Confirm Chuck Hagel

Presidents, regardless of who the president is at any given time, can and should be afforded broad latitude in who he chooses to sit in his Cabinet. Cabinet officers are different from Supreme Court nominations in that the president sets policy and the Cabinet leaves with the president, neither of which is true of the High Court. Unless there's something in a nominee's history that is indisputably disqualifying, the president should have whomever he wants.

Again, you don't have to like the nominee or be happy about the nomination, but elections, as they say, have consequences. Congress should not be dictating executive policy - especially war policy - to a duly elected president, which I remember any number of Republicans telling me about a decade ago.

That's particularly true of a nominee who comes from the Senate. Sitting and former senators are afforded extraordinary deference during confirmation hearings. The only former senator denied confirmation that I'm aware of was John Tower, who the first President Bush had nominated to be Secretary of Defence. Tower had a drinking problem, which reasonable people can see as a disqualification for someone in the military chain of command.

It would be unprecedented for Republican senators to vote against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

If you're a modern Republican, you see Hagel as a contrarian pain in the ass, especially if you're of the neoconservative foreign policy school. Senator Hagel was an early opponent of the Iraq War (although he voted for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in October 2002), he's for cutting the Pentagon's budget, and he has interesting views on America's relationship with Israel.

All three of these things are not only perfectly defensible, they're admirable.

LIke Hagel, I initially supported the Iraq War. This was mostly because Saddam was going to have to be taken out sooner or later, and better to do it when he was weak than after the sanctions disintegrated and he strengthened his military capability. But I thought that the Bush Administration was lying about all of that democracy nonsense. I also assumed that enough force would be deployed to secure the peace after the war. Had I had known otherwise, I would have opposed the war.

Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than any other country. It was thrown together against the will of the ethnically diverse population and held together by tyrannical force. Just as happened in Yugoslavia, when Iraq's people were given a measure of freedom, they immediately began slaughtering one another.

Traditionally, when the United States overthrows a foreign government, they install a military junta that governs the country to the satisfaction of the White House. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, such as Germany and Japan, but there aren't many, and none in countries as confounding as Iraq.

Instead, Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority called for elections, disbanded Iraq's police and military, and implemented a flat tax before there was even the most basic security in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. In attempting to turn an unnatural country into a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation's ideas, Bush created the ideal conditions for the civil war that would soon engulf Iraq, cost 4,500 American lives and create upwards of 4 million refugees. Moreover, it turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign jihad insurgents who are now set to overrun neighbouring Syria.

The single biggest reason that the Democrats have the upper hand on the issue of national security (which they haven't enjoyed since at least the Kennedy Administration) is the GOP's reflexive and wrongheaded support of George W. Bush's disaster in Mesopotamia. Had Republicans not had such a herd mentality over the war, they wouldn't have all gone over the cliff together. Hagel was almost alone among Republicans for calling it exactly as he saw it early on.

As I've said repeatedly in this space, because military budgets are wholly dependent on a given nation's foreign policy, they are the very definition of discretionary spending. A country that will soon be unable to pay its own bills has no business "remaking the world in its image."

For all of the talk about Hagel's ideas being "out of the mainstream," it is the Republican Party itself that has moved out of the mainstream. In the last dozen years, the GOP has shunned the foreign policy conservatism of Eisenhower and Reagan, to say nothing of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, and adopted an almost evangelical Wilsonian foreign policy. The Republican answer to any foreign challenge seems to be "bomb first and ask questions later." And we've seen how well that worked in Iraq.

An interventionist American foreign policy was excusable during the Cold War, when the economies of the former great powers were shattered by the Second World War. That is no longer true. There is no threatening global hegemon that requires an American military presence in each of the world's time zones. Even at the height of their power, al-Qaeda did not pose the threat that the Soviet Union did, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not to be taken seriously.

Republicans, as enamoured as they are with "the Founder's intent," should be the first people to recognize this. The Founders didn't agree on much, but they were in universal agreement on what President Washington later called "foreign entanglements." The Constitution gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" (note the plural) specifically because the Founders unanimously opposed a permanent standing army and repeatedly warned against the establishment of one.

The idea that entitlement spending can be slashed while defense is increased as a proportion of GDP is ridiculous and politically suicidal. That supposedly conservative politicians make assertions to the contrary is further evidence of how delusional they've become.

To avoid a wholesale meltdown of the U.S economy, deep and immediate cuts are going to have to be made, but the Pentagon cannot be spared. This is obviously going to require a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and what constitutes a "vital national interest."

For most of America's history, its vital national interests were limited to Mexico, Canada and keeping sea lanes open for international trade. The Middle East only became a factor during the Second World War, and only because denying Nazi Germany the region's oil was a military necessity. Afterward, the Soviet threat to the region necessitated U.S engagement. However, the blowback of American support for despotic Arab and Persian regimes was the jihadi threat the United States faces today.

Then there's Israel, which seems to be the epicentre of Republican opposition to Senator Hagel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the U.S foreign policy establishment understood that American support for Israel had to be balanced against its interests in the Arab world.

There is a difference between a moral interest and a strategic interest. Support for Israel couldn't be more of a moral interest, which very few sane people would dispute. However, there are 100 million Arabs, who have oil and would very much like nuclear weapons. There are another 80 million Persians of whom the same thing could be said. That is the the definition of a strategic interest.

As a supporter of the Jewish state, I question the the morality of  backing Israel regardless of the wisdom of its policies and how damaging they might be to U.S interests in the Arab world.

First, it's ahistorical. The presidents that took the hardest line on Israel were Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush. All of them, to one degree or another, threatened the continuing relationship to protect America's Arab interests and none of them were labelled as anti-Semites, as Chuck Hagel recently has.

For all the rhetoric regarding the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, Obama hasn't threatened the diplomatic abandonment of Jerusalem (which Eisenhower did over Suez,) describe their military actions as a "Holocaust" (which Reagan did regarding Lebanon,) or cut off loan guarantees (which Bush 41 did when Israel expanded settlements.) Obama has been more tolerant of Israel's conduct than any Republican president except Nixon and the second Bush.

Second, unquestioning American support for Israel; military, diplomatic and financial is only significant if there's a reasonable chance that that support will always be there, and that can hardly be guaranteed at this point. We're are not long from the day when serious people will begin to question whether the United States can afford to provide $3 billion in foreign aid every year. Without that aid, Israelis will be forced to choose between their defense and their economy because they won't be able to afford both.

Washington has to persuade Jerusalem that it is in its long term interest to make a deal with both the Palestinians and the hold-out nations of the Middle East, if only because they can't and won't be subsidized forever. Europe is less accommodating of Israeli intractability every day, and the Chinese and Russians are fully allied with the Arabs and Iranians. Who does that leave in Israel's corner?

