airfoil

Barack Obama ran a better operation, and took full advantage of the concerns over the current state of the economy, the unpopularity of President Bush, and the vague desire for “change” that was repeated throughout this election cycle.

While I believe Senator McCain has a better track record in bridging the divide between the Left and Right, I can only hope Senator - now President-Elect - Obama will make an effort to work across the aisle. However, my hopes are not high.

In addition to having a solid majority of vindictive Democrats in both the House and the Senate, the future President Obama has been quite clear during his campaign that he has little intention of “playing nice” with those on the other side. Early in the campaign, Obama used a telling phrase at a New Hampshire rally. He said, “[I]f you’re going to be in the way of change, get out of the way–we’re pushing you aside.” Not exactly a magnanimous expression of inclusion.

A piece in the Christian Science Monitor back in April examined Obama’s record in working with others - and that record is checkered at best.

I’ll wait to see what an Obama/Pelosi/Reid government does to bridge the divide.

The latest from cartoonist Batton Lash and blogger Jim Treacher:

According to an article in the Chicago Sun Times, as of October 24th, there have been 426 murders in the Windy City during 2008.

During that same period, the US military has suffered 276 combat deaths.

I wonder if any in the news media have asked Senator Obama about this statistic…

…in an Obama/Pelosi/Reid government. And - as an added bonus - this is being welcomed by the addle-brained Jim McDermott.

House Democrats Contemplate Abolishing 401(k) Tax Breaks:

Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute. [snip]

Under [the] plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.

The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.

So, in addition to the very, very bad deal that is the current Social Security system - sucking about 14% of compensation for what will eventually be a guaranteed net loss, why not force people to forego a chance at actually having a meaningful retirement account, and instead impose a mandatory system of 3% returns. The current economic situation is just that - current. There is no reason to believe that the market will not outperform 3% over the long haul.

Andrew Sullivan - at his “Daily Dish” blog - like the rest of those in the left-wing media, continues to come unglued about Sarah Palin. Andrew has been posting little photos titled, the View From Your Window, which - presumably - feature the view from his window at various points during the day or week. Given his current unhinged posts about Gov. Palin, I’m thinking the view from Andrew’s window probably looks like this these days:

According to CBS Joe Biden said today:

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there’s joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”

His veiled suggestion that Palin doesn’t care enough about her baby is shameless.

When asked whether this was an implicit reference to Sarah Palin’s son with Down syndrome, Biden’s press secretary didn’t deny it, and instead went on about how there is no difference between McCain and Bush on issues of medical research.

Later the Biden campaign staff argued the statement had nothing to do with Sarah Palin.

From Richard Cohen’s column in the Washington Post today:

In the biographies of both presidential candidates are episodes of pure wonderment. No man can read about McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and not wonder, “Could I do that?” For most of us, the answer — the truthful answer — is no.

For Obama, that episode has nothing to do with physical courage but much to do with moral commitment. At age 22 — a graduate of Columbia University and already making good money as a financial researcher, he walked away to work with the unemployed and alienated in Chicago.

Wow. Pure wonderment. I had no idea there was so much similarity, so many parallels, between community organizing and being a POW. I never stopped to think about how the personal fortitude and moral courage needed to withstand five years of brutal physical and mental torture in a 4×6 cage (including two years in solitary confinement) and then declining an offer of early release as a gesture of fairness to your fellow prisoners, and to prevent the release from being used as a propaganda tool in service to your country - took just as much courage and commitment as quitting a job as a financial researcher to become a neighborhood bureaucrat. 

Boy. When you look at it like that, it is simply amazing Sen. Obama was able to survive his experience in Chicago. Just remarkable. Pure wonderment. I think I feel a thrill going up my leg…

Now I know Cohen is just another hack who, like most of the media, shills for the Democrats, but this really calls one to question what sort of foul fluid must be coursing through his cranium.

I don’t think I can stand to read one more piece in which New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gets all misty-eyed about how great things are in China.

He seems to be like the guy from Nebraska who goes on vacation to Seattle, sees the beautiful forests, eats at the great restaurants, watches the sun set over the ocean and rise over the mountains, then leaves and thinks about how much better that place was than his town in Nebraska - where he slogs to work every day, needs to get his car fixed, has annoying neighbors, and bickers with his kids about doing their homework. Not realizing, of course, that the people in Seattle slog to work everyday, need to get their cars fixed, have annoying neighbors, and bicker with their kids about doing homework, too.

