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Michael Barone also writes about Toobin’s New Yorker piece on Clarence Thomas.
… The bulk of the article is worthy of attention because Toobin, despite his obvious distaste for Thomas’ views, takes him seriously as a judicial thinker and pathfinder.
“In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court,” Toobin writes. “Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.”
Toobin is on particularly strong ground when he discusses the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. For years it was considered a dead letter in sophisticated legal circles, protecting only the right to bear arms as a member of the National Guard.
But in 1997 Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in a case invalidating one provision in a 1993 gun control law. Thomas pointed to the emerging legal scholarship, some of it the product of liberal law professors like Sanford Levinson, arguing that the Second Amendment was intended to protect a personal right to own guns. …
Jonah Goldberg writes on Obama’s dependence on experts.
… Philip Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, documents that the predictions of even the most credentialed and experienced experts are often worse and very rarely better than random guessing. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization,” he writes, “there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.”
The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The Left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it’s going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don’t have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.
No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.
Spengler also picks up on the dismal record of Obama’s latest appointment.
… Once again, it appears that Obama has hired the best incompetence that money can buy. Larry Summers may have one of the highest IQ’s on record, but he believes that the mathematical models which he plays so cannily have something to do with the real world in which investors lose sleep over risk, entrepreneurs lose sleep over making the payroll, and large-company executives lose sleep over making their numbers.
Large corporations who already have health care plans, and have serried ranks of lawyers to deal with the regulators, are doing very well, in fact. S&P 500 corporations increased employment by 10% over the past year while overall employment was flat. Start-ups who have to deal with Obamacare and the rest of the Washington regulatory burden can’t get over the threshold. Remove the obstacles and let Americans do what they do best and the economy will recover.
Noemie Emery asks, “What if Obama isn’t so smart.”
Eek! Another Republican moron is running for president, and the blogs on the Left are aghast.
Another village in Texas is missing its idiot!
Another s–t-kicking cowboy has messed with their heads.
The question this time is not just whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is dumb — the Left claims the obvious answer is yes — but also whether he is as dumb as George W. Bush, or even much dumber, moronic where Bush was simply “incurious,” and also much less gently bred.
Either way, few on the Left doubt that neither is, as Steve Benen says, “an intellectually curious, creative thinker, capable to examining [sic] complex issues in a sophisticated way.”
Fortunately we have such a thinker, “capable to examining” things to perfection, and that is the problem: President Obama is their ideal of a thinker. He is president, and he has been — how to put it? — a bomb.
Based on results, Perry has been more successful as governor of Texas than Obama has been as president, or as anything else he has ever tried being, in the entire whole course of his life. …
Solar energy queen Solyndra touted by Obama, goes broke with $535 million of our money. The Hill has the story. Smartest guys around, right?
The announcement comes at a tough time for the solar industry, which has faced free-falling solar panel prices.
But the Obama administration has doubled-down on its investments in the industry. The Energy Department finalized last week an $852 million loan guarantee for a separate California solar project sponsored by NextEra Energy. Earlier in August, DOE finalized a $197 million loan guarantee for solar manufacturing facilities in Oregon and California.
Solyndra received the $535 million stimulus loan guarantee from the Energy Department in 2009 to help finance the construction of a new plant to manufacture solar panels.
David Harsanyi says you don’t have to be smart, just right.
… Now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, leading Republican presidential candidate, readily admits that he’s not a scholarly type. But if your spider senses, like mine, are tingling, it probably has more to do with Perry’s slippery politics than it does with his aversion to curling up with a dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations.
In a recent Politico piece (one that mistakes wonkery for overall intelligence), readers are asked, Is Rick Perry dumb? “He is not an ideas man,” explains Politico. He “hasn’t spent his political career marking up the latest Cato or Heritage white papers or reading policy-heavy books late into the night. Advisers and colleagues have informed much of his thinking over the years.”
Listen, I love reading a Cato white paper as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t make me smart; it makes me tragically boring. No doubt Barack Obama picked up his sad conviction in redistributionist economics perusing stacks of white papers—highlight marker within reach—but his presidency was won on crude progressive populism anchored in emotion, not reason. Policy ideas had little to do with Obama’s election victory, though they have almost everything to do with his failures as president. …
Toby Harnden reviews the administration’s speech scheduling stunt.
Oh dear. Maybe it seemed like a clever move during a late-night pizza session amongst White House aides. But the decision to try to get one over on House Republicans by publicly asking for President Barack Obama to address a Joint Session of Congress without first agreeing the date and time was a petty and foolish one.
Congress is a co-equal branch of the United States government. A president addressing a Joint Session is guest of Congress. Guests do not invite themselves and there is a long-established practice of agreeing the date behind the scenes and then going public afterwards.
It seems clear that Speaker John Boehner’s office got some kind of heads up about the proposal before the White House went public. But it appears equally obvious that Boehner didn’t go anywhere near to agreeing to it.
So Boehner called Obama’s bluff – and Obama now has two basic options: do the speech next Thursday before Congress or do it from the Oval Office or somewhere other than Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Jennifer Rubin says the Kansas City Star editors know why the trade deals have been stalled.
… “The real problem is squabbling over the level of aid under a program for workers displaced by foreign competition. Democrats seek to keep spending at elevated levels, while Republicans want to scale back to earlier levels. Surely this issue could be handled separately while Congress moves on the three trade deals, which were all signed before Obama came into office.”
Unfortunately, while Obama dithers the U.S. is losing market share. (“Colombia’s ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Silva Lujan,” says the editorial, “notes that U.S. farmers once claimed 46 percent of Colombia’s food import market. Now the proportion is 20 percent — and likely to go lower. A free trade pact between Colombia and Canada, another big wheat exporter, went into effect last week.”)
In truth, Obama could have sent the trade deals up at any time in the last two and a half years. That he has not suggests he prefers playing politics over offending his Big Labor donors.
Tony Blankley says the jobs policy is the last chance for this administration to get it right. But they won’t.
… I concede it is extraordinarily unlikely that the president will take up my free-market economic policy proposal. Sadly, many presidents, both Republican and Democratic, fail because they remain enthralled to their early policy positions – ineffective as they may have proved to be – and find themselves emotionally unable to divorce themselves from those early mistakes.
The Daily Caller outlines the latest from the administration that will kill jobs.
On Tuesday the National Labor Relations Board announced three new decisions that industry experts say will likely hurt the economy and cost American jobs.
The first and likely most controversial NLRB ruling overturned a 2007 decision that gave workers nationwide the right to protect themselves from union bosses’ bullying and coercive tactics with secret ballot elections.
Via its newly-decided Lamons Gasket case, the NLRB eliminated the 2007 Dana Corp ruling, which the National Right to Work Foundation said protected workers from “coercive practices” union organizers often used to “bully or mislead employees.” ..
Kathryn Jean Lopez provides a few shorts from Cheney’s book.
Why Run? (130)
I was often asked by people why in the world I wanted to be a freshman member of the House, serving in the minority party, after I’d already been White House chief of staff. I used to explain that there was something very special about having your name on the ballot and convincing thousands of voters to support you. That running and winning the right to cast your state’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was politics at its best. That being elected in accordance with our Constitution meant you had earned the right to cast that vote and no one could take it away except by defeating you at the polls. Your political fate didn’t depend upon someone else’s success in an election.
Newt (132)
After describing him as the most memorable member of his congressional class (1976), Cheney writes:
Our relationship was useful in maintaining some degree of peace among the Republicans in the House. For the leadership I served as a bridge to the younger, more aggressive members. For Newt I provided knowledge of which lines he shouldn’t step over if he didn’t want to get in a pile of trouble. And for me, my role allowed me to be identified on the one hand as part of the Republican establishment and on the other as someone who had close ties to the younger generation, eager to overthrow the establishment.
Bittersweet review in Village Voice of Glen Campbell’s latest and last.
You don’t know the meaning of “poignant” until Glen Campbell, sitting two feet from you, starts to sing “Ghost on the Canvas,” the title track of his new—and final—album. The country great, who’s going through the early stages of Alzheimer’s, sometimes forgets which family member once saved him from drowning, the last city he played, which guitar he used on “Good Vibrations.” But when he sails into the magical realism of this heartbreaking Paul Westerberg ballad, he’s the old Glen.
“I know a place between/Life and death/For you and me,” he croons in his familiar, boyish tenor. He sings on about the end, about eternity, and you have to turn your head away, to brush back tears.
Campbell, still spry and blond at 75, his wife, Kim, sitting beside him, is in Manhattan to promote Ghost, maybe the finest album he’s ever made. …