The Javelineer

There are those who doubt the existence of conspiracies. Enter Cass Sunstein, fascist.

Glen Greenwald reports,

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story’s Daniel Tencer.

There are two problems here. First, the idea that conspiracy theorists are ipso facto nuts. Second, Cass Sunstein is in the government now, and his ideas are dangerous as hell.

On the first matter, The government has staged attacks and led citizens to certain death to lead the nation to war. They also lied about it for decades.

The government intelligence agencies have planned to kill citizens to provoke wars. Some 9/11 commissioners and staffers suspected government deception. McCarthy was right, there really was a conspiracy in the intelligence agencies led by Soviet moles in the US government.

Pajamas TV reports that there very well may be an Islamist conspiracy, led by top intel officials in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Consider the contradiction. We have top conservative media reporting on government conspiracies, even as top conservative media deny the existence of government conspiracies. That’s more insane than the truther movement has ever been.

It’s like the people denying the existence of a movement for global government, even while the President of the UN calls for global government and the Copenhagen treaty mentions “global government” 24 times and “global tax” 21 times. Give me a freakin’ break.

There really have been conspiracies in the government to kill citizens. There’s nothing crazy about thinking it could happen again.

All conservatives should be very skeptical of government power, especially the power invested in a standing army, standing intelligence agencies, and federalized police forces. This view is well-backed by the Founder’s, the Constitution, by long American customs, and by prudence itself.

If you ever doubted it, just read Sunstein’s documents. He’s in government now. If he attempts to enact the things he wrote in that report, it’ll be treason.

Thomas Sowell explains why Obama’s foreign policy sucks.

In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became President of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the “concessions and smiles” approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Western Europe has gone down that path before us but we now seem to be trying to catch up [...]

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about “upholding the law” but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and
shot– and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many “rights” have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

I can hardly believe this.

Election gains in some of these affluent regions have helped give Democrats big majorities in the House and Senate. Of the 25 richest districts, 14 are represented by Democrats, according to Congressional Quarterly. In 1995, Democrats represented just five of those districts.

Recently elected Democrats from higher-income areas also have been cautious about legislation that would make it easier for labor unions to organize, and about legislation imposing tough new rules on banks. Republicans have savaged the new Democrats for supporting legislation to stem global warming by capping greenhouse-gas emissions, then forcing polluters to purchase and trade emissions credits — a “cap and tax,” the GOP says.

But planned tax increases are likely the source of the toughest intra-Democratic tensions.

Let me get this straight. A bunch of rich people voted for Obama, and now they are shocked -shocked! – to discover O! wants to raise taxes, over-regulate business, and punish productivity and entrepreneurship? Seriously? They didn’t know? ROFLMAO

Liberal rich people are stupid. There’s just no other explanation. That’s strange I can believe in.

Interesting. The guy has standing. The Constitution is unambiguously clear on the matter. I’m not very energized about it, but if the facts hold true, the Congress can’t just ignore parts of the supreme law.

The Judicial Watch lawsuit, filed on behalf of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and State Department employee David C. Rodearmel, maintains that the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution prohibits Mrs. Clinton from serving as Secretary of State until January 2013, and that Mr. Rodearmel cannot be forced to serve under the former U.S. Senator, as it would violate the oath he took as a Foreign Service Officer in 1991 to “support and defend” and “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution of the United States (Rodearmel v. Clinton, et al., (D. District of Columbia)) [...]

According to Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution: “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time.” The text of the provision is an absolute prohibition and does not allow for any exceptions. However, as noted in the motion, “the ‘compensation and other emoluments’ of the office of the U.S. Secretary of State increased during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, including as many as three times during the second, six-year term to which she was elected.” [...]

“Congress must not be allowed to do an end run around the U.S. Constitution,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Hillary Clinton is ineligible to serve as Secretary of State until 2013. The Constitution is crystal clear on this point. We hope the court puts a stop to this naked attempt to circumvent the Constitution in the name of political expediency.”

