Rumblings in Yemen Continue

The following article  was found at Weasel Zippers attributed to the Wall Street Journal:

President Ali Abdullah Saleh called for an emergency meeting of Yemen’s parliament to be held Wednesday, at which officials close to the president say he will announce measures aimed at tamping down unrest that has swept his country and much of the rest of the Arab world.

An official said the president will say he won’t run for re-election when his term ends in 2013.

Opposition leaders dismissed the emergency meeting as too little-too late, and opposition parliamentary members said they’d boycott the session. Opposition leaders have threatened to go to the streets this Thursday in a protest they say will be the biggest of its kind against the Saleh regime.

The move is the latest by an Arab leader to try to placate growing popular unrest across the Mideast directed at long-serving, autocratic rulers. Large-scale popular protests ended the reign of Tunisia’s long-time president last month, and a series of massive demonstrations in Egypt is threatening President Hosni Mubarak’s hold on power.

Demonstrators have also staged large protests in Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and Sudan.

Ali Amrani, a senior official in Mr. Saleh’s ruling General People Congress party, said the president will say he won’t run again in the 2013 presidential elections.

“Saleh feels that Yemen needs new faces, and will not run in the next elections. His initiative will give realistic solutions to ensure that Yemen does not become the next Tunisia or Egypt,” he said.”

When We Streamline the Budget, Let’s Crop Federal Education Monies!

Stop Federal Spending on Education

“While Washington spends huge sums on things that are education-related, the riches produce almost nothing of educational value.  If anything, the feds keep stuffing donuts into an already obese system, says Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

• In 1970 Uncle Sam spent an inflation-adjusted $31.5 billion on public K-12 education; by 2009 that had ballooned to $82.9 billion.
• On a per-pupil basis, in 1970 the feds spent $435 per student; by 2006 — the latest year with available data — it was $1,015, a 133 percent increase.
• Real, overall, per-pupil spending (federal, state and local) rose from $5,593 in 1970 to $12,463 in 2006.

What do we have to show for this?

• Since the early 1970s, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been stagnant for 17-year-olds.
• In 1973 the average math score was 304 (out of 500); in 2008 it was just 306.
• In reading, the 1971 average was 285; in 2008 it was up a single point, hitting 286.

In the 2008-09 academic years, Washington spent roughly $83 billion on K-12 education and $37 billion on higher education.  Add those together and you get $120 billion, a sum that’s doing no educational good and, therefore, leaves no excuse for not applying it to our $14 trillion debt, says McCluskey.”

Source:  Neal McCluskey, “For the Nation’s Sake, Cut Education Spending,” Cato Institute, January 25, 2011.

For text:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12734

For more on Education Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=27

The above information was printed at the National Center for Policy Analysis

A Clear and Simple Review of the Unconstitutionality of ObamaCare

written by Jeffrey H. Anderson, published at Pajamas Media:

“United States District Court Judge Roger Vinson has ruled that ObamaCare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional and that, since removal of the mandate would make ObamaCare a fundamentally different act than the one that Congress passed, its removal must invalidate the entire 2,700-page overhaul.

In a case brought by 26 states arguing that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, Judge Vinson ruled that the individual mandate — ObamaCare’s requirement that every American must buy federally approved health insurance — exceeds the scope of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and is thereby unconstitutional.

Judge Vinson writes that “the defendants [the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, among others] have conceded that the Act’s health insurance reforms cannot survive without the individual mandate, which is extremely significant because the various insurance provisions, in turn, are the very heart of the Act itself.”  Therefore, Vinson writes,

I must conclude that the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit.

This marks the first time that a federal judge has ruled that ObamaCare as a whole is invalid.

The judge took care to emphasize that “this case is not about whether the Act is wise or unwise legislation, or whether it will solve or exacerbate the myriad problems in our health care system.” Rather, he said, the case is about whether Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce also empowers it to compel commerce.  Judge Vinson ruled that it does not, saying that to declare otherwise would extend the commerce power beyond the the plain and historically understood limits of that power and beyond the limits that the Supreme Court has previous sanctioned.

The Obama administration will now appeal the case, which was brought by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Here are some key excerpts from Judge Vinson’s 78-page opinion:

[T]his case is not about whether the Act is wise or unwise legislation, or whether it will solve or exacerbate the myriad problems in our health care system. In fact, it is not really about our health care system at all. It is principally about our federalist system, and it raises very important issues regarding the Constitutional role of the federal government….

Never before has Congress required that everyone buy a product from a private company…just for being alive and residing in the United States….

It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting — as was done in the Act — that compelling the actual transaction is itself “commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce”…, it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted. It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place….

I conclude that the individual mandate seeks to regulate economic inactivity, which is the very opposite of economic activity. And because activity is required under the Commerce Clause, the individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power, as it is understood, defined, and applied in the existing Supreme Court case law….

The Necessary and Proper Clause cannot be utilized to “pass laws for the accomplishment of objects” that are not within Congress’ enumerated powers….

Having determined that the individual mandate exceeds Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause, and cannot be saved by application of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the next question is whether it is severable from the remainder of the Act….

[T]here are two specific facts that are particularly telling in this respect.

First, the Act does not contain a “severability clause,” which is commonly included in legislation to provide that if any part or provision is held invalid, then the rest of the statute will not be affected….

