Freedom Line Blog

Following up on Ashton’s excellent post yesterday, one of the most salient facts about President Obama’s new Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, is her total lack of a track record. This is not to indict Ms. Kagan for her lack of judicial experience –– more than a third of the justices in the Supreme Court’s history have come from outside what Patrick Leahy refers to as the “judicial monastery” (a phrase too sterling to have been coined by a U.S. Senator — at least in the era since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s passing).

Rather the issue is — apart from Harvard Law’s ROTC scandal while she served as dean– that Kagan doesn’t seem to have an observable opinion on anything. As CNN and New Yorker legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin — a friend of Kagan’s since law school — observed upon news that she would be the nominee:

Judgment, values, and politics are what matters on the Court. And here I am somewhat at a loss. Clearly, she’s a Democrat. She was a highly regarded member of the White House staff during the Clinton years, but her own views were and are something of a mystery. She has written relatively little, and nothing of great consequence.

What Toobin regards as personal anecdotage, however, the New York Times’ always interesting (and often perplexing) David Brooks sees as pathological. As he says in the coda of today’s column:

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

As Ashton mentioned yesterday, the same criticism could be equally applied to the pre-presidential Obama. But this isn’t just the provenance of the left. John Roberts presented much the same sort of blank slate prior to his elevation to the Court. And those already clamoring for a Marco Rubio presidential bid are running the same risk.

Consent of the governed is a meaningless concept when the governed aren’t told what they’re consenting to. If the Kagan nomination is a further indication that we’re living in an age of empty political vessels, the country will be worse off for it.

If you need proof of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, there’s no better contrast than a comparison of the current political climates in the U.S. and our mother country, the United Kingdom.

In a wonderful essay entitled “Thunder on the Mountain”, RealClearPolitics political savant Jay Cost writes today:

D.C. might shine brilliantly to the eyes of some, but it is still just reflected light. For all their posturing, the establishment still works at the pleasure of the people. It just so happens that the people usually choose to renew their tenure.

Yet this year, it looks like the people are set to deliver a historic rebuke to the establishment. The portents of the coming reprimand are all around us.

This follows on an earlier passage where Cost observes:

… the people do indeed rule. While their power is limited, it is nevertheless unconditional where it exists. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi need the assent of the people of the United States to govern this country. But the people don’t need any such thing. In the limited sphere where they rule, they are supreme.

Cost’s point is well-taken. During their terms in office, America’s elected officials are only limited by whatever constitutional strictures the judiciary sees fit to apply. But come election day, the gloves are off. Americans get the politicians they vote for.

Compare that to Great Britain, where today’s dominant story was the resignation of Prime Minister Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party. With Brown stepping down, it looks as if Labour and the Liberal Democrats may be forming a left-wing government; this despite the fact that the Conservative Party came within hailing distance of an outright majority. The UK may be about to get saddled with a government made up of its second and third choices, with the first place caucus left out in the cold.

This is the poverty of the parliamentary system, which makes the executive branch a function of legislative majorities. In addition to ignoring America’s important emphasis on checks and balances, it can also invite this sort of legerdemain aimed at usurping the will of the people.

Count your blessings, America — one of which was ending up on this side of the Atlantic.

Lost amidst reports of the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Greek economic implosion, the massive oil leak in the Gulf, the ricocheting stock market, and the British elections this week was a heart-wrenching story from America’s heartland: the city of Nashville is underwater.

After 14 inches of rain fell in only two days, at least 29 are dead in the Southeast and economic damage in Nashville alone is estimated to have easily reached at least $1 billion. Huge swaths of the city have been without water or power. And the mainstream media has yawned.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I spent half a decade living in Nashville and consider it be one of America’s slices of perfection. The city’s reaction to this tragedy — particularly in light of the scant press — has proven me right. As a good friend said to me in a message earlier this week, “everyone’s pulling together — it’s not New Orleans.”

A story in this morning’s USA Today drives the point home. How many other American cities could be expected to responed with this much grace and dignity?:

“The people who were flooded need somebody to watch their kids while they’re tearing their houses apart, and we have a lot of stay-at-home moms,” Chastity Mitchell says. Others are doing laundry for families that now need every item of clothing they own washed. Dinner on Tuesday was 60 chickens donated by the Publix grocery store.

