginning.  When Obama cannot sell a policy to the American people, or to their elected representatives, he simply executes an executive order as he's done on immigration, Obamacare modifications, guns, unions, etc. Any other president would have been stopped or impeached long ago.  But Obama is our first black president and he leverages it. He doesn't just play the race card, he lives in a house of race cards, and knows that no one will ever dare approach.

Which brings me to the final deception and destruction of Obama's reign - The Constitution.  Obama and his supporters were quick to tell skeptics that he was a big fan of The Constitution.  He'd studied it and taught it.  Why he was practically a founding father!  Yes, Barack Obama was an expert in The Constitution, but only in the same way that a bank robber is an expert in bank security.  He was casing the joint!  He had studied it's weaknesses, knew it's vulnerabilities, and knew how to destroy it.  Obama knew that The Constitution was a limit on what government could do, but he also learned that it was not self-defending.  The Constitution is not like the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones movie - it cannot smite those who seek to destroy it.  It is essentially a voluntary pact between the people and the government. Any determined totalitarian can easily run roughshod over it's weak defenses.  And Obama is nothing if not determined.

A great clause by clause analysis of Obama's willful destruction of The U.S. Constitution is contained in Senator Mike Lee's book,  "Our Lost Constitution - The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document".   There's too much for me to attempt a summary.    

The success of Obama and liberalism to deceive and destroy is due to a cocktail of history and culture that will be a subject for historians and political scientists for generations.  But regardless of how we got here, the reality is liberalism, Socialism, anti-constitutionalism, appeasement, totalitarianism, and Alinsky tactics are the dominant political movements in America today.   The media, Hollywood, academia, TV, and pop music are all-in reflecting and amplifying this agenda.

Anyone, like yours truly, who opposes this zeitgeist is fighting a limited rear-guard action which is likely doomed to failure.  Unless, that is, we have a purely national security election or two, and I don't wish that on anyone because that would mean we are under imminent threat.  Is it any wonder then that a guy like Donald Trump is leading a primary race and that his strongest support is from disaffected registered Democrats? 

      

        

Diet Facism

As everyone knows, the constitution mandates that every five years our government tells us what to eat.  So it is that we have a new directive from the Obama administration - the people who have done such an amazing job of making our entire federal government as efficient, trustworthy, and customer oriented as... The IRS.

Here is an executive summary of the 2015 dietary guidelines: link

Some of the key brilliance found within:

• Saturated fats (natural) and trans fats (manmade) are treated as equally bad.  This defies logic and has been debunked thoroughly.
• Unsaturated vegetable fats (many of which are highly processed) are the recommended fats. This also defies logic.    
• Grains, half of which should be "whole grains", yet all of which are highly processed in the modern world, are still being encouraged as a staple.  This would be great advice in the old days when a farmer grew wheat and then had it ground locally and made into food soon thereafter. But in todays world of modern grain processing this makes no sense.   Grains labelled "whole grains" today are usually refined flours to which they have added back the germ and the bran in proportions unrelated to actual complete grains.  Consumers will be hard pressed to know whether they are buying complete grains or reconstituted "whole grains". 

• According to the bureaucrats - who would never take the advice of sugar lobbyists - a healthy diet can include up to 10% of total calories as added sugars.  That's added sugar, not total! Total carbohydrates would be much higher given the recommendation to drink skim milk, eat lots of fruity things, and load up on pasta and bread.   

And we wonder why we have an ongoing obesity epidemic!

The fact is, governments don't do science.  Individuals do science.  Governments do consensus. Consensus is not science.  No one said this better than the late author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, etc.):

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Crichton was not referring to diet science here but it applies.  Governments are always telling us, "the science is settled".  They've been saying that about diet since 1977.  And yet, obesity rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed since then.   The original "Food Pyramid" that helped put the obesity epidemic on steroids in the 1990s is at the top of this page.

What are the odds these same consensus followers are right about any scientific matter?

If only our government would get back to the business of constitutionally limited government and leave the science to the few gifted scientists who can actually prove their theories.  We'd all be better off and much healthier.      

*If the subject of diet and science interests you, please check out my review of the diet documentary "Fed Up".  Link

What do you call a President who makes Laws without Congress?

Occupy Oregon

The hypocrisy of the Left is truly breathtaking sometimes.  Not that they have a monopoly on it, but they sure seem to have a Google-sized market share.  Take the current stand-off in Oregon where some rabble rousers led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy are trespassing and occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge in protest of federal land holdings, ranchers rights, or some such thing.  Lefties are all over the media (social and otherwise) mocking this petulant and pointless usurpation of public property.  Yup, those would be the same folks who were camped-out across America in public parks mirroring the Occupy Wall Street movement, which employed the exact same tactic to similarly useless ends.

Hopefully, unlike Occupy Wall Street, which resulted in lost lives, rapes, millions in destroyed property, and inconvenience for countless law abiding citizens, this Oregon tantrum will end with a whimper.