Conservative Donnybrook

Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.

Conclusion: A New Glorious Judicial Revolution

Because conservatism is ill-equipped to correct the problems the United States faces as a result of nonoriginalist, activist Supreme Court decisions, there needs to be a countering force that will return the country to its traditional foundation. The failure of conservatism means that this countering force must itself be “activist” in the sense that the doctrine of stare decisis cannot be an impediment to restoring tradition. However, I contend that, properly understood, it is not “activist” at all. A judiciary operating in the Neo-Whig fashion would be restoring to the Constitution, its lost unwritten half, returning it to the previous understanding that the document traditionally has enjoyed. For the written Constitution, this will mean the return to the “historical experiences, conventions, customs, the complexities of political compromise, and long-received principles of morality” that Americans have known for nearly 220 years. For the unwritten constitution it will mean a return to those values known to the Anglo-American tradition for nearly 800 years. Once again Professor Calabresi provides an excellent example of Neo-Whig reasoning:

For example, in Apprendi, Blakely, and United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme recently revived the notion that mandatory sentencing guidelines could not give judges the power to adjust upward a prisoner’s sentence unless the charges justifying the upward adjustment were proved to a jury. Under Professor Merrill’s conventionalism, these cases are certainly wrongly decided because for about 20 years, since the adoption of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, we have gotten quite used to a reduced role for the jury in finding all the critical facts leading to a sentence. For Merrill, I assume, the fact that thousands of cases have been decided this way for twenty years means the Court’s Apprendi line of cases is clearly a violation of conventionalism.

I think, of course, that the Court in the Apprendi line of cases rejected twenty years of wayward practice and restored an 800 year old fundamental right to jury trial under English and American law. Was this “revolutionary” decision consistent with a general skepticism about the powers of human reason? You bet it was. The innovation of the last twenty years in cutting back on the right to jury trials was the effort of the Sentencing Commission to give us a more rational world, and it was that effort which smacked of the French Revolution. In rejecting, the practice of the last 20 years and restoring the practice of the previous 800 years, the Apprendi Court was leading a conservative revolution, a coming full circle if you will and returning to the point where we started.[1]

Returning to the “right to privacy” example and illustrating how a Neo-Whig Court would approach a case in that line is profitable. If we suppose, as is likely to happen in the near future,[2] that one of the states passed a prohibition on abortion and that a challenge to that law was heard by the Supreme Court, how would a Neo-Whig’s approach look? First, the Neo-Whig would look to the text of the Constitution (anew) to see if a right to abortion or some other right (like a right to reproductive privacy) could be found there. As noted above, Justice Stewart was unable to find any wording in the Constitution that could be read to make the right to privacy into an enforceable right let alone would anyone have been able to find a right to abortion, which is an extension of the right to privacy. The presumption, at this point, would be against there being such a right.

However, the Ninth Amendment says that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”[3] Since a Neo-Whig believes in the existence of an unwritten constitution, there must be a mechanism for reading it into the written constitution. There are a few places where this might be done. The first is the Ninth Amendment. Unenumerated rights are just the sort of thing one might expect to find in an unwritten constitution, therefore it is only natural that one would use the Ninth Amendment to import them since they have been neither denied or disparaged. The second place where one might be able to import some of the content of the unwritten constitution might be the Privileges and Immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[4]

Therefore, the Neo-Whig would have to look to the “historical experiences, conventions, customs, the complexities of political compromise, and long-received principles of morality”[5] to see if such a right has been historically enjoyed by Americans. Upon such an examination, the Neo-Whig would discover that there is no such long-standing custom or principle of morality that supports the right to abortion.[6] A Neo-Whig may very well conclude that there is an historical acknowledgement of some sort of right to privacy, but it would almost certainly not extend to sexual behavior that has historically been considered immoral through the centuries.[7] Therefore, a Neo-Whig would conclude that since there is no text supporting the proposed right to abortion, and since abortion is not a right that finds long-standing expression in the historical experiences of Americans, that the Federal Constitution has nothing to say on the matter. This outcome would incidentally support the long-standing American values of limited government, the writtenness of the Constitution and Federalism by the simple fact that the decision of whether or not an abortion would be legal, limited or illegal would be left to the states.

