Maryland's DREAM Act fixation

One of the editors of the local Washington Examiner, Barbara Hollingsworth, writes a column with which I often disagree. (Among other things, she is bitterly opposed to mass transit, except possibly buses, and I've personally exchanged e-mail with her over this.) But today, she wrote a great column, which I will happily quote:

Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Marielsa Bernard's abrupt dismissal last month of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch against Montgomery College's Board of Trustees for granting discounted tuition to illegal immigrants is not the end of the discussion. Judicial Watch plans to appeal the ruling, which could spark the beginning of a re-examination of sanctuary policies nationwide.
The Judicial Watch case was not even on Bernard's docket when she inappropriately intervened and took it away from another judge to whom it had been assigned. A founding member of the Hispanic Bar Association with close ties to CASA de Maryland, a tax-funded advocacy group for illegal immigrants, Bernard ruled that the three plaintiffs — all Montgomery County taxpayers — had no legal standing to sue the college because financial aid is supposedly the sole province of the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

And how's this for unintended irony?

In order to qualify for the in-county rate, students must prove they either live in Montgomery County or that they graduated from one of the county's public high schools within the past three years. In other words, the tax-supported community college imposes its own residency test to determine how much tuition to charge students — but somehow feels free to ignore legal residency requirements under existing federal and Maryland state law.

The community college allows illegal immigrants to enroll at the in-county rate of $107 per credit, about half of the $219 per credit charged for in-state Maryland residents and a third of the $299 paid by out-of-state students. All else being equal, an undocumented Guatemalan living in Silver Spring would pay half as much tuition as a U.S. citizen from Upper Marlboro.

Maryland Del. Patrick L. McDonough, R-Baltimore County, agreed to audit the college when Montgomery state legislators and County Council members refused a request to do so from their constituents. The audit found that the college's long-standing policy, which has apparently been in place for at least a decade, may have cost Maryland taxpayers as much as $10 million, McDonough told The Examiner. "Maryland taxpayers must pay for this deficit."

"They know they're wrong," said McDonough — who helped spearhead a successful citizens petition drive to suspend implementation of the controversial Maryland Dream Act, which grants in-state tuition to illegal immigrants statewide, until a 2012 voter referendum. "Public officials do not have the right to violate the law and use tax funds — including the $147 million Montgomery College gets from the state — any way they want. If that right already existed, why was the General Assembly required to pass SB 167, the Dream Act, which would have allowed it?"

In Montgomery County, the law has been twisted so far that it is now used as a vehicle to reward and protect illegal immigrants while law-abiding citizen taxpayers are forbidden from challenging the misuse of their own money in court. This is supposed to be "fair."

"It's unbelievable that the biggest community college in Maryland is proudly and publicly admitting that it is misusing tax dollars, that members of the County Council and the county executive all think this is a good idea, and that a judge has now inappropriately issued a decision that upends 150 years of legal tradition and says that Maryland taxpayers do not have the right to sue public officials. This will not be tolerated or ignored," McDonough vowed.

If he's right, and this sanctuary college in a sanctuary county in a sanctuary state is finally held accountable for its illegal use of tax dollars, there's no telling how far this could spread.

Now, this time, I think Hollingsworth is right, and I applaud her raising these points.

An interesting comment on organized labor

I don't always agree with Bill O'Reilly, especially when he writes on issues like separation of church and state. But he wrote a column, which I read in the Washington Examiner, which I like enough to reproduce here. (I can't find it on the Examiner's site, but only on O'Reilly's own, so I do not give a link.)

There's lots of angst in the air after Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa called Tea Party people SOB's and urged voters to "take them out." Immediately, voter registration jumped among members of the Gambino family. Apparently, Mr. Hoffa is angry that some Americans want to put a lid on public sector pensions and perks which are bankrupting municipalities all over the country. Old Jimmy believes this is "taking the bread out of the mouths" of American workers.

For decades, union power has intimidated politicians in both parties. I mean, if you were running for office, would you want big union money flowing into your opponent's campaign? Would you want organized demonstrations at your rallies? How about work slowdowns, sudden mass worker illness, or anti-you phone campaigns? Unions have power and power rules.

Thus, many American unions have secured lucrative benefits for their members—benefits that have drained treasuries. The Post Office, for example, is on the verge of bankruptcy, not able to repay $5.5 billion in loans from the Treasury Department. The huge cost of postal retirement benefits is one of the main reasons an American institution may collapse.

All of this is not the fault of the workers. They did their jobs and are entitled to what was negotiated. But public money has run out, and going forward, big changes will have to be made if the American economy is to expand. Jimmy Hoffa can huff and puff all day long, but if he succeeds in blocking economic reform, he will indeed blow the entire house down.

President Obama needs union votes to win reelection. Therefore, he did not condemn Hoffa's over-the-top rhetoric even though he campaigned for verbal restraint in his Arizona speech. Mr. Obama will also not go up against the unions and demand fiscal reform. He will position himself as the champion of the working stiff, even if it means more disasters like the Post Office.

Previously in this space, I discussed my membership in AFTRA, a union that represents TV and radio people. When some greedy suits tried to con me and my colleagues at the syndicated program "Inside Edition" out of pension money, AFTRA fought them and won. So, unions are needed, but they should be optional. No American worker should be forced to pay union dues. Employees must weigh self-reliance against union protections.

With union power in decline, Jimmy Hoffa needs an enemy to rail against, and the Tea Party provides him that. But if he were honest, Hoffa would see the Tea folks simply want financial responsibility and fairness in the public sector. Living within your means is a key to economic success. Gaming the system through intimidation and threats is not.

Hoffa's not looking out for his country on this one.

This time, O'Reilly has it exactly right. I fully agree.

Social Security -- a Ponzi scheme?

Governor Rick Perry of Texas, one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, recently called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He's been criticized for this. But the real point is not whether Social Security is or is not properly described as a Ponzi scheme. It is, according to the definition, much like a Ponzi scheme because money from later "investors" is being used to pay off earlier ones. But unlike a true Ponzi scheme, there doesn't seem to be any plan by the U. S. Government to take the money and run. Rather, it is able to use its taxing power to force people to put money into it, which Carlo Ponzi could not do.

The real question is what to do about it? Canceling it is out of the question — so many people have paid into it all the money that might have gone into retirement savings, so canceling it would make it a Ponzi scheme, complete with the "take the money and run" aspect. It might be true that the program should not have been started in the 1930s on the basis it was, but it's too late to change that aspect of it. What we need to know is what Perry would put in its place. Anything that replaces Social Security has to take care of current retirees — people who didn't get a chance to invest that money in a better alternative — as well as current workers, many of which have already put in much of the money that could have been invested. Perhaps new workers could be put into a better program, more like what an IRA is, but anyone who has already been working and put money into Social Security needs somehow to be helped to compensate for his lost opportunity to invest that money. Perhaps the only fair thing would be to keep all retirees receiving money on the current plan and return, with interest, all money that current workers have paid into Social Security. But where would that money come from?

Ponzi scheme or not, the real question is how Social Security will be changed, and what it means to current retirees and current workers. Perry's criticism of the program does not serve a valid purpose, unless he presents his alternative.

Where has moderation gone?

When I was growing up (I'm in my late 60s now) both of our two political parties had liberals, conservatives, and moderates. It was common for votes in Congress to have large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the question. But in recent years, this is becoming less and less the case. Why?

Some people cite the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the Democrats' selection of delegates to their national conventions, or the rise of Presidential primaries as the near-exclusive mode of picking delegates (as opposed to political bosses and elected officials, who used to pick a lot of the delegates). But this only affects the choice of Presidential candidates, not the hundreds of members of the two houses of Congress or the thousands of members of the fifty State legislatures. So it cannot be that.

