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Jonah Goldberg writes that we need to be doing more for the people of North Korea. He has quite an opening:
If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so?
In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question:
“If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire?
The answers are too obvious, the questions merely rhetorical. And therein lies a very great irony. At long last a genuine spirit of transnational benevolence has arisen, fulfilling the highest hopes of the rare pioneering globalists of the 19th century and before. No longer does this disinterested benevolence abruptly stop at the boundaries of state, nation or culture. Instead it now encompasses all of life both animal and vegetal across the entire globe, with only one exception: Homo sapiens.”
Luttwak overstated how good animals have it, alas. But his point was well taken. And to America’s credit, it wasn’t long after Luttwak’s essay that the United States and NATO (but not the United Nations) finally did something to curb the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia.
But that’s probably little solace to the people of North Korea. …
A National Review post comments on the Virginia Court’s health-care decision.
In its first serious court test, the most unpopular provision in Obamacare — the individual mandate — has been declared unconstitutional on two crucial grounds.
First, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce by compelling people “to involuntarily engage in a private commercial transaction.”
Second, he said the Obama administration can’t argue after the fact that the mandate is a tax and therefore within Congress’s constitutional taxing authority. “The Court is unpersuaded” that the penalty for not purchasing insurance is a “bona fide revenue raising measure enacted under the taxing power of Congress,” he wrote from his bench in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli led the commonwealth’s case against the law. It was a victory for him when Judge Hudson declared that the mandate to purchase health insurance represents an “unchecked expansion of congressional power” that “would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers.”
Cuccinelli had argued that the Commerce Clause of the constitution does not grant Congress the authority to force people into economic activity. Judge Hudson declared that the mandate is “neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution.” …
John Podhoretz comments on Clinton taking center stage, and other tax compromise oddities.
…What was Clinton doing there, exactly? Could it be news to anyone that Clinton would support the deal, especially since it seems to come straight from the his political playbook? Not to mention that, let’s face it, Obama is his wife’s boss.
The event gobsmacked the political class. On Twitter, ABC News political director Amy E. Walter wrote, “Obama just ceded the podium to Clinton. This. Is. Awesome.” Christina Bellantoni of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call used the same punctuation trope: “This is Un. Real.”
Washington froze in wonder at this momentary trip into the past. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Clinton alone at that podium crystallized the sense that the American political system (or more specifically, the Democratic party) had spun out of control over the course of the week.
The week began with the announcement of the grand budget deal on Monday, triggering rage from Obama’s base that he had somehow “caved” to Republicans — conveniently forgetting that the Democratic party in DC had been decimated only a month earlier in the midterm election. …
George Will reminds us of the issues in Bush v. Gore ten years ago.
…The post-election lunacy could have been substantially mitigated by adhering to a principle of personal responsibility: Voters who cast ballots incompetently are not entitled to have election officials toil to divine these voters’ intentions. Al Gore got certain Democratic-dominated canvassing boards to turn their recounts into unfettered speculations and hunches about the intentions of voters who submitted inscrutable ballots. Before this, Palm Beach County had forbidden counting dimpled chads….But three of the four (of Florida’s 67) counties – each heavily Democratic – where Gore was contesting the count were not finished deciphering voters’ intentions. So Gore’s lawyers persuaded the easily persuadable state Supreme Court – with a majority of Democratic appointees – to rewrite the law. It turned the seven-day period into 19 days.Many liberals underwent instant conversions of convenience: They became champions of states’ rights when the U.S. Supreme Court (seven of nine were Republican appointees) unanimously overturned that extension. But the U.S. high court reminded Florida’s court to respect the real “states’ rights” at issue – the rights of state legislatures: The Constitution gives them plenary power to establish procedures for presidential elections.
…The U.S. Supreme Court was duty-bound not to defer to a state court that was patently misinterpreting – disregarding, actually – state law pertaining to a matter assigned by the U.S. Constitution to state legislatures. …
Chris Hitchens reads the riot act to some on the right. Main target – Glenn Beck. Hitch is a little overboard here and overlooks some of the good things Beck has done; like reminding us of Frederick Hayek.
…Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. … …The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.
Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault. …
In the WaPo, Phillip Howard is back. He has a great idea to have expiration dates on legislation. We might ask lawmakers to try this out on the law they passed to give themselves automatic pay raises every year.
…A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities….the political scuffle over ethanol subsidies – with Republican fiscal hard-liners facing off against Republicans from farm states – shows how sunset laws can reinvigorate democratic debate. Critics have long questioned billions of dollars in subsidies (last year, $7.7 billion) for a product known to have serious environmental drawbacks. The issue has come to a head, however, only because ethanol subsidies, like the Bush tax cuts, are set to automatically expire at the end of this year. …To an amazing degree, our government’s choices are dictated by political leaders who are long dead. Health-care programs and Social Security – eating up about 70 percent of each year’s federal revenue – don’t even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: New Deal subsidies intended for starving farmers now go mostly to corporate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment.
…An omnibus sunset law would dislodge the status quo by requiring that every statute expire at some point, unless it is reenacted. Laws with budgetary mandates, such as subsidies, should probably have shorter fuses than broader regulatory laws, such as antitrust statutes. It would be much harder for Congress to overtly support a wasteful subsidy than to passively let it continue. Our democracy would be revitalized if there were an opportunity to debate how laws actually function. However unsatisfactory the current debate over tax cuts, at least there is a debate. …
Gas prices are rising. The US has an answer that will put people to work and bring gas prices down. Stephen Dinan and Kara Rowland discuss this in the Washington Times.
Gas prices have risen $1 since just after President Obama took office in January 2009 and are now closing in on the $3 mark, prompting an evaluation of the administration’s energy record and calls for the White House to open more U.S. land for oil exploration….Gas prices have been on a roller-coaster ride over the past decade, dropping to near $1 after President George W. Bush’s first year in office, crossing the $2 mark in 2005 and reaching $4 in June 2008 before Congress and Mr. Bush took action, lifting presidential and congressionally imposed moratoriums on expanding offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.Mr. Bush lifted the presidential moratorium in July that year. The congressional moratorium expired Sept. 30, and prices fell precipitously, dropping more than $1 in October.
He said the solution is the same for both the short-term and long-term prices: Assure the markets that the U.S. will pursue domestic exploration. ..
“The reason that it dropped is because the U.S. sent a signal to the markets, by dropping the moratoria, that we’re going to drill on our lands. Obviously, we never followed up, and thus you see the crisis gradually rising,” said Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee.