One would expect a Harvard educated attorney to understand the rule of law… I said one would expect….

Our country was yet again grievously wounded because of “free trade,” “tolerance,” and interventionism.

Would that the myriad soldiers — in Texas, of all places — had availed themselves of the duty to protect themselves and their comrades and loved ones by carrying concealed weapons, this comatose piece of excrement would have been dead after the first shot was fired.

I weep for the country that used to be the United States of America but which is now the United State of Aetna, indivisible, with tyranny, oppression, and “free” “healthcare” for all.

Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;–And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

What provision above grants Congress the power to provide health care to Americans?

I’m afraid that if the House’s arrogation of powers not delegated to them stands, even the most obtuse of us will come to the (belated) realization that the United States is not a free country and its citizens are but slaves the fruits of whose labors are enjoyed by their slavers.

The article to which you linked, when read through the lenses of one conversant with history (which one would expect a self-described historian to do), demonstrated far better than I could of the bankruptcy of your side. Kagan starts out by mentioning the Great Depression. He failed to note any of the actual causes of that depression. He failed to take into consideration the “adventurism,” to borrow one of your words from a recent comment, of the United States leading up to that crisis. The economic decisions in the midst and wake of the Civil War (National banking acts of 1863 and 1864 which consolidated currency to fund the Union’s war; Federal Reserve creation in 1913; Aldrich-Vreeland in 1908, etc.) and the domestic and foreign policy decisions in the wake of the war (Reconstruction; almost immediate attempts at imperialism in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Liberia – all of which came about due to slavery and its end; westward expansion, Indian wars, Alaskan purchase; Roosevelt’s splitting of the Republicans, his appointments to the Supreme Court, etc.; financial, monetary, and fiscal management and mismanagement), not to mention World War I, all contributed directly to the spreading thin of the American military and building resentment throughout the world.

Kagan goes on to insinuate that, because the United States seemed to somehow ignore foreign policy, Japan militarized and Germany fell under Hitler’s sway. This is howlingly funny. What we are required to do if we are to accept Kagan’s hypothesis is to absolutely and unequivocally deny that black is black, that water is wet, or that fire is hot. Aside from the fact that it was American “adventurism” (e.g., with the Great White Fleet, which further fueled a zealous desire to militarize in newly-nationalist Japan) which thrust Japan on its path toward imperialism (read about Perry’s Black Ships and the cracking of isolationist Japan, the Meiji Restoration, the Manchurian, Korean, and Russian campaigns of Japan), we can hardly be faulted for “ignoring” Germany: we had shipped thousands of American boys there to fight, bleed, die, and kill, and had established a new world-political body to deal with the German problem only 20 years before the 1933 Nazification. One could be excused for refusing to read any of the rest of Kagan’s ludicrous bombast after realizing this, but, intrepid soul that I am, I trudged on.

Kagan engaged in your least-favorite pasttime. He had the balls to criticize Ronald Reagan (gasp! the horror!) in practically the same breath as he criticized Jimmy Carter. Calling Reagan’s policy decisions about Lebanon “failed” and asserting that these policies led to the bombing of the Marine barracks is hardly what one would expect to hear you lauding. Implicit in this is the recognition that we should not have been there to get bombed. Reagan quickly and wisely realized this and did exactly the right thing: he got out and left Israel to what it was perfectly, demonstrably capable of doing: defending itself and letting Beirut and the Lebanese tend to their own damned affairs. No more Marines were killed there after that. No Al-Aqsa,  ”Quds Force,” or Hezbollah started trouble by killing Americans there. What a concept.  What were “Reagan’s failed policies” in Lebanon? Assisting a “multinational force” along with French troops and others to “keep the peace” in a sectarian civil war. What spawned the Muslim hatred and subsequent suicide bombings? Perceived American preference for Maronite Catholics and the shelling of Druze areas which inadvertantly killed civilians.

Kagan touches tangentially and seemingly accidentally upon one truth: things now are probably more dangerous for the U.S., but because of our huge overseas presence and constant “spreading of democracy” or “war on terror” or “search for WNDs” (we really do need to find those nasty World Net Dailies) or whatever they’re calling it these days, not because we are letting our guard down.