CNS tells a horror story that scares the piss out of me.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

I see. Other people read the bills. Um. That’s what we elect Representatives for, Mr. Hoyer.

It’s very simple. If a bill is too complicated for our Representatives to read (much less actually understand), it is too complicated to be a law.

Think about it. The law is so cumbersome these Democratic asswipes can’t even read it! They can’t even read it. Yet, Democrats want to allow the government to enforce the law on the citizenry.

That is quite simply insane. In-freakin’-sane.

(h/t Michelle Malkin)

James Taranto writes about The Biden Curve.

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing [...]

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem [say liberal pundits] is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking. [...]

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

Something uglier. Hmmm. What could it be? The Socialism of Fools.

Anti-Semitism, someone once said, is the socialism of fools: but he might just as well have said that socialism is anti-Semitism with the Jews left out, for both doctrines appeal to the same resentments, hatreds, and style of thought. It was no accident, as the Marxists used to put it, that Marx himself, though Jewish, was a ferocious anti-Semite who accepted the ancient stereotype of the Jew as a bloodsucking usurer. Socialist and anti-Semite alike seek an all-encompassing explanation of the imperfection of the world, and for the persistence of poverty and injustice: and each thinks he has found an answer.

Insty links to a sobering story in The Telegraph about our fiscal future.

The US economy is lurching towards crisis with long-term interest rates on course to double, crippling the country’s ability to pay its debts and potentially plunging it into another recession, according to a study by the US’s own central bank

As I’ve written before, the Fed is skewered upon the horns of a dilemma. The Telegraph article understands the problem as government debt. They are correct. But the rise in interest rates is a result of debt combined with the inflationary bailouts of Bush and Obama.

On one horn, the Fed can’t lower interest rates for fear of creating even more inflation, bleeding the citizenry of their wealth. On the other horn, the Fed can’t raise interest rates for fear of illiquidity, bleeding entrepreneurs of financing. But maybe there is a middle way between the horns. Ben Bernanke asks a liberal congress for fiscal conservatism. Fat chance with the fat cats.

The budget deficit this year is projected to reach $1.85 trillion, equivalent to 13 percent of the nation’s economy, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

“Either cuts in spending or increases in taxes will be necessary to stabilize the fiscal situation,” Bernanke said in response to a question. “The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.”

Bernanke speaks as if he could monetize the debt. How long does he think foreign central banks will prop up the dollar? Perhaps anticipating inflation scares, the US government no longer even reports M3. Shadow Government Statistics estimates the rate of growth in M3.

Their estimates show a huge, compounding rate of growth in the money supply between early 2005 and early 2008.

Inflation favors a debtor and harms a creditor, because the debtor can pay back the dollars owed in the less valuable inflated currency. Suppose you loan ten dollars to a friend. Before he were to pay, inflation devalues the dollar by 90%. Now your friend pays you back, giving you ten dollars. Before the trade, ten dollars would have paid for lunch, but now it wouldn’t even buy a cup of coffee. The debtor comes out ahead, because he gets the pre-inflated use of the money.

The US is debtor nation. We like inflation. Our creditors don’t. With the spectre of hyperinflation stalking every Fed policy move, the Chairman wants to ensure the blame lands on Congress. Bernanke plays the hero, refusing to monetize federal debt that he knows no foreign bank will buy anyway! In other words, he refuses to monetize debt that he can’t monetize. Whoopty freakin’ do. And these are the smart guys running stuff.

There is no middle way. Foreign banks are going to stop buying our debt. It’s only a matter of time. When that happens the dollar is going to crash, leading to massive inflation.

The French detest the habit of the English to make a virtue of necessity. Except for a preternatural desire for their women, and for some lovers of France who I wish would check me out like a chilled juice bottle, ahem, with those exceptions in mind, I am no Francophile. Still, Bernanke’s virtue of necessity is a rather sickening cowardice. It’s more like unthinking chest beating than sprezzatura.

