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Chip Mellor and Jeff Rowes of The Institute for Justice write a WSJ OpEd on IJ’s recent victory in Louisiana. Pickerhead will confess that The Institute has been one of his favorite charities over the last 20 years. The have the perfect jobs. They spend all their time suing governments. One of their main efforts is to remove licensing regulations that make it difficult for small entrepreneurs to start and operate businesses. Many of the clients are blacks who will be really free and equal when they learn to hate all governments; local, state, and federal.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday struck down a Louisiana law that made it a crime for the Benedictine monks of St. Joseph Abbey to sell their handmade caskets. The decision sets up what may become a historic confrontation at the U.S. Supreme Court over one of the most important unresolved questions in constitutional law: May state governments enact economic regulations simply to protect politically connected special interests from competition?
This story begins 1,600 years ago when Benedict of Nursia founded an order of monks and instructed them to put bread on their table through the labor of their own hands. Following this dictate, the entrepreneurial brothers of St. Joseph Abbey—a century-old monastery in Covington, La.—opened a tiny business on All Souls’ Day in 2007 to sell the unadorned wooden caskets that they have made for generations.
That’s when their ancient ways collided with modern America. The monks had not sold a single casket before the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors—acting on a complaint from a government-licensed funeral director—shut them down. In Louisiana, the government had made it a crime to sell caskets in the state without a license. To do so, the monks would have had to transform their monastery into a funeral home, including building an embalming room, and at least one of the monks would have had to leave the order to spend years becoming a licensed funeral director. All of that just to sell a wooden box.
David Harsanyi says the sequester scare is not working.
… It seems to me that folks too easily conflate serious economic shocks (a downgrade) with less shocking developments (a cut in the growth of government spending). If we’re making assumptions, why not assume that our confidence is sinking because Obamacare and all its taxes are closer to implementation.
A Rasmussen poll found that only 12 percent of Americans believe the sequester has had a major impact on them personally. And the number experiencing a major impact was unchanged from week the sequester first took effect. If the president had been open to prioritization of sequester cuts almost no one would have noticed the cuts. Blaming sequestration for every economic hiccup (or worse) is going to become the hobbyhorse of a lot of people in the next few months. With or without evidence.
Law Prof Jonathan Turley, writing in USA Today says looks like Nixon has won. At least that is what Turley thinks when he sees the present imperial presidency.
This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon’s impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.
Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples: …
Mort Zuckerman says the great recession has been followed by the grand illusion.
The Great Recession is an apt name for America’s current stagnation, but the present phase might also be called the Grand Illusion—because the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially regarding jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify.
The country isn’t really advancing. By comparison with earlier recessions, it is going backward. Despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in American history and a trillion-dollar expansion to the money supply, the economy over the last three years has been declining. After 2.4% annual growth rates in gross domestic product in 2010 and 2011, the economy slowed to 1.5% growth in 2012. Cumulative growth for the past 12 quarters was just 6.3%, the slowest of all 11 recessions since World War II.
And last year’s anemic growth looks likely to continue. Sequestration will take $600 billion of government expenditures out of the economy over the next 10 years, including $85 billion this year alone. The 2% increase in payroll taxes will hit about 160 million workers and drain $110 billion from their disposable incomes. The Obama health-care tax will be a drag of more than $30 billion. The recent 50-cent surge in gasoline prices represents another $65 billion drag on consumer cash flow.
February’s headline unemployment rate was portrayed as 7.7%, down from 7.9% in January. The dip was accompanied by huzzahs in the news media claiming the improvement to be “outstanding” and “amazing.” But if you account for the people who are excluded from that number—such as “discouraged workers” no longer looking for a job, involuntary part-time workers and others who are “marginally attached” to the labor force—then the real unemployment rate is somewhere between 14% and 15%. …
Denis Prager on Florida Atlantic’s falderal.
Question: What is the difference between Christian seminaries and American universities?
Answer: Christian seminaries announce that their purpose is to produce committed Christians. American universities do not admit that their primary purpose is to produce committed leftists. They claim that their purpose is to open students’ minds.
This month FloridaAtlanticUniversity provided yet another example of how universities have become left-wing seminaries.
An FAU professor told his students to write “JESUS” (in bold caps) on a piece of paper and then step on it.
One student who did not, a junior named Ryan Rotela, complained to the professor and then to the professor’s supervisor. He explained that he had refused to do so because it violated his religious principles.
Two days later, Rotela was told not to attend the class anymore. …
Telegraph, UK with an update on progress with OneWorldTradeCenter.
Manhattan’s One World Trade Center, aka “The Freedom Tower” or the most politicised, high-profile skyscraper in the world, is clearly visible from every approach to the city. And when you’re at the top you can see every approach in return.
On the 104th floor, roughly 1,370ft above the bustle of the city, construction workers move about the steel skeleton with the agility of monkeys, creating plumes of flame and showers of sparks with their torches and grinding gear.
When it’s completely fitted out by the end of this year, One World Trade Center, or 1 WTC, is destined to be the tallest office tower in the western hemisphere, and the third tallest building in the world.
But, like so much else about the building, that’s a contentious claim. The tallest-tower designation depends on whether you accept that its 408ft spire is an extension of the tower or a separate antenna.
Call it an antenna and the building will be 400ft shy of its projected height of 1,776ft. The building’s manager and owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with the governors of New York and New Jersey, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, as well as families of those killed in the twin towers on September 11 2001, insist “The Freedom Tower” will be completed with the majesty of 1776 symbolism – the year of American independence – intact.
Whichever way that decision goes, the building that’s up is itself very different to the shard-like Daniel Libeskind design selected in 2003. With its wind turbines and “sky gardens”, that design was never considered practical by Larry Silverstein, the fast-talking developer who held the leases on the destroyed towers. …