One thing that has had an effect is the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Certainly the Southern political situation has greatly changed because of that. African-American Southerners, newly able to exercise their votes, joined the Democratic Party, pulling it leftward, while former conservative Democrats have moved into the Republican Party, jettisoning a hatred of that party that went back to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, because the Democratic Party's Kennedy and Johnson were instrumental in pushing through those civil rights laws. (Examples of this abound. Strom Thurmond, the most obvious example, started political life as a Democrat, leading a revolt in 1948, but his States Rights Party still ran as the "true" Democratic Party in those Southern states where it won. By the end of his political career, he was very definitely a Republican. But the clearest example of this influx of conservative Democrats to the Republican party is probably little known. When I was in graduate school, the governor of Virginia was a Democrat named Mills Godwin. Governors of Virginia cannot be re-elected, but they can, it seems, run again after an interval out of office, so I was surprised to find out, years later and long after I had moved far away from Virginia, that the governor of Virginia was again Mills Godwin, but that he was now a Republican.) This has pulled the Republican Party rightward.

But this only affects the South. Most of the liberal-to-moderate Republicans were in the Northeast (and the few that still exist, like Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts, still are). Nothing has happened to Northeastern politics like the civil rights revolution in the South. African-Americans could, and did, vote in the Northeast. They even elected officials, like Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York. I cannot see what has changed.

Perhaps, the association of particular issues with liberalism and conservatism has. Prohibition used to be a liberal issue, if you look at the past (though liberals like Franklin Roosevelt were also responsible for its repeal). Certainly religious fundamentalism used to go with economic liberalism (if you don't believe that, think of William Jennings Bryan, the most outstanding example of both.) That does seem to have some connection with it, but it cannot account for it all — for one thing, this is a much more recent phenomenon than Bryan.

I wish I knew. I'd love to see a revival of "Rockefeller Republicanism." It was Nelson Rockefeller (and Dwight Eisenhower) that made me choose to be a Republican. By contrast, people like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann make me ashamed to be one. But the absence of moderates in the Democratic Party makes it even more unattractive to me. So I'm really unhappy this year.

Classification can be treacherous

As I have said more than once on this blog, sometimes political classification can be treacherous. On economic matters, I tend toward the conservative end — for lower taxes and lower spending, in general, though I have my causes that I think deserve spending. On social matters, I'm probably very much a liberal. But again, if "liberal" means anti-Israel, as it's coming to be these days, I go back to the right on this issue.

I recently saw a posting on the FrumForum blog by Noah Kristula-Green referring to Jon Huntsman as "More Conservative Than You Think." It bears some quoting:

Ever since Jon Huntsman declared on Twitter that he thinks evolution and climate change are real, he has been identified as the “moderate” candidate in the GOP field, the candidate whose goal seems to be to antagonize the Republican base. Charles Krauthammer described him as “a liberal’s idea of what a Republican ought to be.”

But what if the real Jon Huntsman is actually a candidate with an incredibly conservative record? This is the argument in The American Conservative’s new piece on Huntsman by Michael Brendan Dougherty.

-In spite of his support for civil unions, Huntsman is very socially conservative. His pro-life record is very substantive. Dougherty calls him “the pro-life cause’s most accomplished executive.” In Utah, second trimester abortions are banned and third trimester abortions are a felony because of Huntsman. His gun record includes making it possible to carry concealed guns in Utah.

“In Jon Huntsman’s America, once a child survives the first trimester, he’s well on the way to having a rifle in his small hands and extra money in his pockets,” Dougherty says.

-His economic record is very conservative: $110 million in tax cuts and a flat tax rate state wide. On healthcare, the article refers to Health Exchanges in Utah that he approved, adding that, “Unlike Romney, Huntsman’s state healthcare reform achieved more insurance coverage for residents without resorting to an individual mandate.” Left unmentioned in the piece is that Huntsman is also a strong advocate for the Ryan budget and has made multiple calls for it to be signed into law.

-His foreign policy at times can hit similar to Ron Paul sounding notes without being isolationist. In addition to questioning America’s role in Libya, Huntsman also asks, “why do we have so many military bases in Japan, we’re half a century after World War II? Why so many in Germany? Does it make sense for America to remain in these places?” He wants counter-terrorism in Afghanistan, not counter-insurgency or nation-building, and he wants the US to return to focusing on its long-term growth before going abroad.

Despite this, Huntsman isn’t seen as a conservative at all. He has some of the lowest poll numbers of anyone in the GOP field — he only barely qualified for the upcoming NBC-Politico debate. Rick Perry gets more traction just by calling Ben Bernanke’s actions treasonous and by calling Washington DC a “seedy place”.

Speculating what any of this can mean for Republican presidential nominee, Jon Huntsman is very premature. But during the next debate, it will be important to listen to Huntsman’s answers and keep in the back of your mind this piece of knowledge: whatever Huntsman is, he is not as moderate as you think.

On some of these issues, I'm in agreement with Huntsman. On others, of course, like abortion and guns, I'm not. But this posting deserves some attention.

Another voice on the health care law, for the perusal of our readers

The following column by Marc Kilmer, originally published in the Baltimore Sun, was included in an e-mail I received from my local county Republican Party:

MPPI: Make Health Insurance Affordable by Choice, not Mandate

Do you need a mandate to force you to buy something you want or need? This question isn't asked by those who support a health insurance mandate, such as Dr. Edward Miller and Scott A. Berkowitz of Johns Hopkins ("Hopkins leaders support health insurance mandate," Aug. 9). The reason we have so many uninsured Marylanders is that health insurance is either too unaffordable or it doesn't offer a good value to those who can afford it. A mandate won't solve either of those problems.

Responding to self-interested lobbying groups, well-meaning legislators have mandated that any health insurance sold in Maryland must cover over 60 procedures, something that has dramatically raised the cost of insurance in this state. If you want insurance that doesn't cover, say, in vitro fertilization, you can't purchase it. There are also a number of restrictions on the price and type of health insurance that can be sold in the state.

If you want to escape Maryland's tough regulations, too bad. If you live in the Eastern Shore town of Delmar and want to purchase a cheaper policy from a broker across the street in Delmar, Del., you are legally prohibited from doing so. Now, with the passage of the so-called "Affordable Care Act," restrictions like Maryland are in place at the national level. This legislation will increase the cost of health insurance and then use tax dollars to subsidize its purchase for some people.

If we allowed health insurance to be bought and sold like other goods there would be no need for a health insurance mandate. If people could tailor the health insurance policy to meet their needs and desires and if they could buy health insurance across state lines, the vast majority of people could afford a policy giving them what they want. While some people would not have enough income to afford a policy, that's why we have safety net programs like Medicaid.

Instead of supporting a mandate forcing people to buy a product that is too expensive and doesn't offer people what they want, Dr. Miller and Mr. Berkowitz should advocate giving health insurance consumers more power. These consumers, not government bureaucrats, know what they can afford and what type of insurance is best for them.

A very good column, with which I heartily concur.

Rick Perry? Oh, no!

Some polls I've seen lately show a surge in the numbers for Rick Perry, putting him in #1 position among Republican candidates for the nomination. I hope that it's just a case of people supporting him because he's a fresh face, the newest entry into the race.

It's clear that Perry is the kind of Republican that Democrats like to paint all Republicans as — pretty stupid. His remarks on creationism, for one, bear this out. And he's taken to comparing himself to George W. Bush by saying "Bush went to Yale, I went to Texas A&M." Nominating Perry almost concedes the race to Obama, unless people are so fed up with Obama's handling of the economy that they'll vote for anyone running against him, and I don't see this yet.