Damn the architects of the bailout. All of them. They have fashioned the instruments of our economic decline. Now they act surprised to find the instruments in their own hands. Pfft.

Michelle Malkin links to this video of Sen. John Cornyn getting booed by Tea Party protesters.

You know. I’ve worked to get Republicans elected for twenty years or so. I live in Dallas. Cornyn is my senator. We can do better for Texas.

Cornyn favors amnesty for illegal aliens. Cornyn sponsored the no-talent ass-clownery called the SKIL Bill. He wanted to remove limits on H-1B and screw American tech workers. A few months later, Cornyn voted to bailout fat cat Wall Street bankers and leave middles class taxpayers holding the bill. What a jerk.

We’re going to remove this crumby legislator from office. We’re replacing Cornyn with an ideological conservative who cares about his fellow citizens and their livelihoods. Problem is, who’s it gonna’ be?

Kimberley A. Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal about The Climate Change Climate Change.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

There has never been a consensus on global warming. How can a nonexistent consensus collapse? People are simply discovering the lie, and they are angry at being lied to. Most of the global warming science used to fashion environmental laws is fake science using intentionally faked data gathering methods. Without a doubt, scientific study of global warming is the largest and worst abuse of science in history.

Having perpetrated such widespread fraud and mendacity, global warming alarmist have done incalculable harm to the repute of science itself. Long-term, climate science malfeasance will have worse effects than stupid regulatory proposals. When scientists complain of popular disregard for the findings of science, they can only blame themselves.

Related: Gore’s main scientific ally, Richard Hansen, faked temperature data
Related: Chicken: Gore wont debate imminent climate scientist (Gore’s hyperbole approaches insanity)
Related: Treason against reason?
Related: Obama’s war on science
Related: Greenhouse gases do not cause global warming. Global warming causes greenhouse gases.

Update: Batman’s a scientist
Update: Data is supposed to validate models, not the other way around

J.C. Arenas writes at the American Thinker.

With their decision

Once upon a time the press wasn’t simply an advocate for a particular brand of politics, it was their responsibility to be a watchdog of our government and report the facts and subsequently the general public could weigh those facts and form some sort of opinion.

In the Age of Obama, that idea is as foreign as the Votian language.

Today, our established media not only decide what should be constituted as news but also determine what news is factual.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a five part video series on Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson interviews Charles Kesler. It explains the Progressive project as a movement to remake the Constitution into a government that “leads” people, a radical departure from the traditional American idea that government should leave people alone.

In particular, the liberal wants to eliminate the separation of powers and limited government. I will write a post tomorrow about how the agency system accomplishes this goal. Progressives also re-define rights in positive terms, rather than the negative terms in the traditional American view.

(video links below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Dudley and Jeff Rosen write in the Boston Globe about the hidden costs imposed by federal  agencies.

Unlike spending and associated taxes, which are subject to approval by both the legislative and executive branches and are visible to the public, regulatory decisions don’t face the same checks and balances and their effects are far less transparent. They represent a hidden tax, not easy to measure and track, but borne by American taxpayers, consumers, and workers nevertheless. And often, regulations benefit vocal, well-organized interest groups at the expense of the broader public.

Take, for example, the administration’s recent actions to impose Davis-Bacon wage requirements on a wide range of stimulus projects, which will ensure higher-than-market wage rates for a few, and increase costs for all taxpayers. Or, the delay of the Interior Department’s five-year plan for off-shore oil leases, and cancellation of 70 other oil leases on the mainland. The termination of a cross-border trucking arrangement with Mexico may please certain interest groups, but has already led to trade sanctions and will harm imports and exports that benefit American consumers.

In its first 100 days, the Obama administration completed 23 economically significant proposed and final regulations, eight more than the Bush administration during the same period (and more than any president before him).

