With Pope Benedict XVI set to receive President Obama in a couple of weeks, surely progressive Catholics have too much self respect to try to make some sort of bizarre political hay out of the visit.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Last week witnessed Michael Sean Winters doing what Michael Sean Winters does best: writing logically strained, caricature-laden articles declaring that conservative Catholics have been put to shame by the Pope.

Eh, that’s mere little league stuff compared to this:  The Catholic Democrats have announced their latest propaganda effort, titled the “Pope Greets Hope” Campaign.  One can only stand in awe of the rhetorical brilliance of that one.

So, what are the Catholic Democrats saying in their letter to the Pope?  I’m sure they have a long list of meaningful, orthodox requests.

We support your mutual efforts to:

• Build true understanding among nations;
• Eliminate nuclear weapons;
• Promote economic justice and reduce the poverty that diminishes the dignity and potential of people across the globe;
• Work toward the common ground of promoting the sanctity of all life;
• Encourage the world’s great religions to greater dialogue and understanding, thus promoting peace and tolerance;
• Support programs and policies that preserve God’s creation.

Well, at least they threw in something about the sanctity of all life, so they got that going for them.

We shouldn’t belittle the Catholic Democrats, after all this is similar to the initiative Catholic Republicans  spearheaded during their “The Rottweiler meets the Decider” campaign last year.  You remember that, right?  There’s a link somewhere I’m sure.  Just Google it.

I do wonder who the Catholic Dems think should be kissing whose hands.

Southern Appeal readers in the greater Chicagoland area may be interested in an upcoming conference on Global Bioethics sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. It will be held July 16-18, 2009 on the campus of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. Among the featured speakers are yours truly, O. Carter Snead (Notre Dame Law School), and David P. Gushee (Mercer University). You can find out more about the conference here.

(Originally posted on First Thoughts, a First Things blog)

This weekend the House of Representatives passed Waxman-Markley, a bill designed to stop global warming by imposing a cap and trade system on carbon emissions. Included in the bill is a provision, inserted in the middle of the night before passage, mandating tariffs on goods from countries that do not adequately limit their own carbon emissions. Such tariffs could be waived only with explicit congressional approval.

President Obama has said that he opposes the provision, and some bloggers have been comparing the move to Smoot-Hawley. Yet as Eric Posner notes, the carbon tariff idea is not only not necessarily protectionist, it is necessary to keep Waxman-Markley from being counter-productive. (more…)

…we are just awaiting delivery of Charity in Truth!

The Supreme Court has just ruled, in a 5-4 decision, for the firefighters in Ricci, et al. v. DeStefano, et al.

Follow live updates via SCOTUSblog.

Update: Here’s a link to the opinion.

Any thoughts on the subject?

Rep. Artur Davis is running for Governor of Alabama.  You hear rumblings in Montgomery and elsewhere that some Democratic Party leaders are concerned about Davis being on top of the ticket, both because of his race and because of his liberal stances on a number of issues.  His vote today which helped move the Cap and Trade Bill forward won’t help their heartburn and will be something that Davis will later have to explain.

UPDATE: I think that Bobby Bright may get some heartburn from the bill’s passage as well despite voting against the bill.  Last election, the Republican nominee tried to link Bright with Pelosi and it didn’t work.  When the Speaker rams a bill through which raises taxes and costs jobs in Alabama and no one even has a copy of the bill voters may pay a little more attention to Bright’s vote for Pelosi as Speaker of the House and I suspect that Bright may have to explain his vote a few times while he is on the stump.

Starting tomorrow and until July 11, you can pre-order Windows 7 upgrades for a pretty good savings from several vendors, including Best Buy, Amazon.com and direct from Microsoft.  The Home Premium upgrade will run ya around $50 during the sales; normal price will be around $120 if you wait until Oct. 22, when it is released.

I have Windows 7 Release Candidate running on a virtual machine, and it’s definitely an improvement over Vista.  One neat feature is the ability to have two folders parallel to each other, rename one the same name as the other and have the folders merge.

Anyway, I thought I would give a heads up to anyone interested.

Is she a wise Latina?

You hate how the vacancy came about… but Haley will certainly be an able chairman.