Similarly, each of the other cases mentioned above[8] would be approached in the same way. Contraceptive use and homosexual sodomy would likely be found to be issues for the several states to decide and not an occasion for federal intervention.

But how does this differ from the originalist approach? Let us take Justice Scalia as an example. In Troxel v. Granville, Scalia wrote “the Constitution’s refusal to ‘deny or disparage’ other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges’ list against laws duly enacted by the people.”[9] Likewise, Judge Bork has likened the Ninth Amendment to an indecipherable “inkblot.”[10] However, with nearly 800 years of evidence to draw from, the content of those unenumerated rights is really not so hard to discern for a Neo-Whig. There is no harm in protecting the traditional rights of Englishmen, passed down through the Constitution to Americans. Rather, the harm would be in disparaging those rights that the founding generation risked so much to defend.

A Neo-Whig revolution in the judiciary, where Traditionalists (formerly conservatives) take back the reins of the Courts is America’s only hope for a return to the values, customs and morals that made this country the greatest to grace the earth. No longer can the country afford to have innovation upon innovation ratcheted in place by a conservative judiciary lacking the tools to turn the tide. It is time to take over the laying of the track, to make a 180 degree turn, and, if the conservatives still desire, they can pound in the spikes behind the Neo-Whigs.

A well known Catholic priest has quit the Catholic Church in favor of the Episcopalian church.  His reason: The Episcopals allow him to love up the ladies.  Nothing like sin and promotion of sin to soothe the wayward soul!

To quote the article linked above: “Some Catholics expressed sympathy for Cutie and said it was time to end the celibacy rule. Others said that, given the recent scandals involving U.S. priests sexually abusing young boys, and Irish priests raping, flogging and enslaving children in Catholic schools, they were relieved that Cutie had merely become involved with an adult woman.”

Indeed, thank God out priests feel comfortable to break the sacrament they took!  Never mind that whole commitment to God and Church thing.  What ever feels good, right?

Now, if we can just get ex-father Cutie (hilarious name I might add) to take the pedophiles with him… after all, sex is sex right?

Sorry. Part II is the longest, but it all goes together. Part I can be found here.

What is a Neo-Whig?

As the title to this paper indicates, I will be arguing in favor of an approach to constitutional interpretation that in some way relates to the Whig political party. I qualify this by calling for a Neo-Whig approach and so one can only assume that there is a difference between the Whigs of old and the Neo-Whig that I call on today. Let us first look at what I take to be the Whig party’s stance toward government and so define that term. Afterward, I will describe in what ways the new Whig of today, or Neo-Whig (although I detest using the designation “neo”)  should differ from the old, thus making what I will call a Neo-Whig.

A. Who Were the Whigs?

The Whigs that I have in mind are those politicians that were largely responsible for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. In particular, I appeal to those Whigs as Edmund Burke described them, and as I understand them from Burke’s description. Burke viewed the Glorious Revolution as a “revolution not made, but prevented.”[1] According to his version, the Whigs of the Glorious Revolution overthrew James II “to preserve [their] antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which [was their] only security for law and liberty.”[2] Indeed, the very thought of “the fabrication of a new government” was enough to [rightly] fill the Whigs with “disgust and horror.”[3] Instead the Whig view of proper government was to preserve the inheritance they had received from their forefathers.[4] Innovations by King James II had forced those patriots who valued that inheritance to take the drastic step of deposing James in favor of William of Orange.[5] Whether  James II actually was capable of working fundamental constitutional changes, the Whig interpretation, which Burke strongly proclaimed, held that the king had and that he would.[6] It is quite likely that the real reason behind the deposing of the king was his Declaration for Liberty of Conscious, in which he extended toleration to Catholics and Dissenters and that anger at the king for so doing and fear that a popular uprising may result in another English Commonwealth prompted the Glorious Revolution.[7] In avoiding the establishment of a new Commonwealth, the William of Orange was preventing a looming revolution by deposing the king.[8]

One of the most influential books that Burke wrote was Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he reflected on the origins of the French Revolution.[9] In that book, he predicted that a revolution founded in ideological innovation was doomed to end in disaster.[10] “Burke declared, looking upon the ghastly spectacle of the French Revolution, that is was not merely mistaken, but evil, to attempt to govern a nation by utopian design, regardless of prudence, historical experience, convention, custom, the complexities of political compromise, and long-received principles of morality.”[11]