Some of these regulations will have significant effects, such as two new final regulations from the Department of Transportation. The DOT estimates that its new regulations tightening the fuel economy of new cars and trucks will cost consumers more than $1 billion for model year 2011 vehicles and its new rules requiring stronger vehicle roofs will add another $1 billion or more per year. The Labor Department suspended regulations providing for the employment of temporary agricultural workers. The Department of Interior issued final regulations broadening requirements for its staff to be consulted on any project that might increase greenhouse gas emissions (though ironically, on May 8, it announced it would retain a separate Bush-era regulation circumscribing the role of its staff on such projects). And if Congress doesn’t intervene, EPA’s proposal to regulate global warming under the Clean Air Act could potentially lead to the most far-reaching and costly regulation ever, subjecting tens of thousands of new facilities to such EPA regulations for the first time, most of them small businesses operating in every part of the country.

The Administrative State is dangerous. Tomorrow, I will write a post explaining why.

(h/t Don Boudreaux)

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s distortions and policy reversals.

Why has President Obama developed a general disregard for the truth, in a manner far beyond typical politicians who run one way and govern another, or hide failures and broadcast successes?

First, he has confidence that the media will not be censorious and will simply accept his fiction as fact. A satirist, after all, could not make up anything to match the obsequious journalists who bow to their president, proclaim him a god, and receive sexual-like tingles up their appendages.

Second, Obama is a postmodernist. He believes that all truth is relative, and that assertions gain or lose credibility depending on the race, class, and gender of the speaker. In Obama’s case, his misleading narrative is intended for higher purposes. Thus it is truthful in a way that accurate facts offered by someone of a different, more privileged class and race might not be.

Third, Obama talks more than almost any prior president, weighing in on issues from Stephen Colbert’s haircut, to Sean Hannity’s hostility, to the need to wash our hands. In Obama’s way of thinking, his receptive youthful audiences are proof of his righteousness and wisdom – and empower him to pontificate on matters he knows nothing about.

Finally, our president is a product of a multicultural education: Facts either cannot be ascertained or do not matter, given that the overriding concern is to promote an equality of result among various contending groups. That is best done by inflating the aspirations of those without power, and deflating the “dominant narratives” of those with it.

The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.

The media are complicit in Obama’s War on Truth.

Read the rest of this entry »

The gray bars are actual deficits under Bush. The red bars are projected deficits under Obama.

Obama's debt problem. (h/t Instapundit)

Read the rest of this entry »

In The American Spectator, Roger Scruton writes against the pagan youth worship that is the modern university.

The true conservative cause, when it comes to the universities, ought to be the restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities. And that shows how difficult a task the recapture of the universities will be. It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better. And the word “better” simply raises the problem all over again. Who has the right to say, that one thing is better than another?

He argues that universities have replaced educated judgement with mere taste. The left have culminated a successful and radical attack against judgement itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a little late on this one. Alcee Hastings wants a law protecting fetishists from discrimination. He inadvertently urges against his proposal by reading the list of protected behaviors.

Uh huh. Tell it to the man, Alcee. Get down with it.

(h/t Reason)

O! has nominated the Wise Latina to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, she is a racialist on legal maters. Why is she a racialist? Because she’s a liberal. James Taranto explains.

Today, you can easily imagine a conservative uttering the Meathead’s earnest query: “Why do you always have to label people by nationality?” But somewhere along the line, liberalism lost its ideals and adopted Archie Bunker’s [racialist] theory of representative government.

UPDATE: Ed Whelan at NRO has a huge rap sheet on the Wise Latina. (h/t Powerline)

UPDATE: This post has been edited to address the concerns of Marco Randazza who worried that I had missed the parody genius of his post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obamanomics^® in action. According to Rassmusen,

Only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car. That figure includes just 30% who are Very Likely to do so.

This sequence of videos explains why. First, the original GM commercial.

Read the rest of this entry »