 The view from Riverwalk includes a limestone bluff that rises hundreds of feet on the far side of the Harpeth, yet the rural feel is just a 15-minute drive from downtown. The neighborhood of $200,000-$400,000 homes celebrates its proximity to the Harpeth with street names such as Bending River and Wide Water. 

Mitchell says he has spoken with only one person who has flood insurance. He says the eligibility rules must be re-evaluated.

“You just don’t expect something like this,” he says. “There’s no villain. There’s no bad guy. Some of the parts of Bellevue that have been flooded, you’d never expect the little Harpeth River to do that.” 

He adds, “We really don’t have time right now to point fingers at anyone. It’s time to come together and help your neighbors and make sure your neighbors have food, shelter and clothing.”

Three cheers for Nashville. And a prayer for its people.

From NBC in the Bay Area:

On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.

Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal’s office.

“They said we could wear it on any other day,” Daniel Galli said, “but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today.”

Apart from the utterly fatuous political correctness, let’s put to rest the “its their holiday” canard. As is typical of the PC police, the heavies don’t even understand the sacred cow they’re protecting.

Despite widespread perception to the contrary, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s independence day (that’s September 16 for those of you playing the home game), nor is it even particularly significant in Mexico. Rather it’s a commemoration of Mexico’s unlikely victory over France in the Battle of Puebla. The battle was part of a war that started because Mexico refused to pay its debt to international creditors. And before it was finished, the country had been defeated and seen its government taken over by a puppet emperor furnished by Napoleon III.

Not exactly sources of national pride. If only someone in California’s public schools had access to a history book …

From the people who gave you Syria and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission, comes the latest piece of evidence that the UN is an institution dedicated to the social promotion of vice: Iran’s elevation to membership on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Though press coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Turtle Bay on Monday largely focused on nuclear policy, Iran’s benevolence towards the fairer sex did come up yesterday. Per Fox News:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday appeared to defend his country’s recent re-election to a seat on the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, arguing that Iranian women are “highly respected” in his country while 70 percent of European women are physically abused.

Speaking at a news conference in New York, Ahmadinejad said that a “woman is the symbol of beauty of God” in his country while there is “no dignity left for women in Europe.”

And how precisely is that dignity maintained in Persia? Just ask Tehran’s top cop:

Brig Hossien Sajedinia, Tehran’s police chief, said a national crackdown on opposition sympathisers would be extended to women who have been deemed to be violating the spirit of Islamic laws. He said: “The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehaviour by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values. In some areas of north Tehran we can see many suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins.

“We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them.”

It’s a wonder that every feminist in the Western world isn’t a neoconservative.

That was the topic taken up by two of the nation’s finest economic journalists over the weekend.

Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson, one of the few legitimate talents left on that particular sinking ship, says yes:

… What’s missing [to promote a global economic rebalancing] is a sizable revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute thinks the renminbi may be 40 percent undervalued against the dollar. This gives China’s exports a huge advantage and underpins its trade surpluses. Other Asian countries fear altering their currencies if China doesn’t change first. “They’ll lose ground to China,” notes Hensley. The European Union, Brazil and India all feel threatened by the renminbi. President Obama wants U.S. exports to double in five years. That’s probably unrealistic, but it’s impossible if the renminbi isn’t revalued.

Samuelson is rarely deserving of a public refutation, but gets one (though it’s not targeted at him) from a recent column by the always-insightful Steve Forbes, who lays the China hysteria to rest:

… A decade and a half ago China fixed the yuan to the dollar. If there had been any mistake in the exchange rate it would have been flushed out in trade patterns fairly quickly. Again, to simplify: If you sell a bottle of wine for four loaves of bread but suddenly notice you’re getting only two loaves, you’ll adjust your price pretty quickly to ensure you’ll get those four loaves again.

 By fixing the yuan to the dollar Beijing outsourced its monetary policy to the Federal Reserve. And for this “manipulation” Washington politicians and policymakers are in a lather of outrage. This fixing of a measure of value has enormously facilitated commerce–and thus prosperity. During the last 15 years U.S. exports to China have increased 650%, China’s exports to the U.S. almost 670%.