It's hard to imagine many Americans tolerating cuts to their Medicare and Social Security benefits while their government provides billion in military aid to an ally that thinks that it doesn't have to make a serious bargain with its neighbours. I believe that's more than the domestic political traffic will bear once America's economic decline becomes a recognizable reality.

Israel can make a tolerable deal now, or a considerably worse one later, when they've been financially and diplomatically abandoned. It is deeply immoral for a nation rapidly facing bankruptcy to provide assurances to the contrary to Israel.

Senator Hagel's views on a possible conflict with Iran are not unlike my own. Military will not destroy the Iranian program, only delay it and paradoxically prove to Tehran that it's necessary. Even if the current theorcacy were replaced tomorrow, Iran's security situation would still be such that it would feel it needed a nuclear deterrent because any country in Iran's position would feel that way.

Given the geography and demographic facts, war with Iran would be much more challenging than the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan are by several degrees of magnitude. The American people might support armed action in theory, but the reality is almost certainly going to be quite different. Sending troops in there when public support will evaporate almost immediately isn't just unfair to the military, it's immoral.

Bob Woodward wrote an interesting article about Hagel in yesterday's Washington Post;

This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.

The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale war.

Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.

Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the White House.

He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.

The Republican party line on Hagel is that "his views are out of the mainstream." But if there's one thing that's proven indisputably true over the last fifteen years, it's that the "mainstream" isn't just wrong, it's increasingly dangerous and unaffordable.

How well has "the mainstream" served American strategic interests in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both countries are almost certainly going to worse than the United States found them a decade ago, and the potential for both destabilizing their neighbours in unpredictable ways is enormous. "Mainstream thinking," particularly in the GOP, is precisely what put America where it is today: broke and militarily broken.

Hagel describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican. President Eisenhower also stood outside of the mainstream and in direct conflict with the military he commanded and the prevailing political attitudes of both his party and the country. Ike understood that the greatest threat America faced was the unintended consequences of poorly considered action.

Had Eisenhower remained in office, it's impossible to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring because the series of events that led to it never would have been set in motion. It's entirely possible that the Soviets would have reacted militarily to the British, French and Israeli hostilities in the Suez Canal if Eisenhower hadn't stopped it first.

If the United States is to survive as anything resembling the country we recognize today, it had better start adopting views "outside the mainstream" immediately.

For that reason, the Senate should confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Silly

I like the idea of a balanced budget amendment to the U.S Constitution. Columnist George Will certainly outlines the need for one. Unfortunately, no Republican has ever proposed one that wasn't balls-out stupid.

Proponents for an amendment usually fail to point out that debt-ridden basket cases like California and Illinois have balanced budget amendments. They, like most of the states, just use accounting tricks to make their books appear to be balanced, when in fact they're a shocking mess and only likely to get worse.

Conservative proponents of an amendment also display an almost incredible level of dishonesty when they compare deficit numbers from the Bush years to the present day in an attempt to demonstrate that Republicans are more fiscally responsible. A cursory look at the charts they present seem to make their case clear, but they neglect to tell you about the accounting tricks that the GOP employed from 2001 through the beginning of 2007.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are prime examples of the budgetary chicancery they used. The Bush Administration didn't primarily fund the wars through the usual annual budget process. They instead went to Congress several times a year to seek military funding through emergency supplemental bills. Remember the $87 billion that John Kerry voted for before he voted against it? That was an emergency supplemental. And the costs of the wars through 2009 was roughly a trillion dollars.

The beauty of those those bills is that because they aren't part of the budget, they bypass annual deficit reporting numbers. Instead, they are added directly to the debt. So, when you're shown graphs listing deficits from the Bush years, you're only getting half the story. You're being lied to without the people doing it actually lying. But it's really no different from Enron accounting. It's the same kind of math that the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments used to prove that the Too Big To Fail banks were solvent when they weren't.

I mention this because these are the same people who most strongly advocate a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). You shouldn't take anything these people say on faith, given their demonstrated history of ignorance, duplicity, or both.

For an amendment to be effective, it would have to be clean. The language should have to look something like this: "Congress shall each year enact a budget that is in balance without exception." Another option is to require balance over three or five year periods, but there cannot be exceptions.

The lack of exceptions is key. If there's an emergency, such as a war, natural disaster or financial calamity that requires deficit spending, that money should be subtracted from the following year's budget (or the next three or five.) Or there would have to be an automatic tax increase to pay down the deficit.

I have yet to see a "clean" amendment proposed by anyone. More often than not, they're riddled with exceptions that Republicans like spending money on, or spending that is politically advantageous to them. It's important to note that the biggest deficits in U.S history were created by Republican presidents. Even the current Obama deficit is driven mostly by the wars, the Bush tax cuts, and program spending, such as Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind that the GOP categorically refused to pay for when they controlled the process. The Obama stimulus (to date, his biggest ticket spending item) was a one-time outlay, whereas the Bush programs were structural and almost impossible to repeal.

More importantly, most of the Republican BBA proposals I've seen require a supermajority (usually three-quarters) vote to raise revenue. By 2016, just the cost of servicing the debt will be roughly equal to the Pentagon's budget, making balancing the budget by spending cuts alone almost impossible. New revenue will be absolutely necessary to avoid a catastrophe, and the denial of same demonstrates the singular unseriousness of most Republican proposals.

If a supermajority is necessary anywhere, it would be in passing emergency supplemental spending, which bypasses the budget process entirely and would also presumably get around any proposed amendment. Since most such spending tends to be military in nature, it would also make lawmakers think twice about going to war. At a minimum, it would make them be more forthright about the costs of war.

Before a balanced budget amendment is introduced, Congress is going to have to be serious about its accounting practices, which currently do not factor the single largest threats to the U.S economy: the unfunded liabilities of future Medicare and Social Security spending. Democrats point to the "balanced budgets" of 1998-2000, but if a private business or individual budgeted that way, they would find themselves being indicted. The unfunded liabilities might cost as much as $75 trillion by 2050 and no reasonable person thinks that the American economy is going to grow at anything near the rate necessary to absorb that cost.

An amendment will finally have to recognize that tax cuts actually are spending, and will require other spending costs to offset their cost. The single biggest driver of the deficit today remains the Bush-Obama tax cuts, which cost over $3 trillion over the last decade and produced almost nothing in economic growth.

From 2001-07, the Republican Party proved beyond any doubt that "fiscal responsibility" is nothing more than a rhetorical wedge for them. They say they deserve another chance, but their continued lies about the nature of the Obama deficits undermine that case. For that reason, they shouldn't be trusted about a BBA.

I believe that a balanced budget amendment is going to be necessary, but not before Congress undertakes a number of significant and painful reforms. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a rhetorical stunt and all of the trick accounting in the world isn't going to fool the international markets.