The lack of a severability clause in this case is significant because one had been included in an earlier version of the Act, but it was removed in the bill that subsequently became law….

Moreover, the defendants have conceded that the Act’s health insurance reforms cannot survive without the individual mandate, which is extremely significant because the various insurance provisions, in turn, are the very heart of the Act itself. The health insurance reform provisions were cited repeatedly during the health care debate, and they were instrumental in passing the Act. In speech after speech President Obama emphasized that the legislative goal was “health insurance reform” and stressed how important it was that Congress fundamentally reform how health insurance companies do business, and “protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.” See, for example, Remarks of President Obama, The State of the Union, delivered Jan. 27, 2009. Meanwhile, the Act’s supporters in the Senate and House similarly spoke repeatedly and often of the legislative efforts as being the means to comprehensively reform the health insurance industry….

In other words, the individual mandate is indisputably necessary to the Act’s insurance market reforms, which are, in turn, indisputably necessary to the purpose of the Act….

I must [therefore] conclude that the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit. The individual mandate cannot be severed….

Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void….”

Obama Administration to Okay Muslim Brotherhood Participation in Egyptian Government

  Sounds sensible especially if the Brotherhood can renounce terror.  Obama has a great opportunity to show leadership and wisdom aiding some worthy solution to the present Egyptian crisis even though he has no experience and thus far has not demonstrated any wisdom associated with his governance…..Eric Holder, Van Jones, ObamaCare,  Ground Zero Mosque, closing Guantanamo, and so on 10 to the fifteenth power times.

Obama has an opportunity to do a positive here.  He may chicken out.  If he does, we’ll have to root for Hillary.

This is a good article by Ed Morrissey on the Egyptian crisis.   Tough choices are ahead to attain the best results for all sights and sides beyond  autocracy and radicalsim both of which will have to be demasculinized.

“Welcome to the new reality of cold, hard choices in Egypt, and the consequences of democracy in regions where radicalism thrives.  In order to stay ahead of the crisis in Egypt, the Obama administration yesterday signaled that it supports the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian politics as long as they renounce violence and commit to democracy:

The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.

The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said. But by even setting conditions for the involvement of such nonsecular groups, the administration took a surprise step in the midst of the crisis that has enveloped Egypt for the last week. …

Monday’s statement was a “pretty clear sign that the U.S. isn’t going to advocate a narrow form of pluralism, but a broad one,” said Robert Malley, a Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. U.S. officials have previously pressed for broader participation in Egypt’s government.

The George W. Bush administration pushed Mubarak for democratic reforms, but a statement in 2005 by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not specifically address a role for Islamists.

“This is different,” said Malley, now with the International Crisis Group. “It has a real political edge and political meaning.”

If the name Robert Malley sounds familiar, it should.  Obama supposedly fired Malley as an adviser for Middle East affairs in April 2008 from his campaign (Malley later claimed he’d quit) after it came out that Malley had met with Hamas on several occasions, despite Hamas’ status as a terrorist group as indicated by the State Department.  Those meetings took place through the auspices of the International Crisis Group as well.   Malley also helped create J Street, designed as a counterbalance to AIPAC, which lobbies for Israel in Washington, and while a member of Clinton’s team was the only administration official to blame Israel for Yasser Arafat’s refusal to accept the Clinton peace plan.

Even so, this does nothing but acknowledge the obvious.  The Muslim Brotherhood has operated in Egypt since at least 1928 despite repeated and sustained attempts to stamp it out.  It’s a political minority, but an influential and significant movement that could end up playing kingmaker in an unruly shift into free elections in Egypt.  We have no real say in the narrowness or broadness of whatever pluralism emerges in Egypt — presuming, of course, that the army doesn’t seize control instead.  The best we can do is to try to get ahead of it and pressure Egyptians into renouncing violence in the interim, and hope the rest of Egypt holds them to their commitments.

Duncan Currie makes a good point about the inevitability of this moment, and at least a dim hope for a kind of reformation from it:

“I fully expect the Muslim Brotherhood to do well in any election,” Gerecht tells me. “They have a fairly substantial following.” He has no illusions about the group’s Islamist agenda, or about its virulent anti-Americanism, or about its hatred of Israel. In his view, calling for U.S. “engagement” with the Brotherhood is like calling for engagement with Ayatollah Khamenei. But Gerecht insists that allowing Brotherhood members to participate in a democratic process is the sine qua non of Egyptian political maturation. The country will never achieve real progress, he says, without first creating the political space necessary for a momentous debate over God and man. Indeed, Egypt’s secular liberals must defeat the Islamists in the public square, rather than through military repression. They must win the battle of ideas. …

If Egyptians voted the Brotherhood into a position of serious power, that would generate a kaleidoscope of problems for America and Israel (and Egypt). No serious analyst should pretend otherwise. But Gerecht’s logic is inescapable: You can’t have authentic Egyptian democracy while disenfranchising the country’s largest opposition movement. If you aren’t willing to countenance Brotherhood electoral participation, you shouldn’t be demanding representative government.