As I noted in my criticism of Obama’s exports fetish in this year’s State of the Union, a focus on so-called “trade deficits” is meaningless. Forbes gives an excellent explanation:

The notion that a trade deficit or surplus indicates anything about an economy’s health is also mistaken. The U.S. has had a trade deficit with the rest of the world for some 350 years out of the 400-plus since Jamestown was settled in 1607. Focusing on deficits and surpluses ignores equally important flows of capital, as well as the phenomenon of supply chains and the intracompany trade that crosses borders.

Americans will survive Beijing’s economic policies intact. Whether we can say the same about Washington’s is another question altogether.

How about “The Cartel”? That’s the title of what looks to be a fantastic documentary put together by the good (and talented) folks at the Moving Picture Institute. View the trailer below … then buy tickets for yourself and all your friends:

From Colorado today comes news that the small town of Ridgway is seeing an organized movement to make voting compulsory. From the relevant piece in the Denver Post:

RIDGWAY — Residents of this Old West- meets-New Age town can be fined if their fences are too high, they have too many chickens, their dogs aren’t on leashes or their weeds are out of control.

Tom Hennessy would like to add not voting to that list.

Hennessy, a popular Ridgway brewer and pub owner, is proposing that the mostly dirt-street town at the edge of the San Juan Mountains become a national model by enacting a mandatory-voting statute. Residents who don’t bother to vote, for no good reason, would be fined.

“We could do this. It would be a paradigm shift,” Hennessy said. “We could be the great civics lesson in representative democracy.”

The piece later goes on to note that Ridgway’s last city election saw only 170 out of 790 registered voters go to the polls. (By the way, I’m not sure that “only” isn’t a bit of a stolen base. Voter turnout of a little over 21 percent in a standalone city election doesn’t strike me as aberrantly low).

I never cease to be amazed by those who think that the key to strengthening democracy is to compel those too apathetic to drive to their polling places to vote (George Will has applied this same principle in criticizing the use of mail-in ballots).  Not only that, the decision not to vote can be just as much of a political statement as heading to the polls — one of either contenment or resentment. One of the inherent virtues of particpatory  democracy is that it is disporportionately shaped by those who actually … you know, participate. Thus, the folks in Ridgway would do well not to fix something that isn’t broken.

As I mentioned in a recent column, President Obama’s seeming contempt for the Israeli government — especially in light of his propensity for coddling hostile regimes — is an embarassment that undermines America’s traditional foreign policy values. Now, that judgment seems to be echoing through the corridors of power in the Democratic Party.

Chuck Schumer, the liberal New York Senator who may well succeed Harry Reid as Democratic leader in the upper chamber next year, had this to say about Obama’s Israel policy during an interview on a Jewish radio program:

I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk,” Schumer told Segal. “Palestinians don’t really believe in a state of Israel. They, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a two-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there.

“If the U.S. says certain things and takes certain stands the Palestinians say, ‘Why should we negotiate?'” Schumer said.

Given the strong ties that America’s Jewish community has to the Democratic Party, this could be the beginning of a widening fissure on the left. Politico has the full story.

The general rule of political economy is that issues that tug on the public’s heartstrings are the ones most likely to produce a government response mired in muddy thinking and unintended consequences (think about the rebuilding of New Orleans).

CBS News provides testimony to this maxim courtesy of a shocking report from the Caribbean: Haiti wants the food aid sent in the aftermath of its devestating earthquake to stop! Per CBS:

The public outpouring is so generous it’s interfering with the Haitian economy.

If food is free local farmers can’t sell what they grow.

Desperately poor residents who aren’t earthquake victims are moving into refugee camps for the free food and health care. But the government wants residents to be less dependent on foreign aid, not more.

The whole thing (plus video) here.

Remember all the pieties in the early days of the Obama Administration about how there would be a higher wall between special interests and the White House than ever before? Those of us who know the realities of Washington never expected much from those promises. After all, there is a limited pool of talented people in our nation’s capital.  When they’re not working in the public sector, they have to make up for it with the higher pay that comes from private sector jobs. Keeping those folks from jumping back and forth would dramatically reduce the federal government’s talent pool.