Did "Borking" Begin With Bork?

Judge Robert Bork died on December 19th at the age of 85, an occasion that I expected Republicans to take advantage of by ratcheting up their constant pissing and moaning about how unfair life is. Modern conservatism, a philosophy that's supposed to be based on rugged self-reliance, is seemingly defined today by high decibel whining.

If you don't think that there's nothing funnier than the sight of a guy holding a copy of Atlas Shrugged and complaining about how he just can't get a fair shake from the Washington Post, you probably don't have a sense of humor at all. Or you're not very bright. Whichever.

Contemporary Republicans also don't have a particularly solid grasp of history, which is probably why the outrage machine wasn't sent into overdrive with Bork's death. With the exception of ranting about Woodrow Wilson, today's Republicans barely acknowledge anything that happened prior to 1980.

Worse than that, although they hold the memory of Ronald Reagan on the same kind of Olympian pedestal that Barack Obama has himself nominated on, they don't seem to remember very many facts about his presidency. The Reagan that I'm constantly preached to about on Fox News and blogs isn't the Reagan I remember being president. As a matter of fact, it isn't the Reagan presented in the innumerable (and often fawning) memoirs of those that served in his administration.

That the passing of Robert Bork didn't get the kind of coverage I would have expected it to was more than likely due to the fact that nobody really remembers him. Given modern attention spans, 1987 may well be 1587.

I like Richard over at Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. We don't agree on a whole lot, but he's a good writer and seems like good people. And he's the only person I'm aware who started the debate about Bork that I've wanted to have, but have been too lazy to start myself.

The contemporary conservative wisdom about the Bork nomination, which Richard reinforces, was that it was all the Democrats fault. They started fighting dirty to win an ideological battle that didn't previously exist.

Smarter Democrats will now concede that going after Bork on ideological grounds was a mistake. Firstly because Republicans would shortly become better and meaner at it, and expand well beyond Supreme Court nominations. Secondly, the Bork nomination probably could have been defeated without resorting to philosophical guerrilla warfare.

Were they half as bright as they thought they were, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden could just as easily made Bork's hearings an exploration of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre as they were about nonsense like abortion. Presented properly, especially with Watergate still being the very recent past in 1987, it could have killed Bork's hopes of sitting on the High Court. And it was the Saturday Night Massacre that finally convinced most people that President Nixon could and would be removed from office.

Nixon, through Attorney General Elliott Richardson, appointed the very first Special Counsel, Archibald Cox to investigate the exploding Watergate scandal. As soon as the existence of the president's secret taping system was exposed, Cox demanded the tapes. Citing executive privilege, Nixon not only refused to hand them over, he ordered Cox to stop asking for them, violating his pledge to Richardson to stay out of the investigation. Cox ignored the order and subpoenaed the tapes.

On Saturday October 20, 1973 Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. The third-ranking officer in the Justice Department was the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, who carried out the order and was made Acting Attorney General for the balance of the year. The Cox firing was subsequently found to be illegal and Nixon named Leon Jaworski special prosecutor.

The Saturday Night Massacre was the predicate for Nixon's eventual resignation because it smacked of obstruction of justice, an obstruction that Bork carried out. While it's true that Bork was later confirmed by the Senate to serve on the U.S Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court is a very different matter.

You know who agrees with this line of thinking? Republicans. I know that because they used very similar logic in trying to defeat Eric Holder's nomination to be Attorney General in light of his role in Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich.

As a matter of historical fact, Democrats weren't the first ones to play dirty pool with the Supreme Court. That honor again goes to President Richard Nixon, with an able assist from congressional Republicans.

Nixon and Chief Justice Earl Warren had loathed one another for nearly twenty years when the former was elected president. Wanting to deny Nixon the opportunity the name the next chief to the Court, Warren resigned not long before the 1968 election. Lyndon Johnson then nominated his longtime crony and fixer, Justice Abe Fortas to the position.

Fortas had received speaking fees from American University (which weren't illegal, then or now) which Republicans and Dixiecrats used to filibuster the nomination, the first time that had happened in a Supreme Court nomination. A subsequent, more serious scandal forced Fortas to resign from the Court entirely in 1969

Nixon was determined to have as many friendly seats as he could on the Court (and finally wound up with four.) After Fortas resigned, the president, through then House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, engineered an attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas for outside income similar to Fortas'.

However, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Ford also cited as grounds for removal Douglas' opinions in an obscenity case and some outside writings, making the impeachment transparently political. One of Ford's most famous quotes "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history" comes from the Douglas matter.

With the exception of two singularly unqualified Nixon nominees (Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell,) Democrats hadn't seriously impeded Republican nominees to the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia, for example, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-0 just a year prior to Bork's nomination.

But I'm sure that they remembered how the GOP launched the first filibuster against Fortas and tried to impeach Douglas. When they had a clear shot at a vulnerable Republican nominee in Robert Bork, they took it. In retrospect, I'm only surprised at how patient they were.

As I said earlier, I like Richard and Eye on a Crazy Planet quite a bit. But I would respectfully suggest that the history is considerably more complicated than his post implies. This wasn't started in 1987 and it wasn't started by Democrats. The Official Republican Narrative would have you believe otherwise, but that narrative is frequently untrue.

When Richard says that "With his death, now might be an appropriate time to look back and see if there is a way to start healing a still debilitated process," he seems to imply that self-examination is a process that should be exclusive to Democrats.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Republicans and conservatives have spent the last year getting their asses kicked from one end of the country to the other. In large part this is because of a deeply odd alternate reality bubble that they've built around themselves. But as we all learned on November 6, denying reality doesn't make it any less real.

Republicans have spent decades now denying their more unsavory characters and actions. Not only do you have a hard time finding a conservative who will say that President Reagan actually broke the law in trading arms for hostages, it's a challenge to find a Republican who'll admit that Nixon was president at all.

But Nixon wasn't alone. He had the full support of his party in Congress and not a few conservative southern Democrats that would soon become Republicans in his judicial wars. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they had to know that there would be consequences for it someday. They just didn't care. It shouldn't surprise anyone that liberals would one day exact their revenge, as they did on Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Anyone who thinks that this problem is going to rectify itself unless both conservatives and liberals engage in some self-examination is either dishonest or delusional.

The Constitution didn't foresee political parties and avoided a parliamentary system, in part, to preclude them. President Washington repeatedly warned against their establishment without success. The system was able to endure parties that it wasn't designed to accommodate because America historically had long periods of one-party dominance.

In the last twenty years that's become less and less true. Not only are there more "wave elections" at any other time in American history, they're coming closer and closer together. As the balance of power is dramatically upended more frequently, partisan warfare increases exponentially and the system starts to break down.

If you prefer a government that does nothing, that's great. Unfortunately, the U.S government hasn't "done nothing" for a century now. Its foreign and military policies are overextended to the breaking point and the balance sheet is disastrously out of whack. A broken political system, under these circumstances, will eventually destroy the country.