There are certainly problems with Mitt Romney, but so far he seems the best choice. I've seen some mention of former New York State Governor George Pataki as a candidate, and I would — as far as I can tell — be able to support him, but I haven't seen that he was interested in the nomination. I might have really liked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and had a favorable view of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, but both of them have made it clear that they aren't interested. My favorite blog owner, Dennis Sanders, keeps advocating Jon Huntsman, who is probably closer to me politically than Romney, but can he get the nomination in a party where he's polling about 2%? And if he manages to get that nomination, will he be able to make himself known to enough people to get their vote in Nomember 2012 against an incumbent President Obama? So with all these factors, I have to go for Romney.

I really don't understand

In just about a month, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in our military services will end. What I cannot understand was the point in continuing it in place once it was decided that it would go. Why should a gay serviceman or -woman be subject to discharge for revealing, now, something which would have no effect if he/she reveals it about him/herself in another month?

I understand that the service chiefs wanted time to educate people about the new rules — but it still would make more sense to begin this education and immediately state that no further discharges of service personnel who revealed that they were gay would take place, both, upon the decision to end DADT.

If anyone can tell me the justification for continuing DADT once the decision to end it was made, I'd like to know it.

Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and the real reason to oppose them

Two days ago, Cal Thomas posted a column in the Washington Examiner which took "liberals" to task for supposed "bigotry" toward the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, or "evangelicals" in general, with the following words:

In contemporary culture, those who claim to tolerate everything are intolerant of ideas that come from perspectives other than their own, especially when those ideas are rooted in conservative politics or evangelical faith.

Though anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic bigotry sadly are still with us, the new and "accepted" bigotry among some on the left is for those who call themselves -- or are sometimes mislabeled by people who don't know the difference between born-again and born yesterday -- evangelical Christians.

With two evangelicals running for president, the opening salvo in what is likely to be a God vs. government battle has already been launched. A June 22 article in Rolling Stone magazine gives bigots permission for more bigotry. The illustration by Victor Juhasz, which accompanies it, reveals where the writer is headed.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is dressed as Joan of Arc with a Bible in one hand, a bloody sword in the other, a cross on her chest, and the "finger of God" pointing at her from heaven.

In the background, people are being burned at the stake. Father Charles Coughlin at his worst would have had trouble topping this on his bigoted radio broadcasts in the 1930s.

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi says Bachmann is "a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions." One of many examples he cites is her assertion that China is "plotting to replace the dollar bill."

Recently, China's official Xinhua News Agency editorialized in favor of a new global reserve currency, replacing the dollar. Don't look for a retraction.

There's plenty more in "Michele Bachmann's Holy War" on which the bigots can feast. This is the argument of anyone who has little or no faith in God. They attack people who believe the Supreme Being does not sit in the Oval Office.

The secular left is also going after Gov. Rick Perry's faith. Writing in the New York Times, Timothy Egan refers to the Texas governor as a "biblical bully" and asks, "Is God listening to Rick Perry?"

Ideas that come from the minds of secular liberals are considered right and good, no matter their track record. Ideas from conservatives, be they secular or especially evangelical, are "bat sh*t crazy," according to Taibbi's scatology.

There is a way to blunt this coming tidal wave of anti-evangelical bigotry. Bachmann and Perry -- and any other Republican who wishes to join in -- should not play on the territory of their opponents.

Instead, they should focus on what works and whose lives have been transformed by embracing similar faith and similar attitudes.

When I read this column, I felt like commenting, but while the Examiner used to print letters to the editor from me routinely, they haven't always done so. So I held off. And I was glad to see in today's Examiner, a letter to the editor by David Lampo, which could almost have been written by me. The letter was so good, I want to reprint it as a guest editorial in this blog:

Re: "A new wave of liberal bigotry," Aug. 18

Cal Thomas should receive a chutzpah award for his piece charging "the left" with religious bigotry simply because they are exposing the scary records and statements of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Anyone who studies these two candidates will find a long list of examples of religious and anti-gay bigotry, particularly in the case of Bachmann, whose long-held religious belief in the views of the radical theologian Francis Schaeffer make her the most extreme major party presidential candidate in generations.

Millions of Republicans, independents and libertarians are deeply worried about the records of these two candidates. They are not being attacked simply for having religious faith, as Thomas states. They are being attacked because their beliefs and statements are so extreme that most Americans will repudiate them at the polls if the country is unfortunate enough to have either one of them as the Republican presidential candidate.

If that happens, the many virtues of divided government will become readily apparent.

David Lampo

Alexandria

Well written, Mr. Lampo!

Do we really need them all?

I'm not one of those anti-military types who want us to limit our military to homeland defense, but sometimes I wonder, Do we really need to have an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, and a Marine Corps as separate services?

The Army is supposedly land-based, the Navy sea-based, and the Air Force air-based. But the Army has airborne troops, the Navy has its SEALs (who often, as in the action that got Osama bin Laden, operate on land), the Navy and Air Force quarrel over the specifications for planes they will both have to use, and the Marine Corps, though technically a part of the Navy, seems to be more a land force than anything else.

Some time ago, Canada merged all its services into Canadian Forces. I think that, just because we're a bigger country with a much bigger military, this doesn't mean we can't do the same. It should be much more efficient to eliminate duplication.

Back in 1947 the Defense Department was created, and the Army and Navy no longer had separate Cabinet secretaries to report to. Yet it was only this year that the two services' Washington-area hospitals were merged. More than sixty years later!

I think Canada did it right. Let's do the same!

Pawlenty is out, Perry is in

This past weekend, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination. And Texas Governor Rick Perry joined the race, and immediately became a serious contender in the eyes of the political correspondents. In fact, they are calling it a three-person race, with the only candidates with serious chances at nomination being Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Perry. But I have to say I have great skepticism about Perry's fitness for the Presidency — not as much skepticism about Perry as about Bachmann, but enough to worry me about the chances he might be nominated.

I rather wonder whether Perry is perhaps not intellectually up to the Presidency, as I read that Perry is a creationist. But, the truth be told, I searched for evidence, and what I found was this quote from the "Outside the Beltway" blog. And if you read the quote, what Perry is advocating is not creationism, but intelligent design. And, as I stated about 2½ years ago, they are different. In fact, I am firmly convinced that the evidence of science proves that evolution has occurred, but that there is no way one can tell from that evidence whether the mechanism for the evolutionary changes is the Darwinian one — random mutations plus natural selection — or an intelligent designer playing with his creations to see what he can produce. And I favor the latter, so while I am totally opposed to creationism, and I accept evolution, I also accept intelligent design.

But then, read that quote again. Perry seems to oppose intelligent design to evolution; he talks about teaching one alongside the other as if they are alternatives. So perhaps he is one of those creationists who say "intelligent design" when they really mean "creationism." I'm really afraid this is the case.

More and more, I'm pulling for Mitt Romney to get the nomination.

Scoreboard on the individual mandate

At the District Court level, four courts have ruled. Two say it's constitutional, two say it's unconstitutional.

At the Circuit Court of Appeals level, two courts have already ruled, one remains to be heard from. One says it's constitutional, one says it's unconstitutional.

Whatever the 4th Circuit Court in Richmond, the remaining appeals court says, this is a sharp division. It clearly will have to go to the Supreme Court. I'm not certain why there is so much division among the judges — its unconstitutionality is clear to me. But all bets are off until the Supreme Court actually rules. I'm waiting with bated breath.

The Eleventh Circuit has ruled! Now on to the Supreme Court.

A great opinion was issued by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The individual mandate in last year's health care law is unconstitutional.

[T]he individual mandate contained in the Act exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power. This conclusion is limited in scope. The power that Congress has wielded via the Commerce Clause for the life of this country remains undiminished. Congress may regulate commercial actors. It may forbid certain commercial activity. It may enact hundreds of new laws and federally-funded programs, as it has elected to do in this massive 975- page Act. But what Congress cannot do under the Commerce Clause is mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die.

