"Rally Against Apathy Draws Small Crowd"

Wisdom from the Fourth Estate.

About as good a reason as I can think of for immediately firing a tenured law professor...

Professor Louis Michael Seidman at the Georgetown School of Law:

Let’s Give Up on the Constitution

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions...

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago. 

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

I was waiting for this. Liberals have shown utter disdain for the Constitution for a very long time now, and now this a**hole-- a law professor at a major law school-- is proposing that we formalize it. Chuck the Constitution in the garbage.

A law professor who proposes ignoring the Constitution is analogous to a doctor who proposes killing patients or a pilot who proposes crashing airliners.

If we can chuck the Constitution, surely we can chuck little things like tenure, academic freedom, etc.

Professor Seidman should be fired immediately. He should never be allowed near a law student again. 

"Why not prevent HIV like we do smoking?"

My friend Wesley Smith has a refreshingly commonsensical suggestion to stop the spread of AIDS:

[H]ere’s an idea from a non-expert based on what I think is common sense. Why not treat HIV like we do smoking? We don’t wring our hands about smoking. We don’t tell our young people that we would prefer that they didn’t smoke, but if they choose to, we hope they will use a filter cigarette. Rather, from early childhood, we unequivocally tell kids: “Don’t smoke! It’s bad for your health. It’s bad for those around you. It’s bad for society.” In part, that is why smoking rates have plummeted.

Perhaps, we should similarly stop treating at HIV-risk youth as if they were fragile egg shells and bluntly warn about the dangers of promiscuity by saying unequivocally: ”Don’t sleep around! It’s bad for your health. It’s bad for those you sleep with. It’s bad for society.”

Perhaps if we employed the same social strategies against HIV that we have successfully used to combat smoking, we would see similar results.

So much commonsense, so little chance of implementation. You can imagine a public health campaign with one of those signs with a red circle around a guy's butt, with the slash across it: "Just say no!"

Never happen. Ordinary effective methods of stopping epidemics of behaviorally-spread diseases will never be applied to AIDS. Chastity would end the AIDS epidemic overnight. But the political forces opposed to treating AIDS like other epidemics are too strong.

AIDS is the only epidemic with a political constituency that facilitates the spread of the disease.  

Get well Hillary!

As you may have surmised, I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton's politics.

But she is ill, and this is a matter that transcends politics. The Secretary of State is in Presbyterian Hospital in New York being treated for what is reported to be a dural venous sinus thrombosis-- a blood clot in a vein that drains the brain.

The prognosis is generally good for this condition, and she is in the best of hands at Presbyterian.

It is quite likely that her hectic schedule and exhaustion contributed to her illness. She has been serving our country with vigor.

Please pray for her speedy and complete recovery.

"Most Racial America"

James Taranto has a great post on Democrat racial politics and the ugliness it is bringing to our nation. Of course, Democrats have always done racial politics-- sowing racial division is simply what it means to be a Democrat politician.

"Colorblind" is the one value Democrats have never embraced and will never embrace.

Glenn Reynolds understands:

The Democrats gave us Jim Crow. Demonization and division are what they know. It’s easier to change the objects than to change the strategy.

Why should Democrats change the strategy? Race-baiting works. Slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, Segregation, lynching, affirmative action, race-baiting. On and on. Only the favored and disfavored races change. Racial division and race-baiting have worked well for them for 200 years.

Still does. And with the economy in long-term shambles and government dependency (and the increase in government power inherent to dependency) exploding, race-baiting politics makes it a trifecta of Democrat demagoguery.

It has been said that the Republicans are the stupid party. In many ways they are stupid politically, or at least they are unwilling to push the racial and class divisiveness and dependency-enslavement of voting blocks that is needed to play the Democrat game. Republicans aren't willing to divide us and to destroy Americans' self-sufficiency to get their votes.

Some Republicans really do believe in small(er) government, free(er) enterprise, and a color-blind society. Not all or even many, but some. No Democrat believes in any of those things.

It's why I'm a Republican. Repubs have a lot of faults, but they stop short of the abject demagoguery-- and the shamelessness-- of the Democrat party. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all of our readers and commentors. May this New Year be safe and prosperous for you and yours. 

"Demand a plan-- demand celebrities go f*ck themselves"

A very clever video based on a gun control ad made by a bunch of Hollywood stars-- people who, it seems, have made personal fortunes glorifying gratuitous gun violence.



Note to Hollywood stars: give back the tens of millions of dollars that you have personally made glorifying gun violence to millions of people, likely including Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza. Donate the money to the families of the kids killed by gun violence-- violence that you personally have glorified your whole career.

And when you tell ordinary people who haven't gotten rich glorifying gun violence that they can't own guns to protect themselves and their families, how about giving them the armed security teams that guard you?

How about voluntary gun-control in the movies? Oh, what's that you say... 'We'd love to, but then we'd make a lot less money...'

Hollywood stars get rich off of extolling gun violence, and then tell us ordinary people that we haven't been "anti-gun" enough. Gun laws apply to the little people. Not for the criminals, not for the journalists, not for the rich Hollywood elites.