I agree with Richard that the story of Robert Bork should be studied, but there's a context in the decades that bookend the defeat of his nomination that shouldn't be ignored.

History is the study of trends, not incidents. In strict isolation, Franz Ferdinand was just some obscure Austrian that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within the context of greater trends, his assassination was the opening salvo of the First World War.

Robert Bork is emblematic of a larger trend that began long before his nomination and continues to this day.

The National Rifle Association Isn't Helping

The most predictable thing happened in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Everybody got dogmatic, stupid, and frequently both. The reaction to the massacre managed to reaffirm my contempt for the human spirit more than the massacre itself, which is saying something since we are talking about 20 dead first graders.

As I've said repeatedly over the last week, if I thought gun control would be even remotely helpful, I might find it in myself to support it, the obvious constitutional problems aside. But that train left the station well over a century ago. Even if you could stop the production of all American guns tomorrow, there would still be as many as 300 million of them floating around out there. Liberals understand this, they just refuse to be honest about it.

Conservatives (or more exactly, Republicans) have been even worse over the last seven days. They're going out of their way to blame everything but guns and looking for liberal solutions that limit free speech rights and accomplish nothing. It's repugnant and all the proof you need that you shouldn't trust those assholes any more than you trust liberals. At the end of the day, their solutions require just as much big government and primacy of the state over the individual.

Over the last week, I've seen far too many conservatives blame TV, movies, video games, the Internet and even the news media itself. That kind of stupidity and brazen dishonesty is even more dangerous than the most powerful of assault weapons. Don't get me wrong, they still want their guns. In fact, they want more guns out there. The Second Amendment must be protected, even at the expense of the First.

It's also important to remember that most of the outraged voices this week are the same people that believe corporations are people for the purpose of election spending. If that's true (and I don't have any serious philospohical problems with it) it therefore stands to reason that they enjoy the full spectrum of First Amendment rights, including producing brutally graphic movies and video games.

If the sharp curbing of free expression rights,combined with the wholesale arming of the populace produces anything other than Yemen, I'm at a loss to explain what it would be. The American left and right seem to be in agreement that personal freedom has to take it in the nuts and are only arguing over whose will go.

Perhaps the most offensive notion out there is that this is all the fault of the news media. If I understand this assertion properly, it goes as follows: If the news media stops reporting the news, then nobody will get the idea to shoot a whole bunch of folks. The idea is that the desperate, sad and ill among us are looking for some manner of immortality. If they happen to attain that through a measure of infamy, so be it. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Boiled down, the logic seems to be that if we ignore them, they'll just go away. And if you're a simpleton, you might very well agree.

But why then don't we apply that standard to all bad actors in the world? Wasn't Osama bin Laden granted a measure of fame in the wake of 9/11? Would there have been attempted copycat attacks if we all just agreed not to talk about the big hole in Lower Manhattan? Would rockets stop falling in the suburbs of Tel Aviv if the Israeli media stopped making such a big deal about Hezbollah and Hamas?

The idea that crazy people often do weird shit seems to have escaped everyone. It seems self-evident that they do weird shit precisely because they're crazy, and guns or media have little, if anything, to do with it. But it seems that mine is an increasingly lonely voice. Everybody wants the government to do something, even people who don't naturally trust it to do much at all.

I was actually impressed with the National Rifle Association's ability to keep its mouth shut in the days after Sandy Hook. Not only did they show admirable restraint, it was savvy public relations, which they're not often famous for. For example, the NRA's mouthpiece in chief, Wayne LaPierre responded to the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco by calling government agents "jackbooted thugs," causing lifelong member George H.W Bush to resign in protest.

In keeping a respectful silence, the NRA very well could have gained some goodwill. And they couldn't have that, so they yesterday sent LaPierre out to piss it all away with a presentation so brazenly dishonest and chock full of stupidity that it couldn't possibly be ignored.



Actually, that's not true. Fox News bailed as soon as they understood just how badly Wayne was fucking up the narrative.

That LaPierre believes that the solution to a problem with guns is more guns should surprise no one. After all, the proliferation of weapons is the NRA's raison d'etre, their very bread and butter. But it is just a little counter-intuitive. As the always amazing Michele Catalano said "Next we'll combat the heroin problem in my town by providing the kids with more heroin!" I actually don't agree with that, but it's a great rejoinder.

According to the new official position of the NRA, guns aren't the problem, the media is. And only the government can address that. If the First Amendment has to go to protect the Second, by God, the NRA will be first one to pull the trigger.

In calling for armed cops in every school, LaPierre seems to be calling for a dramatic expansion of the federal government. Most of the examples he cited - airports, the president and Congress - are all protected by federal employees and paid for by Washington.

Let's not pretend that the NRA is a kumbaya, "Up with People" wing of the Democratic Party, okay? These are self-described conservatives. And they're basically proposing the federalization of the school security without a plausible way of paying for it and in direct opposition to decades conservative dogma about the federal role in education.

In fairness, that idea isn't half as fucking dumb as the wholesale arming of teachers. I could be wrong, but I suspect that giving glocks to a bunch of liberal arts majors won't end as well as some folks seem to think it will. Even if it did, it doesn't address the expanding use of body armor in mass shooting incidents since the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America shootout. If it's hard for the cops to take these psychos out, there's no reason to believe that your kid's guidance counsellor is going to have better luck.

This expansion of government also flies in the face of the paranoid and constitutionally unsupported idea that the Second Amendment is necessary because Americans might have to rise up against their government that the NRA is generally supportive of.

Look, you're not rising up against shit, okay? Even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 was unequal to federal might, and the United States didn't have a standing army at the time, let alone drones, Apache helicopters and Ticonderoga class cruisers with Aegis combat systems that can destroy a basketball with a Tomahawk missile from 500 miles away. For all the lunatic romantic remembrances of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it's sort of important to remember which side won those confrontations. If the next 25 most powerful nations can't defeat American military might, why does anyone think that some pissed-off hillbillies and blogger shitheads can?

That's not to suggest that I'm against guns. I'm not. But I'm also not going to look at you with a straight face and suggest that your right to bear arms is more important than anyone else's free speech rights.

Not only does LaPierre say exactly that, he will fight to death for the right of people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms but he wants Grand Theft Auto and a twenty year old Oliver Stone movie made verboten, pronto. There is no other reason to devote that many paragraphs to scapegoating the culture if you don't want action on it. If, as some suggest, that he's only calling for "public shaming," we should take a good long look at how effective that's been against the NRA. Some people are simply biologically without shame.

Here's an interesting test I use to determine if someone is being honest with me. I take note of whether someone holds up individual amendments over the Bill of Rights as a whole. For example, the Second Amendment is pretty meaningless without the Fourth keeping the government from coming to take your guns away. The rest of the document is little more than quaint without the First Amendment.