The American War for Independence stands in stark contrast to the revolution in France. In line with this Whigian train of thought, Russell Kirk more recently writes of the American patriots:

The men who made the American Revolution were not abstract visionaries. Suffering practical grievances, they sought practical redress; not obtaining that, they settled upon separation from the Crown in Parliament as a hard necessity. That act was meant not as a repudiation of their past, but as a means for preventing the destruction of their pattern of politics by King George’s presumed intended revolution of arbitrary power, after which, in Burke’s phrase, “the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties.”[12]

Where the French sought to enshrine the new Enlightenment principles of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” to replace the outmoded ideas of their French past, the Americans sought a return to the chartered rights of Englishmen[13] and a return to the old modes of living that Americans had lived under for more than 150 years prior to the Revolution. In essence, the Americans wrote for themselves a “conservative constitution.”[14]

This view is bolstered by a survey of the governing document that the Founding Fathers drew up. When one reads through the Constitution, especially the Constitution originally ratified – one lacking a Bill of Rights – one finds a document of extremely practical application. It does not contain the high language one would expect to find in a document extolling a new ideology as one finds in so many governing documents of recent vintage, like the so-called European Constitution establishing the European Union. Rather, it is a functional document, creating a national government that was to coexist with pre-existent state governments – a government which would sit atop these prior governments and exercise only those delegated powers which it was given by the states.

Even once the Bill of Rights was added to the document, it could still be fairly called a conservative document, since every single one of the rights offered for ratification could already be found in one or more of the various state constitutions. Indeed, some of the rights identified by the Bill of Rights could lay claim to a history that stretched back hundreds of years to the Magna Charta.[15] Simply put, there is little, if any, innovation present in the Constitution. Continue Reading »

I have decided to to post a paper I wrote in law school, in which I argue for a new order in judicial decision-making. In particular, I argue that we need an activist. traditional judiciary who will roll back the innovations of the progressives in order to restore a government that comports with the unwritten American government. In so doing, I will be presenting three sections. The first lays out the problem of conservatism, which lacks the means to counter the progressive activism that tends to move the polity in only one direction. The second section will introduce the concept of what I call the Neo-Whig and also the idea of Russell Kirk’s conception of the unwritten constitution. Finally, I present an argument for how a Neo-Whig would decice cases and make the case that our future is dependent on such a judiciary.

The Problem with Conservatism
Imagine a case comes before the Supreme Court. One party asks the Court to discover a new right (perhaps in the penumbrae); the other asks the Court to uphold a principle that has been known in the culture for centuries. Further, let us suppose that the Court decides the case in favor of discovering the new “right.” Over the course of the next twenty years, let us “imagine” that the Court continues to uphold this decision. At the end of twenty years a conservative justice is confirmed to the Court. The problem arises when the new justice opts to uphold the precedent, which has been in place for twenty years, in the interest of stability. Hardly can this be called stable, since it is a relatively recent innovation in the jurisprudence of the Court. But, this is precisely what happens.

This phenomenon is not particular to Supreme Court justices, but also to politicians and judges who consider themselves conservative. The very word “conservative” denotes this tendency to keep in place that which has come before. Conservatives conserve. Progressives progress. And every time “progress” is made, it becomes a candidate for conservation. The question is how long does an innovation have to persist before it is no longer an innovation and has become the traditional cultural position?

Let us make this example a bit more concrete to see how this ratcheting effect of conservatism works with progressivism. In the discussion which follows, I will make much of the fact that many of the Justices involved in the decisions below were appointed by conservative presidents. It does not necessarily (and obviously does not) follow that the judges they appointed were themselves conservative. Many of them turned out not to be by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is a fair assumption that whenever a conservative president appoints a judge and conservative Senators confirm him, they had a reasonable expectation that the judge they appointed would uphold conservative values.

In 1965, Justice Douglas, writing for the Supreme Court, stated that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”[1] In so doing, he recognized a “right to privacy” in the Constitution that extended from the combination of the right of association, the right against quartering troops, the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right against self-incrimination. But the Court did not stop there.

Seven years later, the Court extended the “right to privacy” to encompass unmarried persons’ right to contraceptives.[2] “If under Griswold the distribution of contraceptives to married persons cannot be prohibited, a ban on distribution to unmarried persons would be equally impermissible.”[3] In the seven years separating the cases, five new justices were seated on the Supreme Court: Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist. Other than Marshall, all of these were appointed by Richard Nixon and were presumably expected to uphold conservative values by those who appointed them and yet only one justice dissented (Burger) and on an unrelated issue (the person convicted for distributing the contraceptives was not a licensed doctor or pharmacist).[4] Indeed, in his dissent, Burger stated, “I do not challenge Griswold v. Connecticut . . . despite its tenuous moorings to the text of the Constitution, but I cannot view it as controlling authority for this case.”[5] Astoundingly, Justice Stewart, an Eisenhower appointee, had dissented in the Griswold case specifically stating that, he could “find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court” and yet he joined in the Eisenstadt Court’s decision upholding the very right he had denounced only seven years earlier. Thus, the conception of a “right to privacy” was ratcheted in place. The story goes on.

The following year, the right to privacy was found to secure a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.[6] Justice Blackmun,[7] in the opinion he wrote for the Court stated, “This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Again, Justice Stewart, who so strenuously objected to the discovery of a right to privacy in Griswold, followed the Court in Roe.[8]

Twenty years later, the Court reconsidered its previous decision extending to women the “right to abort” their children in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.[9] In the intervening twenty years only three justices that were sitting on the Court at the time of the Roe decision remained.[10] Of the remaining six justices comprising the Court, all were appointed by Republican presidents, and therefore carried with them the expectation of being conservative by those who appointed them, especially considering that Roe turned out to be such a divisive decision in society at-large and remained controversial at the time Casey was decided.[11] Continue Reading »

Obama announced yesterday that Corporate Auto Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards would be raised to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. Mugging for the photo op, were Governors Jennifer Granholm (MI), Arnold Schwarzenegger (CA), and Deval Patrick(MA), each of whom presides over some of the worst economic conditions in their respective states and each having proven to be inept at balancing a budget. The president and governors were abetted by Union capo, Ron Gettelfinger and members of Congress. Smiles and backpats were the order of the day.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder. ARE THEY INSANE? Haven’t we been hearing about the bad financial straits that the automakers have been suffering through recently? Why in the world would anyone do anything to increase the cost of their products when they are having a hard time selling their products as it is? One estimate is that the new standard will add $4,000 to $10,000 to the cost of each new vehicle. It seems the administration and his admirers have set out to destroy the automakers even as they lavish untold amounts of taxpayer monies upon them.

The model is not new. It seems that Obama is following a model in which you take a formerly productive member of society, promise to pay him money seized from other taxpayers, and meanwhile create roadblocks to allowing that member of society becoming productive again. This way, one can create a dependent constituency who, even if he realizes that he has become a slave and is being hurt by the “kindness” being shown him by his master, nonetheless can see no option but to vote to keep the checks coming. Obama seems to be offering the carrot to the automakers at the same time he is making more carrots more necessary.

The rational thing to do at this point when the automakers are struggling to survive would be to lighten the regulatory burden that Big Government has placed on them. Instead, it appears the federal government will be increasing the regulatory burden of 49 states, by exporting California’s repressive auto emission standards to the rest of the nation, further increasing the costs associated with the automakers’ products for the other 49.

None of this will be good for the automakers and it certainly will hurt the consumer on Main Street.

A judge in Minnesota has issued a warrant for the arrest of a mother who failed to show up for a court hearing.  Earlier, the court ordered the boy’s parents to force him to receive chemo-therapy treatments for his Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The parents objected on religious grounds.  Their son, the infirmed, also objected, going as far as to tell the judge “I’d fight it. I’d punch them and I’d kick them” if doctors attempted to administer the treatments.

What the court has done here is violate the Constitution in the name of science.  So what if the boy’s cancer can easily be cured by treatment?  So what if the court believes that his life can be saved?  Why should the court get to make a decision on this boy’s health?  If anyone has the right, it is the infirmed boy.  If his immaturity is a bar, then it is his parents whom should make the decision.

This is an attack on parental rights, religious freedom of the individual and the Constitution itself.

