A Conversation Somewhere in Philadelphia

circa 1787, near 3d Street.


Hamilton: what's up, JimBob?  How's it coming?

Madison: Hey, Al.  Just dotted the i's and crossed the t's on habeas corpus clause just to make certain that no one ever thinks that the government has the authority to detain anyone without due process.  I think it's pretty solid.  But I keep getting hung up on the preamble.

Hamilton: What part?

Madison: So far I have, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence of all of humanity..."

Hamilton: Whhhooooaaaa there, little man.  What was that last bit?

Madison:  We are establishing a federal government that is to defend the sanctity and dignity of all humans everywhere, except where we don't, for all of time regardless of the threat or consequences, no?  That's the note Gouverneur slipped me.

Hamilton (chuckling): Gouverneur.

Madison: I know, right?

Hamilton (snapping to): That's biting off a little more than we can chew, don't you think?

Madison: Absolutely not.  We have a continent rich with natural resources and more than our share of industrious, entrepreneurial people.  We will tax those people to the point of breaking their spirit while running up unfathomable debt.  We can then establish a military larger than our needs or our means and make sure that nobody ever does anything we don't like.  And none of that will be a problem, right Mr. National Bank?

Hamilton: Watch it.  Where are you going with this?

Madison: With our resources and the fact that we know what's best for everyone else, we can't possibly confine ourselves to protecting, um, ourselves.

Hamilton: Is your stammering the result of your redundancy, your imbecility or you coming to your senses?

Madison: No need to insult.  That's a nasty habit of yours that you'd be wise to mind.

Hamilton (waving off Madison): Listen, let's keep things simple.  Keep it at "provide for the common defense."  You still have that bit in there about being able to change things, right?

Madison: Article V, just where we left it.

Hamilton: Good stuff.  We don't want people to forget that if they don't like what we "old white guys" put in there, they can just change it and not resort to having the courts or congress or the president bastardize all of the work we put in here and ignore what we've plainly written rendering the entire enterprise a sham.

Madison (snaps his fingers):  You're drifting.

Hamilton (starts): Sorry.  Anyway, if the people decide later that they want to become the world's policeman, they can just amend the constitution.  It will spell the end of the republic, but you know what they say about all good things.

Madison: What?

Hamilton: You're an idiot.  What's next?

Madison: Huh?  Oh, OK, so we'll keep it to "provide the common defence."

Hamilton: That should be an "s" there.  We're Americans.

Madison: Fuck off, foreigner.

Hamilton: Next...

Madison: ...Ok...here we are, "provide the common defence," and then "provide welfare to everybody for any reason..."

Hamilton (rubbing his forehead): I'll be back.

Madison: Were are you going?

Hamilton: I'm getting Franklin.  It's going to be a long night.

The Best Analogy

Peter Beinert wrote a hit-peice on Marco Rubio for something called the Daily Beast.  He starts off swimmingly by calling the reading of two books, one an autobiography by Rubio, the other a biography about him, an act of "literary masochism."  So we get how hip and funny Beinert is right off the bat.

The second paragraph cuts right to the heart of things, starting "It’s not that Rubio is as smart and perceptive as Obama."  I was e-mailing a friend of mine tonight along these lines.  What evidence has there been of Obama's intelligence and perspicacity?  But I digress.

Rubio might be sharp as a tack, he may be another Sarah Palin.  I don't know.  I do know that political autobiographies are about as useful for finding out about a person as dropping an anvil on your foot, as both are completely untethered to any useful information about the subject.  My point being that I don't know enough about Rubio to have an opinion one way or the other about him.  I've heard he is a "Tea Party" guy, but I've heard that about both Palin (possibly) and Ron Paul (no), so I don't know exactly what that means.

But after reading these books, Peter Beinert knows Marco Rubio.  I have a sneaking suspicion that he already had a pretty good bead on Marco Rubio before he picked up either book, but that is another matter.