But while the potential for this promise to be broken could be seen a mile away, who would’ve guessed that it would have happened in a fashion so embarassing to the White House? Just a few days after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it was going after Goldman Sachs for dodgy shorting practices — an event that (coincidentally, we’re told) came in the midst of the Administration’s push for new banking regulations — Politico reports that Obama’s former White House Counsel, Greg Craig, has been retained by Goldman to help them navigate the rocky shoals of the Beltway.

One wishes some enterprising member of the White House Press Corps would put the question to the President: “Is your former White House counsel part of the corrupt Washington infrastructure you deplore or does the private sector have legitimate grievances with how it’s being treated by your administration?” It has to be one or the other.

Amidst President Obama’s quixotic pursuit of a nuclear-free world, Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting observation over at The Corner:

Ultimately, when and how a country uses its nuclear weapons does not depend on treaties. It depends on the Commander-in-Chief. Sure, worries about violating a treaty might — probably would — make using nukes more “costly” in a president’s cost-benefit analysis. But at the end of the day, using nukes is such a huge deal that I think most presidents, most human beings, would make the decision based on their core values and instincts. And, suffice it to say, I don’t think Barack Obama would ever use nuclear weapons under almost any remotely plausible circumstances. He’s even less likely to use nukes than the president in Independence Day, and that Bill Pullman character first needed to mind-meld with one of the aliens to be extra-super-sure that they were evil conquerors.

Depressing, but true. Read the whole thing here.

Freedom Line readers in the Denver area should consider attending next week’s Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Primarily to keep me from getting strung up.

I’ll be in attendance all week, one of about four conservatives (out of hundreds of panelists). I’ll be participating in panels on the future of California, the military-industrial complex, President Obama’s foreign policy, globalization, U.S. relations with China, the  GOP’s prospects for renewal, special interest politics, “the politics of fear”, and the maturation of President Obama (details here). I’ll also be speaking at the Boulder County GOP’s Lincoln Dinner on Wednesday night.

I’d love to see any of you there. If only to double the conservative population of Boulder.

I guess there had to be at least one negative aspect of the Reagan legacy. It’s temperamental. The Gipper was famous for the sign on his desk reading “It CAN be done”. What a great American sentiment: sweet-tempered, optimistic, tenacious. It helps, of course, when the goal in question CAN be done.

Not so “energy independence”, which has become something of a Fox News shibboleth the last few years. While there’s a strong case to be made for allowing increased domestic energy production, the idea that it will free us from the vagaries of the global energy market is a pipe dream. But don’t take my word for it. Noted conservative economist Irwin Stelzer (a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard) makes the point in a very judicious analysis of President Obama’s push for increased oil exploration published in today’s D.C. Examiner:

More important, and this is no fault of the president’s, even if these offshore areas are eventually opened up, their development cannot eliminate the security threat and economic consequences of our dependence on foreign oil. Fuel autarchy is not in our future.

There just isn’t enough oil offshore to replace our imports from unfriendly countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. No matter what happens in the newly permitted areas, we will need their oil.

Sober, but entirely accurate. Call it Coolidge Conservatism.

Here’s a little secret about those of us who tend to the Freedom Line garden (though it applies equally to all our brethren in the conservative blogosphere): we’re hopeless nerds. Our reader’s digests of political and policy developments come from hours of reading, writing, and thinking about the great issues of the day. Government is for us what fantasy football is to a much broader swath of America.

When you spend that much time consuming news, however, the callouses develop quickly. It’s hard to be impressed. To break through to the sense of genuine wonder that brought us into this field usually requires either singularly great writing or a singularly great man.

I mention all this to give a full-throated endorsement to Mark Bowden’s article “The Professor of War,” a profile of General David Petraeus in the May issue of Vanity Fair (a publication whose political coverage — with some exceptions for Christopher Hitchens — is usually uneven at best). This is a piece so exceptional — and an individual so compelling — that one can only hope Bowden someday gets drafted to be Petraeus’s official biographer.

