Obama wins endorsement of government employees union

Along with creating millions upon millions of green jobs, he’ll help promote this growing and increasingly important sector of the economy.

David Harsanyi, on Barack Obama’s putative judicial philosophy:

Supreme Court justices take an oath promising to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties . . . of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”

They do not take an oath to “faithfully and impartially perform all duties . . . except when personally offended, or when having pangs of empathy for the poor or trying to be a standup guy or gal.”

Listening to Barack Obama, you may think they do. And though the Bush administration cared little for the Constitution, the next administration, it seems, won’t care in a brand new way.

You may remember conservatives fuming when Sen. John McCain joined the “Gang of 14″ — a group of self-proclaimed moderates who in truth were too cowardly to vote on qualified judicial nominees.

These days, McCain is reborn. Embarked on his “Don’t Worry, I’m No Maverick! Tour 2008,” he has addressed conservative concerns about judges, promising to look for “judicial restraint” and “limits to the scope of judicial power.” McCain cited John Roberts and Samuel Alito as model judicial appointees.

For conservatives, it’s comfort rhetoric (though hard to believe). For his soon-to-be presidential rival, it’s unacceptable.

“Barack Obama,” explained spokesman Tommy Vietor, “has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what’s truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves.”

Really? Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, knows full well that the Supreme Court isn’t charged with upholding subjective world views on “economic and social justice” — quite the opposite, in fact.

Justices solemnly swear to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” So judges, incredible as this may sound, are not prohibited from “protecting” the powerful if the powerful happen to be right on the constitutional issue.

To suggest otherwise, as Obama has, is to suggest they should ignore their oath.

Of course, herein lies the problem: who is left to judge the judges, save for the documents that are supposed to constrain them in scope and power in the first place, and against which they pit themselves as active agents of change?

When you have successfully turned all meaning into something that in in the abstract “context-specific” while simultaneously bracketing the intent that governed the original context through which interpretation must necessarily be filtered — what you have done is, in essence, turn interpretation into a game of pure semantic word play, one that allows the clever or the mischievous or the otherwise willfully motivated to forge just about any “meaning” that the intersection of context, signifier, and current connotation (as it relates to signifieds) allows.

It is to turn altocumulus clouds into bunnies or sheep or copulating ghosts or a weeping Jesus writ suggestively across a springtime sky.

And to do that, under the false assertion of “interpretation,” is to render any kind of legal “constraint” obsolete — save for the wink and the nod given it by those who would rather not admit publicly that what they are doing, when they rewrite the law (and that is precisely what they’re doing if their interests go anything beyond sussing out original intent, though that intent itself be tied to ratification, oftentimes) is to create new texts out of the marks of extant texts whose actual meaning was, at the time these texts became law, fixed and (at least theoretically), immutable.

But then, what’s the use of being a Messiah if you can’t rewrite the metaphysics of meaning, right?

Well, besides the hot chicks, I mean…?

I have plans to don the old CITIZEN JOURNALIST garb and mingle with those who’ll be flocking to Denver for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. If you’d like to help support the site in general, or help with any of the expenses I’ll accrue while attending these events or infiltrating these groups, please go ahead and hit the Tip Jar (Amazon) or Donate button (PayPal). For Freedom! And Capitalism!

Thanks. Speak Truth to Power. Take it to the Man. Viva La Revolución!

Etc.

****
Thursday morning update: Thanks to those of you who have thus far contributed, and who have expressed concern for my son. His fever broke yesterday, and for most of the day he was fine. This morning, however, he has a stomach ache and a rash.

The doctor’s office on-call nurse told me that such a rash is normal as part of the course of a viral infection, and that my son is now in the last stages of getting well. But to me, it seems like he is anything but. He has no fever just now, but he’s lethargic and not at all liking his tummy pain. Could be he’s just constipated, I guess — or that he hasn’t been eating much.

Many worries. This parenting gig is hellish at times like these.

More Californication

As state leaders hunt for politically palatable solutions to the swelling budget shortfall, some Democrats are proposing unorthodox ways to generate cash. […]

Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello), chairman of the Revenue and Taxation Committee [… ] has proposed some of the Legislature’s more unconventional measures, including taxes on digital downloads and adult entertainment. […]

Calderon said he was moved to push for levies on downloads such as iTunes because state sales tax laws do not reflect the high volume of purchasing that Californians do online. Consumers can download music from the Internet through Apple’s iTunes and other services tax-free, Calderon noted, while they pay sales tax for buying the same music on a compact disc at a store.

