Clarence Thomas: Constitutional Hero

Clarence Thomas could end up destroying progressive statism

Walter Russell Mead writes that the left has gone from declaring Clarence Thomas a dunce to ringing all-hands-on-deck alarm bells over the horrible realization that this justice has been patiently sapping the very foundations of New Deal statism for over 20 years.  Shock and horror, ladies and gentlemen:  The left has finally realized, hopefully too late, that Justice Clarence Thomas is a brilliant constitutional scholar of formidable intellect.

What we didn’t know, and what the world at large didn’t know until very recently, was that the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked.  Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.  (New Blue Nightmare:  Clarence Thomas)

The Sun Also Sets

In the case of the Second Amendment, the collapse has already come.  Back in my Pundit High days, anyone who dared to suggest that the Bill of Rights gave individuals the right to bear arms would have been laughed out of the class as an ignorant yahoo.  These days, that is the accepted view of the US Supreme Court and most of the legal profession.  The resurrection of the Second Amendment proves that the “dead letter” clauses of the Constitution can come back to life — and suggests that Clarence Thomas understands how this can be done.

Justice Thomas is the intellectual firepower that will eventually blow the Obamacare Battlestar Gallactica out of the sky...

...which is why liberals are screaming for him to recuse himself on such a flimsy premise:  His wife, instead of being an angry feminist footsoldier in progressivism's long march, instead has become a tea party activist.  Liberals hate how conservative male chauvenist pigs control their women, but hate it more when they don't.

The next topic for Constitutional revisionism is the expansive reading of the commerce clause that the New Deal judges used to justify the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious economic programs.  The Obamacare health reform depends on that kind of reading of the commerce clause; the penumbras must stretch pretty far for the Constitution to give Congress the right to require all Americans to buy private health insurance.  And if the commerce clause can be stretched this far, one must ask whether there is anything that the Constitution blocks Congress from doing.

The terrified left realizes that this is not the end of Thomas' efforts, but rather just the beginning...

The Second Amendment was a constitutional landmine for the left; the Tenth is a nuclear bomb.

A strict reading of the 10th Amendment would invalidate many expensive and expansive federal programs.  Thomas's cogent arguments in a few key cases could restore personal liberty to its rightful primacy and return us to a serious reading of the enumerated powers, finally arresting the progressives of all parties who have hijacked the ship of state.

Taken seriously today, that approach to the Constitution would change the way Washington does business.  Radically.  The list of enumerated powers is short and does not include, for example, health care, education, agricultural subsidies, assistance to the hungry or old age pensions.  Most of the New Deal and Great Society (with the interesting exception of civil rights laws which enforce the Civil War era amendments) would be struck down.  Whole cabinet departments would close.

Mead tempers expectations, saying none of this will happen tomorrow, if at all.  But it is the single greatest threat the all-encompassing progressive state has ever faced.  Even if nothing dramatic transpires, Justice Thomas has moved the intellectual football and advanced the cause of liberty, actually changing scholarly legal thought, and that will redound to our good for decades to come.

I've only given you a taste of this erudite and entertaining writer's article.  I recommend you go read the whole thing.  It will lift your spirits while enlightening you.  He couches this entire article in a Lord of the Rings theme, making the reading of such weighty matters an absolute delight.  

All quotes from:  New Blue Nightmare:  Clarence Thomas

Please go read the original Jeffrey Toobin article, Partners.  You will gain a great appreciation of just how badly Justice Thomas and his brilliant wife frighten the left.

Why Does Obama Hate American Workers?

The Chavez twins

Barack Obama is the Hugo Chavez of North America

Western Hero doesn't celebrate international communist holidays, but we recognize our American Labor Day, since it has been cleansed of it's embarrassing socialist origins.



Obama and the Democrats Wage War on the American Worker

Obama used the power of the state to punish another enemy this past week, sending armed agents to storm a guitar factory whose owner had the temerity to not bribe, er... pay a campaign contribution to the Obama campaign.  The pretext?  Indian workers should have sanded those boards, not Americans!

Boeing's newest plant remains shuttered and thousands out of work because Obama has again used the power of the state to punish South Carolina for not voting for him.  

Add to this the fact that President Obama's "Jobs" Czar has shipped tens of thousands of jobs to China, and it is clear that President Obama and the Democrats hate the American worker and have done everything in their power to discourage American businesses from hiring them.