This is one more nail in the coffin of the bill that has been called "Obamacare." As I have maintained all along, whatever may be the good features of the bill, the individual mandate clearly has to go.

The Obama administration obviously will appeal to the Supreme Court. This, of course, they have a right to do. But I predict that the Justices of that court will accept the Eleventh Circuit's ruling. The Constitution is clear on this point.

Mitt Romney is even more the front runner

Looking at the Examiner coverage of the debate in Iowa, it seems that Mitt Romney has pulled out even more in front as the candidate with the best chance at the 2012 Republican nomination.

The Examiner tends to run far to my right, yet they agreed that the best performance in the debate was Romney's; they gave him a B+ while Newt Gingrich got a B- and nobody else anywhere above a C+. (I can't find a link; this seems to have only appeared in the paper edition of the Examiner.) But if even they admitted that Romney beat their favorites, he seems to be an unquestioned front-runner.

Why Michele Bachmann should not be the nominee

This is probably not news to anyone, but it's clear that, on all the issues that she considers important, Michele Bachmann and I are on opposite sides.

In a campaign stop in Iowa, Bachmann said:

"I'm 100 percent pro-life, I'm 100 percent pro-marriage, pro-family, I'm 100 percent on the Second Amendment."

Assuming that "pro-marriage, pro-family" means in fact against allowing same-sex marriage (which would be consistent with her previous stands) her "100 percent" issues are all on the wrong side. Supposedly, Bachmann is the "Tea Party" candidate. The "Tea Party" is supposedly an anti-tax, anti-spending movement, which would meet with my approval, but when Michele Bachmann makes the three things listed here her signature issues, she's lost me.

Moderates? Or not?

As I said in one of my recent posts, Solomon Kleinsmith's comments in his blog took issue with my characterization of the debt ceiling deal as a "compromise." But it seems that the Washington Post characterized it as a victory for "moderates." So was it a "centrist" or "moderate" deal? Kleinsmith doesn't think so. I do, as does the Post.

I don't very often find common ground with the Washington Post, but it looks like an agreement here!

Government foolishness

On July 13, 2006, I went to the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration office to get a new identification card. (Why the Motor Vehicle Administration is the place to go is strange enough — but because it's issued in a format based on a driver's license, MVA issues it.) A card was issued to me, with an expiration date of July 13, 2011. Five years was the term, apparently.

Yesterday I attempted to go to a meeting that was scheduled to take place inside a Federal Government building, so I had to show a photo-identification card. At first, the security guard was about to pass me in, but then she said "Let me look at that card again." She saw the date, and I was denied entry.

First of all, why was there a need to put an expiration date on that card, in the first place? If it was valid proof that I was who I claimed to be on July 12, why was it not on July 14?

And why would it be necessary to deny me access to the building, just because my card expired, less than a month ago? I think both the State of Maryland (for setting an expiration date on the card) and the U. S. Government (for caring that it had passed, less than a month ago) were being rather foolish. As I said, it would have been sufficient to let me into the building less than a month ago — why not yesterday?

So I had to head back to the MVA office to get a new identification card. At first glance, I thought that perhaps this was just a scheme for the State to collect more money from fees to issue these cards. But I was charged nothing for the new card — and, surprisingly, the expiration date on the new card was August 6, 2019! If five years was all that a card was good for in 2006, why am I given eight on the new one? All I lost was the chance to participate in a meeting and a bit of time; the processing took perhaps a half hour, but I had to spend some time traveling to the MVA office. The State gained nothing — in fact it lost, since the clerk who renewed my identification card had to be paid. What was the point of all this?

A euphemism that obscures

It is interesting that people trying to get things like the DREAM Act or other laws that make it easy for illegal immigrants to get the privileges of citizens (or residents) never call them "illegal." They always use the euphemism "undocumented." (I just saw an example in a local paper, the Montgomery Gazette.)

You'd think that someone had just forgotten to fill out a form, or lost his papers. But in fact, the correct thing to call them is "illegal." They are here in violation of the laws of this country. If that isn't what "illegal" means, I don't know what the word means!

This country is a nation of laws. The immigration laws are on the books and just as much valid laws as anything in the statute books, whether for murder, theft, or anything else. Anyone in violation of our nation's laws deserves to be punished, not abetted. The states of Arizona and Alabama are doing the right thing — if the Federal Government will not enforce its own laws, the States need to do it for them.

Where is the political center?

There is a blog I read frequently, called "Rise of the Center," owned by Solomon Kleinsmith. He obviously considers himself a centrist, but sometimes I wonder.

Now, I do not claim to be at the dead center of the political spectrum, but I think I'm a relatively short distance to the right of center. Yet Kleinsmith sometimes impresses me as far to my left.

Case in point: the recent debt ceiling/deficit settlement. In comments to his posting on it, he took me to task for referring to the final solution as a "compromise," because in his eye, any refusal to impose a new tax burden on the American people is a "hard right" position. In fact, the Tea Party types gave up quite a lot in order to win a no-new-taxes solution, and many voted against the bill because they felt it did not cut spending enough. I'll admit that if you consider the most extreme positions of the left wing of the Democratic Party and the most extreme positions of the right wing of the Republican Party (approximately synonymous with the Tea Party), the final solution was closer to what the right wanted than to the left. But the right wanted to eliminate several executive departments (Yesterday's Washington Examiner had a column advocating the Energy, Education, and Housing & Urban Development departments; Sen. Rand Paul has proposed a bill to eliminate Commerce as well as those three), eliminate the Medicare drug benefit, and many other reductions in the Federal Government that were not even approached. (Frankly, the department I would eliminate is Agriculture. When it was formed, more than half of all Americans were farmers. Today it is about 3%. Do they really need a whole Cabinet department devoted to their interests?)

Yes, this was a compromise. Both sides gave up something, and members of the two houses of Congress from both ends of the political spectrum refused to vote for it. But yet, Solomon Kleinsmith insists this was "not a centrist solution." I guess to me the center isn't what Kleinsmith thinks it is. But then, nobody has the power to define the center, I guess.

Sore winners?

It is very strange that so many of the "Tea Party" types voted against the budget compromise bill. They may not have gotten all they wanted, but they got a lot.

Yesterday, I saw a post in the Washington Examiner by Susan Ferrechio:

The debt deal President Obama signed into law Tuesday was shaped largely by the Tea Party movement, which propelled dozens of fresh faces into Congress last year only after the candidates pledged to drastically slash federal spending.


While many Tea Party freshmen in the House and Senate ended up voting against the debt ceiling bill because they didn't think it cut deep enough, their fingerprints were all over the measure.

There were historically steep cuts, no tax increases and a commitment to even bigger spending reductions in the near future. In response to Tea Party pressure, the measure also requires the House and Senate to vote on a balanced budget amendment, something that hasn't happened in 15 years.

Yet it wasn't enough for some. In the face of a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate, did they really believe they could avoid all traces of compromise? If I'd been trying to get the Government to do something, and I got as much of what I was trying to get as the Tea Partiers did, I'd have been enthusiastic!

Political posturing

So now the debt ceiling bill was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President, only a few hours before the Government was theoretically to go into default. And yet, all this drama really meant nothing.

I never believed the U. S. Government would go into default; like certain banks, it is "too big to fail." I was totally confident that a solution would be found, and found in time, and the timing confirmed my belief that it would be made at the very last moment, so that nobody could question details. The whole thing was a perfect exercise of political posturing; the most liberal and the most conservative members of each house voted against it, but always making sure that enough members voted in favor to pass it. If there were any possibility of enough negative votes to scuttle it, some fierce arm-twisting would have ensued.

Did anyone really expect anything different? This is the way politicians work. But some people will say, if professional politicians are going to do this sort of thing, the time is ripe to institute term limits and restore amateurism in politics. I do not think that's the solution. You would only replace people who are so familiar with how the system works, and how to game it, with people who are so ignorant of how laws are worded (and how lawyers can game the laws) that they'd pass sloppy laws whose meaning would be uncertain when they were passed and which the legal profession would twist to mean whatever their clients wanted them to. I think the current way is better, but our Congress has not acquitted itself very well.

The debt ceiling vote -- as I expected

Yesterday — after 7 pm — the House of Representatives voted to extend the debt ceiling. A moment of drama was added by having Rep. Gabrielle Giffords return to the House for the first time since she was shot last January.

It will still need to pass the Senate, which is scheduled to vote on it today — the last possible day before a threatened default. I assume it will pass.

As I said in an earlier post, the politicians involved were playing "chicken" to win political points. President Obama got the one thing he desperately wanted — an extension past the 2012 election, so the election would not be fought while the debt ceiling debate went on. The Republicans got one thing they wanted — at least short-term, no new tax increases. The Tea Party got only some of the spending cuts they wanted — but this was a bit of a victory for them, since the Democrats wanted, at first, not to make any cuts, and to do it all by tax increases.

It's a compromise. Everyone got something and gave up something. But as a Republican I have to say that the Democrats, controlling the Senate and White House, had so much in their favor, and yet gave up so much in the end. I have to think that the Republican Congressional leaders worked beyond the call of duty to make this a bill with more Republican input than you might expect with the Democrats controlling so much of the machinery.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and anyone else I forgot in the Republican Congressional leadership.

Stealing domain names and cheating

The Center for Range Voting is a group that advocates what they (and I) consider a better way of conducting elections: a method that has been called both "range voting" and "score voting." (The latter describes it better, so I prefer it.) They have their own website, with the URL rangevoting.org .

A rival group, officially named the Center for Voting and Democracy but now mostly using the name of FairVote, is similarly engaged in advocating changes in the voting system, but mostly favors a system called "instant runoff voting" or "the alternative vote," which has mainly been used in Australia, but in recent years has been tried here. (A couple of years ago it was used to elect the mayor of Burlington, Vt., with disastrous results, showing the weakness of this method, though it has worked fairly well in Australia.) These groups, both advocating different election method changes, find themselves in conflict, with CRV usually having the more logical arguments, but FairVote having the most convincing propaganda machine to many people. But now FairVote seems to have crossed the line and started playing dirty. They set up a blog, with the URL rangevoting.com . It has been set up very recently, apparently to hijack people who intend to get to rangevoting.org but get the URL wrong. (This was reported on Dale Sheldon-Hess' voting methods blog, "The Least of All Evil.")

Has FairVote no sense of ethics?

The debt ceiling debate

What I've been saying for some time, I truly believe. All the public posturing is just a bid to score points before November 2012's election. Booth sides are in a game of "chicken." But I'm sure a deal will be reached, behind the scene where we can't tell who twisted whose arm about what. It certainly makes one wonder how anyone can stand being a politician — I certainly couldn't.

Strange reasoning on DOMA

There are hearings going on in the Senate Judiciary Committee about repealing the unfortunately-named "Defense of Marriage Act." And the people opposed to this have brought forth an argument that, on its face, looks reasonable: for example, Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, cited a 1947 Supreme Court case that declared, "Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race."

If same-sex marriages are to be denied because they cannot procreate, however, why are marriages not immediately annulled when the wife gets a hysterectomy? Or when the husband gets a vasectomy? Why are postmenopausal women allowed to marry?

When the opponents of same-sex marriage explain why they oppose it, but not marriage of a man and a woman where a hysterectomy, a vasectomy, or simply menopause has occurred, then I'll believe their argument. Until then, it is clear that they are simply trying to impose their idea of morality upon others.

President Obama still doesn't get it!

President Barack Obama is quoted as having said, after another breakdown in the talks over the debt, "Can they say yes to anything?"

It is clear that he still hasn't gotten it. No, they aren't going to say yes to tax increases, particularly in the midst of a recession. And if you keep insisting on raising taxes, you will not get an agreement. The reason that John Boehner, not Nancy Pelosi, is Speaker of the House, is that the American people, last November, spoke out. And they embraced the idea that the way to fix this economy is not "tax and spend," but "give the people their own money, to spend."

Goodbye, Borders

My favorite blog (other than this one!), Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue," has in the past week done two posts on the demise of the Borders bookstore chain. I suppose if he can do so on his mostly-political blog, so can I. He comes originally from Michigan, so I suppose his contacts with Borders go way back. I first discovered them in the 1980s or 1990s, when a Borders store opened in the Washington, D. C. suburbs. I'd never seen a store with so many books on some of the topics I liked, all in one place! (Barnes & Noble, which goes back a long way and which I knew back in my college days, the late 1950s, was primarily a place to buy used textbooks; eventually, of course, they turned into the same sort of big-box general bookstore that Borders became. But that wasn't the Barnes & Noble I remember.) The Borders store in question got bigger, outgrew their original space, and moved into a big shopping mall a block or so away, and other Borders stores opened in the area until, at one point, there were 3 stores in D. C., and a fair number in the suburbs. Most of them have now already closed; the two remaining ones will close soon as the chain dies.

I could see it coming. Though I actually worked at Borders for a while in 1998, and my wife actually worked at a different Borders store for 12 years and a few months, until her store closed earlier this year, it has become clear that the wave of the future is Amazon.com. This became obvious in recent years, when I found that even though, as the spouse of an employee, I had a 33% discount on all books I bought at Borders, I could still get some cheaper on Amazon. It is just too expensive to maintain a brick-and-mortar store.

When my aunt died and left me an inheritance (she died many years ago, but the inheritance became available only last year), I put a sizable chunk of the money into Amazon stock. It has done amazingly well. Obviously, there is money to be made from selling books — but not in the type of store that Borders represents. Borders, like Tower Records a few years ago, is a store I'm sorry to see go. But you cannot expect a company to stay in business if they cannot make a profit. Goodbye — I loved you when you were here.

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

The Republican Party and the tax impasse

Both of our two major parties are broad coalitions. Cerainly it is hard to find an issue on which all Democrats agree, or an issue on which all Republicans agree. (I will speak mainly of the Republicans, because it is to that party that I belong.)

The Republican Party includes the Log Cabin Republicans and viciously anti-gay Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. It includes isolationist Ron Paul and hawkish John McCain. It includes Sarah Palin, so anti-abortion that she bore a child she knew would have Down's Syndrome, and it includes pro-abortion former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. But one thing unites most of these disparate Republicans: economic policies favoring allowing more of our nation's taxpayers to keep more of their own money. So is it such a surprise that this tax impasse is occirring?

Certainly, there are Republicans who would accept the need to raise some taxes, but when it comes down to this sort of showdown, given the other issues that divide the Republican Party, it is safer, for someone like John Boehner, whose job is to lead the party in its negotiations with President Obama, to be hard-line on taxes, and keep all the Republicans in your camp, than to concede on the issue and lose the support of many who are crucial to the success of the Republican Party.

How will this impasse be settled? Your guess is as good as mine.

Is President Obama really pro-gay-rights?

A reader named William Hart posted a comment to yesterday's post. In it he expresses the opinion that President Obama should be re-elected in 2012 to ensure progress in gay rights. I think Mr. Hart is totally misinformed, and I think that more than a response to a comment is called for, so I'm making a full post.

