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This coming June is the ninth anniversary of the infamous Kelo decision where the Supreme Court said it was perfectly OK for a government body to take land from one person and give it to another who promised to develop the property for a purpose deemed preferable. The land in question still lies vacant because the City of New London cannot find a developer. National Review has a look.
Nine years after the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision gutted the right of American property owners to resist eminent-domain seizures, the neighborhood at the center of the case remains a wasteland.
FortTrumbull in New London, Conn., was bulldozed to fulfill the vision of politicians and developers eager to create a New Urbanist mixed-use “hub” for upscale living in the depressed town near the mouth of Long Island Sound.
But after nearly a decade, the land is nothing but vacant urban prairie. After homeowners were forced off their property for the sake of “economic development,” the city’s original development deal fell apart, and the urban-renewal corporation that ordered the destruction has not found a developer to use the land.
In January, The Weekly Standard’s Charlotte Allen reported on the horizontal blight that was Fort Trumbull, a neighborhood made famous by Kelo v. City of New London (2005), wherein the Supreme Court ruled that government may forcibly transfer property from one private owner to another if the government believes the latter will generate greater economic activity. …
Seth Mandel calls ‘Kelo’ the “shame of a nation.”
When Sarah Palin was criticized for her inability to answer a series of questions in interviews after her selection as John McCain’s running mate, various commentators each had the one that bothered them the most. The one that caught and held my attention was when Palin was asked which Supreme Court decision–other than Roe v. Wade–she disagreed with. I wasn’t bothered so much by a supposed lack of judicial expertise but rather reminded that conservatives have been too negligent in their outrage at one ruling in particular: the 2005 Kelo decision.
That was when the Supreme Court shredded property rights by upholding a Connecticut town’s eminent domain seizure of private property to transfer to a developer under the guise of improving blighted neighborhoods and thus fulfilling the “public use” requirement under the Fifth Amendment. It’s bunk, of course. I would like to be able to expect conservatives not simply to mention Kelo when asked what non-Roe decision they oppose, but to hiss the words through gritted teeth, preferably with smoke rising from their ears. Kelo was indefensible, an assault not simply on the Constitution but on the pillars of a free society, and a nation that forgets or excuses the high court for its role in this travesty should be ashamed of itself. …
… Respect for private property rights is an essential foundation for a free society–and our Founders knew it and said so. The court’s decision in Kelo looks worse with every passing year, and we shouldn’t forget it for a moment.
Charles Krauthammer with amazing counterintuitive facts about health care.
Swedish researchers report that antioxidants make cancers worse in mice. It’s already known that the antioxidant beta-carotene exacerbates lung cancers in humans. Not exactly what you’d expect given the extravagant — and incessant — claims you hear made about the miraculous effects of antioxidants.
In fact, they are either useless or harmful, conclude the editors of the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine: “Beta-carotene, vitamin E and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful.” Moreover, “other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases.” So useless are the supplements, write the editors, that we should stop wasting time even studying them: “Further large prevention trials are no longer justified.”
Such revisionism is a constant in medicine. When I was a child, tonsillectomies were routine. We now know that, except for certain indications, this is grossly unnecessary surgery. Not quite as harmful as that once-venerable staple, bloodletting (which probably killed George Washington), but equally mindless.
After “first, do no harm,” medicine’s second great motto should be “above all, humility.” Even the tried-and-true may not be true. Take the average adult temperature. Everyone knows it’s 98.6 . Except that when some enterprising researchers actually did the measurements — rather than rely on the original 19th-century German study — they found that it’s actually 98.2.
But if that’s how dicey biological “facts” can be, imagine how much more problematic are the handed-down verities about the workings of our staggeringly complex health-care system. Take three recent cases:
Emergency room usage. …
… This is not to indict, but simply to advocate for caution grounded in humility. It’s not surprising that myths about the workings of the fabulously complex U.S. health-care system continue to tantalize — and confound — policymakers. After all, Americans so believe in their vitamins/supplements that they swallow $28 billion worth every year.