President Obama and the Democrats are gold-plated members of the DC-Chamber of Commerce Cheap Labor Cabal that supports the exploitation of illegal immigrants.  They violate the human rights of immigrants while denying millions of American workers a decent wage for their labor.  Millions more Americans are completely out of work thanks to the Democratic party jobs program for illegal immigrants.

Strangling Job Creators with Red Tape

Another dictatorial tactic is to tangle up a company with confusing and contradictory regulations so that no matter how diligent and sincere its efforts are, an army of compliance bureaucrats can storm its offices and quickly find damning evidence of corporate malfeasance and disobedience to the state.

Trucking company Old Dominion took an alcoholic trucker off the road, following Department of Transportation regulations.  That same action ran afoul of another government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (See the Human Events article)  Another company impaled upon the horns of a government-created dilemma.

We need to get rid of EEOC, Department of Labor and every other agency that enforces labor laws or enshrines the enforcement of some laws over others.  So many government agencies serve as nothing more than infestations of special interest activists to they can sap this nation from the inside by using the government's powers against their enemies.  It is a sure sign of a destructive, hidebound government when one private sector business action complies with one government regulation while simultaneously breaking another.

Pass the laws and let violations be dealt with in civil court.  As a bonus to liberals, that action could increase labor union membership, making unions actually useful again as an advocate before the bar for workers whose rights have been abused by employers.

Our government must also cease raiding places of business as if they were Al Qaeda strongholds.  The federal government's armed raid on the Gibson Guitar factory was a gross overreach befitting a Latin American dictatorship, or perhaps a Russian Kleptocracy raid on BP.
 
Obama's Jobs Machine is Stuck in Reverse

So if you're out of a job, you should be marching on the White House and demanding an end to job killing statism that supports foreign workers over American workers.  Demand an end to illegal immigration that is stealing millions of jobs.  Tell the government to call off the regulatory gestapo that harasses the people who hand you a paycheck.

Australia vs. Germany

I'm still stuck in the Thomas Sowell "Compared to What?" mode, so I thought I'd do a quick economic comparison between the US, Germany and Australia.
 
We've been arguing a lot over economics here at Western Hero and around Right Blogistan.  I want to present a few basic economic facts to help us keep it in perspective.  All information is from The Heritage Foundation 2011 Index of Economic Freedom.

It is useful to state statistics as a percentage of GDP, since GDP is the generally accepted (although imperfect) expression of a nation's total economic output.   It's the whole pie.

A Tale of Three Countries

Here are a few facts about America, Germany and Australia.  I include Australia because it ranks #3 on The Heritage Foundation's index and it is a model of small government.  I list Germany because liberals, with reason, like to cite that country as a successful example of enlightened progressive governance. 

United States of America
GDP:  $14.2 Trillion
Total Revenue:  26.9% of GDP
Total Government Expenditures:  38.9%

Germany
GDP:  $2.8 Trillion
Total Revenue:  40.6% of GDP
Total Government Expenditures:  43.7%

Australia
GDP:  $851.2 Billion
Total Revenue:  30.8% of GDP
Total Government Expenditures:  34.3%

One thing that immediately stands out is that all three countries spend more than they take in. Must be an international contagion.

Liberals want us to be more like Germany

I at least credit them with ignoring Communist North Korea and Castro's Socialist island paradise to pick a pretty good model.  In order to emulate Germany, we'd have to tax everything, making the price of everything go up.  Imagine a 19% sales tax.  Denmark, Sweden and Norway have a VAT of 25%!  We'd also have to strip states of their remaining rights, since the federal government only collects 18% of GDP, with the other 10% collected unevenly and unfairly among the states.  Get that done and you still have to figure out how to squeeze another 15 cents of every dollar out of the taxpayer.

Note the small difference in expenditure/GDP between Germany and the US.  We're almost on par, yet our social services stink in comparison to Germany's.  I think this points to horrible inefficiencies in how our government operates.  This also explains why Obama and his liberal fellow travelers are demanding draconian tax hikes to feed the voracious beast.

Conservatives should point to Australia

Australia is the gold standard of how a country should operate. It is ranked #3 in the world in The Heritage Foundation index.  Only Singapore and Hong Kong are higher (but who wants to live where you can get sick breathing the air or get your ass caned for chewing gum in public?).

Australia has a relatively small and efficient government, low corruption, and light but effectively enforced regulations on the economy and banking. It is an excellent business climate, and that translates into Joe Biden's favorite three-letter word:  J-O-B-S.

I would glady pay taxes for a government like Australia's that provides a great return on taxpayer money and doesn't stifle freedom in the process.

