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Out of Egypt comes a story about Muslims showing up at a Coptic Christian Mass to provide protection. We have only one source for this, a blog from Cairo, but we want it to be true.
Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.
“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.
Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole. …
Charles Krauthammer thinks there is good reason to read the Constitution in Congress.
…Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration’s bold push for government expansion – a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.
Call it constitutionalism. In essence, constitutionalism is the intellectual counterpart and spiritual progeny of the “originalism” movement in jurisprudence. Judicial “originalists” (led by Antonin Scalia and other notable conservative jurists) insist that legal interpretation be bound by the text of the Constitution as understood by those who wrote it and their contemporaries. Originalism has grown to become the major challenger to the liberal “living Constitution” school, under which high courts are channelers of the spirit of the age, free to create new constitutional principles accordingly.
What originalism is to jurisprudence, constitutionalism is to governance: a call for restraint rooted in constitutional text. Constitutionalism as a political philosophy represents a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist government – for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures – in the words and meaning of the Constitution.
Hence that highly symbolic moment on Thursday when the 112th House of Representatives opened with a reading of the Constitution. Remarkably, this had never been done before – perhaps because it had never been so needed. The reading reflected the feeling, expressed powerfully in the last election, that we had moved far, especially the past two years, from a government constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers to a government constrained only by its perception of social need. …
Jonah Goldberg exposes embarrassing liberal criticisms of the House reading of the Constitution.
…Last week, Ezra Klein, a famously liberal Washington Post blogger, explained to MSNBC host Norah O’Donnell that the “gimmick” of reading the Constitution on the floor was ultimately silly because the Constitution was written “more than 100 years ago” and is, therefore, too confusing for everyone to understand. By that standard, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare and the Bible are long past their expiration dates…One might also point out that the recently minted phonebook-thick Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) is a good deal harder to decipher than the U.S. Constitution.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s promise to require that every legislation contain a clause citing the constitutional authority for it has sparked a riot of incredulity. A writer for U.S. News & World Report says the idea is “just plain wacky.” …Dahlia Lithwick, Slate magazine’s legal editor, responded, “How weird is that, I thought. Isn’t it a court’s job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn’t that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?”
…You do have to wonder why senators and representatives bother swearing to “support and defend” the Constitution if that’s not part of their job description. Surely, it would strike most citizens as bizarre to suggest that legislators shouldn’t worry about whether their proposed legislation is constitutional. …
David Harsanyi ponders the Constitution.
…because the Constitution has become too complex for many of us to decipher, and thus irrelevant, its time to boil the whole thing down to its troglodytic and/or graceful basics and engage P.J. O’Rourke’s rules of governance in a free society:
1. “Mind your own business.”
2. “Keep your hands to yourself.”
If the public believes in the spirit of the founding and politicians are committed to the resurrection of the constitution those rules are a good guide when looking at new legislation. …
In the Corner, Mario Loyola notes that politicians on both sides of the aisle have aided in the federal government overreach.
The opening of the new Congress with a reading of the Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives has triggered some angry reactions on the left, but it wasn’t intended just as a criticism of them. The GOP leadership was also implicitly criticizing those Republicans who have strayed from the ideals of limited government, individual liberty, and constitutional originalism.
…People can sense that in Washington, a relentless concentration of government power has been well underway for decades. They sense that it is a danger to our democracy — and they don’t know the half of it. While Obamacare’s assault on constitutional rights is well understood, the EPA’s audacious power grab and the increasingly corrosive use of conditional federal funds in state budgets are only just becoming apparent.
Liberals laugh at such talk. But there aren’t many thoughtful law students of any political persuasion who can read the classic “con law” case of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) without feeling that somewhere along the line the Supreme Court lost its way and stopped guarding against the unconstitutional expansion of federal power. …
Karl Rove explains some of the unethical consequences of the federal government gaining power through Obamacare.
…By early December, HHS had granted 222 such waivers to provide mini-med policies for companies including AMF Bowling and Universal Forest Product, as well as 43 union organizations. According to the department’s website, the waivers cover 1,507,418 employees, of which more than a third (525,898) are union members. Yet unionized workers make up only 7% of the private work force. Whatever is going on here, a disproportionately high number of waivers are being granted to administration allies.
…The AARP provided a big chunk of the $121 million spent on ads supporting the bill’s passage, as well as $21 million on lobbying in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. HHS’s proposed regulations on Dec. 21 exempted the AARP’s lucrative “Medigap” plans from the rate review and other mandates and requirements.
…The AARP is also exempt from the new law’s $500,000 cap on executive compensation for insurance executives. (The nonprofit’s last CEO received over $1.5 million in compensation in his last full year, 2009.) It won’t pay any of the estimated $14 billion in new taxes on insurance companies, though according to its 2008 consolidated financial statement, it gets more money from its insurance offerings than it does from dues, grants and private contributions combined. Nor will it have to spend at least 85% of its Medigap premium dollars on medical claims, as Medicare Advantage plans must do; the AARP will be held to a far less restrictive 65%.
It’s not hard to connect the dots. The Obama administration is using waivers to reward friends. On the flip side, business executives will be discouraged from contributing to the president’s opponents or from taking any other steps that might upset the White House or its political appointees at HHS. …
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill hedges his bets against global warming. Still, the cold, white proof against global warming is hard to ignore.
You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones. They host million-dollar conferences on how we’ll cope with our Mediterranean future; we sleep for days in airport lounges waiting for runways to be de-iced. They pester the authorities for more funding for global-warming research; we keep an eye on our elderly neighbours who don’t have enough cash to heat their homes.
…Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted ‘no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand – ignoramuses that they are – is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.
‘The snow outside is what global warming looks like’, said one headline, in a newspaper which 10 years ago said that the lack of snow outside is what global warming looks like. A commentator said that anyone who says ‘what happened to global warming?’ is an ‘idiot’ because nobody ever claimed that global warming would ‘make Britain hotter in the long run’. (Er, yes they did.) …
… In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt – and then spread that salt on the snow which they claimed had disappeared from our lives.
Christopher Hitchens is “tea”ed off and wishes to make us more refined.
…Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different “golden” rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.
If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.” This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. …