People are growing weary of the wars, growing weary of the constant misequation of the United States of America with Israel by the radical Zionists, and people are growing weary of the stubborn economic hardships put upon them by constant imperialism. Bring Americans home to defend America. Root out radical Islam here and deport it. If the resistance starts here, put it down swiftly and with no remorse. But there is no way we need to be defending South Korea from a tinpot near-dead in charge of a run-down non-entity. There is no justification for making all those “security guarantees” to states in the Russian sphere of influence. There is no way you could possibly believe that Kagan essay if you know and understand history. There is no way you can continue to call yourself a conservative and defend such Wilsonianism. It is definitionally schizophrenic, or alternatively simply mendacious, to claim to be conservative and yet espouse this baseless, historically-illiterate, radical Ledeenishness while at the same time believing it makes us safer. Your apologists split their time between appealing to how much safer we are and how dangerous it’s getting. Your side constantly purports to support “democracy” and “freedom” while working overtime - often in cahoots with outright radical socialist would-be totalitarians – to quash them through Patriot Acts, occupations of foreign countries, propped-up banking cartels and outdated unionized auto companies (remember which President started those great things?). Your side is trying to cling desperately to relevance, which is understandable. But for whom are you striving?

Last night, as I watched the President’s press conference, I watched in mild shock as Lynn Sweet (from Obama’s adopted hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times) unabashedly toadied up to the privileged, elitist president by lobbing a (likely pre-screened) softball question having nothing to do with so-called healthcare reform. Calling the President’s attention to the brouhaha surrounding his “friend” Henry L. “Skip” Gates’ arrest by Cambridge, MA police, the President, a former Constitutional Law professor, said “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”

So, to recap, the President of the United States of America — after admitting he did not have a command of the facts — made some serious leaps in a nationally televised press conference.

I would not be “pretty angry” if police officers investigating a possible burglary at my house asked me to identify myself, nor would I be “pretty angry” if they detained me if I were stupid enough to yell at them and refuse to provide such identification. In fact, neither would just about any other sane member of society not bent on attacking police officers. But there’s more to it, of course. Just as I suspected when I heard of the incident, “Professor” Gates, who makes his living — a handsome living among the privileged elite of Northeastern academia in Harvard — immediately began to play the race card, and I feel confident in speculating that he did so with a view toward future racemongering, as is his wont. Read the police reports for yourself. You be the judge. 

But let’s frankly and openly discuss another thing that’s “just a fact,” Mr. President: African-Americans and Latinos “disproportionately” commit the crimes in this land of ours. Not so in many other places; but here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., even with a Republican-authored and pushed Civil Rights Bill, the facts are plain. Janet Reno’s Department of Justice confirmed it, even. Federal UCR stats continually confirm it. Blacks and Latinos, and specifically, young black and Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican men, disproportionately commit crimes of almost all classifications. Steve Sailer had a detailed and irrefutable piece on the matter in 2005 on VDare.com. Please take the time to read it and pay close attention to the data he lists and the sources he cites.

That has quite a lot to do with the “long history” of some minorities being “disproportionately” stopped: it’s called criminal profiling, and it is entirely different from simple racial profiling. Guess what? A white guy in a BMW circling the block in a crappy lower-income black neighborhood — as anyone who has ever watched COPS could tell you — is just as likely to be stopped (moreso, probably) as a black guy in the same area, because, chances are, he’s up to no good. Looking for blow, a hooker, whatever. Same thing applies to the ones cops know by experience commit other types of crime. Except those other types of crime turn out to be the ones society deems most serious: murders, aggravated assaults, robberies, burglaries, thefts, and so on. If blacks comprise about 13% of the population, give or take of the country as a whole, and if that 13% is “disproportionately” crammed into urban areas, we still should raise an eyebrow when the crimes in those areas with higher concentrations of blacks and Puero Ricans, for example, still show a disproportionately large number of those minorities committing those crimes. Not just getting arrested for them, mind you, because noone yet is insinuating (against evidence or common sense) that whites are committing them at higher rates, they just aren’t being arrested for them. Yet. I’ll bet someone, perhaps “Professor” Gates, will surprise me.

So, Mr. President, we’ve laid some other facts out there. Let’s discuss them. How about you start by loudly, vociferously, and continuously demanding that certain slivers of certain minority groups stop acting the way they do? You know, before you go accusing the diversity instructor and universally recognized nonracist good guy cop of acting stupidly before you know anything about the incident (apart from what your racist friend Skip told you, that is).

If you can’t beat ‘em, I suppose, you join ‘em. So, I will show how even the the Michael Jackson estate would be affected by the Cap and Trade bill that the House of Representatives passed last week. But first, a little about the bill itself. The bill itself states that its purpose is ”[t]o create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.” Some of that may need to be explained. For instance, global warming pollution is carbon dioxide – the same stuff you exhale. Indeed, each respirating organism on earth is now categorized as a polluter. For an idea of what “transitioning to a clean energy economy” looks like, take a look at Spain. Apparently, if we look at Spain, it is possible to create clean energy jobs, but each one will cost between $750,000 and $1.4 million and will cost 2.2 jobs in other areas per job created. On other hand, we will be saving the planet, right?