See also:  Western Hero - How to run a Country:  Australia

Quotes of the Week & Cetera

It's been a fun week here at Western Hero.  The highlight was perhaps when Jersey accused a college professor with a PhD of being anti-intellectual.  Good one man!

I do agree with Jersey that it is tiresome to see an Ivy League alum like Bill O'Reilly try to act like an anti-intellectual working class mug living in a two-bedroom bungalow on the south side.  Like Jersey, I don't know any working class multimillionaires.

Conservativesonfire had a trenchant comment on intellectuals:

Intellectuals should be locked in rooms and only allowed to pass their written ideas under the doors. Smart people with good common sense would then read and discard most of them while implementing the good ideas far better than the intellectual ever could.

I would be more charitable and put them on an island paradise somewhere out of harm's way where they couldn't screw up society by trying to run it.

Here's a quote on women from FreeThinke:

There's a powerful charm -- and a great deal of quiet power -- inherent in old fashioned ladylike behavior. I regret its passing. Women don't have to take on the worst characteristic of male behavior in order to compete successfully with males.

A quote like that could only have come from a wise gentleman with more than a few years behind him...

Rush is Right

I rarely have the opportunity to listen to the radio at the jobsite, but I really, really like Rush Limbaugh, most of all because he lives in the left's head rent-free 24/7.  They pay more attention to him than tea partiers do.  Rush is also right.  He's got talk radio down to a science.  My only complaint is that he is so good as to be mechanistic, and he doesn't debate liberal callers well.  But you can't have it all.  The only reason I don't mention him very often is because it invites the inevitable stoopid leftwing ding-dong comments about getting my talking points from Rush.

Here's what FreeThinke thinks of Rush:

You can practically hear the twinkle in his eye as he speaks. Of course he only appeals to truly bright people.

Rush functions like an Intelligence Test. If you don't like him, you're either a dodo or a Marxist.

Rush is the prime mover in the Conservative Radio Talk Show phenomenon. He got there first, has the strongest, most charismatic personality, and the most facile wit. And he's proved himself to be incredibly durable. He's withstood the test of time. If it weren't for Rush there would be no such thing as Conservative Talk Radio.

Of course naturally I love him, because I write all his material, and he delivers my lines perfectly -- just as though he were making it up on his own. He and I have had a great partnership going for a very long time. I SO enjoy being the silent, unseen, unknown guiding genius behind the scenes.

And just who am I?  The Great No-Longer-Silent Majority that's who I am.

Still, Michael Savage is my favorite...

Popping a beer in the evening and listening to Michael Savage on internet radio is like inviting an interesting old raconteur uncle into my home.  I like Rush, but I love Doc Savage.  He talks about nutrition, music and anything under the sun, and he unleashes some righteous angry rants. He's a conservative who hates the GOP establishment, and an unreligious man who extolls the wonders of God and reads the Bible.  Last night he had a friendly conversation with uber progressive former NY Governor David Paterson.

Savage has a lot of wisdom behind him and he's full of common sense.  Pictures are now out of boxing great Oscar de la Hoya wearing women's undergarments.  He paid millions to keep them hidden lest they damage his macho image, but somehow they got out anyway.  Now he is engaging in long confessions as part of his rehab from drug and alcohol addiction.  His wife, God bless her, is staying by his side.

Uncle Mike's take?  He admires de la Hoya, and he said he should not have let anyone blackmail him.  If anyone tried to make fun of him over the pictures he should have said, "Oh yeah?  Get in the ring with me.  I'll beat your ass while wearing pantyhose!"  That's wisdom and common sense.

FreeThinke again puts in words what I am thinking:

The only other talk show host worth his salt is Michael Savage. He really tells it like it is, and pulls no punches. Of course he's an awful braggart, and unlike Rush he means it, but he's an honest, authentic Noo Yawk type -- like a lot of the men I grew up around -- so his crassness and utter lack of diplomacy and finesse don't bother me a bit. In fact it's refreshing.

I try to listen to liberal talk radio but I just can't stomach it.  Randy Rhodes is a hateful shrike, the Molloy guy sounds terminally depressed, and the rest of them are so unremarkable I can't even remember any names.  Thom Hartmann is about the only liberal talker I like, and I highly recommend his book, The Edison Gene.

Who are your favorite talkers?

Compared to What?

Dr. Thomas Sowell says there are three questions that can cut through the fog:

“Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?”