Our experience in Iraq should be somewhat instructive as well.  Most of the political parties in the transition formed along sectarian lines — Sunni and Shi’ite, with the Kurds more organized by ethnicity.  That has led to momentous struggles and a great deal of instability in the short term.  Over the long run, though, it at least appears that the groups have begun learning to deal with each other rationally in terms of secular governance rather than at the point of a gun or a sword, as they have done for centuries.  We were in much better position to manage that transition, but even absent our combat presence, the Iraqis appear to be working it out among themselves now.

Don’t be fooled, however, into thinking that the question is if the Ikhwan gets into “a position of serious power.”  They may be a minority, but a sudden shift to representative democracy will probably result in a multitude of political parties with varying degrees of attraction.  The Muslim Brotherhood will remain unified, and could very well be the most effective political party in the field for years to come.  Even if they can’t attract a majority of the vote, they are likely to end up controlling a ruling parliamentary coalition.  We will have to deal with that scenario almost immediately — and hope Egypt can mature fast enough to end it peacefully.  Algeria didn’t get so lucky and ended up in a deadly civil war in 1991 that still hasn’t reached a certain conclusion.

Update: Ralph Peters offers a bracing slap across the face to the US:

The key point, though, is that we’re not going to determine what happens in Egypt. Egyptians will decide that. We can only play on the margins. And better to back the side with the winning hand—which, in the long term, will be the people, not an 82-year-old dictator with dynastic aspirations (which have evaporated).

And no, a democratically elected government in Egypt would not be as pliable a partner for the United States as Mubarak’s regime has been. Don’t like it? Tell me exactly how you’d fix it. Invade? We can’t deal with 30 million hillbillies in Afghanistan, let alone Egypt’s 80 million people and its US-equipped military. Let’s talk real options, not talk-show fantasies.

Yes, a democratic Egypt will see the Muslim Brotherhood represented in parliament. Well, guess what? In democratic elections, sometimes Al Franken gets a seat. Better to have the Islamists inside the tent, uh…waving out…than outside shooting in.

Don’t let the pundits b.s. you, though: Those demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other Egyptian cities are not made up of fundamentalists. While extremists would love to exploit the situation (we’d only help them by continuing to pretend that Mubarak remains a player), they don’t, can’t and won’t control it. Look at the pictures. You don’t see masses of bearded men in traditional dress waving Korans, but guys in jeans and windbreakers, college girls and entire families. What you’re seeing is Egypt’s version of the Tea Party: angry citizens who feel their government has refused to hear their voices. The difference is that, in Egypt, they haven’t had an outlet at the ballot box. These are not Islamist fanatics. Let’s not drive them into the arms of the radicals.

Read it all; it’s long, but well worth the time.”

Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther and Egypt? Do Americans Know These Names?

(Some might know the Muslim Brotherhood.  It was in the tv news yesterday….and the day before.)   The modern American knows Thomas Jefferson as a slave holder and  Martin Luther as a black reformer if they recognize the names at all.   In the modern American public school students who offered these descriptions would be graded highly….after all, the answers were close…..kinda…..and American young these days need a great deal of self esteem.

“Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther, and the Muslim Brotherhood”       by Duncan Currie at National Review Online.

“Like Reihan and Alex Massie, I’ve been curious to know what Reuel Marc Gerecht — former CIA officer, Islam expert, and robust supporter of Arab democracy — thinks about the extraordinary events convulsing Egypt. Gerecht combines a staunch belief in the inevitability of Middle East democratization with a sober-minded realism about its probable consequences. Back in the heady “Arab Spring” days of 2005 — before Iraq became an abattoir of sectarian bloodletting, before an Islamist group captured roughly 20 percent of all seats in the Egyptian national assembly, and before the Palestinians elected Hamas — he rebuffed the notion that somehow the region could embrace genuine democratic pluralism while keeping religious fundamentalists on the sidelines. “The history of democratic Christendom,” Gerecht wrote in The Weekly Standard, suggests that “you don’t get to arrive at Thomas Jefferson unless you first pass through Martin Luther.”

In other words, during the infant stages of Arab democracy, we should not anticipate a dominant performance by the secular liberals popular among Washington think-tankers. The political success of devout Muslims will trigger all manner of alarm in Western capitals. (Witness the reaction to Iraq’s first free elections, which empowered a slew of religious parties.) Yet Gerecht argues that, over the long haul, drawing Islamic fundamentalists into the cross-pollinating world of democratic competition is essential to defusing the ideological appeal of jihadism.

What about the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which Gerecht has described as “the fount of all Sunni fundamentalists”? The Brotherhood represents Egypt’s “most organized non-state political force,” observes Noah Millman. In the 2005 national elections, its candidates (running as “independents”) secured approximately one-fifth of all parliamentary seats, despite violent government harassment at the polls. Under a truly free, democratic political order, wouldn’t Brotherhood influence balloon? And wouldn’t that be a disaster?

“I fully expect the Muslim Brotherhood to do well in any election,” Gerecht tells me. “They have a fairly substantial following.” He has no illusions about the group’s Islamist agenda, or about its virulent anti-Americanism, or about its hatred of Israel. In his view, calling for U.S. “engagement” with the Brotherhood is like calling for engagement with Ayatollah Khamenei. But Gerecht insists that allowing Brotherhood members to participate in a democratic process is the sine qua non of Egyptian political maturation. The country will never achieve real progress, he says, without first creating the political space necessary for a momentous debate over God and man. Indeed, Egypt’s secular liberals must defeat the Islamists in the public square, rather than through military repression. They must win the battle of ideas.