But, how do they propose to do it? The bill is designed to increase the price of energy in order to drive down consumption.

During the campaign, Obama also pledged that he would never raise taxes in any form on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But his cap and trade tax is estimated to cost American families almost $2,000 a year when it becomes effective, growing to almost $7,000 a year for a family of four by 2035. That will be paid through higher prices for electricity, oil, gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, coal, food, and every product that is produced or transported using energy.

In short the Cap and Trade proposal passed out of the House last week is a “Tax on Everything” – everything that uses energy. An interesting exercise is to try to think of anything that you purchase that requires no energy to produce, deliver, sell, or consume. The increased costs associated with that energy usage will be embedded in the price of every consumer good and service that Americans utilize. As a result, Americans will purchase fewer goods and services. If Americans purchase fewer goods and services, then companies who provide those goods and services will be forced to cut production (read: jobs). But, hey, we’re saving the planet.

One of my “favorite” provisions of the bill is in sections 201-203, which requires every State to adopt the building codes of California. (See ACES Sec. 201(c)(3) which reads “COMPLIANT CODE — For the purposes of meeting the target described in subsection (a)(1)(A) [which required that State's become compliant within one year of enactment] for residential buildings, a State that adopts the code represented in California’s Title 24-2009 by the date two years after the enactment of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 shall be considered to have met the requirements of this subsection for the applicable period.”) The code then goes on to dictate to State legislatures the legislation it is required to pass and the timeline on which it is required to pass it.  The States are to be denied federal funding from the Act if they are found to be noncompliant. Indeed, if  the State fails to enforce compliant building codes within 2 years, the Secretary of Energy shall enforce the codes within that State.

The bill requires not only new buildings to satisfy whatever arbitrary standard the Secretary chooses, but it also places the burden on homeowners of existing houses to “retrofit” their property before they are allowed to sell them. This provision alone will place an incredible economic burden on homeowners whether they earn $250,000 or not.  Their mobility, their choice of where to live, their ability to change jobs will be affected by this single onerous provision. But, we will gladly sacrifice our freedom because it’s saving the planet, right? I hope MJ installed new windows and an EnergyStar compliant furnace before he died, otherwise his estate’s going to get hit with a gigantic bill to retrofit Neverland Ranch before they can sell it and distribute the proceeds to his heirs.

There is plenty more where that came from in the bill that has nothing to do with the actual Cap and Trade bits and which are sure to raise the eyebrows (or ire) of anyone who loves his freedom. For instance, there is an entire section regulating outdoor lightbulbs to be brighter and last longer. There’s even a provision regulating the type of bulb one can use to illuminate their artwork, including mandating its color spectrum and power factor.

As mentioned earlier, outrageously, this bill passed the House of Representatives 219-212. Now the bill goes to the Senate. If the Senate passes the bill, it will become law. If the Senate passes any kind of compromise bill, it will go to conference and will become law in some form. The only hope now is that the Senate stops this bill dead. “Obi Wan Senati, you’re our only hope!”

After all that, I apologize, but I don’t really care how this bill will affect the Jackson estate. I can assure you it would be bad. But, thanks for all the MJ Googlers for stopping in.

If you stick with the story, the ethical question is raised (buried) toward the end of the article.

The United States must end the cycle of supporting tyrants in Latin America.  Zelaya is/was a socialist and a dictator in the making.  This was no coup, the military in Honduras arrested the president after he illegally solicited assistance from the dictator Chavez to illegally hold a referendum which would have allowed him to run for election indefinitely.  Furthermore, the military arrested Zelaya upon request from the Honduran Supreme Court after its judgement was dismissed by the would-be dictator Zelaya.  Zelaya actively attacked a military installation with leftist supporters.  His goal was to distribute illegal ballots in an attempt to forever control the nation.  Only the legislature can call for a constitutional referendum. 

So, the legislature condemned Zelaya, the Supreme Court condemned him and the military defended democracy and the rule of law by abiding by the constitution and the wishes of the other two branches of government by arresting the hack. 

And Obama calls for a return of the socialist would-be dictator in defiance of democracy and the rule of law.  Mr. Obama, one’s character can be determined by the company he keeps.  Fidel and the mini-communists in this hemisphere are not good company.