Tag: right

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judiciary partisanship U.S. Constitution

Heal or Heel?

Supreme Court, packing, packed, red, blue, Republican,Democrat, right, left, partisan,

Call it High Court chutzpah?

In a Second Amendment case seeking U.S. Supreme Court review, five U.S. Senators have filed an amicus curie or “friend of the court” brief … that wasn’t very friendly.

“The Supreme Court is not well,” argue Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D‑R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D‑Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D‑Hawaii), Richard Durbin (D‑Ill.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D‑N.Y.) in their brief against the Court accepting the case. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”

A not-​very-​veiled threat.

Is their goal really to ‘reduce political influence’? Or to leverage influence against the Court should it not “heal itself” — or come to heel — by authoring judicial decisions more to Democrats’ liking? 

Seven Democratic presidential contenders, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kristen Gillibrand, support court packing — having the next Democrat-​controlled Congress increase the size of the SCOTUS beyond nine justices, to 12 or 15.

“[M]ost Americans recognize this tactic for what it is, which is a direct attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” Sarah Turberville and Anthony Marcum write in The Hill. “It is no coincidence that court packing is employed by would be autocrats all over the world rather than by leaders of liberal democracies.”

To supposedly “depoliticize” the “partisan” Supreme Court, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants to pick five justices to represent Democrats and five to represent Republicans, and then those ten would together choose five additional justices. 

Nothing like being overtly partisan to vanquish partisanship, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Supreme Court, packing, packed, red, blue, Republican,Democrat, right, left, partisan,

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ideological culture

The Milkshake of Human Unkindness

milkshake, political violence, New Republic, Nigel Farage, Brexit, right, immigration,

“The biggest topic in British political circles on Monday … was milkshakes,” writes Mike Ford in The New Republic, “or, rather, one milkshake in particular.…”

Milkshake, you ask?

Yes. Milkshake. 

The shake in question “was lobbed by a bystander in Newcastle at Nigel Farage, a Brexit Party candidate in the European Parliament elections later this week.” And Mr. Ford goes on to note that infamous Internet figures Tommy Robinson and Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin (the latter inaccurately dubbed “alt-​right”) have received multiple hits of thrown cold, frothy confections.

It is “a thing.” A meme — a replicable operation.

Burger King has even encouraged the fad, if in a bizarrely mercenary way.

“Throwing a milkshake at someone is rude at worst,” Ford asserts. “It may also qualify as assault in some jurisdictions, especially in the United States.” That second sentence contradicts the first. It is assault “at worst.”

Ford’s op-​ed, entitled “Why Milkshaking Works,” has a tagline: “The far right fears nothing more than public humiliation.”

Really? Look, no one wants the inconvenience of these stupid attacks, but it is the unhingedness of the left that shines through, here — a threatening, punching, shouting-​down, spilling-​upon movement that I suspect mainly grows the ranks of the anti-left.* 

The New Republic has long been a progressive rag: the “new” in the title referred to the magazine’s support for progressivism.

Fitting, then, to see it cheer on, this week, the idiotic, unkind extremism of current progressive culture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, to some on the left all non-​leftists are “far right.” This is called the phenomenon of “the left pole.”

milkshake, political violence, New Republic, Nigel Farage, Brexit, right, immigration,

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard national politics & policies Popular

Re-​Segregation

segregation, bias, right, left, conservative, liberal, water fountains

It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition.

We see this in 

  • higher education, dominated by left-​of-​center professors and administrators; 
  • in the news media, overwhelmingly filled with Democrats; and 
  • even in the corporate world, especially in HR Departments.

That some areas of life are filled with one type of person, and others with a different kind, should shock no one. But the intolerance of this? It has recently become extra extreme on the left: De-​platforming, physical attacks on free speech, censuring and firing employees who dare offer facts inconvenient for progressivism. When a senior Facebook engineer attempted to bring in tolerance and diversity, what should have been a non-​story received national attention.*

It amounts to a new segregationism. 

People are segregating more and more in their communities based on income and culture (see Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort) — despite many of these same self-​segregators support for Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda of de-segregation. 

Another current trend is shunning. When it was discovered, the other day, that the In-​N-​Out burger chain had contributed $25,000 to the California Republican Party, the Twitterverse cooked up something special: “#BoycotInNOut — let Trump and his cronies support these creeps” … well, that gem is from the chair of the California Democratic Party.

Apparently, this Democratic Party official is demanding separate eating establishments for progressives and conservatives.

But hey, where would I eat?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Arguably, many of the stories we fret about should be non-​stories — as in, “none of our business.” But when some people make others’ business theirs, the stories just will not stay local.