Except in China, the government adds in a dose of throwing you in prison for not parroting the Communist Party line, sterilizing your wife, sister and daughters, AND forces you to slog to work everyday for a handful of yen. All for the good of the Motherland, mind you.

China may be building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks - but they are doing it on the backs of oppressed people both in China and in places like sub-Saharan Africa - where the Chinese are pillaging the forests of Mozambique for raw timber, strip mining cobalt in the Congo, and sucking every last bit of oil out of Equatorial Guinea. All the while, shipping every raw good to China for processing in what amounts to modern government labor camps - leaving the African nations with nothing but economic and environmental disaster.

Yep. It sure is easier when you have no conscience as a nation. Sure wish we were more like that…

Jerry Large wrote a column in the Seattle Times today, expressing the predictable and typical reaction those on the left have had since the Supreme Court decided the District of Columbia v. Heller case this past week.

Large writes that the Second Amendment to the Constitution is “about having a militia to protect the state, but I think five members of the court read it through a haze of gun lore.”

He says this with an air of absoluteness - yet many of the country’s most experienced constitutional scholars - and at least five whose opinion counts most - see it quite differently. Although I admittedly don’t know much about Large’s legal background or his scholarship on the history of the Constitution and American jurisprudence, my assumption is that he is not considered among the nation’s elite constitutional lawyers. As such, his sweeping and simplistic comment suggests that his particular reading of the Second Amendment is somehow rooted in more developed thinking and scholarly research than that of a majority of Supreme Court Justices - and their extensive backgrounds and research into constitutional law. I appreciate that Mr. Large is in the infotainment business and not on the bench, so I hope he’ll forgive me if I tend to take what the majority on the Supreme Court say as having somewhat greater weight.

From what I gather, much of the argument over this amendment stems from a desire by some to interpret what the framers “intended” the amendment to mean - particularly the first clause - and that discussion seems rooted in an argument over punctuation. George Mason University School of Law professor Nelson Lund, wrote an article for the school’s Civil Rights Law Journal in which he contends that the militia part of the amendment is “grammatically independent of the rest of the sentence,” and does nothing to qualify the command contained in the second part - based on his study of legal writing styles of the day. Another scholar, University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron, contends that then and now, the comma makes what precedes it an absolute clause, creating a cause-and-effect relationship with the clause that follows.

I’m not a constitutional scholar, and like other lay citizens, must rely on arguments made by judges themselves to understand the approaches they use to interpret law. Justice Scalia’s approach, his arguments and his rationale are most compelling for me.

Scalia posits that we should look to the exact words in a law and in the constitution - not to lawmakers’ intent.

If you and I enter into a contract, should my intent matter or should what the contract actually says matter? If I lease you a home, and intend to throw you out after one month, but put my signature on a lease that states the term as 12 months, what should take precedence - my intent or the words written into the contract?

Justice Scalia and others contend that there is a specific, written clause in the second amendment that says, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” They have made their determination based on this specific language. Others suggest that the preceding clause, which cites a “well regulated militia” as one example of a reason individual rights should not be infringed, takes substantive precedence - in other words, that the intent of the founders was to make the right to bear arms a collective right that exists only when individuals are organized into government regulated groups.

Scalia suggests that looking for intent is just not acceptable practice. Legislators may have many, many reasons for voting to pass a particular bill. As has been shown again and again, legislators often vote for a bill based on issues that have nothing to do with the content of the bill. In our system, 535 people vote on a piece of federal legislation. The “intent” argument would seem to suggest that we can know the specific intent of all of those people, and that the intent is shared among all who vote yes. Even if legislative intent can somehow be intuited or discovered, Scalia and others object to it because “intent” is simply not law. Article I of the Constitution requires both houses to pass a bill and present it to the president for his signature. The words that are on the paper, and signed by the president are the words that govern us. If it is not written into the law, it may be an interesting window into the sausage making machinery, but it is not law. Period.

If the outcome of a ruling like this is not what we’d like, because an amendment or statute is written in a particular way, we have perfectly acceptable means available for elected officials to fix the language in the law - amend it. Our constitution has been amended 27 times in 200+ years - as recently as 1992. If the citizens of the United States do not like the way the Second Amendment is worded, they can, through their elected representatives, change it. But for now, it says what it says.

As Justice Scalia once noted, “We are governed by laws, not by the intentions of legislators.”