For decades, Gerecht notes, U.S. policymakers of all stripes nurtured the hope that an “Arab Atatürk” would emerge to catalyze piecemeal liberalization within the stable confines of an autocratic system. This way, the theory went, democratization could unfold gradually, and the threat of an Islamist election victory would be neutralized. It was a nice idea. Unfortunately, the Arab Atatürk has proved to be a chimera. While U.S. officials were waiting for Godot, brutal dictatorships were creating fertile ground for jihadist recruitment.

Take the Mubarak regime. No doubt, its maintenance of the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty has greatly bolstered regional stability, and its adoption of prudent economic reforms has aided GDP growth. Yet its iron-fisted subjugation of the Brotherhood and other Islamists contributed significantly to the development of al-Qaeda, and its pragmatic approach to Israel should not be confused with an enlightened attitude toward Jews. Under Mubarak’s watch, says Gerecht, Egypt has become the Middle East’s leading bastion of anti-Semitism, which functions as “a currency of legitimacy” for the ruling government.

Still, shouldn’t we be profoundly nervous about a post-Mubarak transition? “It is unquestionably going to be a rollercoaster ride for the United States,” Gerecht admits. “This is the price you pay when a detested authoritarian regime is the indispensable pillar of stability in the Middle East.” Among Arab countries, Egypt boasts the oldest liberal tradition; but that tradition has been pulverized by the dictatorship. Gerecht stresses that the Muslim Brotherhood has “evolved” considerably and is far from a monolithic bloc. Yet he also acknowledges that Western fears of a Brotherhood-led government are amply justified.

While democratic elections do not necessarily promote stability — indeed, they can dramatically disrupt short-term stability — they do “allow for the evolution of these societies.” Luckily for us, Gerecht adds, the democratic wave is crashing before the Muslim Middle East goes nuclear. Our biggest concern isn’t really the outcome of the first free Egyptian election; it’s preventing the cancellation or theft of the second free election (and the third, and the fourth, etc.).

If Egyptians voted the Brotherhood into a position of serious power, that would generate a kaleidoscope of problems for America and Israel (and Egypt). No serious analyst should pretend otherwise. But Gerecht’s logic is inescapable: You can’t have authentic Egyptian democracy while disenfranchising the country’s largest opposition movement. If you aren’t willing to countenance Brotherhood electoral participation, you shouldn’t be demanding representative government.

On balance, then, the nascent Egyptian revolution holds both great promise and great peril. Speaking to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius at the World Economic Forum retreat in Davos, an Egyptian business executive said of regime change in his home country, “Long term, it’s good; short term, it’s bad.”

The Romance of a Leftwing Judge and the Court She Rules

Wisdom is not often a strength of the human female.   She may work at gaining some portion of what might be called wise, but emotions keep getting in the way.   Her world isn’t what it is, but what she dreams it could be….and should be.   Her drive is to fit reality with skirt and blouse.

Here is an article by Scott W. Johnson at PowerLine….dealing with a local issue here in the Twin Cities.  The title is, “License to Kill:  The Comedy after the Tragedy.”

“Four years ago Koua Fong Lee killed three Minnesotans when he rammed his 1996 Toyota Camry into the rear of another car at the Snelling Avenue exit of Interstate Highway 94 in St. Paul. Lee’s car careened into the other car somewhere between 70 and 90 miles per hour and Lee was, not unreasonably, convicted of negligent vehicular homicide.

Lee’s particular Toyota model was never part of the controversy over the alleged unintended acceleration of certain models of Toyota cars. No mechanical problem was found with the car after the accident. The trial judge nevertheless granted Lee a new trial on the ground of ineffective assistance of counsel after the Toyota controversy seemed to lend some credibility to Lee’s account of how the accident happened. Former Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner declined to prosecute the case again. Lee is now free once more to drive the city streets.

Unbelievably, to my knowledge, no one other than me has asked Gaertner why she threw in the towel on the case. In comments she made about the case before a local lawyers’ group this past October, Gaertner made it clear how much she disliked being asked around town about Lee’s eight-year sentence (a sentence the prosecutor had requested after Lee’s conviction). Wasn’t the sentence too harsh? Prosecuting crimes can really be a bitch; it may not always be the best way to win friends and influence people.

Gaertner said she stood behind the case she originally brought against Lee after deliberating over it for a year after the accident and taking heat about the delay from the local chapter of the NAACP; the deceased victims of Lee’s negligence were all black. Gaertner also said the state legislature should revisit or clarify the law against negligent vehicular homicide.

In response to my question asking why she threw in the towel on the case, Gaertner cited the difficulty of getting a jury that could fairly adjudicate the case as well as the loss of collective community support for additional punishment of Lee. I came away from Gaertner’s presentation thinking that she may be the most thin-skinned and pathetic elected public official I’ve ever personally encountered, and I’ve encountered a few.

Michael Fumento exposed the absurdity of Lee’s exculpatory claims in an excellent New York Post column. For some reason Fumento’s analysis has never seen the light of day in the local media.