The point of the post is to share what is the best analogy I've ever read. In describing what drove young Rubio into politics, Beinert writes "[w]hat he fell in love with on the streets of Miami’s raucous Cuban ghetto was the political game."  Rubio's parents were Cuban immigrants, and he was raised in Miami.  Beinert then writes the best analogy I've ever read, immediately following the previous sentence, "The best analogy might be John F. Kennedy, who also learned the art of politics in a parochial ethnic community but through personal skill and generational change was able to transcend it."

John F. Kennedy learned the art of politics in a "parochial ethnic community?"  His maternal grandfather was the mayor of Boston and served three terms in congress.  His father, a fabulously lecherous human being, went to Harvard, made money through investing and was hob-nobbing with FDR at the dawn of WWI, three years before JFK was born.  JFK lived from birth to the age of ten in Brookline, MA, then moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx.  He attended private elementary schools, summered in Hyannisport, MA, went to The Choate School, then on to Harvard.  You get the idea.  I won't disagree that the Kennedy family was ethnic.  I pretty sure there were several pair of Irish sunglasses donned by all of the kids at one point or another, and certainly some of the boys' spouses on more than one occasion.  But to describe his upbringing as happening in a "parochial ethnic community" is patently absurd.  And, further, to depict Kennedy's political ascendency as something that had to be attained through some Herculean transcendence in spite of the parochial ethnic community has somehow managed to escape is an insult to anyone who can spend 35 seconds on wikipedia finding out exactly how unparochially ethnic JFK's upbringing was.

I would go further, but once I got to the best analogy I've ever read, I stopped reading.

Yoo's Back

John Yoo, Chief architect for the George W. Bush administration's more novel views on the constitution and presidentialauthority not found written down anywhere, is sharing his thoughts on the National Security Agency and revelations that the agency, via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, can collect information on whomever it wants, whenever it wants, regardless of whatever medium humans can communicate through.

Mr. Yoo is against putting the NSA in an "impossible position", because "we are placing these kinds of domestic law-enforcement standards on a foreign intelligence function. With domestic law enforcement, we want the Justice Department to monitor one identified target (identified because other evidence gives probable cause that he or she has already committed a crime) and to carefully minimize any surveillance so as not to intrude on privacy interests.

Once we impose those standards on the military and intelligence agencies, however, we are either guaranteeing failure or we must accept a certain level of error. If the military and intelligence agencies had to follow law-enforcement standards, their mission would fail because they would not give us any improvement over what the FBI could achieve anyway."

What Mr. Yoo fails to grasp is that the government, whether domestic law enforcement, the military or intelligence agencies, is covered by the same standard.  Namely that the government does not have the right to search a person, his house or his "effects" without a warrant and that warrants may only be issued upon probable cause.  The "reasonable suspicion" standard that allows police to detain a suspect temporarily doesn't cut the mustard here.  There are no hidden, secret codicils that say the president gets to do whatever he wants under certain circumstances.  And if the government, all in the name of protecting us, gets to pick and choose what authority it has and what what rights the people get to enjoy under specific circumstances, the whole system has failed.

It is a point I have made before and feel obligated to repeat: in our system, the people are the sovereign, the government is the servant.  Executives, legislators and bureaucrats do not have the authority to decide what powers they have.  This is kind of important.

Don't Call it That

I like language.  I'm not an expert, rather a hobbyist.  I like to play with words in order to convey meaning, tone, emotion and I enjoy writers who do well what I attempt futilely.

I like the utility of words and appreciate the development of contemporary communication, save the text lingo and obsessiveness with acronyms, but that is a fight for another day.

But sometimes, I find, that we don't have words to describe certain things or events.  Neologisms come and go, but it's weird to stumble upon needing a word to describe a thing or event that has been around since civilization dawned.

Take, for instance, when the military in Egypt overthrew the popularly elected government of Mohammed Morsi and suspended the constitution a few weeks ago.  I could have sworn that there was a phrase that we had, of French origin, that described perfectly what that is ("overthrow" is too prosaic).  I scanned wikipedia, I flipped through dusty old books, I meandered through the local library and I couldn't find the words that I was certain existed.

Someone foolishly suggested that the words I was looking for were "coup d'etat," the definition of which is (from dictionary.com):

a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force.