Much hullabaloo has been made in California over COLA… that is, cost of living adjustments.  With our beautiful state in dire straits, many local governments (Los Angeles included) have asked public servant unions to fore-go their annual cost of living adjustments.  I find this sort of thing outrageous.  What right does a local government have to ask employees to fore-go what they contracted for so long ago?  The whole point of a COLA is to ensure that the value of the dollar earned by the employee fairly reflects the cost of living in a given area.  Asking civil servants to disregard their contracts in a fiscal emergency is unfair and an insult to the taxpayer.

It is my opinion that COLAs ought to be mandatory this year.  The overall cost of both ownership and renting a family home has dropped dramatically over the past year.  the price per gallon of gasoline is nearly half of the cost it was the year before.  automobiles cost less, tangible personal property costs less.  Almost everything is cheaper.  The cost of living in California, especially Southern California, has dropped by margins unseen in modern history.  I am all for the COLAs.  By all rights, the union members deserve a downward COLA adjustment to reflect just how far a dollar earned can go.

Every time I see the new Pepsi logo, it reminds me of the Barack Obama campaign logo. As a result, I urge everyone to drink Coca-Cola.

Shortly after the election, I wrote a post about Basic Truth About Politics #1. As I wrote then, a local radio talk show host blithely answered a caller who expressed his dismay at Obama’s victory asking how such a thing could have happened by saying that it is very simple: they liked him better. I was a little miffed at the simplistic answer, but on reflection I came to see the truth of the assertion. The simple truth is Americans elect presidents for the same reasons they elected Student Council Presidents in high school – they like him better.

Today, that same talk show host has posted the following on his blog (he also spoke about it briefly on the sow today and promised to spend more time on it tomorrow). What is interesting is that it seems he has abandoned the basic insight he once possessed. Now he argues that the Republican Party must adopt the Democrats’ campaign planks in order to retain any relevancy. His prescription? Jettison any principled stand in favor of the dignity of life. Jettison any principled stand in favor of the rule of law. The people, he argues, don’t want any of that. Just look at the past election. In other words, Obama won. Assimilate or die. Resistance is futile.

I would agree with Abdul to a certain extent. There are relatively few people who actually care about the issues. But those people are highly motivated and highly vocal. Look for instance at the Ron Paul phenomenon. Paul commanded a corps of true conservatives and also attracted the Ross Perot/Pat Buchanan black helicopter crowd. The mainstream GOP apologists, adopting a strategy close to Abdul’s reasoning, focused almost exclusively on the fringe element and tarred Ron Paul with his supporters’ excesses. They did the same to Perot and Buchanan. As a result, the GOP has been steadily moving to a more Statist position since the Reagan years as they strive to make the tent larger and larger. Ironically, the GOP’s relative share of the electorate has decreased leading one to question whether moving into the Statist Democratic position is favorable to the party, pace Abdul’s claims.

Ronald Reagan perfectly demonstrates why Abdul is wrong. For years after Watergate the mainstream media was declaring the GOP DOA. There was an existential struggle between the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the party and the Rockefeller Rupublicans. In 1976, the Rockefeller wing won and nominated Gerald Ford, the moderate candidate. Ford, of course, went on to be defeated by Jimmy Carter. Four years later, the conservative wing of the party was able to nominate its candidate and Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. The Party moved away from Statism and the people heartily endorsed that move.

The point is not that conservative values win elections. The point is that conservative positions do not lose elections. Ronald Reagan was far more likable than Carter. Reagan won. It is as simple as that. The lesson is that those of us who care about the issues need to develop candidates that the electorate can relate to, that they want to drink beers with. In short, a candidate who is charismatic will win the election even if he is a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist or even if he is a strict constitutionalist. It is the television era for better or worse.

As far as that goes, I wrote before that it was time to let the GOP go its merry way. But, if the conservative Ron Paul wing of the GOP can find a charismatic candidate (note to Paulites: not Ron Paul), the GOP can be saved. There is no reason the Party cannot turn again from Big Government Statism. There is nothing that locks that position in place. There is nothing to fear from nominating a true conservative as the candidate’s policies have very little to do with whether he will win an election. If image is everything, as appears to be the case, the key is to find a candidate who possesses both the image and who also carries the message.

