On The Hugh Hewitt Show this week, we discussed Sid Caesar and Shirley Temple and Magna Carta and King John. And in passing I said the following:
I mentioned before, I think a couple of weeks ago on your show, Hugh, that the Canadian Constitution and the Jamaican Constitution and the Australian Constitution, they just say you know, "Executive power shall be vested in Her Majesty." And everything else is nothing, there's nothing else written about it. And here, you guys decided to do it differently, and you wrote it all down. And yet you're the ones who've wound up with an absolute monarch in which the King wakes up in the morning and decides which clauses of Obamacare are valid that particular day. And Congress, which supposedly officially controls the power of the purse, the House of Representatives, does nothing about it.
With hindsight, I might be being a bit unfair to absolute monarchs. The American republic has hitherto been an exception to the general rule in the western hemisphere that republics are presidential republics - that's to say, Latin-American republics where the only guys who matter are the president and his cronies. That's where the US seems headed, and very fast.
~Speaking of our descent into Latin-American dysfunction, my fellow Rush guest-host Walter Williams writes:
There is no material poverty in the U.S... What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.
That's correct. Because Big Government pushers want junkies, not citizens. Which is why the benevolent bureaucracy actively recruits dependents. Fifty million Americans on food stamps is a good start, but we can always do more! Hence, those US Department of Agriculture ads pitching food-stamp eligibility to Mexicans in Mexico. In an age of computerization, globalization and long-term unemployment, how many more unskilled immigrants does America need? Ten million? Twenty million? Forty million? The Democrats are importing voters, and the Me-Too wing of the Republican Party is stupid enough to think it can win a bidding war for the affections of the ever swelling ranks of the Undocumented-American community. Ann Coulter puts it this way:
With all the smirking on the left about their electoral victories, it's important to remember that Democrats haven't won the hearts and minds of the American people. They changed the people. If you pour vinegar into a bottle of wine, the wine didn't turn, you poured vinegar into it. Similarly, liberals changed no minds. They added millions of new liberal voters through immigration...
Immigration is the "single issue" that decides every other issue. If this country were the same demographically today as it was in 1980, Romney would have won a bigger victory in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter.
She's right about that. Pundits always drone on about how Republicans have to adjust to "changing demographics", as if they're occurring naturally. But they're not - they're the conscious result of government policy pushed by Democrats and the bipartisan saps across the aisle. And the changes are so non-natural they're occurring at a rate you usually need a civil war or Black Death for. As I wrote the week after Mitt's defeat:
According to the Census, in 1970 the "Non-Hispanic White" population of California was 78 percent. By the 2010 census, it was 40 percent. Over the same period, the 10 percent Hispanic population quadrupled and caught up with whites.
That doesn't sound terribly "natural" does it? If one were informed that, say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 percent black in 1970 to 40 percent black today, one would suspect something rather odd and unnatural had been going on. Twenty years ago, Rwanda was about 14 percent Tutsi. Now it's just under 10 percent. So it takes a bunch of Hutu butchers getting out their machetes and engaging in seven-figure genocide to lower the Tutsi population by a third. But, when the white population of California falls by half, that's "natural," just the way it is, one of those things, could happen to anyone.
But it happened to America because the political class chose to let it happen. Ann Coulter again:
We're living in a different country now, and I can't recall moving! Had I wanted to live in Japan, I could have moved there. Had I had wanted to live in Mexico, Pakistan or Chechnya -- I could have moved to those places, too.
(Although maybe not. They all have stricter immigration policies than we do.)
I'm sure they're lovely, but I wanted to live in America. Now I can't. At the current rate of immigration, it won't exist anymore. The Democrats couldn't win elections there, so they changed it.
~Barry Bickmore, armed with his trusty "online legal dictionary", has been patiently explaining to us rubes for some weeks why yours truly is destined to lose to Michael E Mann. He fell quiet for a while, but it turns out it was because he was stalking Yale Law School prof Stephen Carter, who had made the mistake of expressing misgivings about Mann's suit. Carter rose to the bait and initially responded to Bickmore, and the latter has published parts of their correspondence. Before the put-upon Prof Carter decided to bail, he made a couple of interesting points. First on the recent ruling by the new judge:
The trouble is (to put on my lawyer's hat), the judge didn't hold that the charges against Dr. Mann were libelous per se. He ruled that a jury could reasonably find them to be so. That's where the danger arises. The exceptions the Supreme Court has carved out for commentary about public figures is intended to keep such questions from the jury in cases touching the public interest.
I don't think I'm meant to comment on the judge, am I? So let's move on to Professor Carter's other insight:
Even if Dr. Mann wins the case (and I'm quite confident it will be settled; nobody wants to put it in front of a jury), the tenor of debate won't change.
Well, I can't speak for Dr Mann or my co-defendants, but I want to put it in front of a jury - in part because I loathe "settling" and regard it as a malign and corrupting influence on the American "justice" system. Nobody's guilty or innocent any more, are they? It's all about the settling. But the pressure to "settle" means that, for a litigious goon like Dr Mann, simply launching suits relieves him of the need to win them. Nuts to that. He wanted this case, so he can have it and take it to a jury.
By the way, looking at America's latest unwon war in Afghanistan, I wonder if the fetish for "settling" hasn't infected US war-making. America wages war like a sclerotic case at the DC Superior Court: it goes on for years, it's ruinously expensive, and at the end of it there's no real defeat or victory, we just agree to "settle".
~Bonus: Mann and God at Yamal. Le climat, c'est moi.
~From our Yeah-Tell-Me-Something-I-Don't-Know department:
US Plummets In Global Press Freedom Rankings
Don't worry, it's not about the Mann suit.