President Obama talks the gay rights line. But has he done anything he could to further the cause of gay rights? On Jan. 20, 2009 he became President. That very day he could have issued an executive order repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He could have done so at any time since that day — but he has not. It took a court order to repeal DADT.

True, earlier this year he (or his Attorney General, but this is really the same thing) said he will cease fighting to uphold the "Defense of Marriage Act." But it took him two years to get to this point. Why did the Obama Administration fight to uphold DOMA for the first two years of its existence?

Among the people fighting to replace President Obama, the most anti-gay are probably Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Does anyone really think that Barack Obama will speed the progress of gay rights any more than Bachmann or Santorum? What might he do to help -- and why hasn't he done it already? Please answer, in specifics.

The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" -- finally!

Through the Frum Forum blog, it has come out that the military has finally complied with the court order to accept openly gay recruits. The order was issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Funny, President Obama was elected with so much gay support, but it took the judiciary to end DADT. If Obama were so pro-gay, he could have issued an executive order.

In this, as in the gay marriage controversy, the President talks as if he is sympathetic to gay equality, but look at his actions! Yet the majority of gay activists remain firmly behind him. It's not really justified, but you can't convince them.

Reliving the O. J. Simpson case

I notice that on another blog, there is a post by Marcia Clark, who was the prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial, in which she describes the Casey Anthony verdict as "Worse Than O.J.!" This, of course, implies that the O. J. Simpson verdict was wrong. Now I want to say this: I am definitely not a football fan, so in my mind O. J. Simpson was hardly the "American hero" that, to some people, he was. And I am absolutely convinced that Simpson murdered those two people. Yet, had I been on that jury, I would have had to vote to acquit. Why? Because in our legal system, the accused is presumed to be innocent, unless guilt can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And the prosecution failed to make that kind of a case. With the possibility of evidence tampering by a racist policeman, the procesution's case was definitely one that could engender doubts.

I haven't followed the Casey Anthony case that closely. I don't know whether the not-guilty verdict there made sense — what I've seen implies she was, in fact, guilty, but read what I said about Simpson above. But I think Marcia Clark, who couldn't get a conviction herself in a case where the defendant was clearly guilty, because her side botched the case, is not the one to comment!

Gregory Kane and the Kennedys

I have on several occasions referred to columns I have read in the Washington Examiner, a local edition around here of a national paper. They are a rather conservative paper, and most of their columnists are well to my right, so I sometimes find myself in agreement, and sometimes in disagreement, with the columns in the Examiner. But today I saw a column where my disagreement stemmed, not from the Examiner columnist's being too far right, but from his praise of a liberal Democrat for whom I have little but scorn.

I suppose it is a conscious decision by the Examiner, but I don't know for sure: it features a number of African-American, but well to the right of center, columnists, perhaps to show that you don't need to be liberal if you are an African-American. And one of those African-American conservative columnists, Gregory Kane, has been the author of columns I have criticized in the past as far more conservative than I consider sensible. But today's column by Gregory Kane errs in the opposite direction, as I said above. Today's Gregory Kane column was entitled, "Six heroes to visit on the Fourth." Apparently there are six people whom he considers heroes to such degree that he visits their graves, and theirs only, each Memorial Day and Independence Day. And while nobody would challenge his selection of Medgar Evers as his #1, highest ranking hero, I certainly have some qualms about some of the others.

I'm not quite sure what qualifies boxer Joe Louis as his #5 choice, or actor Lee Marvin as his #6. His other actor selection — #2 Audie Murphy — makes sense, as Murphy was, in Kane's words, "America's most decorated soldier in World War II."

But it's his third and fourth choices that give me a pain. #3 was Robert F. Kennedy, and #4 his brother John. He puts Robert above John because "it was Robert Kennedy who got on board with civil rights long before his older brother did." But he concedes that

In the early 1960s, neither Robert Kennedy nor his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was very adept at handling the nation's civil rights problems.

They completely botched the crisis at Ole Miss when rioters protested James Meredith's admission to the law school. They even acquiesced to the resegregation of an integrated military police unit in an attempt to appease racists.

So why do they deserve such heroic ratings from Kane? Of course, I have particularly bad feelings about Robert; John was a mediocre President who failed to accomplish much on his own, but got much of his program enacted into law through the skills of President Lyndon Johnson. But Robert was positively bad. First of all, it was the Robert Kennedy Attorney General's Office that sponsored more illegal wiretaps than any other administration in history, and people who criticized President Richard Nixon for illegal wiretaps usually fail to have the same animus toward RFK — because they're liberals? because RFK was the victim of an assassin's bullet, like his brother 4½ years earlier?

My biggest gripe about RFK was his coming into New York State to take a Senate seat from the man I feel represented me best of all the Senators and Representatives who have represented me in my life — Kenneth Keating. RFK had no connection with New York State (except for having spent a short time in school there) and yet, because the Constitution does not specify a minimum length of time as a resident of a State, RFK was allowed to move to Long Island in New York State a few months before the election. (This provided a precedent, decades later, for Hillary Clinton, but she actually did a reasonable job of representing New York State in the Senate!)

The reference to RFK's (and JFK's) graves at Arlington Cemetery reminds me of something that happened quite a few years ago. Two or three friends of mine from New York came down here, and wanted to go to Arlington to see the two Kennedy graves. I stayed away from those two graves, because I felt that one should show a certain amount of respect for a grave, which, in the case of the two Kennedys, I could not honestly do. So I stayed some distance away, out of sight of the graves, but one of my friends, on the way back to join me, spotted another headstone, which he called my attention to, and which did merit my respect — the name on the stone was Kenneth Barnard Keating! Oddly, Keating's and RFK's graves are not far apart.

One more step in the vetting of the health care law

A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (Cincinnati) has ruled the Obama health care law constitutional. And at least one blog post, by Eli Lehrer in the Frum Forum, predicts that the law will survive. I hope not. But a lot has to happen. Two other Circuit Courts of Appeals, the Fourth in Richmond and the Eleventh in Atlanta, still have to rule. And then, it surely will reach the Supreme Court.

The Cincinnati court was upholding a lower court ruling, in Michigan. Among the District Court rulings, two found it constitutional and two found it unconstitutional. If these courts failed to agree, why does Lehrer believe the Circuit Courts will all agree? And the Supreme Court often overrules circuit court decisions anyway. So this is just one setback for justice. In the long run, nothing has yet been decided.

An Examiner column I really liked

I've recently mentioned some columns and editorials in the Washington Examiner to which I found myself very much opposed. I should, in fairness, cite a column which appeared today, which I applaud unhesitatingly. It was done by Examiner columnist Noemie Emery. (I read it first in the paper; it is now available online as well.) She in turn was responding to a column by Michael Walsh in the National Review Online in which Walsh had said:

"After running one of the most disgraceful 'honorable' campaigns in American political history ... you'd think the least the least of the military McCains could do is to slink quietly off into the wild blue yonder with the thanks of a grateful nation trailing in his wake. But no, at age 74, he's still in the Senate ... where he can continue to reach across the aisle, poke his finger into the eyes of conservatives, hog the media spotlight, rail about Republican 'isolationists,' suck up to Fox News, and unleash his ankle-biting mini-me onto his enemies. Please, just go away."

Emery's response, after quoting this paragraph, began:

This was National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh's pique-bomb for John McCain, R-Ariz., whose behavior was clearly irking him.

But the appraisal is as short on understanding as it is long on rhetoric. McCain's "disgraceful" campaign did a remarkable job under the circumstances in staying close to Obama. He actually led him for two weeks before the financial implosion put paid to his chances.