That's a test that LaPierre and the NRA routinely fails. In a mad and desperate effort to deflect even the tiniest amount of responsibility for gun violence from guns, he throws other freedoms over the side.

Yes, I know that ol' Wayne didn't explicitly call for the censorship or regulation of media. But I can't overlook the fact that he didn't have to. He has no shortage of stooges in Congress and the conservative media that will do it for him. In fact, they've already started.

Always remember that Wayne LaPierre isn't a symbol of freedom; he's a lobbyist. As such, he'll say anything you wind him up to, provided you dangle enough money in front of his snout first. And anyone who doesn't get that is probably too dumb to own a gun in the first place.

The Tea Party is Keeping it Classy!

One of the great things about the Tea Party is that it claims to be leaderless. There are also many factions of it that are constantly warring with one another over who actually represents the movement. In that they aren't unlike the Communist Party split in the days immediately after the Russian Revolution.

So why is that a great thing? Well, if you're the Tea Party, it allows you to avoid responsibility for anything! For a movement that never tires of advocating personal responsibility, when was they last time you saw them accept direct responsibility for anything that their members have said or done?

The correct answer is "never." Not once. It's always the fault of the mainstream media or some nefarious socialist plot (when the mainstream media itself isn't part of some nefarious socialist plot,) but it's never, ever their fuck up. That's the first reason that you shouldn't trust these people. The second reason is that they're idiots.

Timothy Birdnow is with Tea Party Nation. He has posting rights on their website, so I assume that he speaks for them in some way. And he sure is efficient. In this post he manages to cram so much crazy and stupid into such a small space, just 2,875 words, that you can't help but be impressed!  To give Mr. Birdnow his proper due, he also manages to stuff a healthy dose of small government rhetoric while calling for big government solutions. You really have to read it to believe it.

The takeaway from the Birdnow commentary that Mediaite is running with involves George Zimmerman. You remember George, right? Good. I'd rather not devolve into re-explaining his sad story, nor do I want to re-litigate it.

Birdnow says this about Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School; "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

That's a highly debatable point, actually. Were those children carrying skittles and iced tea? If they were, that could have been a problem.

The fact that Mr. Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder at least suggests that he isn't exactly judicious with a firearm and is perhaps best kept away from children. Mr. Birdnow also never explains how Zimmerman would have dealt with Adam Lanza's body armor. A head shot, you say? He shot Treyvon Martin in the chest.

It's really too bad that Mediaite focused on the Zimmerman angle because there's just so much other crazy in Birdnow's piece that it should be dealt with at length. He has a list of suggestions, few of which have anything at all to do with gun violence but are almost all paranoid, comic or both.

1. Homeschool. Take away the power of the radicals in the classrooms. Makes your kids safer, too.

Well, it makes your kids safe from strangers, I'll grant you that. But since most murdered kids are taken out by a close relative, why shouldn't they all be?

 2. Back Right to Work legislation for the public sector. Teacher’s unions have helped cement much of this in place. As long as we have group think in the classrooms we will never see the end of this.

Huh? Do non-union teachers have some ninja powers that I'm unaware of. It would be kind of cool if they did. Also, the unionized teachers were shot trying to protect the kids.

3. Engage in more frank discussion of race and culture. For far too long we have tiptoed around these issues, fearful of being branded a racist. If black thugs kidnap and rape a woman, ask if there is something in the black culture that fostered that. If an evil white kid murders a bunch of children at the school, ask the same question of the white community. What was it that spawned this behavior? What was this kid taught? We have to stop hiding from our respective national sins.

I'm not sure what "black thugs" kidnapping and raping a (presumably) white woman have to do with this, but okay. And what exactly does severe mental illness have to do with "national sins?"

It should also be pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of mass public shootings are white men. And the violence is rarely ever racially motivated.

5.Call evil out. We have to stop being sorry and start being angry. This is not a time for national grief so much as a time for national anger. We should stop tolerating this sort of thing. Indeed, stop tolerating any bad behavior. If you see kids jumping ahead in line, say, call them out. If you see punks bothering their neighbors call them out. Say something to the idiot blaring his car stereo. Say something to the foul-mouthed teens. Tell the brats to pull up their pants; nobody wants to see their filthy underwear and pimply behind. We have to start saying something, stop ignoring it. The first way any society maintains order is through social pressure from individuals. We have insanely given that up.

You know, in a nation where everybody is armed, I'm not sure that's very wise. This is, I think, the "broken windows" theory with one important difference. Every loudmouthed hillbilly like Timothy Birdnow gets to be a cop.

6.Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. He sees his life as at the mercy of others, and sees himself as having no real input or control. He has been coddled all his life, given free rein to indulge his senses but not to face the responsibilities that freedom necessitates. He was an eternal juvenile, a child who was not allowed to grow up. He lived in a world of the Progressives making, not in reality.

The family is the fundamental building block of civilization, and from it all power originates. The Left has systematically destroyed the family for the purpose of empowering the State, and this has destroyed so many lives. Individuals - especially immature individuals - need to be taught how to live, how to think, how to believe. Man’s animal passions must be placed in check and his rational faculties engaged. His moral compass must be set. Liberalism sought to destroy all the controls by destroying the family and community, centralizing power in meta institutions and granting the individual absolute moral autonomy without giving him the wisdom he needs to exercise it. . It is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.

Um, wow.

Birdnow thinks the solution is a devolution of power from the federal government. He then cites the opinion of an FBI profiler and plasters his own opinion over that of the profiler. I've read a lot about profilers. Never once have I heard them cite "Progressives" as a cause of anything.

Moreover, who do you suppose that Birdnow wants to empower the family to triumph over the dastardly Left? My guess is Congress. I know, I can't follow his fucking logic, either.

7. Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. People have understood the close relationship between sex and violence through history; sex was an inducement to military service in ancient times (and modern, too) and it has traditionally been understood that a sexually robust individual will fight harder and more aggressively. We are engaging half this equation, overstimulating our youth while denying them a planned outlet. Even if they were to live promiscuously (a very bad thing for society) they still cannot find adequate outlets for their passions, which have grown to titanic volume. Fighting is the traditional outlet. Societies have always carefully planned ways to release this tension constructively - through physical labor, through hunting, through military service, sometimes even through intellectual pursuits. Now we have nothing, no place for this pent-up frustration to go. The only answer is to follow the other societal coping mechanism, which is to tone down the sexual stimulation, encourage chastity and modesty. Our society has conveniently thrown that away as well. We have to restore it.

Parents, monitor what your children watch, what they look at on the internet. Make sure they dress modestly.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. These guys are going ape with an AR-15 because they're horny?  Are you serious?