Ramesh Ponnuru has an op-ed in the New York Times today in which he criticizes conservatives for having a blind spot with respect to judicial activism involving racial issues.  I disagree with many of his arguments. However, I’ll set aside, for the moment, the propriety of conservatives using the New York Times to argue with their own, and move on to a good ol’ fashioned fisking:

[W]hen it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint.

The Voting Rights Act decision was a case in point. Eight justices avoided weighing in on the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that certain jurisdictions, mostly in the South, get Justice Department permission before making any changes to election procedures. Instead they ruled that a utility district in Texas that wanted to be freed from the provision should have an opportunity to try.

But Justice Clarence Thomas went further, declaring the provision unconstitutional. Congress, he argued, was justified in the 1960s in responding to the denial of the voting rights guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, but things have changed and the provision is no longer needed.

Justice Thomas is, in my view, right to consider the law outdated. But is that really for him to say? Congress is the proper body to make that judgment. In 2006, it decided to renew the law for 25 years. Its determination that the law was still necessary may have been mistaken, but it is not clear that the Constitution authorizes judges to second-guess it.

Well, if one believes in judicial review, the Court will always have the authority to “second guess” laws when it believes they potentially conflict with any provision of the Constitution. Treating a subset of states according to different, more onerous standards is at least dubious under basic principles of federalism. I’m not entirely familiar with the jurisprudence or the history with respect to the federal governmnent discriminating against certain states, but I’d wager it’s a great deal more complex and more enlightening to this discussion than Ponnuru lets on. (more…)

I recently read Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘N’ Roll, which is about the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia during the Communist period (I was supposed to see it performed on a recent trip, but plans fell through). I was struck by one passage in particular, by the lead character Jan, describing an incident from his childhood, when he had just returned to Communist controlled Prague after a stint in England:

A one-legged man showed up at my school once. He waited outside the classroom. It turned out the man with one leg had come to say goodbye to our teacher. Afterwards, the teacher explained to us his friend lost his leg in the war, so as a special favor he’d been given permission to go and live near his sister somewhere in north Bohemia. ‘You see,’ our teacher said, ‘how Communism looks after its war heroes.’ So I put my hand up. God, I must have been stupid. I really thought it would be interesting for them, so I said in England anyone could live anywhere they liked, even if they had two legs. My mother was questioned and she lost her job at the shoe factory, but the point is the others kids in the class. They thought I was telling travelers’ tales. They couldn’t grasp the idea of a country where someone, anyone, could decide to move to another town and just go there. Suppose everybody wanted to live in Bohemia when their job is in Moravia! How would such a society work

(more…)

How hot is it?

So hot that South Louisiana is experiencing widespread road buckling.

An absolutely brillant put-down of Andrew Sullivan by Christopher Badeaux.

Poor Sully is going to have to go to the burn unit after this.

As part of their strategy against Obama’s health care proposals, Senate Republicans recently introduced the “Preserving Access to Targeted Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services” (PATIENTS) Act of 2009, which would prohibit Medicare or Medicaid from using “comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.” Here’s Paul Krugman commenting on the move:

How bad is it? Let me count the ways.

1. Politicians who rail against wasteful government spending are taking action to prevent the government from reining in … wasteful spending.

2. Politicians who warn that the burden of entitlements is killing the federal budget are stepping in to block … the single most painless route to reducing the growth of entitlements.

3. They’re doing it in the name of avoiding “rationing of health care” … but they’re specifically addressing taxpayer-funded care. If you want to go out and buy a medically useless treatment, Medicare won’t stop you.

4. These same politicians are, of course, opposed to efforts to expand coverage. In other words, it’s evil for government to “ration care” by only paying for things that work; it is, however, perfectly OK, indeed virtuous, to ration care by refusing to pay for any care at all.

I can’t speak to the politics of the measure (on that score the Republicans seem to know what they’re doing). But as policy the move leaves something to be desired, to put it mildly.

(HT: Scott Sumner)

Newsweek has an interesting Q&A with Robert Bork regarding Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Here are some of the questions and answers I found interesting:

Newsweek: Is there a principled definition of what judicial activism is?

Bork: Sure. A judge is an activist when he announces principles or reaches results that cannot plausibly be related to the actual Constitution.

…

Newsweek: Your own confirmation hearing in 1987 is often called a watershed for the process.

Bork: It wouldn’t have been but for the fact that I looked like the fifth vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. And in modern politics, that is a subject that raises hysteria.

Newsweek: Would you have been the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?