Moving from the realm of tragedy we now enter the realm of farce. Lee and his family have filed a lawsuit in federal district in St. Paul against Toyota. Toyota is alleged to be responsible for the problems flowing from Lee’s conviction and punishment. According to the Star Tribune, Lee alleges he required psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder because of both the accident and his imprisonment and that he now requires sleep medication.

The AP reports that Toyota has now moved for the dismissal of some of Lee’s claims. Law students struggling with the concept of “proximate cause” in their Torts class may be helped by this example:

In documents filed Monday in U.S. District Court, attorneys for Toyota said many of Lee’s claims are without legal merit and should be dismissed. Among them, they said Lee can’t claim damages for his incarceration because any alleged wrongful conduct by Toyota could not have directly caused his trial and imprisonment.

“The reality, of course, is that many independent actors – including police, prosecutors, defense counsel and jurors – played pivotal causative roles in sending Koua Fong Lee to prison,” Toyota’s attorneys wrote.

The case of Koua Fong Lee represents a horrendous miscarriage of justice, but it’s not the one we’ll be reading about in Minnesota for the foreseeable future.”

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Mark Steyn: “The Battle for Freedom is Far from Lost!”

There are few people in our modern American battles against creeping Marxism who can deliver the realities and facts of  bureacratic assaults upon our liberties with such clarity and upbeat, pep and zest, with such humor, smile and laugh as Mark Steyn.   He back in town at his blogsite, SteynonLine and offers this winsome piece for today:

“I Fought the Thought Police, and I Won!”    by Mark Steyn ……. ……(who helps make life great being  a conservative these days fighting the  Mubaraks and Pelosis at home and abroad…ghr) “The latest European heresy trial ended yesterday with the acquittal of Lars Hedegaard. I wrote about the background to the case last week, and, while I’m glad that Scandinavia’s great warrior for free speech will not be rotting in a Danish prison, I’m inclined to agree with Tundra Tabloids that the verdict of the court in Fredericksburg is something less than a ringing victory for the principle of freedom of expression. Lars Hedegaard, in his own statement upon acquittal, sees the court’s decision this way: As my ancient forefathers, the vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to win. My detractors – the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West – will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality, namely that the judge in the Court of Frederiksberg resolved that my supposedly offensive comments on the violations against little Muslim girls were not intended for public dissemination. Re the last part, that’s correct. The judge acquitted the defendant supposedly because Mr Hedegaard had been unaware that his ”racist” and thus criminal remarks about Islam’s treatment of women would be released to the wider public. Nonetheless, Lars denies that this means he got off on a technicality. Instead, he sees it this way:  The judge chose the way out provided by my capable counsel. However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year – and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes. My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech. I have no doubt that the massive support I have received from freedom fighters around the world has been instrumental in securing my acquittal. I think that’s closer to the truth. In my own case in Vancouver, Maclean’s and I were acquitted for political reasons. Under British Columbia’s pansy-totalitarian “human rights” code, we were clearly guilty. But the troika of kangaroos understood that they and their grubby little racket couldn’t stand the heat of convicting us. So they decided discretion was the better part of valor, and let us get off scot free in order that they could get back to terrorizing non-entities with non-deep pockets far from the glare of publicity. Likewise, under Denmark’s law as written – a law in which truth is no defense – Lars is also clearly “guilty”. But, as in Vancouver, the system couldn’t withstand the scrutiny that a conviction would have brought. So the judge decided to acquit the defendant for political convenience and hope that the next boob dumb enough to question the received wisdom of the benefits of mass Muslim immigration would be some obscure rube with no international megaphone. As for the “major victory for free speech”, the broader Danish – and Scandinavian, and European – culture is as antipathetic to this most fundamental western value as ever. As Mr Hedegaard put it in another recent interview: We have very few journalists and very few mainstream media who would really take on the fight for free speech.  Hey, tell me about it. Nevertheless, this is an encouraging verdict, because it shows how easily the statist enablers for Islamic imperialism crumble to dust when you shine a light on them. That’s why it’s important to internationalize these cases – to emphasize that Ezra Levant is Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolf is Geert Wilders is Lars Hedegaard. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali says, we have to spread the risk, so that the Islamic supremacist thugs understand that they will have to kill us all. So it is a victory, if not for free speech then at least for the western resistance. As Lars’ statement concludes:   The battle for freedom is far from lost. Courage! Final thought: We could do with some courage on this side of the Atlantic, too, where the pressure to shrivel the bounds of public discourse to an ever narrower conformist pap is (for the moment) less statist but just as relentless.” Comment:   Defense of democratic institutions is the responsibility of those who benefit from their  freedoms…..WE, THE PEOPLE!

Christopher Hitchens Writes about Dictatorships. Doesn’t Mention the Obama Left.

This article by Christopher Hitchens was found at Slate.   Mr. Hitchens is a Leftwing romanticist who himself from his writings has hovered around a yen for Marxist rule from time to time……the rule which frees itself from foolish people.

Here Mr. Hitchens writes as a fan of democratic processes….making people responsible for their lives and futures rather than the “know better Leftist”. 