His proposal would empower state authorities to collect sales tax on the downloads, increasing the cost of a typical 99-cent song to roughly $1.07. Calderon projects that the bill (AB 1956), which could also apply to pornography downloads, cellphone ring-tones, online books and feature films distributed on the Internet, would raise about $500 million for the state budget. […]

Calderon said the resistance to his bill did not surprise him. But he is perplexed that he hasn’t been able to get more traction for another proposal: a 25% tax on sex toys, strip shows, pornographic magazines and videos and anything else sold in an “adult entertainment venue.” […]

Assemblyman Mike Davis (D-Los Angeles) is targeting a wider group of consumers. Almost every Californian would bear some of the brunt of his proposal to charge a 25-cent tax on every plastic carryout bag from stores. […]

“A person is going to think carefully before spending a quarter to get a bag,” Davis said. […]

AB 2388 by Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) would place a surcharge on vehicles based on their weight and the amount of carbon dioxide they emit. Assemblyman Joe Coto (D-San Jose) wants to collect new fees from drivers of luxury vehicles that get less than 15 miles per gallon. His bill is AB 2638.

But Mike Davis is quick to prove California’s socialists Democrats aren’t just about tax levying. They are there to help out your poor, suffering grandparents, too.

Davis says he knows people are suffering financially and has proposed a property tax break for low-income seniors. There’s a catch: The proposal (AB 2459) would require seniors to “work off” their taxes in county offices, doing such jobs as gardening, record filing or data entry.

So the next time you walk into a state office, court or the DMV and see grandma on the other side of the counter balancing a stack of files on her walker, remember Mike Davis and the true face of Democrat fairness.

Yeah, baby.

Code Pink brings their gibbering idiocy to the Berkeley Marine Recruiting Station, once again: 

“Most of the time they are just practicing their right to protest and their freedom of speech or whatever, so it’s not usually a problem for us. But sometimes it crosses the line, and that happened [Monday] when the grannies were here blocking the entrance and banging on the door,” Wheatcroft told FOXNews.com.

On Tuesday, Code Pink’s theme was “Fierce mothers raging against war,” Joi said, to talk about all the mothers killed and raped in war. Wednesday’s theme was “Bring your daughter to the protest,” where daughters explanied why they don’t want their parents fighting the war. Thursday is “Sisters don’t allow sisters to live in war zones” day, and the week wraps up Friday with “Witches, clowns and sirens day.”

Ah, the good old days.  Kite flying and everything:

So that is what we are going to be discussing today. And as our witnesses will soon explain, Saddam Hussein and his sons systematically violated the human rights of Iraqis and those of other countries as well. They did so with utter disregard, operating a vast enterprise encompassing at its worst mass graves, the use of torture chambers, chemical baths, routine rapes, brutal and arbitrary murder including legitimizing killings and medical amputations as punishment.

    In lesser cases, restrictions on social, legal and educational mobility for women, arbitrary detentions in both crude prisons and psychiatric facilities, collective punishment by association and the blockading of entire villages. They all became common punishment for undescribed offenses. Saddam and his sons treated Iraq and its people as their own personal preserve subject to their very whim. What they wanted, they got. What they wanted to do to others, they did at will.

    In the months following Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces have found we are told as many as 263 mass graves containing as perhaps as many as 300,000 corpses. Lieutenant General Jay Garner formerly of the Coalition Provisional Authority has been quoted as saying that our troops may one day find as many as one million of Saddam’s victims. The role of women long overlooked in Iraq is one that we must examine. Women were brutalized partly in an effort to control their husbands, partly out of a mere uncontrolled hostility. Rape was a State policy and at times videotaped and sent to women’s families in order to intimidate them. At other times, the rapes were intentionally committed in front of the families. Women were denied equal education and the basic legal protections to which all human beings are entitled and they were all denied.

If only the Code Pink witches, clowns and sirens had been there to stop Saddam.

Potheads.

I know some pw regulars were especially keen to see the Wachowskis’ film adaptation of the 60s Japanese cult cartoon, so here’s a non-spoilery review.

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Dan’s post downpage was entirely too jolly, to gratify the rage this case has made me feel. So, I offer this, expanded from a comment of mine and crossposted from Atlanta Rofters, for anyone who feels the same way:

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Please absorb and employ as many of these terms and phrases as possible, you dig?

in order to get high.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Somewhat related: Unwanted sexual contact in college. I recall that “unwonted” was more like it my freshman year. I don’t think that this study says anything about sexual contact that is unwanted ex post facto, but Shakespeare understood the coyote hangover well:
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From Belmont:

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq was captured today in the northern city of Mosul according to the Iraqi ministry of defense. Al-Masri’s life parallels that of al-Qaeda itself. Born an Egyptian he followed al-Qaeda’s fortunes from the Middle East to Central Asia and back. According to US sources, Masri was born in 1967, “joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1982 … joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which later became part of al-Qaeda. He went to Afghanistan in 1999, where he became an explosives expert. In 2004 he was put in charge of al-Qaeda’s overseas networks, and in 2006 he succeeded al-Zarqawi as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

Intrestingly enough, Masri was captured in Mosul.

That’s so intresting, it deserved to be stated twice. So, have a beer or four.

Oh, and read this, too.

Back in November of 2006 — back when al Qaeda had successfully plunged Iraq into sectarian chaos and the Iraqi people needed us the most — James Carroll (a columnist for the Boston Globe) was excited about the possibility of America’s apparent defeat.

h/t Glenn Reynolds; if you’re not familiar with him, you should check him out

More: Melissa responds to the perpetual Gerson thread, here.