Bork: Oh, of course. It’s one of the most corrupt decisions I’ve ever seen.

Newsweek: Was it your view that the law on abortion should be left totally to the democratic process?

Bork: I oppose abortion. But an amazing number of people thought that I would outlaw abortion. They didn’t understand that not only did I have no desire to do that, but I had no power to do it. If you overrule Roe v. Wade, abortion does not become illegal. State legislatures take on the subject. The abortion issue has produced divisions and bitterness in our politics that countries don’t have where abortion is decided by legislatures. And both sides go home, after a compromise, and attempt to try again next year. And as a result, it’s not nearly the explosive issue as it is here where the court has grabbed it and taken it away from the voters.

It is really a shame this man is not on the Supreme Court.

On this feast day of St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians, it seems appropriate to mention my latest enterprise.

Southern Appeal has always been a law blog, among other things. When I came on board as a contributor, it was in spite of my lack of experience with the law. I am now endeavoring to gain a greater involvement with the law — as a legislator.

I am a candidate for the Illinois legislature. I am seeking to unseat a Republican incumbent who has voted to repeal parental notifications for minors seeking abortions, voted to increase state funding of abortion, voted to abolish conscience protections for pro-life healthcare providers, voted for state funding of embryo-destructive stem cell research, who voted to remove the requirement that abortion providers be physicians, and who voted to protect abortion providers from malpractice suits. Her largest contributor is a pro-abortion PAC, and she has repeatedly been endorsed by Planned Parenthood.

And in 2008, she ran unopposed in both the primary and the general election.

I am running against her as a regular guy with no money, no organization, and virtually no relevant experience. But at least I know what a person is.

For me to beat her may require a miracle. But as a Christian, I believe in miracles. I’m asking for your prayers, for the intercession of St. Thomas More. And if you want to help spread the word, I’d be grateful for that as well.

St. Thomas More, Patron of politicians, ora pro nobis.

Today is the feast of St. Thomas More. He was an honest lawyer, and as punishment he was beheaded. All other lawyers should take heed of this fact.

I’ve recently been watching the surprisingly good Showtime series The Tudors, which is a dramatic retelling of the reign of Henry VIII. It’s not family viewing, but the historical material is very engaging, and the treatment of Thomas More on the show is, in my opinion, top notch. The above clip, in which More refuses to take the Oath of Succession, may offer a glimpse of what I mean.

The United States Supreme Court has just released its opinion in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder.  At issue was whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is constitutional.  The Court, while acknowledging that there are “serious constitutional concerns” regarding the Act, chose instead to rule that the Utility District could “bail out of the Act” (a lengthy process whereby the political entity establishes that it doesn’t discriminate and should not longer have to seek pre-clearance from the Justice Department before it any changes to any election procedure) thereby avoiding the question of whether Section 5 is constitutional.

I have not read the decision but I am disappointed that the Court did not take this opportunity to rule on Section 5 constitutionality.  While the Act has had a significant positive impact in the states to which it applies (it doesn’t apply to all of the states), I have long thought that there were constitutional and practical problems with the Act. 

If you want to move a polling place because the current location was destroyed by a tornado, you have to make a lengthy submission to the Dept. of Justice to get that approved.   In Alabama, there were changes made to the section of the Alabama Code which dealt with the conduct of elections.  It was cleaning up wording, making grammatical changes, etc.  The bill passed both the Alabama Senate and the Alabama House without a single dissenting vote.  The filing to the Department of Justice weighed over 50 lbs.  All of this for a bill which did not have a single dissenting vote.  It is incidences like this which highlight that there are significant problems regarding the current application of the Act in 2009.

With relatively little fanfare, President Obama has dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by dismissing all of its Bush appointed members. The council was originally set up by President Bush to foster a needed public discussion among multiple disciplines—including medicine, biology, philosophy and theology—over the complex emerging issues facing our society. In many ways, the council was able to carefully consider and publish its advice in a non-partisan and non-confrontational matter that is rarely found on such sensitive issues. Unfortunately, now it does appear that the President will appoint his “own” members and in the very likely event he brings back none of Bush’s appointees, this means effectively this council will become nothing more than cover for an aggressively progressive agenda. That’s unfortunate and quite frankly, the major draw back I saw in Bush establishing the council in the first place. I always thought he should have made it an “ad hoc” committee with a non-renewable six year mandate. Thus is the nature of committee to spawn lives and agendas quite distinct from their founding. Anyone, an outgoing member of the Council reflects on the success behind them and the pitfalls ahead.