“Not long ago, a close comrade of mine was dining with a person who I can’t identify beyond telling you that his father is a long-term absolutist ruler of an Arab Muslim state. “Tell me,” said this scion to my friend, “is it true that there are now free elections in Albania?” My friend was able to confirm the (relative) truth of this, adding that he had once even acted as an international observer at the Albanian polls and could attest to a certain level of transparency and fairness. The effect of his remarks was galvanic. “In that case,” exclaimed the heir-presumptive, thumping the table, “what does that make us? Are we peasants? Children?” The gloom only deepened, apparently, as the image of the Arab as a laughing stock—lagging behind Albania!—took hold of the conversation

Who could have predicted that such a comparison would have turned out to be such a catalytic one in the mind of this nervous dauphin? So multifarious are the sources of grievance in the Arab world that it could have been any one of a host of pretexts that ignited a revolt, or revolts. This ought to make one beware of too glibly selecting the ostensibly crucial one. Poverty and unemployment? These are so pervasive that they could explain any rebellion at any time—and in any case Tunisians are among the richest per capita in North Africa. Dictatorship and repression? Again, these are commonplaces, and so far the most conspicuously authoritarian despotisms—Syria and Saudi Arabia, for instance—have been spared the challenge of insurrection. (May these words of mine go out of date with all speed.)

I think that the factor of indignity and shame, of the sort manifested in the anecdote above, makes a more satisfactory initial explanation. And one of the cheering and reassuring things about dictatorship is the way that it consistently fails to understand this element of the equation. How gratifying it is that all such regimes go on making the same obvious mistakes. None of them ever seems to master a few simple survival techniques: Don’t let the supreme leader’s extended family go on shopping sprees; don’t publicly spoil some firstborn as if the people can’t wait for him, too, to be proclaimed from the balcony; don’t display your personal photograph all over the landscape; don’t claim more than, say, 75 percent of the vote in any “election” you put on. And don’t try to shut down social media: It will instantly alert even the most somnolent citizen to the fact that you are losing, or have lost, your grip.

People do not like to be treated like fools, or backward infants, or extras in some parade. There is a natural and inborn resistance to such tutelage, for the simple-enough reasons that young people want to be regarded as adults, and parents can’t bear to be humiliated in front of their children. One of Francis Fukuyama’s better observations, drawing on his study of Hegel and Nietzsche, was that history shows people just as prepared to fight for honor and recognition as they are for less abstract concepts like food or territory.

Sooner or later, the line gets crossed and people can take no more. Nicolae Ceausescu wrote his own death warrant on the day in December 1989 when he decided to summon the people of Bucharest for just one more compulsory rally where they would have to stand, screaming with inner boredom, and clap their hands to order while he spoke for as long as he liked. I remember thinking, of the Egyptian “elections” of last fall, that President Hosni Mubarak would have gotten more respect for simply canceling them than for pretending to hold them in the insulting way he did. Something similar applies to the “green” rebellion that followed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent plebiscite: Everybody already knew that things were “fixed,” but this time the mullahs didn’t even trouble to pretend that they were not fixed. It’s possible that people will overlook outright brutality sooner than they will forgive undisguised contempt.

The best of the Egyptian “civil society” dissidents, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, produced the extraordinary effect that he did by the simple method of challenging the Mubarak regime on those very terms. If it was going to pretend to hold elections, then Ibrahim and his fellow researchers claimed the right to conduct independent surveys of the voters and to publish the results. One can hardly imagine a milder form of resistance, yet, because of the overweening stupidity and crudity of the authorities, it had consequences of an almost seismic kind. Show trials of mild-mannered opinion pollsters and think-tank scholars; dark accusations of secret foreign funding for the practice of political sociology: The whole lumbering apparatus of the Egyptian state conspired to make itself appear humorless and thuggish and to convince its people that they were being held as serfs by fools. Again, the sense of insult ran very deep, and Mubarak’s bullies were too dense to understand their own mistake.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is one of the minority of Arab public intellectuals to have supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and to have believed that it might contribute to a democratic renaissance in the region. This argument will go on for a long time and can’t be resolved too simplistically one way or another, partly because the liberation of Iraq can’t be described as the act of its own people, and thus in a way underlines the same problem of dependency. The post-2003 democratic wave was brief and somewhat shallow, and it indirectly benefited Hamas and Hezbollah as well as the Kurds and Shiites of Iraq and the Lebanese democracy movement. But the regime-change school in America can claim a degree of vindication.

We argued that the supposed attractions of authoritarian “stability” are in fact illusory, since nothing is more volatile and unsafe than dictatorship, which lacks any self-critical method for learning from its mistakes. Earlier “people power” episodes, in Asia in the early 1980s and in Eastern Europe in 1989, as well as in the general repudiation of military rule in Latin America and the peaceful liberation of South Africa, had definitively proved this point. They had also left the Arab regions looking rather conspicuous, and rather backward, in consequence. In the long term, this sense of being relegated to infancy and immaturity has had a salutary effect, which one hopes will outlast the temptations—of the immature culture of self-pity and victimhood, plus the equally false reassurances of theocracy—that are certain to arise now that the period of enforced adolescence is over.

Comment:  Dictatorships occur naturally among democratic governments when people no longer  pay attention to the world around them.   Such is the case here in America with the advent of the Obama Left, the Progressives-progressing-to-Marxism people. 