George Will says we don’t have a president bystander. We have president ‘magic words.’
Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking that saying things is tantamount to accomplishing things, and that good intentions are good deeds. So, his presidency is useful after all, because it illustrates the perils of government run by believers in magic words and numbers.
The last progressive president promised Model Cities, with every child enjoying a Head Start en route to enjoying an Upward Bound into a Great Society. Today’s progressive president also uses words — and numbers — magically emancipated from reality.
Thirty months have passed since Obama said: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Today, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, says Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power has “strengthened.” In last month’s State of the Union address, Obama defined success down by changing the subject: “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.” If saying so makes it so, all is well.
Assad, however, seems tardy regarding this elimination, perhaps because the threat of force was never actually made. The Democratic-controlled Senate nullified the threat by its emphatic reluctance to authorize force. Reuters recently reported that Assad had surrendered “4.1 percent of the roughly 1,300 tonnes of toxic agents” he supposedly has. The “.1” is an especially magical number, given the modifier “roughly” attached to 1,300 tons.
The English Civil War was not finally ended by negotiations between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I; Cromwell seized power and Charles lost his head. America’s Civil War ended when Robert E. Lee capitulated to U.S. (“Unconditional Surrender”) Grant. Russia’s civil war ended when Leon Trotsky’s Red Army defeated the White forces. Spain’s civil war ended with Francisco Franco in Madrid and remnants of the loyalist forces straggling across the Pyrenees into France. China’s civil war ended when Chiang Kai-shek skedaddled to Formosa (now Taiwan), leaving the mainland to Mao. But Syria’s civil war — after the massacres, torture, chemical weapons — supposedly will be resolved by a negotiated regime change: with words. …
Chicago Magazine profiles Valerie Jarrett.
What exactly does Valerie Jarrett—the Chicagoan often described as a big sister or mother figure to the Obamas—do in the White House? The instant histories of the Obama White House tend to portray her as the Obamas’ pit bull, a woman loyal only to the president, first lady and her own image. In a recent book on the 2012 campaign, Jonathan Alter writes that Rahm Emanuel, on agreeing to become Obama’s chief of staff, recognized that Jarrett would wield such outsized power that he tried unsuccessfully to finesse her into Obama’s senate seat. (Alter also speculates that Valerie Jarrett was one reason why Rahm hightailed it out of DC in late 2010 into the relative ease of the Fifth Floor.)
Others in media and Washington circles portray Jarrett, who held top positions in Chicago government and business, as a brilliant strategist and thinker who practically runs both wings of the White House and who did as much or more than anyone to put the Obamas there. In 1991, Jarrett, then Mayor Rich Daley’s deputy chief of staff, offered Michelle Robinson a job in City Hall. Before Michelle accepted, she insisted that Jarrett meet with Michelle’s fiancé Barack Obama. Jarrett promptly took both under her wing and, over the years, introduced Barack to the inner Daley circle, to wealthy business people, and to the people who mattered in her enclave, Hyde Park—all of which helped Obama as he moved up from community organizer to Springfield to Washington.
So which is it? Here are six pieces of conventional wisdom about Valerie Jarrett, 57, followed by, in my opinion, the reality. …
… 4. Jarrett is a mother figure to other White House staffers, especially women.
She’s certainly that to Barack and Michelle: “I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, You need to think about these three things,” Michelle told the New York Times’ Jodie Kantor. “Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.”
And she’s certainly that in her own mind: “And I try very hard to make sure that I am available to people here, particularly, I think, women often come to me. I am older than most of the people here, so I try to be a resource.”
Jonathan Alter’s reporting revealed someone quite different: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, `I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”
Derogatory nicknames abound for Jarrett: “Keeper of the Essence,” “Night Stalker” (because of her access after hours to the Obamas in their private quarters), “personal custodian of the president’s lofty motives and gifts.” The latter comes from This Town author Mark Leibovich, who quotes from an apparently leaked memo titled “Magic of Valerie,” its 33 talking points circulated to White House staffers ahead of a New York Times Jarrett profile.