Via Robin Hanson, it appears that over the last year public opinion has moved right on a number of hot button political issues such as abortion, gun control, and global warming.

How to explain these changes? According to Hanson, the answer may lie in some recent research about the effect professing support for Obama has on people’s political opinions:

People were more willing to express potentially prejudiced attitudes when their past behavior had given them a bit of credentials as a nonpredjudiced person. … After Obama supporters expressed support for Obama in the experiment, they were more willing to say that a police job at a force characterized by racial tension was better suited for Whites than for Blacks. … Obama’s election was associated with (a) greater perceptions that anyone, regardless of life circumstances, can achieve success in the U.S. through hard work, (b) decreased perception that the U.S. has a long way to go to achieve racial equality, (c) less support for policies that address racial inequality such as affirmative action, desegregation programs that promote diversity in public schools, business efforts to promote diversity in the workplace, and equal access to healthcare for minorities.

(more…)

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh was recently called to testify before the Senate. Under questioning from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the following exchange occurred:

Sen. Boxer: “Why has it been delayed?”
Brig. Gen. Walsh: “Ma’am, at the LACPR…”
Sen. Boxer: “You know, do me a favor. Could say ’senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?’”
Brig. Gen. Walsh: “Yes.”
Sen. Boxer: “It’s just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it. Yes, thank you.”
Brig. Gen. Walsh: “Yes, senator.”

The words “disrespectful” and “petty” immediately come to mind. First of all,  ”sir” and “ma’am” are perfectly appropriate for addressing a U.S. Senator according to military protocol. None of the other senators present had complained, all of whom had been addressed the same way.

Secondly, Ms. Boxer herself failed to address the general as “sir” or “general” in her question, which was arguably disrespectful. Furthermore, she had previously addressed Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as “ma’am.” You can’t expect to demand specific titles when you neglect to use them yourself.

Thirdly, who is so pretentious that they make these requests to begin with? I’m an attorney. Technically, attorneys can insist on the use of the suffix “esquire” in written correspondence. They can also opt to harangue court personnel if they fail to address them as “counselor.” However, the only attorneys who make a huge fuss over these things are self-absorbed and rude.

Using proper titles is a polite thing to do. However, when a polite title is already being employed — and “sir” and “ma’am” are certainly polite — only somebody with a huge ego or a chip on their shoulder would voice any complaint.

Via Marginal Revolution, I find the following excerpt from an interview with the famed economist Paul Samuelson:

By the way, [Milton Friedman is] about as smart a guy as you’ll meet. He’s as persuasive as you hope not to meet. And to be candid, I should tell you that I stayed on good terms with Milton for more than 60 years. But I didn’t do it by telling him exactly everything I thought about him. He was a libertarian to the point of nuttiness. People thought he was joking, but he was against licensing surgeons and so forth.

Being against state licensing for doctors certainly sounds nutty. Then again, the history of medicine is full of ideas that seemed nutty but turned out to be true (and, conversely, is full of theories that now seem loopy but at the time were thought to be sound common sense). So it’s worth noting that according to a recent survey of the available literature: “economists who have examined the market for physician services generally view medical licensing as a constraint on the efficient combination of inputs and a drag on innovations in health care and medical education.” Perhaps if Samuelson hadn’t spent sixty years or so avoiding certain topics with Friedman, he might have a better sense of such things. Still, everyone’s entitled to make a mistake once in a while, right? (more…)

Russia? No, Washington D.C. According to this Reuters story President Obama has appointed around 20 czars. We now have a drug czar, a U.S. border czar, an urban czar, a regulatory czar, a stimulus accountability czar, an Iran czar, a Middle East czar, a czar for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, a compensation czar, and even a Great Lakes czar.

The problem with this is that these czars, appointed solely by the president, are unconstitutional. Article II, Sec 2 of the Constitution requires that the appointment of such officers be done with the advice and consent of the Senate. This was pointed out to President Obama back in February in a letter from Senator Byrd. In that letter Byrd observed:

“As presidential assistants and advisers, these White House staffers are not accountable for their actions to the Congress, to cabinet officials, or to virtually anyone but the president,” Byrd wrote. “They rarely testify before congressional committees, and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege. In too many instances, White House staff have been allowed to inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.”