McCain was also elected to the Senate five times, by fairly large margins. Having put away a movement conservative challenger by a two-to-one margin in the 2010 primary, he has the right and the power to do as he wants. He represents his state — not conservative pundits, to whom he owes nothing. He has the right to poke his finger in the eyes of anyone when he thinks they deserve it. He has the right to rail at "isolationists" when he thinks that they're wrong on the issues. And they, of course, have the right, and the duty, to rail back at him.

And then Emery went on to make it clear that the Republican Party has an identity separate from its conservative wing. And one of Emery's best remarks in that column is:

The Republican Party is conservative in the relative sense that it is the more conservative of the two major parties, and home to everyone in the country to the right of the center, by one degree or by one hundred: to Olympia Snowe and Michele Bachmann, to Jim DeMint and Jon Huntsman, to Rand Paul and Marco Rubio; to Scott Brown and Rick Perry.

There are no "Republicans in Name Only"; only different kinds of Republicans.

Bravo, Ms. Emery. I couldn't have said it better.

Voting methods

Recently I made a post on another blog in which I've expressed some of the same thoughts I'd earlier expressed about open primaries. A subsequent commenter made a posting in which he advocated a system that was originally called "the alternative vote" and is now often called "instant runoff voting." I once liked IRV, but unfortunately it can often lead to a siituation in which centrist candidates are rejected in favor of extremists. So it's particularly unfortunate that someone trying to form a centrist party is pushing IRV.

Readers are encouraged to read the links I've made in this post, also an article on a better system, Bucklin voting, and the best system in my opinion, score (or range) voting. Don't make up your minds untill you are familiar with all the options.

Perhaps people's minds are changing

The New York State Senate passed a gay-marriage bill yesterday. Though the chamber is controlled by Republicans, it was mostly Democratic votes that passed it; four Republicans joined all but one of the Democrats. But it is the first time a Republican-controlled legislative chamber has passed a gay-marriage bill. (See also my posting of May 15, entitled "New York State, conservatives, and gay marriage.")

But the most interesting point in this was a Republican senator representing a Buffalo-area district, Senator Mark J. Grisanti. Although he had campaigned on an anti-gay-marriage platform, the discriminatory features of the current law's permitting only straight couples to marry eventually got to him. He was quoted as saying:

I apologize for those who feel offended. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.

Obviously, he gets it. Hopefully, others are going to realize what Sen. Grisanti has.

New York State, unlike California, has no initiative/referendum process. Once the bill is signed by Gov. Cuomo, it will become law in 30 days, and no "Prop. 8" type movement can kill it. So New York is about to become the largest State in the U. S. to permit gay marriage.

Not a good idea, even if bipartisan

A bill has been proposed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul to legalize marijuana. I think it's a terrible idea.

The plus on the bill is it would hand back to the States the right to decide whether the drug should be legal; I think that generally that sort of thing is a good thing, but not in the case of a dangerous drug which (for some reason) has lost its stigma among some people.

Some people argue that it's safer than alcohol and tobacco; I'm not so sure. People have been using those two for centuries; in the case of alcohol, for millennia. People have some idea of the effects of these two drugs, they know the risks, as well as the positive effects. Cannabis, by contrast, is a fairly new drug. On top of all this, it's usually smoked rather than ingested, so the dosage is harder to control than alcohol (though the same as tobacco). I will always say to anyone that claims that cannabis is safer than alcohol and tobacco: "Prove it." Until then, I say, keep it illegal. Let's not give people too many ways to curdle their brains. Alcohol is enough.

Yes, criticize Pres. Obama when he deserves it. But this isn't such a case!

There is a family of newspapers all called "The Examiner," published in various places around the nation, under a common ownership. One of those places is Washington, D. C., and since I live in the Washington suburbs, I get to see that edition of the Examiner regularly, without going online, though the columns appearing there do appear online, so I can link to them. The paper is pretty uniformly conservative, which means I usually agree with them on economic issues and disagree with them on social issues. And today, I saw a column on one of those social issues, and I feel I need to comment on it.

One of their regular columnists is Hugh Hewitt, and his column appeared today, under the title: "Time for government attorneys to stand up to Obama". And although some of the points that Hewitt made have some merit, Hewitt, annoyingly, said:

This president told his DOJ to refuse to defend a federal statute that has never been questioned by any federal appellate court, much less by the Supreme Court, the Defense of Marriage Act.

Now, the way I understand our Constitutional system, when no court has even ruled on a law, and perhaps even up until the Supreme Court rules on it, anyone, certainly including the President, has a right to decide whether he believes that law is constitutional. And Hewitt specifically states that DOMA "has never been questioned by any federal appellate court, much less by the Supreme Court." The way I read the Constitution, this means its constitutionality is open to each American's interpretation. And, since President Obama has sworn to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," if he deems some act of Congress to be unconstitutional, it is acting within the spirit and letter of that oath to refuse to defend it.

I am sure Mr. Hewitt does not read this blog. I wish he did, so I could ask him pointblank: Suppose you were President of the United States, and Congress passed a bill you thought unconstitutional. Would you feel bound to defend it in court?

Are there any readers of this blog whe can make a case for Hewitt having any case there? Does anyone feel there is any compulsion under the Constitution for a President to try to defend an act that he believes to be unconstitutional? I'd really love to see any reason that Hewitt might consider to justify his condemnation of President Obama on these grounds.

Jon Huntsman

I notice a lot of publicity about Jon Huntsman recently. It's not surprising to find two posts in a row over at Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue" blog — he's shown a great liking for Huntsman for some time. But his name is appearing in a lot of places, treated as a serious rival to Mitt Romney, unlike such as Herman Cain (who has about as much chance of nomination as I do) or Fred Karger (who might as well have never declared his candidacy, for all the attention he's getting). So I should weigh in on him. I don't know very much about him, of course. But one newspaper described him as "the only moderate" in the race; that alone tends to incline me favorably toward him, though the comment comes from a paper tht is hardly itself describable as moderate. And the simple fact that Dennis Sanders likes him has to count in his favor, as Sanders' positions and mine tend to be pretty close on a lot of issues.

That's probably enough to say that Huntsman gets a positive rating — if he becomes well-enough known that it looks like he can beat Obama in November of next year, I could easily support him.

The Judiciary: guardian of freedom

Just like the days of the African-American civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s, it seems that when the more bigoted elements of our populace want to take away rights and freedoms from some group (currently, gay Americans), it takes a judicial decision to rule in favor of those rights and freedoms. As I posted in this blog last August, bigots trying to kill gay marriage rights in California challenged Judge Vaughn Walker's decision because he was gay and could himself be benefited by a ruling for gay marriage. As I said in that posting, perhaps Judge Walker should have recused himself because this was bound to happen, but the ruling itself was a good one. And so it came to another United States District Court judge, James Ware, who was asked to vacate Judge Walker's decision. (Walker has retired, but this does not figure in any of the discussions here.) And, showing the good sense required of his office, Judge Ware refused to listen to the bigots' pleas. Judge Walker's decision stands — at least unless the voices of bigotry can get an appellate judge to reverse it, which hopefully will not happen

But will he really do it?

Newt Gingrich is supposed to make a speech tonight to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Beverly Hills, California. In it, he "will pledge that, if elected president, he would sign an executive order on his first day in office moving the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv."

I wish I could believe it. But of course, Gingrich is not too likely to be nominated, let alone elected, so he won't get a chance to prove his sincerity.

Not a single President, not even the most pro-Israel of them, has been willing to do this, despite the fact that it is simple courtesy to put your embassy in the capital city of the country it is accredited to. But (perhaps because of Arab oil money), no President has been willing to do this. Because the so-called "Palestinians" want to put their capital there.

