Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
Author: Redactor
A lot of big money in the Republican Party is now actively being marshaled to make sure that Tea Party efforts come to naught.
The latest endeavor bills itself the Conservative Victory Project, and has been written up in the New York Times, which relates the group’s intent: “to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles.”
You see, campaigns to unseat staid, big-government “conservative” Republican incumbents have not gone unnoticed amongst the Old Guard of the GOP. And these folks are worried about the quality of the gravy their gravy train returns. So they seek to shore up the “winners”:
“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads, the “super PAC” creating the new project. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.”
Law is, of course, thinking of several Tea Party candidates in the last election who blew it, Big Time. You know the ones: the candidates who talked weirdly of rape.
But it’s not just Tea Party Republicans who shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, or place foot in mouth. Mainstream “conservatives” blow it, too, as Grover Norquist pointed out in the Times article. “People are imagining a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Grover.
I worry that “the real problem” Law and his cronies (such as Karl Rove) are fighting is the specter of a successful Tea Party contingent, with Rand Paul at its lead. Real change is awfully frightening to the whip hands on the gravy train.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ugly in New York
Part of New York State’s emotionally motivated, hastily concocted new gun control law requires persons owning ugly-looking guns—semi-automatic rifles—to register them with the government.
Officials may protest that they don’t intend to go rounding up the ugly-looking guns. They may also insist that the new law makes it harder for a newsroom to publicize the names and addresses of gun owners (as the Journal News of White Plains, New York recently did).
But a registry that exists is a registry that can be accessed, and abused, despite any official’s alleged good intentions. Many advocates of gun control, including the Senate’s chief sponsor of a new assault weapons ban, admit that if they had their druthers, they’d outlaw all privately held guns. How would the registry be used then?
Many New York owners of ugly guns are up in arms, so to speak. Why? Because they don’t see themselves as criminal suspects properly tracked for exercising constitutional rights. There are good reasons why good people might refuse to voluntarily add their names and addresses to a list of targets.
Brian Olesen, president of one of New York State’s largest gun dealers, says he’s heard “from hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration deadline comes.”
It’s not just some guns that look ugly. Turning peaceful people into criminals by a mere act of legislation is ugly in the extreme.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
This weekend at Townhall, another foray into the big issue of the day, what to do about preventing gun massacres. Click on over to Townhall.com — actually, here precisely — then come back here to consider the sources, and a few more notions:
- “The Great American Gun Frenzy,” Paul Jacob, Townhall.com, January 13, 2013
- “Let Teachers Bear Arms,” Paul Jacob, Common Sense, December 20, 2012
- “Newtown Votes for Armed Guards in Elementary Schools,” by Alexander Abad-Santos, The Atlantic Wire, February 1, 2013
- “Newtown Sides With NRA – Votes for Armed Guards in Schools,” by John Nolte, Breitbard.com, February 1, 2013
- Wikipedia entry
And this:
The law is reason unaffected by desire.
Who has benefited?
America’s bailout economy started many administrations ago, but really went Big Time under President George W. Bush . . . and then went Enormity Time with President Barack Obama.
The Washington Post provides the latest in bailout news by noting an inter-departmental squabble:
The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said Treasury approved all 18 requests it received last year to raise pay for executives at American International Group Inc., General Motors Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. Of those requests, 14 were for $100,000 or more; the largest raise was $1 million.
Though this is all quite scandalous, don’t expect policies to change or heads to roll — barring a joint Tea Party/Occupy uprising. The nature of the modern “regulatory” state is clear: government bureaus are quickly captured by the industries they aim to regulate. It’s an old story. The revolving door between business and bureaucracy is as well-established as between journalism and politics.
So why do we have bailouts?
- They show that politicians are “doing something”;
- They mimic the welfare state logic of “helping the poor” (if, with caustic irony, by stuffing the wallets of the rich);
- They aggrandize the showy machinations of the legislative and executive branches at the expense of the branch of government designed to handle massive business failure, the courts.
Perhaps Americans shouldn’t have voted in either an MBA grad (Bush) or a constitutional lawyer (Obama). Maybe what the country needs is a bankruptcy lawyer in the White House.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A recent court decision has slowed—dare we hope, stopped?—the erosion of an important check on executive power. This is the constitutional provision that the president’s appointment of certain high officials be subject to Senate approval.
Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute reminds us that presidents have sought to circumvent the advise and consent requirement since the days of Warren Harding.
The Constitution enables the president to make appointments when the Senate is in recess, i.e., between sessions. (In the days of the Founders, that hiatus lasted many months.) Starting with Harding, though, presidents began making appointments during so-called intra-session “recesses,” or breaks within a regular session. These “recesses” were as brief as ten days by the time we got to Clinton and Bush II.
In 2007, the Senate began conducting brief pro forma sessions within these “recesses” to prevent appointments from being made without its consent. Last year, President Obama counter-moved by declaring that he had authority to determine what constitutes a session. On this basis he made several appointments sans the Senate’s consent.
The DC Court of Appeals has now ruled the maneuver unconstitutional. “The power of a written constitution lies in its words,” writes Chief Judge David Sentelle. “When those words speak clearly, it is not up to us to depart from their meaning in favor of our own concept of efficiency, convenience, or facilitation of the functions of government.”
Do presidents sometimes find the Constitution inconvenient? Too bad.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Bright
The corn law was intended to keep wheat at the price of 80s. the quarter; it is now under 40s. the quarter.