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ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people political challengers too much government

The Centre Cannot Hold

UK, British, politics, parties, centrist, left, right, partisan

The British may spell their words in funny ways, but their political problems do not seem all that foreign. Their left-​of-​center party has gone far left, Marxoid left; their right-​of-​center party has gone ultra-incompetent.

A healthy majority of Brits disapprove of both parties. So, no wonder many Brits are looking to create a new one.

A new centrist political party, no less.

Over at The Economist, the columnist writing under the name “Bagehot” (pronounced “badget”) predicts that this hope will be dashed, for at least three reasons:

First, Britain already has a centrist party, and it is not doing very well.

Second, there sure are a lot of contenders — 35 new parties have been formed just this year, including one called, with humble brag, “Sensible” — and all that competition fractionalizes the vote.

Third, the country sports the same system of vote counting and elections as America does, first-​past-​the-​post, which “is hard on startups.”

That last point is worth thinking about. In multi-​candidate races, the British-​American electoral system declares as winners those who obtain a bare plurality of votes — thus ignoring the preferences of those who vote for minor party candidates. This means that those who “waste” their votes not only hurt the candidacies they like as second-​best but also insulate the second-​best parties from those voters’ influence. So the parties become narrow-​minded and unhinged from an interested group of voters.

Bagehot thinks Britain’s centrists need to rethink, conjure up some new ideas. But what they need to do first is fix a system that prods political parties away from new ideas. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people national politics & policies

Monied Hopes Dashed

elections, Democrats, Republicans, left, right, CNN, Obamacare

Democrats had high hopes. Their come-​back after the 2016 defeats seemed near at hand. After all, Trump is proving increasingly erratic and incompetent, and the Republican mis-​handling of the ObamaCare repeal appears to be a disaster of ginormous proportions.

How could they not start taking seats in Congress back? 

There were four open seats requiring new votes this late Spring. “Democrats tried an inoffensive moderate message in Georgia,” CNN’s Eric Bradner informs us. “They ran a banjo-​strumming populist in Montana. They called in the cavalry in South Carolina and tried to catch their foe sleeping through a long-​shot in Kansas.”

Democrats failed, 0 – 4.

Why? Well, the congressional vacancies were made by the new president’s appointments, and he may have targeted those districts that were especially safe. Nevertheless, CNN notes, “[t]he party got closer than it has in decades to winning some of the four seats — a sign they’ve closed their gaps with Republicans in both suburban and rural areas.…”

But there is a lesson here that CNN did not draw from the debacle. The much-​lamented Georgia race, in which Jon Ossoff lost to Republican Karen Handel, was a race in which Ossoff out-​spent Handel six to one in what is called “the most expensive House race in history.” And yet, somewhat oddly and perhaps hypocritically, Ossoff, the bigger spender, went on air complaining about money in politics.

All that moolah did not push him over the top. Ossoff and the Democrats — as well as the feckless Republican majority — might look for fewer excuses and stand for something voters actually want.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism political challengers responsibility too much government

French Beacon

France, French, election, Macron, Le Pen, democracy, press, freedom, right, left, centrist

“Since the French Revolution,” the New York Times pontificated online, “the nation has often been viewed as a beacon of democratic ideals.”

Really? Can a nation of constitutional turnovers — kings and republics and revolutions and foreign occupation — be a beacon? Most often we in America compare our Revolution to France’s, focusing on The Terror: mob rule and proto-totalitarianism.

On Friday, “the staff of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron said… that the campaign had been targeted by a ‘massive and coordinated’ hacking operation, one with the potential to destabilize the nation’s democracy before voters go to the polls on Sunday.” A few minutes later, the campaigns fell under the country’s election gag rule, unable to debate immediately prior to the voting. The government told the media not to look at what was dug up in the “hack” (which everybody said was by Russians). Though Macron’s putative Islamization plan is worth looking at, surely.

Much talk (at the Times and elsewhere) of how the hack destabilized democracy. No talk, for some reason, about how the election regulation gag rule did. 

The idea that information might destabilize democracy? Awkward. 

Still, we can see how an info-dump’s timing might destabilize an election.

But since Macron won by a large margin, the Late Exposure Strategy may have backfired, Russians or no.

The most obvious oddity in reportage? The continued reference to former Socialist Party hack Macron as “centrist” while Le Pen is called “far right” ad nauseam. Macron is pro-​EU; Le Pen is nationalist. Neither are reliably for freedom. The fact that Macron packaged his En Marche ! Party as centrist doesn’t make it so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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