Or as is more often the case, dictatorships occur where people have never reached the civilized level of managing government affairs via the democratic process.   This happens to be the case throughout much of the world.

Hitchens claims dictators treat people like fools.   Unfortunately, when it comes to the realities of life, most people in the world still struggle to stay alive from day to day.    These are the people who are the ultimate in Leftwing dreams of the simple, Earth friendly  life.   Garden locally, shop locally, dig locally, eat locally, wear no clothes  locally, so Hollywood folk and other Leftwingers can make movies or take videos of such folk…”in the indigenous form” which they, especially women of the Left, romanticize about.

Unfortunately, democratic government still is a rarity in the world and even among this rarity, there are always those, most of them Marxists, who dream about running peoples’ lives without the irritations caused by differing opinions…….ruling how people should think, what they should read, wear,  say and  eat , and what light bulbs  should be bought and which storms, tsunamis, and quakes  should wipe out the Earth itself if the citizens don’t rally around goverrnment and university experts….. Obama people.

Reaction from the Jewish Left to Court Decision against ObamaCare Mandates

from Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic comes the following assault on the Court:

“SCHOCK!  A Court Decision Tinged in Politics.”

“Did Roger Vinson, the federal judge who on Monday ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, have a particularly conservative take on politics as well as the law? His ruling certainly suggests as much. There’s what looks like a shout-out to the Tea Party–specifically, a reference to the American Colonists’ outrage over the tax on tea. (Page 42.) There’s the gratuitous reference to General Motors as “partially government-owned.” (Page 45.) And there’s the use of President Obama’s campaign rhetoric against the law Obama now supports. (Page 68).

Nor is the first time a judge invalidating the Affordable Care Act may have tipped his political hand. Henry Hudson, the federal judge who issued a narrower ruling against the law late last year, noted in his decision that the bill was rushed through the legislative process–which is a strange way to describe a law nearly fourteen months in gestation, unless you are trying to argue there was something fundamentally illegitimate about the process that produced it.

But perhaps the clearest indicator of bias in the decisions against the Affordable Care Act is the gist of the decisions themselves. For generations, conservatives have championed “judicial restraint.” If judicial restraint means anything, it means deferring to the Congress on matters of policy preference–like, for example, whether it’s better to run a national health insurance system with a system of regulated private insurance (which is what people will get with the Affordable Care Act) rather than via a single-payer, government-run plan (which is what the elderly already get with Medicare). But if these these decisions by Judges Vinson and Hudson carry the day–and, please remember, two federal judges have already ruled the other way–they would effectively take that discretion away from the Congress. 

Of course, I can’t be sure about these things. It’s hard to tell the difference between partisan bias (i.e., issuing rulings that favor one party) and ideological bias (i.e., issuing rulings that bend the law to one’s philosophical preferences on policy). And, to be quite clear, I’m not one of those people who thinks “bias” is necessarily a bad word anyway. I don’t think the constitution has some unambiguous, values-free meaning, particularly when applied to lawsuit like this one. 

Almost by definition, a case that makes its way through the judiciary and up to the Supreme Court, where this one will almost surely land, is open to varying interpretations. There are precedents, yes, but none involve exactly the same set of circumstances. Otherwise, the case wouldn’t be in front of the courts in the first place. 

It’s up to the judges to decide which precedents matter more. And that’s a decision bound to reflect their values. All of which is a long way of saying that judges can do whatever the heck they want.

Well, almost anything. Most judges at least try to ground their rulings in the language of the Constitution, as interpreted in modern times. My colleague Jeffrey Rosen, who knows far more on these subjects than I do, has argued persistently and elegantly for this sort of judicial restraint.

And you can tell when judges are struggling to be so restrained. It’s when they make conspicuously weak arguments. A prime example in Vinson’s decision is his frequent citation of reports from the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service. Both agencies are respected arbiters of policy but Vinson, strangely, cites their interpretations of law—which is a little like asking Ruth Bader Ginsburg to produce actuarial tables on the long-term solvency of Social Security. 

Elsewhere, Vinson asserts that the decision not to carry health insurance has “zero” economic impact. But then, literally a paragraph later, he acknowledges that uncompensated care for the uninsured transfers $43 billion in costs to the rest of society. Later, he goes so far as to recognize that requiring people to get insurance is “necessary” for carrying out the universal coverage scheme Congress determined it wanted.

So if Vinson admits all of these things, why did he bother first to assert that forgoing coverage has “zero” impact? He’s drawing a distinction between present and future commercial activity that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. (I’m going to write a separate post on that later.) My guess, honestly, is that Vinson is desperate to play down the link between decisions to forgo insurance and the impact on other people’s premiums–a link that history and scholarship have established firmly. And that’s because the link, if real, would place it within most contemporary understandings of the Commerce Clause’s reach.

Can we expect more such creative reasoning as the case moves forward? The justices of the Supreme Court have certainly imposed their own will before. If they hadn’t, George W. Bush might never have become president. (Ezra Klein is not the only one who sees echoes of Bush v. Gore in this litigation.) 

Still, there is one other check on the courts’ discretion: Public perception. Judges can defy public values up to a point, but only up to a point. And while the public remains divided on the Affordable Care Act, it has expressed a clear and unambiguous preference for health insurance that is affordable and available to all–while preferring, for better or for worse, to keep the existing system of private insurance in place. Is the Supreme Court really ready to reject that preference? 