Again, who is to be restricting "the sex in movies, television, on the internet?" This guy likes the government a whole lot more than he's letting on. And I love how "intellectual pursuits" can "relieve tension," but only "sometimes."

Birdnow obviously holds the Second Amendment very close to his heart, so much so that he sometimes forget that there's one right before it. Or would he prefer that it be stopped at the distribution point, which is government interference in business and exactly what the Tea Party is supposed to be fighting against.

You know what else relieves sexual tension, Tim? Furious masturbation and hardcore, animalistic fucking. Want proof? I'm the least excitable person I know.

Finally, making sure children dress modestly has certainly gone a long way in preventing Afghanistan into a violent and chaotic shithole. Oh, wait ....

8. Control drugs. Do not think that puffing a joint is harmless. Several American states decriminalized Marijuana, and it is actually legal in Washington and Colorado. Is it a coincidence that this shooting just occurred? Probably, but not in the long haul. Drugs and crime and violence go together. Trayvon Martin, the youth shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain after he was assaulted , was likely high http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2888655/postswhen he was shot - and George Zimmerman has claimed Martin assaulted him, something backed by medical testimony. Martin had trace amounts of marijuana in his system, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-05-17/news/31753474_1_medical-... should be pointed out. Would Martin have done that had he been sober? And medical marijuana is a joke; there are far better substances that can be used. It is nothing but a way to backdoor legalization.

Again with the government! Remember, it's the state and local governments that are decriminalizing marijuana, precisely the people the people that these Tea Party types are supposed to trust more than the diabolical tyrants in Washington that they need their semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against.

I know that you teenagers are hip enough that I don't need to point this out to you, but Mr. Birdnow doesn't understand that potheads are too busy giggling to attack anyone.

10.Go back to church. We need God more than ever, need prayer. It’s time the Ten Commandments were taught again. It’s time the Bible was taught. It’s time people learned the examples of the heroes of our Judeo-Christian heritage - heroes like Moses, who gave up his life as an Egyptian noble to become a shepherd and eventually lead his birth mother’s kin out of slavery, or David who spent years hiding from King Saul, and who, at one point, had Saul completely under his power (in the cave of Adullum) but would not smite the Lord’s anointed, or of John the Baptizer, a man who spoke the truth until his head was cut off, or of any of the Apostles who died for their faith. Most of all they should learn of Jesus, who refused to turn from the Truth and allowed himself to be sacrificed in the most painful manner possible for other people’s sins.

This evil can be fought, but not by any methods likely to be proposed by Progressives or imposed by our government. At best it will entail a top-down approach that will impose greater restrictions on the individual, on the family, and on the community. The solutions will be more of what caused this in the first place.

"Well, we obviously need the tyrannical and probably Marxist federal government to stop the porn and pot, but once that's taken over, the churches can take care of the rest."

You know what scares me even more than monsters like Adam Lanza walking among us? The fact that otherwise intelligent people support and vote for ideological nonsense like this.

Mike Huckabee Has Lost His Mind

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The American Way of Death

When tragedy strikes, most people think that the natural reaction is do something, which isn't exactly true. If you've been following the mainstream media and the blogosphere since Friday morning, you might have noticed that the proper reaction in the face of tragedy is to get stupid.

Awesome stupidity, so powerful that it seemingly has its own gravitational pull, has been the order of the day, as it usually is.

The ignorance comes in two distinct styles. The first is liberals, who want the government to ban and/or restrict access to firearms. The second is conservatives, who want the government to ban and/or restrict access to everything else. From what I've seen since Friday, both groups seem to agree that some government infringement of freedom is necessary.

I'm not a gun nut. The fact is that I don't think about them all that much. However, I don't think that objects, in and of themselves, are inherently criminal. I feel the same way about guns that I do about drugs. Their possession should not be a criminal offense, but their misuse should be. Simply put, guns are tools, and there is currently no shortage of laws prohibiting shooting someone in the head.

Even if you were to somehow transcend the immutable laws of American gun politics and enact a total ban, you would still accomplish next to nothing. This is because you would still have over three hundred million existing American guns in circulation; enough for every man, woman and child in the United States for generations to come.

Just as the U.S government is unequal to the task of constitutionally rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal aliens, it will not effectively be able to collect and dispose of 300 million firearms. Even if the Second Amendment were to magically vanish overnight, the rest of the Bill of Rights would preclude such an effort. Guns, as you might have noticed, are considerably smaller and easier to hide than Mexicans. Getting rid of the weapons that are already out there would require nothing less than martial law, and I'm not convinced that would be very effective.

There are already more than enough weapons to ensure that what we saw in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday will happen again, and no amount of liberal wishful thinking or half-baked policy prescriptions is going to change that. Criminals are deservedly famous for breaking the law and the mentally ill are renowned for doing weird things.

Conservatives are even more disappointing. Their big idea is a return to involuntary civil commitment. The only problem with that is the paucity of evidence suggesting that it would have prevented any of the mass shootings that we've seen in the last several years. Very few of the perpetrators, if any, have histories that would meet any plausible standard for long-term commitment.

This kind of thinking reveals the hypocrisy of modern conservatives. The very people who barely trust the government to deliver the mail, let alone levy and collect taxes, want to make it easy to relieve the citizenry of their basic freedoms.

Even with the high standards the Constitution requires for criminal conviction, hundreds of people have been exonerated and released from unjust incarceration. If you operate from the premise that civil commitment requires a much lower due process standard (and some believe there should be no such standard at all,) how great is the risk for misuse of the procedure is there? There is, after all, a reason that commitments were curtailed in the first place. Does anyone trust the government to do the right thing all the time, even knowing what we do about the imperfect criminal justice system?

Like it or not, the mentally ill have the same rights you and I do, and limiting them under the color of law should be no easy task. There is no "unless you're nuts" clause in the Constitution, especially in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. I checked. If you want to argue that commitment is a civil action, then the Seventh Amendment should apply.

The conservative consensus seems to be, "So long as no one touches my guns, I don't care about anyone else's rights, especially lunatics." That goes a long way in demonstrating just how committed to freedom these people are. Liberals generally believe that the rights of the people are subservient to the duties of government or the needs of society. Conservatives aren't supposed to.

On the Sunday shows this morning, both Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and outgoing Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CN) went to the same stupid stand-by that morons usually do, television, movies and video games.

Firstly, this is (and excuse the pun) a weapons-grade stupid argument, for which there is little if any research to back it up. Second, it presumes that the First Amendment is somehow less inviolate than the Second, which is moronic and dangerous.

Even if you can prove that media makes the crazy even crazier, we do not order our society based on what certain stimuli is going to cause the mentally ill to do, any more than we do for children. Furthermore, I barely trust the government to deliver the mail, which presumes that the role of media watchdog is well beyond its capabilities, to say nothing of its enumerated powers in a constitutional republic.