I wish people would recognize the facts: there has never been such a nationality as "Palestinian." Before 1948, in fact, the only people living in the area who referred to British Palestine by the name of Palestine were the Jews. The Arabs wanted it considered as part of "Greater Syria." And in 1948, the Arabs were offered a state in the area by the United Nations, but refused it; they wanted all of British Palestine, not just a share of it. When the Jews took the UN up on its offer, the Arabs immediately attacked, but were defeated in the ensuing war, and Israel began its existence with a larger share of the territory than the UN had offered (but still a very hard-to-defend area, with a narrow neck of land in the middle).

But the Arabs never acknowledged their defeat, and still wanted to eliminate the Israeli nation completely. After two more wars, in 1967 and 1982, some Arabs (not yet all, even now!) are willing to accept an Israeli nation, if they go back to the 1948-1967 boundaries! It would be like Mexico wanting to recognize the US only if it gave back the Southwest and went back to the pre-1850 boundaries — this just isn't going to happen.

The only way to settle the Arab-Israeli question is if the Arabs are willing to accept Israel's existence and negotiate with them to determine what portion of the territories won by Israel in 1967 will Israel willingly return, in exchange for a true cessation of hostilities. The Arabs have no case: they must realize that, like Japan in 1945, they have to rely on Israel's good will. They cannot keep acting as if they can dictate terms to Israel.

But I don't think they are ready to do that. How many more wars will it take?

And why can't a US President do what Newt Gingrich says he'll do?

Looks like these judges get it!

According to the Associated Press,

Judges on a federal appeals court panel on Wednesday repeatedly raised questions about President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, expressing unease with the requirement that virtually all Americans carry health insurance or face penalties.

All three judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel questioned whether upholding the landmark law could open the door to Congress adopting other sweeping economic mandates.

And later on in the same story:

...the pointed questions about the so-called individual mandate during almost three hours of oral arguments suggests the appeals court panel is considering whether to rule against at least part of the federal law to expand health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans.

It is absolutely clear to me: the individual mandate is unconstitutional. And now, even some Democratic-appointed judges are feeling that way. (Two of the three judges on the 11th Circuit Court panel are Clinton appointees.)

It won't be finally decided until the Supreme Court gets to rule. But more and more, the unconstitutionality of this is being recognized by the Federal judiciary.

The cure is worse than the disease, but then, he doesn't believe there is a disease.

Gregory Kane is a columnist whose column appears in (among others) the Washington Examiner, a newspaper I regularly read. He's one of those rare individuals who is African-American, but politically conservative, and he recently wrote a column that made me gag — not the first I've seen out of him, but one of the worst.

The column is also on the Web, under the title "Worried gays should check out the Pink Pistols." It starts off making a number of anti-gay-rights comments, not horribly surprising since Kane usually agrees with "social conservatives" on the issues where I differ strongly with them, such as gay rights, separation of church and state, etc. (He particularly does not like the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," thinking it's going to lead to lascivious behavior of gay servicemen towards other servicemen, rather a predictable attitude, as ridiculous as that seems.)

But then comes the kicker: He transitions from his anti-gay rhetoric to the following:

What's needed is ... more Pink Pistols chapters nationwide. The Pink Pistols are, far and away, my favorite LGBT organization.

Pink Pistols members don't wait for presidential proclamations or congressional statutes for their protection. Their goal is to protect themselves.

In short, they carry firearms for "self-defense." Just what we need — more gun-toting people who feel they are at risk (sarcasm intentional). I don't know about you, but I don't want to see anyone carrying a gun around (other than a policeman or a military person who needs it to do his/her job) — but anyone who might feel they aren't gaining enough respect? He/she might shoot because of a perceived slight that wasn't real, and aim poorly, and I might be hit just because I'm passing by, even if I have nothing to do with what's going on.

But Kane doesn't think of such things. He just wants the NRA's version of the Second Amendment to apply (his post, on the Web, is even tagged "nra"!) And he doesn't care about danger from guns — he just thinks that as little as he likes gay people, if they can help him make a case for an armed society, he'll use them. To him, guns aren't dangerous. To me, they are. And even though he doesn't seem to care about the discrimination that inheres in "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" he thinks that anti-gay discrimination is just another thing that will go away if people are free to shoot other people on the slightest provocation.

Sorry, Mr. Kane, but this column is a poster case of ideas that meet with my disapproval up and down the line: you're wrong on gay rights, wrong on guns, WRONG!

Not conservative enough? Rick Santorum? Weird...

As I said yesterday, Rick Santorum is probably the candidate I like least, now that Mike Huckabee has taken himself out of contention. But this is because I think he is too far to the right, particularly on social issues. So I was ill prepared to see a column in today's Washington Examiner chastising Santorum for not being conservative enough!

It seems that what Examiner columnist Timothy Carney finds objectionable is that, back in 2004, Santorum and Pres. George W. Bush backed the re-election campaign of Arlen Specter.

In that year, Specter represented the GOP's best hope to retain that seat in Pennsylvania. Any good Republican should have backed Specter, given that nominating a more conservative candidate risked giving that seat to the Democrats. (Sure, six years later, Specter, tiring of fighting arch-conservatives in Republican primaries, switched to the Democrats. And Pat Toomey, the same man who had challenged Specter in the GOP primary six years earlier, actually won the Senate seat! But 2010 was a different thing from 2004. And it is very unlikely that Toomey would have won in 2004.)

But Carney is so enamored of ideological purity that he considers Rick Santorum insufficiently conservative. This sort of weirdness amazes me. And it's the kind of thing that makes it hard for me to stay a Republican — but, of course, it's the extremism of the Democrats in the opposite direction that keeps me in the GOP.

Another not-so-good choice

Well, as of this past weekend, Rick Santorum has declared his candidacy. And while he's not as bad as Huckabee, he's someone I really hope cannot get the nomination.

Santorum is one of the most extreme of the "social conservatives," with strong opinions against homosexuals, and other far-right positions. As I've stated in previous posts, the "social conservatives" are what are making it hard to be a Republican these days, with positions I cannot accept on many such issues, from abortion to gay rights. And so Santorum is, to me, one of the least preferred of the candidates for the nomination.

A local straw poll

I just received an e-mail notifying me of the result of a straw poll that was taken locally in my county. It said:

Romney Wins Montgomery County Republican Straw Poll

Former Massachusetts' Governor Romney edged Christie, Giuliani and Pawlenty in voting by Maryland Republicans Former Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney was the winner of a straw poll conducted by the Montgomery County Republican Party on May 28 and 29 at the Hometown Holidays Festival in Rockville, Maryland.

Of the twelve Republican candidates on the ballot, Romney captured 17 percent of the vote, narrowly edging New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who received 15 percent of the vote and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with 13 percent of the vote. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty received 11 percent of the vote.

Candidate	Percent of Vote
Mitt Romney	17%
Chris Christie	15%
Rudy Giuliani	13%
Tim Pawlenty	11%
Michelle Bachmann	8%
Ron Paul	7%
Herman Cain	6%
Newt Gingrich	6%
Sarah Palin	6%
Jon Huntsman	4%
Rick Santorum	4%
Other Candidates/No Preference	3%

I took part in this straw poll, and mine is among those counted for Mitt Romney. BUT...of course, Chris Christie was not really running, and Rudy Giuliani (who is actually the person I'd love to vote for) hasn't a chance at the nomination. (I spoke to the person who was collecting the ballots, and he agreed with me: Giuliani is the best of the candidates, but he's not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination.)

I wonder how the result would be if this straw poll had been conducted with everyone voting for the one they would really like, and especially if something like "approval voting" were used, so one could choose more than one. For my real favorite (if the likelihood of winning the nomination were excluded from consideration) is, as you might gather from my earlier posts, Giuliani, and I would also rank Christie high, perhaps above Romney. I suspest there are others in that poll who feel like me.