I have been a subscriber to MLB.TV for five years now. As a Cubs fan, spending the money was not strictly necessary when I first signed up, because WGN was carrying almost all of their games and my cable provider includes WGN in its channel lineup. I could watch virtually every game at home. Nonetheless, I wanted to be able to watch games when I was not at home on my laptop. As soon as I signed up, I realized that half the games were blacked out. However, back then, the blackout only applied to home games, so I still received half the games. I was a little miffed, but I accepted that as part of the deal. The Cubs are not in business to give away their product. Fair enough. And, in any event, even though I am a Cubs fan, I am also a baseball fan and have been known to watch almost any team.

However, as time has gone by, the blackout restrictions have become worse. Now ALL televised games are blacked out – not just home games. Furthermore, WGN now has only about a third or less of the televised games. If I lived in Chicago or the surrounding area, I would not have much of a problem with this situation. However, I live in Indianapolis, 180 miles and three and one half hours’ drive away. I hardly live in the local area. Moreover, not only are the Cubs blacked out here, but the White Sox and Reds are as well. In other words, if you live in Indianapolis, you are credited with having THREE home teams, even though there are none in Indy. What’s more is that I cannot even tune in the WGN radio broadcasts and there does not appear to be an Indianapolis radio station that broadcasts Cubs games (Reds, yes; Cubs, no). Supposedly WNDE AM-1260 carries the games, but it seems every time I want to listen to one, they are either not broadcasting it or my reception is terrible (AM radio at night is an iffy proposition).

When I moved up to Ann Arbor, Michigan for law school, I signed up as I always do, but found myself blacked out up there even though the area in which I lived was not a blackout area. MLB explained to me that the applicable blackout area is based upon where the credit card securing the account is billed. In my case, my credit card bills were still being sent home to Indy. I suffered through my first year of law school getting only half the games. During my second year, I changed my billing address to Ann Arbor and enjoyed a summer full of Cubs baseball. However, when I graduated and moved back to Indy, I had to change my billing address and am now stuck with the blackouts. It looks as though this may have changed and is now based on the location of the server from which you are accessing the game. If so, it may be possible to access the game through a proxy. Unfortunately, this seems dishonest to me and it really should not be necessary for someone like me where MLB has denied us a local franchise.

Astoundingly, it is even worse at my father’s home in Spencer, Iowa. In Spencer, they are blacked out from the Twins (221 miles), White Sox (495 miles), Cardinals (534 miles), Royals (353 miles), Cubs (495 miles) and Brewers (453 miles)! How in the world does that make sense? If every one of those teams were broadcast on local television stations, I could understand that. But, in fact, the only “local” team (in that their games are regularly broadcast) is the Twins from what I can tell when I visit. It is as though MLB is intentionally going out of its way to make sure nobody ever purchases their product! Of course, I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the idiocy of an organization that would hire Keith Olbermann.

I am inclined to tell MLB to get bent altogether. In fact, if I could get English broadcasts of Japanese games, I’d probably just become a Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters fan and abandon MLB entirely. But, if MLB were involved in the enterprise, we would probably find that anyone who did not already have a Japanese franchise in their city would be blacked out of most of the broadcasts!

What I find completely ridiculous, as I mentioned, is that in no rational sense can I be said to be living in the local Cubs viewing area (or the Reds for that matter – it is no hardship to be blacked out of the White Sox games). Furthermore, the annual cost for MLB.TV is $109.95 so it is not exactly like I am trying to avoid paying for the product I wish to receive.

What I am saying is that I will not be signing up for another year of MLB.TV again unless they change the breadth of the areas caught up in the local blackout areas. I urge anyone considering spending money on MLB’s product to think carefully about it. If you are a Cubs fan that lives in Los Angeles and don’t care about watching Dodgers or Angels games, then you’ll be fine. But, if not, you may find yourself being screwed on the very games you most want to see.

This is a great visual of the $100 million that Obama has been urging his cabinet to trim from his bloated $3.5 trillion budget. The cuts are supposed to show the president’s commitment to “go line by line through the budget to cut spending” and “reform government.”

Yes. Very committed. Seeing the level of the president’s commitment, I am left only with Hope™ that government will somehow be reformed and spending truly cut. Right now the cuts seem to amount to chump Change™.