Update: I clarified why I think Vinson’s argument about the impact of going without insurance makes no sense to me. Thanks to reader “ulexamp” drawing attention to my confusion over this. Also, I’m not rehearsing my arguments about the constitutional merits of the Affordable Care Act, for the sake of readers who have seen them several times already. But if you’re just reading up on this now, here is what I think. And, for a slightly more nuanced take, here’s my old colleague Charles Lane (who, I should mention, knows a lot more about law than I do).

The following video at RealClearPolitics is from an interview at MSNBC   with Congressman Anthony Weiner and leftwing opinion writer, Ezra Klein who appear appalled by the Vinson decision.  

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/02/01/rep_weiner_on_health_care_ruling_most_activist_court_you_can_imagine.html

Comment:  I do not know what Jonathan Cohn really wants readers to believe from his “Shock” regarding this Court decision.   It shouldn’t be a surprise to the entire awake American population that we are in a Civil War today between those who defend the Constitution as the source of American Law……and the folks such as Jonathan Cohn and other leaders and spokesmen  of the Americas’ Jewish Left  who believe in advancing their Marxist devotions that Marxist Man rather that Law guide America’s future.

Again, herein lies the battle  in my view……it is the answer to the question  as simple as this:……Will the Law of our Constitution be our guide to preserve a  Government decided by  the People,  or should the Will of Man (or Woman) at the head of Government and its bureaucracy  manage the decisions and  lives of the American people?

Make no mistake about this battle.   The  Barack Hussein Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrods of the Left have twisted the once liberal American Democrat Party into a  Progressive-progressing-to Marxism quasi dictatorship to run the lives of the American people as they see those lives should be led….through New Age Marxism.”

We shall see how the Supreme Court will line up on this vital issue forming America’s future.   For those Americans who believe in the Rule of Law, the High Court’s decision will be 9-0 to uphold the Roger Vinson decision.

This ruling will certainly separate the Marxists from the democrats.   I would not be a bit surprise if the decision is  an 8-1 decision in agreement with Judge Vinson.

Shakeup in Jordan Government

The following articles are from Haaretz.

King Abdullah appoints new PM after thousands of Jordanians take to the streets protesting rise in fuel, food prices, slowed political reforms

Jordan’s King Abdullah has sacked his government in the wake of street protests and has asked his former ex-military adviser Marouf Bakhit to form a new cabinet, an official said.

King Abdullah’s move comes after thousands of Jordanians took to the streets – inspired by the regime ouster in Tunisia and the turmoil in Egypt – and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Samir Rifai who is blamed for a rise in fuel and food prices and slowed political reforms.

The Royal Palace says Rifai’s cabinet resigned on Tuesday.

Abdullah also nominated Marouf al-Bakhit as his prime minister-designate. No other details were immediately available.

“(Bakhit) is a former general and briefly ambassador to Israel who has been prime minister before. He’s someone who would be seen as a safe pair of hands,” said Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies at London’s City University.

“I wouldn’t see it as a sign of liberalization. With his previous premiership, he talked the talk of reform but little actually happened,” she said.

Under fire from an enraged public over high food prices, Rifai announced wage increases two weeks ago to civil servants and the military in an attempt to restore calm.

Protests have spread across Jordan in the last few weeks, with demonstrators blaming corruption spawned by free-market reforms for the plight of the country’s poor.

Many Jordanians hold successive governments responsible for a prolonged recession and rising public debt that hit a record $15 billion this year in one of the Arab world’s smallest economies, heavily dependent on foreign aid.”

In another article at Haaretz……

Thousands of Jordanians protest rising costs of food,

fuel

More than 5,000 Jordanians took to the streets across the country on Friday to protest rising prices for fuel and foodstuffs and demand the prime minister’s ouster.

University students, leftists and labor activists staged rallies in five cities – Amman, Irbid, Karak, Salt and Maan – waving Jordanian flags, toting placards and chanting for Prime Minister Samir Rifai to step down.

The Royal Palace says Rifai’s cabinet resigned on Tuesday.

Abdullah also nominated Marouf al-Bakhit as his prime minister-designate. No other details were immediately available.

“(Bakhit) is a former general and briefly ambassador to Israel who has been prime minister before. He’s someone who would be seen as a safe pair of hands,” said Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies at London’s City University.

“I wouldn’t see it as a sign of liberalization. With his previous premiership, he talked the talk of reform but little actually happened,” she said.

Under fire from an enraged public over high food prices, Rifai announced wage increases two weeks ago to civil servants and the military in an attempt to restore calm.

Protests have spread across Jordan in the last few weeks, with demonstrators blaming corruption spawned by free-market reforms for the plight of the country’s poor.

Many Jordanians hold successive governments responsible for a prolonged recession and rising public debt that hit a record $15 billion this year in one of the Arab world’s smallest economies, heavily dependent on foreign aid.

Comment:  To be noted that in the video footage on Fox News  television yesterday the Jordanian protestors, in the tens of thousands rallied under countless Communist Party of the good old Soviet Union.   The commentary from a Jordanian claimed that the banners demonstrated the secular not the Muslim Brotherhood Islamic extremists.