Anyone who has ever bought a car or a house instinctively understands this.  The wife and I wanted a luxury home in the foothills with acreage and a big horse barn, but a little bungalow in a working class neighborhood was all we could afford, so here we are.

Campaign Season is Upon Us

All sides shovel hard facts, some more creatively than others. So after sifting the information, "Compared to what?" is the salient question.  We tend to compare a program or candidate against a mythical ideal that just does not exist in real life.  We're human--we're flawed, so "compared to what?" is the question that must be asked.

Some would criticize me for being an unprincipled ABO (Anybody But Obama), but I compare every GOP candidate to Obama and it's a no-brainer.  If you're talking about a third party you might as well slap an Obama Hope and Change bumper sticker on your car.

Consider the GOP field: 

* Palin has scant experience...
* Bachmann maybe a little more...
* Herman Cain shows the downside of no political experience...
* Jon Huntsman, fresh from working for Obama...
* Ron Paul is neo-nazi flypaper for some reason...
* Rick Santorum can't even get elected in his own state...
* Gary Johnson smokes pot...
* Mitt Romney is a RINO and looks like the manager who fired you...
* Rick Perry has the odor of crony crapitalism on his boots...
* Newt Gingrich is an operatic bloviator in love with big government...

Still, I would pick any one of these candidates over Obama and his gaffmaster sidekick Palooka Joe from Scranton.

Windmills and Choo Choo Trains

Michael Barone employs all three Sowell questions in his article illustrating how the private sector innovates while government spends and vacillates... 

While governments dither and dispute, the private sector discovers.

For years, governments, national and local, have been promoting wind and solar power, to little practical effect. Curiously, the biggest wind power producer is Rick Perry's Texas. But wind power isn't reliable, and both wind and solar cause serious damage to the environment.

In the meantime, the oil and gas industries -- the favorite target of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats -- have developed new techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that have vastly expanded recoverable American energy supplies. (Michael Barone - Intercity Buses )

The hard facts are that government wastes money and gives us crappy, surly service, and at a higher cost than the private sector.  Government stinks in comparison to the private sector.

Barone goes on to explain how entrepreneurs are coming up with efficient bus services tailored to the customer, a concept unheard of in government.  He compares this solution to the hundreds of billions that light rail costs.  Again, examine the facts, weigh the cost, and the comparison is easy.   

It makes too much sense for a statist to understand:  Untethered buses are much cheaper and more efficient than infrastructure-heavy trains.  As a bonus, you can cut down on petroleum usage and save the environment by converting those buses to natural gas.

So which gets us closer to the free market solutions described by Michael Barone?  Voting for Obama, voting for a 3rd party candidate, or voting for whoever gets the GOP nomination?

God Save us from Another Cerebral President

A liberal at Politico has taken the original step of questioning the intellectual capacity of a GOP candidate for president

Funny, no one on the left ever questions the intelligence of laff-a-minute good-for-nothing-but-government Maxine Waters or gaff-master good-for-nothing-but-government Joe Biden. Dim bulbs flicker across the liberal landscape, but progressives persist in smearing successful conservatives (George Bush got higher grades than Al Gore, remember?). Here’s the latest poop throwing monkey attack:

Another Texas governor who drops his “g’s” and scorns elites is running for president and the whispers are the same: lightweight, incurious, instinctual.

Strip away the euphemisms and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: Is he dumb — or just “misunderestimated?” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Cerebral presidencies are rarely successful

Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama. All supposedly highly-intelligent, all dismal failures.  A president doesn’t need to be a genius, he just needs to be an effective manager and a bold leader, traits not normally found in ivory tower eggheads.

There are different kinds of smarts. There’s book smarts, street smarts, and an ability to think on ones feet, evaluate information and make good decisions using a combination of logical thinking and gut instinct nurtured by experience. Those of us with working class dads who never saw the inside of a college classroom can tell you how we marveled at the man’s ability to smell a rat and avoid making stupid mistakes. 

Leadership takes that special kind of smarts, and intellectuals usually don’t fit the bill. The best leaders, be they sergeants or generals are smart, but not the brainy Newt Gingrich intellectual type. They are interested in ideas only for their practical use, not as an academic pursuit.  Good leaders can ingest information, often conflicting, presented to them by experts. They can evaluate that information against experience and empirical evidence and pull the trigger without the dithering and the drama.

The two most important qualities to look for in a president are Philosophy and Judgment

Philosophy tells us where the candidate wants to lead the nation, and judgment tells us if he can take us there or not. Our best leaders picked good people and trusted them, encouraging open debate and then synthesizing the information to craft policy. Putting philosophy aside, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush were all very good at this. Barack Obama is not, and he's ill-served by an inept staff to boot.