But that can't be it, because the United State Department of State says unequivocally that what happened in Egypt is not a coup d'etat.  Because if it was, according to the law that authorizes the disbursement of financial and military aid to Egypt if the military overthrows the government, then the more than $1.2 billion dollars that our government takes from current and future taxpayers and sends to Egypt each year would automatically be cut.

So my search continues to find out what to call what happened in Egypt.  Any help would be appreciated.

Head Slap Special

President Obama is "pivoting" again, trying to bring attention to the economy.  Which might night be such a hot idea because, in this arena, he's an idiot.

And I don't say that because he's a socialist who like to "spread around" other people's wealth, though that does not help his score here.  I say that because he doesn't know how markets work.  And if you don't know how markets work, you shouldn't try to focus attention on the fact that markets aren't working very well and that the reason they aren't working as well as they ought is directly related to policies promulgated by like-minded intellectual pygmies.

The best part is that he thinks his speeches will help his cause, and if his cause is helped, more of the policies he supports will be put in place and then the economy will perform better.  Let's never mind that this is the heighth of hubris that Hayek addresses in the quote cited on the banner, but just mind that liberal policies are the worst thing you can do to an economy.

But if we put aside the trade-off between the costs versus benefits of wealth-transfer schemes, avoid the discussion of whether the distribution of income is even a concern of the federal government and shy away from rhetoric such as (from the president's speech yesterday at Knox College, emphasis added):

"In the period after World War II, a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity.  Whether you owned a company, or swept its floors, or worked anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain -- a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and decent benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and most of all, a chance to hand down a better life for your kids.

But over time, that engine began to stall -- and a lot of folks here saw it -- that bargain began to fray.  Technology made some jobs obsolete.  Global competition sent a lot of jobs overseas.  It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class.  Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the very wealthy and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor."***

And

"So in many ways, the trends that I spoke about here in 2005 -- eight years ago -- the trend of a winner-take-all economy where a few are doing better and better and better, while everybody else just treads water -- those trends have been made worse by the recession.  And that's a problem.

This growing inequality not just of result, inequality of opportunity -- this growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it’s bad economics.  Because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer consumers.  When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy.  When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow farther and farther apart, it undermines the very essence of America -- that idea that if you work hard you can make it here."

You can look at actual facts, like:

    (source)

Yes, the president and his supporters are correct.  The middle class is shrinking.  More people are becoming wealthy and slightly fewer people are as poor as they were.  But why let facts get in the way of dulcet, but fatuous, rhetoric.


***Please see here for a partial antidote to this paragraph.  There is so much wrong in his speech and this paragraph is the lodestar for its sophistry.

Of Course He's Smiling. He's Probably Drunk

I'm agnostic on the current immigration debate.  I am for almost completely unfettered open borders, specifically so far as a source for employees is concerned.  If someone can pass some form of security background check, welcome in.
This would work, of course, so long as we were to get rid entirely of the wealth-transfer schemes dressed up as social welfare.  But that is a fight for another day.
The reason I am agnostic is that if the matter is to be addressed by our legislators, I am reasonably certain that the result will be ineffective and expensive.
But God bless Harry Reid for giving me the best reason of all not to support the legislation currently under consideration:

The First Tea Party was Hosted by a Madman

It hasn't happened for a while, but I have occasionally been asked for my thoughts on the "Tea Party" movement.

At first, I thought there might be something to it.  Without knowing what those that identified themselves as tea-partiers stood for, I only knew that people like Keith Olbermann and Aaron Sorkin hated them and called them racists.  Based on that alone, you could have colored me a supporter.

But upon examination, the movement, such as it is, revealed itself to be entirely lacking in any sort of credibility or coherent political philosophy that demonstrates a scintilla of rigorous thought.  I think contemporary progressivism (modern "liberalism") is intellectually offensive and an insult to human dignity; contemporary conservatism is morally bankrupt and clings to impotent nostrums.  But as Walter  Sobchak says in the Big Lebwoski



The Tea Party is an ephemeral trifle.  Hastening itself to its rightful place in forgotten lore, one of the groups that constitutes the movement, the Tea Party Leadership Fund, is pushing for Sarah Palin to run for Senate.  Well done.