Lawyer-Wearing-Yarmulka

Received via text message:

"The Supreme Court has decided that the Constitution forbids the government from executing child rapists, but provides the means for the citizenry to do so themselves"

I say, an excellent summary of Kennedy v. Louisiana and District of Columbia v. Heller.

Charles Krauthammer points out that Obama has flip-flopped on several issues since the primaries (FISA, NAFTA, Iran, campaign finance, his grandmother), and no one seems to care.

Krauthammer doesn't care either but he notes:

Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

The good:

"Senator Obama does not support re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters," said press secretary Michael Ortiz in an e-mail to B&C late Wednesday.

The bad:

"He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible," said Ortiz.

"[T]hat is why Senator Obama supports media ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets."

Obama just wants to trade once set of government regulations for another. Big deal.

Full story here.

Whoo Hoo!

(Real commentary to follow later)

Full decision here

Three years ago, Jonah Goldberg weighed in on the matter:

After three decades, they’ve announced he’s not a Cookie Monster at all. In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, “C is for Cookie” has been changed to “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food.” And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster’s ontology, his telos, his raison d’etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.

If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn’t they just name him “Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie”? Conceptually, this is no different than the idiot animal rights types who want their dogs and cats to be vegans, too. Cookie Monster cannot help being a Cookie Monster any more than your tabby can stop liking fish. It is their nature to do so. Why not just declare that Big Bird is now an elm tree? If the ineffable, inexorable, immutable nature of Cookie Monster’s cookie-eating can be erased for some good cause, why should Big Bird’s birdness be safe?

Sesame Street and its defenders say they are just trying to do their bit in the war against child obesity. That’s nice. But at what price? The whole point of the Cookie Monster character was to have a character who was silly because he ate so much. If Cookie Monster were a Greek god, he’d be the god of gluttony. Wouldn’t it have been more honest and simply better to implore kids not to be too much like the Cookie Monster rather than make the Cookie Monster like everyone else? We all understand we shouldn’t be like Oscar the Grouch.

Who says that making Cookie Monster into moderate eater will improve kids' behavior anyway? Indeed, for years, Cookie Monster has devoured not only cookies, but things which merely look like cookies, including plates, Frisbees, and the moon. If Cookie Monster is so influential, why haven’t I heard more about kids going to the hospital after trying to eat plates?

Obama wants to raise payroll taxes:

It is shocking to think that we have a presidential candidate who would make the private sector $5 poorer in order to make the government $1 richer. More likely, given the calculated political design of the proposal, no one in the Obama campaign told the candidate about the economic, ethical or historical consequences of his suggestion.

It's really sad when both major presidential candidates are such economic ignoramuses.

Most troubling is John Mccain, who as a Republican, should know better.


Karl Rove sums it up nicely.

This past Thursday, Mr. McCain came close to advocating a form of industrial policy, saying, "I'm very angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they've made, but their failure to invest in alternate energy."....

Most dramatic change comes from new businesses, not old ones. Buggy whip makers did not create the auto industry. Railroads didn't create the airplane. Even when established industries help create new ones, old-line firms are often not as nimble as new ones. IBM helped give rise to personal computers, but didn't see the importance of software and ceded that part of the business to young upstarts who founded Microsoft.

So why should Mr. McCain expect oil and gas companies to lead the way in developing alternative energy? As with past technological change, new enterprises will likely be the drivers of alternative energy innovation.

From a comment thread yesterday:

DovBear: So declare them POWs and allow the Geneva Conventions to take affect. You can't have it both ways (and I don't trust someone who tries)

Me: Why the hell would you want to classify KSM as a POW? Why the hell should he be entitled to that designation if he doesn't follow the rules that classify you as one?

DovBear: Because we're better than they are.

I've never understood that line of reasoning. Offering your end of the bargain when the other party doesn't comply with their end isn't the result when you're better then the other party. It's when you're dumber then they are. Would DovBear pay for a car that the dealer did not deliver? Even if he's "better" than the dealer? Why is the Geneva Convention any different?

Apparently, a link from Bad4Shidduchim sends your sitemeter through the roof. The vast majority of you here are looking for shidduch posts, I assume. It's not exactly the main focus of my blog. Law and politics is. To paraphrase a female J-Blogger I once met, "Oh, I know your blog, there's just nothing I want to read in it."

But I do blog about shidduchim once in a while, so here's the complete list.

A Dating Post

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Shiduchim Etiquette

A Shidduch Story

A Shidduchim Etiquette Question

A Shidduch Story, Part II or Lying Shadchanim And The Lies They Tell

Lying Shadchanim And The Lies They Tell, Part III

Dating During Bar Prep

In Defense of Shidduch Lists

A Shidduchim Etiquette Question, Part II

Another question for the ladies. (Guys feel free to respond as well)

One of the no-no's of shidduch dating, is that it's not proper to take a date to a location in her own neighborhood, especially for the first date. I completely understand the rule. It's shouldn't even be a rule- it's just good manners. A friend once told me that she had a date where the guy picked her up at her house, then proceeded to walk down the block with her to the local cafe. Not cool.

So I want to know- Do you care if a guy takes you to a local restaurant? If you do care, will you tell your date? Or will you just sit there, silently stewing while hoping you don't run into all your friends and neighbors. Also, at what point would you be comfortable staying local?

I've also noticed that the older the lady is, the less likely she'll care about staying local. Is this true?

(Part I)

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.

-Justice Antonin Scalia

"The point is, oil companies have got to be more participatory in alternate energy, in sharing their profits in a variety of ways, and there is very strong and justifiable emotion about their profits..."

-John McCain

1. Why should oil companies have to participate in alternative energy? If they want to, they will. If they don't want to, what exactly is he going to do? Force them?
2. Oil companies do share their profits. It's called dividends to shareholders. It's called increased shareholder value. What McCain wants, is to transfer money from the shareholders of oil companies to other people.
   
3. Yeah people are upset about gas prices. But is emotion an effective method of government?
   

Dems withdraw global warming bill, (aka, the Liebernan-Warner bill), for now.

This bill is so horrible, I don't even know where to begin. It would shave a point or two off GDP. It would jack up energy prices. It would result in a massive expansion of government regulation of the economy. It would lead to thousands of Jack Abramoffs- as people compete for free carbon-credits. It would result in trillions of dollars flowing into the Treasury, open to all sorts of abuse. Oh, and it would have no effect on global warming.

Instead of hiding behind a bureaucratic cap- and trade farce, how about a simple carbon tax that would be revenue neutral? Every dollar that comes in would be offset by a reduction in payroll or corporate taxes.

If I were Obama, I'd rather lose the election than win and have Hillary as my Vice-President. It's perfectly fine for someone to chose their rival for the VP slot. Reagan did it. Kerry did it. But it only works when the VP is willing to wait 8 years for their turn. Hillary isn't going to wait until 2016 to get another shot at the White House.

...And thus the Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and political record. The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor. The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate. The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976. Questions about all these attributes (from foreign policy expertise to executive experience to senatorial experience to judgment about foreign leaders to the instructors he has had in his cultural values) surround Barack Obama. And the Democratic party has chosen him.

-William J. Bennett