It used to be that presidents might appoint two or three such czars, often for symbolic purposes to raise awareness of an issue. Now we have upwards of 20 such public ministers handling everything from executive compensation to national security. This should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Not only does this practice violate the Constitution it is a gigantic flashing warning sign that our government has metastasized well beyond the size and scope set forth in the Constitution.

From Bloomberg:

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he has ordered the U.S. military to take defensive measures should North Korea attempt to fire a ballistic missile toward Hawaii.

“I think we are in a good position, should it become necessary, to protect American territory,” Gates told reporters at the Pentagon today. [emphasis added]

That would be American soil, Mr. Secretary.

Although published during the 2008 presidential campaign, Michael Bauman’s essay on government bailouts is probably more relevant now than it was then. Mike, as some of you know, is a professor of theology and culture at Hillsdale College. And, like yours truly, earned his Ph.D. from Fordham University in New York City. Here are some excerpts:
(more…)

Yesterday’s New York Times contained an op-ed by David Leonhardt responding to the criticism that Obama’s health care proposals would lead to rationing of health care:

[R]ationing is an inescapable part of economic life. It is the process of allocating scarce resources. Even in the United States, the richest society in human history, we are constantly rationing. We ration spots in good public high schools. We ration lakefront homes. We ration the best cuts of steak and wild-caught salmon.

Health care, I realize, seems as if it should be different. But it isn’t. Already, we cannot afford every form of medical care that we might like. So we ration.

Mr. Leonhardt’s problem here is that he falsely equates rationing with economizing. In the case of rationing, distribution of a particular good is limited by third parties according to some general formula or central plan. Economizing, by contrast, involves a person allocating their own limited resources in the way that seems best to them.

While both rationing and economizing can be used to keep health care costs under control, economizing is preferable to rationing for a couple of reasons. First, as I’ve noted previously, economizing has been shown in a variety of contexts to bring prices down over time, as producers have the incentive to appeal to the economizer by cutting costs and lowering prices. Rationing, by contrast, limits costs not by reducing the cost of any particular medical treatment or procedure, but by limiting the overall number of procedures performed. (more…)

I just graduated from the Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, KS. However, I would be exceptionally remiss if I left this post without posting the picture of General Robert E. Lee that hangs on the 3rd floor of the Lewis & Clark Center (where CGSC is located). This picture was given to the CGSC by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1935. This is right since THE GENERAL was posted to Fort Leavenworth before the War Between the States. In fact, you can see his old house here. The base theater is named after his nephew. SEMPER FIDELIS!

….of women who hide behind their children on Facebook.

The author of this article wonders why mothers on FB use pictures of their children as profile pictures instead of pictures of themselves.  These women are intelligent, some even have careers, yet don’t seem to have an identity outside of their children.  You could read this as some feminist rant who wants women to separate themselves from the typical feminine realm of family stuff, or you could read this as an author who went to too many dinner parties with frolicking children anecdotes.

I tend to agree with my friend, who says, “If they put up with making the baby for 9 months and are now raising it, I think they’re entitled to showing it off a little bit.”

This week’s EconTalk podcast features Charles Platt, a journalist who “went undercover” as a Wal-Mart employee to see what all the fuss was about. It so happens that I was the catalyst behind the podcast, which is a geeky thing to be excited about, but there you have it.

The discussion focused a lot on the degree of autonomy and authority that Wal-Mart employees had. Every employee, for example, not only has access to a wealth of information regarding item costs, profit margins, etc., but any employee has the authority to lower prices on particular items at their discretion. Individual departments also had a high degree of autonomy:

My amiable, laid-back department supervisor had been doing this kind of thing for 15 years. When I asked him why, he took a moment to process the question. He had to think back to other employers he’d worked for in the distant past. None of them, he said, had treated him so well.

What exactly did he mean by that?

His answer lay in the structure of the store. “It’s deceptive, because Wal-Mart isn’t divided into separate stores like a mall,” he said. “But really, that’s how it works. Each section is separate. This is – my pet store! No one comes here and tells me how to run it. I could go for weeks without a supervisor asking any questions.” Here was the unseen, unreported side of the corporate behemoth. Big as it was, it was smart enough to give employees a feeling of autonomy.

(more…)