If, as Lieberman suggests, "violence in entertainment is 'a causative factor' leading to incidences of violence," why is said violence centered primarily in the United States? Entertainment and culture is one of America's leading exports, but only Americans are violently set off by it with any regularity.

Conservative voices have spent the last few days pointing to mass shootings in Norway, Scotland and Australia to make their case that gun availability isn't a factor in the violence. And they're largely right.

But what they don't seem as enthusiastic about pointing out is that this is the fourth such shooting in the United States in the last six months. There was one in Portland, Oregon as recently as Tuesday. In other countries, they happen maybe once in a generation, but there have been two in America in the last five days.

In a country of 33 million, 1,927,693 Canadians have valid firearms licenses, meaning that about one in every sixteen of us is armed. If you assume that there are hundreds of thousands of unlicensed and illegally imported weapons from the United States here, Canada has no shortage of guns. Canadians also consume precisely the same entertainment Americans do.

Yet we don't have the issue with mass shootings that the United States does. Neither does any other industrialized nation with available weaponry. An American citizen is probably more likely to be murdered within the territorial United States than in one of the many war zones where U.S troops are deployed.

Stringent gun control in Canada is relatively recent thing that came with mass urbanization. The same is probably true of Australia. Like the U.S, both countries were "frontier nations." But of the three countries, it was only in the United States that murder rates were very high. In an era long before assault weapons and video games, the American people collectively decided that they enjoyed killing one another. And if they didn't have guns, they'd use knives or even really big sticks.

The conservative and liberal arguments about firearms availability, mental health and culture aren't borne out by the statistics in the rest of the world. But American homicide rates are utterly out of whack with the rest of the industrialized world. You have to go to the Third World or active war zones to find numbers that are anywhere close to America's.

The problem isn't with guns, mental health or culture. It's a problem with Americans. Unless and until that's addressed, nothing else is going to matter. And I'm not at all sure that's something that government can address.

The End of DOMA?

The U.S Supreme Court announced late last week that it would hear two gay marriage cases this term, the appeal of the California Proposition 8 case and a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA.)

I'm actually surprised that DOMA, which was passed in 1996, has survived as long as it has. Yes, I know that both houses of Congress passed it, but Congress passes unconstitutional nonsense all the time, which is sort of why the Supreme Court exists at all. And please don't remind me that President Clinton signed it. As subsequent events conclusively demonstrated, few marriages were more in need of defending than Bill Clinton's.

For my newer readers, I'll quickly explain my views on same-sex marriage.

I have a basic test that I apply to any law, proposed or already in effect. That is "Is this something that a reasonable adult should give a shit about?" If the answer is no, there's really no reason that the government should give a shit about it, either. In such cases, I support giving the people the right to do whatever they please.

Then I decide whether the law is constitutional. Even the best law ever is a giant waste of everybody's time if it doesn't conform with the supreme law of the land.

As far as gay marriage goes, there is no reason for the government, especially the federal government, to give a shit. If "the family" needs the force of the feds to defend it, it's already doomed. The government did a remarkably poor job in defending the World Trade Center, which was at least a physical thing in a specific location, two things "the family" decidedly is not.

Having said that, I do understand that homo hitchery might offend your religious sensibilities. Too bad. Just as is true with the family, the federal government doesn't exist to defend your personal superstitions. Besides, the same government that can protect your religious beliefs can also limit them. Moreover, if you need curs like your average politician to affirm your spirituality, you're probably going to hell, anyway.

Religion is a deeply personal thing and government is about as impersonal something can get. Nothing good ever comes from intermingling the two. You know when I'll be okay with the government policing marriage? When the states are allowed to resume burning witches.

DOMA is unconstitutional on its face and no one has ever seriously argued that it isn't. Article IV, Section of the Constitution is better known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause, which compels the states (as well as the federal government) to  respect the "public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state."

Since marriage is a public act and often a judicial proceeding, DOMA couldn't be more clearly in violation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Through DOMA, the federal government also violates the "due process" clause of the Fifth Amendment, since it voids liberty granted by the state in any other state or before the federal government without due process of law.

Marriage is also a public act, with very specific government benefits, primarily - although not exclusively - through the tax code. When the federal government limits those benefits to a certain class of citizens, absent a compelling state interest, it violates the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, of which the language is very clear.

If corporations and George W. Bush's first presidential campaign meet the definition of "legal persons" under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, it's very difficult to rationally argue that homosexuals don't. That's just a matter of elementary logic.

The Supreme Court has also ruled repeatedly that marriage is a "fundamental right," that the states and Congress cannot deny, even to prison inmates. I suppose that you can argue that prisoners awaiting execution enjoy greater fundamental rights than gays do, but it would be an affront to both common decency and common sense.

You know who, first and foremost, knew that there were severe constitutional issues with DOMA? The people who oppose gay marriage. That's why they've been pressing for a constitutional amendment since 2004.

DOMA is a dead issue constitutionally, unless certain of the justices defy logic, precedent and the clear language of the Constitution to rule otherwise.

Of the two cases coming before the Court, Hollingsworth v. Perry (the Prop 8 case) is the more likely of the two to be ruled upon narrowly, based entirely on the specific circumstances in California. In any eventuality, it's hard to see Hollingsworth having much of an effect on the national gay marriage question.

United States v. Windsor (the DOMA challenge) couldn't be more different. That does have national ramifications, albeit more limited ones than you might think. As an Equal Protection Clause case that challenges Section 3 of DOMA, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman in the federal law itself.

The Court would have to take a much more expansive view of the law than I think they will to apply a repeal of Section 3 to the states. I just don't think that there's a majority on the Court for that.

The Court could very well strike down Section 3, apply it only to the federal government and ignore the rest of DOMA, which isn't at issue in Windsor.

A much, much stronger challenge would be Section 2, which states that "No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship."

Section 2 is flagrantly in violation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. There simply is no way to read it otherwise. In fact, Section 2 uses the " public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State" language of the Clause to deny its applicability. It's almost impossible to imagine Section 2 withstanding any level of scrutiny whatsoever.

If Section 2 is thrown out, it wouldn't matter what the federal government or the individual states did because recognition of gay marriages would be immediate, nationwide and benefits couldn't be denied by anyone.

Again, I think that both Hollingsworth and Windsor will be decided as narrowly as the Court can manage. I don't expect the victories that other gay marriage supporters want or expect, but affirmative rulings in these two cases - even exceptionally narrow ones - make the next round of cases harder to defend against.

Furthermore, as these challenges continue making their way through the federal courts, more and more states are legalizing same-sex marriage; either through the state courts, the legislatures, and now at the ballot box. American popular opinion is also changing much more quickly than I ever thought it would. Three different polls from just last month show that a majority of Americans now supports same sex marriage, up from just 22% in March, 2004.