This piece is far too rich to justify through excerpt, so here’s one brief paragraph that ably represents the writing in microcosm:

Congress underestimated David Petraeus. He is a man of such distinction that in the army legends have formed about his rise. Beyond his four-star rank, he possesses a stature so matchless it deserves its own adjective—call it “Petraean,” perhaps. It is an adjective that would be mostly complimentary, but not entirely so—there can be a hard edge to the man, a certain lack of empathy, and there is something vaguely unseemly in his obvious ambition. But when Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins. When he assumed command in Iraq, he had accepted a challenge few thought even he could meet, turning around the longest and most mismanaged war in American history. But Iraq is only part of the story. Through his writing and teaching, Petraeus was at the same time redefining how the nation will fight in the 21st century. And he was doing something more difficult still: leading a cultural and doctrinal revolution inside one of the most hidebound institutions in the world, the United States Army. Whatever the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan, this transformation is a Petraean legacy that will be felt for years to come.

My favorite piece of journalism so far in 2010. Read the whole thing here.

Here’s another warning about Barack Obama’s impending Med-State (in a tribute to the founder of medicine, would this be called a Hippocracy?)

The Cato Institute’s Dr. George Avery, a public health professor at Purdue, uses a recent briefing paper to look at how science has been manipulated for political purposes in both the health care and climate change debates. But while his examination of the “Climategate” scandal out of the University of East Anglia is old news by now, his insights into health care are chilling. To wit:

In health care policy, critics have long worried about the inordinate influence of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers on research to show the safety and viability of new products. Recent information, however, shows that government agencies may cause more problems in this area — a worrisome development considering that health care legislation recently passed by the United States Senate would allow federal agencies to punish organizations whose researchers publish results that conflict with what the agency feels is appropriate.

The specific language in the bill relating to comparative effectiveness research (essentially a way of studying medical best practices) allows the federal government to withhold research dollars when the results are not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence.” Apart from being absurdly vague, this is also a threat to intellectual honesty in science — obviously every new breakthrough is, by definition, not “entirely consistent with the evidence” that preceded it.

Another interesting note: Dr. Avery concedes that medical research underwritten by a company that stands to make a profit on the underlying product often results in pressure on the researchers. No real surprise there (you budding economists will recognize a principal-agent problem at work). However, he notes that similar pressure from  government is much more omininous, since the monopoly power of the state can much more effectively suppress contradictory findings.

Despairing over the passage of Obamacare? Beginning to fret that you sound like those liberals who are constanly promising to emigrate if a Republican wins the White House? Fear not, my friends, the health care bill contains an escape hatch for those of you who’d like to avoid the European Med-State to come. But you better be able to grow a beard.

As I’ve chronicled on Freedom Line before (here and here), the Amish and Old Order Mennonites have long pushed for an exemption from the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, as their religious beliefs forbid it. Well, they got it. And some are speculating that Muslims may be the next in line for an opt-out.

What would happen, one wonders, if millions of conservative Americans started declaring themselves Amish when the Obama Administration’s insurance company-underwritten collection agency came knocking?

For those interested, I’ll be appearing on “The Takeaway” with John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee on Public Radio International on Friday morning at around 6:30 am Eastern to discuss the relationship between the Tea Party Movement and the GOP in the aftermath of Obamacare.

You can find your local affiliate here or listen online after the fact here.

That’s the name of the game that journalists and pundits will be playing as the country tries to get its arms around the more than 2,400 pages of health care reform legislation that President Obama signed yesterday.

Luckily, the folks over at Investor’s Business Daily have been cataloging every freedom that Obamacare strips away. Among the more terrifying:

6. You must buy a policy that covers ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services; chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

You’re a single guy without children? Tough, your policy must cover pediatric services. You’re a woman who can’t have children? Tough, your policy must cover maternity services. You’re a teetotaler? Tough, your policy must cover substance abuse treatment. (Add your own violation of personal freedom here.) (Section 1302).

Read all 20 here.

At a moment when the free world is shrinking from its heritage of limited government at home and quiet strength abroad, thank God for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an address to AIPAC in Washington, Netanyahu gave one of the most honest reflections on the promise and peril of the Middle East ever to come from a sitting Prime Minister. The best passage:

Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us.

To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small. You are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan.

This fanaticism’s hatred of Western civilization predates Israel’s establishment by over one thousand years. Militant Islam does not hate the West because of Israel. It hates Israel because of the West – because it sees Israel as an outpost of freedom and democracy that prevents them from overrunning the Middle East. That is why when Israel stands against its enemies, it stands against America’s enemies.

This speech is one of the most important of 2010. Read it here.