Rick Perry has demonstrated these successful leadership qualities in his 10 plus years as Texas Governor:

“If he doesn’t know the answer, he’s going to find someone who does,” the lobbyist said. “He recognizes good help and brings ’em on for advice. He’s not going to know every foreign leader — but he has the good sense and instincts to pick good people who help him make good decisions.”

“Pilots execute flight plans,” Miller said. “They have a plan, they fly a certain pattern and that’s the way he’s always operated — he has a flight plan for what he’s trying to do and he executes.”

Mike Baselice, Perry’s longtime pollster, said his client is of the Ronald Reagan school of management: “Trust people and manage well.” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Indeed, it’s the presidents who get too far in the weeds who get into trouble

Think Lyndon Johnson with maps of Vietnam on his desk planning bombing raids or Jimmy Carter making unilateral and ill-considered moralistic decisions on foreign policy that redounded greatly to our nation’s detriment. I’ve seen sergeants and colonels make the same mistakes during my military career.

A president can’t do it all anyway; the galaxy of subject matter is too vast for any one brain to comprehend.  I had the great fortune to study colonels and generals up close during my last few years in the Air Force. Like presidents, people who are in charge of vast enterprises are not the technocrats figuring out every problem. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not writing code while running their respective companies as CEO. They are leading a team and managing its efforts.

The best leaders take the long and broad view, set the tone and transmit the game plan, leaving their experts to solve the Rubic's Cube.  David Harsanyi explains…

That doesn't make them "dumb." What makes a person dumb is repeating mistakes when all the evidence tells him to stop for his own good. We will witness this human shortcoming when the president rolls out his new "stimulus" package.

Some ideas, goes Orwell's saying, are so dumb only intellectuals can believe them.

On the other hand, reflexive anti-intellectualism (a misguided belief on the right that was spurred by having to share the word "intellectual" with Cornel West) is also destructive. If you're going to propose more than hope in 2012—say, some policy—you have to be prepared with scholarly backup. (Harsanyi – You Don’t Have to be Smart, Just Right)

Did President Obama Make the Oceans Recede?

Did President Obama rebuke the hurricane from his lofty NOAA command post?

The Telegraph’s Toby Harnden writes derisively of the overhyped hurricane Irene. The dire warnings blared out by the nanny state trio of Obama, Bloomberg and Napolitano never came to pass. Harnden’s reacap of the stereotypical reporters doing their stereotypically hysterical reportage from the stereotypical windswept beach was priceless. The New Jersey reporter who stood in raw sewage and commented it didn’t taste very good got special mention.


But what really happened?

Remember when, to thunderous world applause, President Obama pledged he'd make the oceans recede? The assembled press corps shivered with excitement and collectively piddled down their little hind legs as His O-ness soared to oratorical heights untrammeled by mere-mortal presidents.

David Plouffe hinted Monday that Obama has fulfilled that campaign promise this past weekend, but would not elaborate when pressed.  Others were more direct, criticizing the president for his unilateral intervention that has stirred the wrath of the ocean's rulers.

"He should not have done it," clucked the UN Special High Poobah Rapporteur for Climatological Appeasement.  "His unilateral oceanic imperialism smacked too much of that horrible Bush administration.  The ocean's denizens are angry.  President Obama should apologize."

Bush, Cheney to blame for ignoring, disrespecting the ocean kingdom

Has Obama incurred the wrath of Poseidon?

DC insiders say an apology may be forthcoming. In a face-saving move, it will be couched in criticism of the last administration. Dick Cheney's pasty white complexion was a proud testament to his total disregard for the Oceanic kings, having never once visited the beach.

And it is alleged that President Bush urinated upon their abode during various sailing jaunts off the coast of Kennebunkport, Maine. While in the very act of "drainin' the lizard", the former president is rumored to have said, "what's the ocean ever done for me? Heh heh heh!"
 
Ocean Kings Pledge to Rebuff Obama Apology

Reverend Al Gore of the International Church of Gaia insists the Earth is angry, and that includes the roiling oceans, which will "conjure up category 25 hurricanes and steal our coconuts" if we don't change our ways.

Cowering Europeans are bracing for further waves of righteous oceanic anger, certain that the foamy spillover will inevitably reach their  shores.  EU Parliament members have taken to wearing flippers and have outlawed seafood consumption in an effort to appease the angry gods of the deep.