No matter what happens, there isn't going to a decades-long controversy, a la Roe v. Wade, that haunts America.

George Will said it best just this past weekend.

Bill O'Reilly: The Gold Standard of Stupid

If you haven't noticed this already, I'm a weird kind of conservative. I actually believe in giving the maximum amount of practical freedom to the people, even if it's at the expense of the government, especially the federal government.

For example, if you believe that the federal government has the duty to "protect the family" from anything other than armed foreigners I respectfully submit that your family just isn't worth saving. Something is eventually going to get them, and it's very likely going to be their own idiocy. Try as you might, there's just way to legislate against ignorance and superstition.

There's a cost-benefit ratio inherent in conservatism that most conservatives seem to have forgotten about, particularly where federal power is concerned. .

Here's how I feel. If I don't give a shit about something, I'm pretty sure that there's no reason for the government to give a shit. At best, such issues are best left to more local levels of government. Ideally, they should be left to the people.

There are already more than enough meaningless laws that are never enforced. I would argue that most of them are passed for no other reason than for stupid people to feel good about themselves. Look at the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004. Murdering a woman is, contrary to popular opinion, not a federal crime in the United States. But four states out fifty didn't make killing the fetus of a pregnant woman a crime, so Congress stepped in. So far as I know, there has never been a case prosecuted under the UVVA, but it sure makes idiots feel good about themselves.

And that brings me to Bill O'Reilly. He'd never describe himself as a conservative (he prefers "traditional American"instead,) which is good because he's an idiot that wants a small federal government that does fantastically huge and stupidly intrusive things.

I'm sure that you've all heard about the Kansas City football player that killed his girlfriend and himself last weekend. It was tragic and sad, but more tragic still was the opportunity it gave idiots to be idiotic.

 

Bob Costas made a remarkably stupid argument. That's because football and baseball aren't "America's pastime;" killing one another is. Lots of countries, from Somalia to Switzerland, have an excess of guns. But no other country sees its citizens killing each other for no reason quite like the United States. Not only are they good at it, they enjoy it. Anyone who has watched MSNBC on the weekend knows that.

The available evidence suggests that Jovan Belcher really wanted himself and Kasandra Perkins dead. If he didn't have a gun, he probably would have used a knife or even a really big stick. One way or another, those folks were gonna get dead.

It's important to note that Costas works for NBC. That's because Bill O'Reilly might be the only living person left watching NBC. If anyone on NBC says anything at all, there's a better than even chance that O'Reilly will feature it on his insipid "Talking Points Memo."

And guess what Bill's topic has been this week!


Wow. So much stupid. Can barely breathe. It burns, I tell you! It burns!

Let's take this point by point, shall we?

Well, even if you believe what Costas and Whitlock are putting out there, what's the solution? The Constitution gives Americans the right to protect themselves, that's clear. In many parts of the country people need hand guns in order to feel secure against criminals who might harm them.

Actually, the Constitution does no such thing. Here is the Second Amendment in full.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Look at the language of the amendment. Nowhere in it is the right to "feel secure against criminals who might harm them." That's just not what the Constitution says.

If you read the Federalist Papers, there is only one thing (other than that the English monarchy eats ass) that the Founders agreed upon - that there should be no standing army. A standing army is an invitation to constant foreign war, which is something that the years from 1989 through, well, now, sort of prove.

But European conquest of the New World was still rather a fad in 1789. The Spanish had Mexico and Florida, and the British had Canada. The United States had to defend itself somehow, right? That's where "A well regulated Militia" comes in.

Militias weren't necessary to secure a free state from criminals back then, since there were already police. The Second Amendment was created to defend against foreign invasion without putting together a standing army.

That might sound to you like a wildly liberal reading of the Amendment, but it's what it actually says. If you don't read so good, I'll print it again.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

See? The language really isn't that complicated.

On the other hand, if gun ownership is a constitutional right, I can't see any language barring carrying by convicted felons, the mentally ill or near federal buildings and schools. That's not there, either. But there is no literal reading of the language that gives you the right to blow a hole in Treyvon Martin's chest. Just sayin'.

Look, I don't care if you have a gun or not. Accordingly, that's something I'd leave to the people, just as a matter of common sense. Shooting people is, more often than not, already a crime. But the idea that's it's an individual right, absent national defence, is an incredibly expansive and hardly literal reading of what the Second Amendment actually says.

O'Reilly continues bringing the stupid.

"Talking Points" has long felt that criminals who use handguns should be punished more harshly than they are now. In fact, all gun crimes in America should be federalized and that includes illegal possession. The level of aggression that a criminal brings is far greater when that criminal uses a gun. A lethal weapon is just that... lethal.

And so there should be mandatory federal prison time for any person convicted of having a gun illegally and if you commit a crime with a gun that mandatory should be 10 years.

I hate to be a know-it-all, but is there is a single state in the Union where "having a gun illegally" is anything other than, well, illegal? Logic would also instruct me to believe that committing a crime with a gun is already a crime.

Keep in mind, this is a "traditional, small government guy," who just happens to want expansive federal laws that infringe on state jurisdiction.

And the past 10 years there has been an increase in the number of handguns in America. There may be 100 million of them in circulation right now. But there has been a decrease in handgun crime. 10 years ago there are about 7,000 handgun murders. Last year the number was about 6,000 it is quite understandable that people are reacting emotionally to this terrible crime in Kansas City.

But the problem America has is not law abiding citizens possessing weapons. That's not damaging the nation. Crimes committed with handguns and out-of-control people -- that's what's hurting the USA. You'll never stop crimes of madness, you're never going to stop them like the Kansas City situation.

But you can put violent criminals away for a long time if they use a gun during the commission of a crime. And that should be done.

You know how Bill O'Reilly's right? Because federal drug laws have worked so swimmingly! Notice how no one is getting high anymore?

If you want to point to a decrease in American handgun deaths in the last decade, have I got a statistic for you!

About the same number of  Americans were killed by other Americans with handguns in the United States in the last twelve months than were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last ten years.

In that spirit, here cometh the Great Battle of the Morons.



Oh God, it burns. It burns so bad!

"BEARS AND INDIANS!"

Nothing beats the Aurora "Dark Knight Rises" argument, though. That is classical stupidity of the sort that I'm sure will one day be taught in classrooms.

So let's say you're in a really dark room that's suddenly filled with tear gas and gun fire. Do you really think that shooting wildly and blindly into the darkness is going to end well? Really? Because pretty much anyone who knows anything about guns will tell you not to shoot at something you can't see, especially with at least hundred people around you.

Here's what I've learned. The problem isn't with people having guns, it's with idiots having guns.

Unfortunately, almost everybody is an idiot.

And that's why I watch the O'Reilly Factor. So you don't have to.