Tag: politics

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. – Robert A. Heinlein To Sail Beyond the Sunset

The Heller decision will be handed down a little bit later this morning. That decision will help tell us just how far our “cancer of democracy” has metastasized in the body politic.

Do They WANT Vigilantism

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Today’s Kennedy v. Louisiana Supreme Court ruling (PDF file) is another 5-4 “victory” for the politically Left-leaning members of the Court. Beginning at page seven in the decision is a graphic description of what the scrote did to his eight year old stepdaughter. That description begins:

Petitioner’s crime was one that cannot be recounted in these pages in a way sufficient to capture in full the hurt and horror inflicted on his victim or to convey the revulsion society, and the jury that represents it, sought to express by sentencing petitioner to death.

He’s right. By the end of it I was wondering why the sack of excrement was still breathing. This is Louisiana, right? Don’t they have a lot of swamp and alligators down there?

I have a nine year old granddaughter. If some subhuman did this to her, I’d sit in a prison cell for the rest of my life, or take the needle content in knowing that he’d never do it to anyone else – ever, at the same time anguished that I hadn’t prevented it in the first place. I’ve made this point before.

Justice Alito wrote the dissent. It begins on page 42:

The Court today holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. This is so, according to the Court, no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be. The Court provides two reasons for this sweeping conclusion: First, the Court claims to have identified “a national consensus” that the death penalty is never acceptable for the rape of a child; second, the Court concludes, based on its “independent judgment,” that imposing the death penalty for child rape is inconsistent with ” ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’ ” Because neither of these justifications is sound, I respectfully dissent.

He then goes into a heavily annotated and deeply legal discussion of the existing precedents, but to my mind this is the key graph of the dissent:

The Court is willing to block the potential emergence of a national consensus in favor of permitting the death penalty for child rape because, in the end, what matters is the Court’s “own judgment” regarding “the acceptability of the death penalty.” Although the Court has much to say on this issue, most of the Court’s discussion is not pertinent to the Eighth Amendment question at hand. And once all of the Court’s irrelevant arguments are put aside, it is apparent that the Court has provided no coherent explanation for today’s decision.

(My emphasis.) In essence, Alito just illustrated that the court did what Alex Kozinski called constitutionalizing their personal preferences – “build(ing) magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text.”

Today on the Hugh Hewitt radio program Hugh had “the Smart Guys” on again – Law professor (and now Dean of the new U.C. Irvine School of Law) Erwin Chemerinsky and Chapman University Dean John Eastman. Chemerinsky was ecstatic over the “evolving standards of decency” language of the decision. I’m trying to get a transcript of that portion of the show, because it is a textbook example of “Living Document” interpretation of the Constitution, and Alito points it out here. Alito makes one more excellent point:

The Court’s final — and, it appears, principal — justification for its holding is that murder, the only crime for which defendants have been executed since this Court’s 1976 death penalty decisions, is unique in its moral depravity and in the severity of the injury that it inflicts on the victim and the public. But the Court makes little attempt to defend these conclusions.

With respect to the question of moral depravity, is it really true that every person who is convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death is more morally depraved than every child rapist? Consider the following two cases. In the first, a defendant robs a convenience store and watches as his accomplice shoots the store owner. The defendant acts recklessly, but was not the triggerman and did not intend the killing.

In the second case, a previously convicted child rapist kidnaps, repeatedly rapes, and tortures multiple child victims. Is it clear that the first defendant is more morally depraved than the second?

One wonders how Justice Alito managed to refrain from accusing the Court’s majority in this case of moral depravity of their own.

As an aside, my boss has his own idea as to how child-rapists should be punished.

Oh, THAT Should Be Fascinating

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Oh, THAT Should Be Fascinating

The D.C. Wire reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court today did not release its long-awaited ruling on whether the District’s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment. That means the potentially landmark decision will almost certainly come tomorrow morning when the court is planning to issue the last of its rulings for the term. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, which was argued nearly four months ago, could settle the decades-old debate over whether the Second Amendment grants individuals the right to own firearms.

Mayor Adrain M. Fenty is planning to hold a news conference at the John A. Wilson Building after the decision is announced.

It should be every bit as well-reasoned and factual as his last one.

More Unintended Consequences

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More Unintended Consequences

Or were they really unintended?

Do you own a turbo-diesel pickup truck? Buy it on the understanding that you could get good performance and fairly decent mileage, and your fuel would cost less than gasoline? Do you own a diesel car for the same reasons?

Are you now pissed off that diesel costs more, significantly more, than gasoline? Have you been blaming it on Congress for passing “low sulfur” restrictions? Do you believe that it costs more at the pump because it costs more to refine?

You’d be wrong.

One reason why diesel fuel today is higher priced than gasoline is because of the unintended consequences of the 2007 EPA mandated ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) fuel – and not necessarily because it costs more to produce…

Everything changed in October of 2006, when the new U.S. ULSD regulations were implemented. Current U.S. ULSD is regulated to contain no more than 15-parts per million sulfur. In actual practice, U.S. ULSD contains just 7 or 8-ppm, which perhaps not coincidentally allows our ULSD to meet the somewhat stricter 10-ppm sulfur regulations in Europe. So, ULSD produced here in the United States has, for the first time, become acceptable for use in Europe. According to a 2/08 article in Reuters entitled “ANALYSIS-Exports keep U.S. diesel prices above gasoline“, they reported that U.S. diesel fuel is currently being exported in quantity. The economics of “Supply & Demand” no longer apply to the U.S. diesel fuel market. American truckers could boycott diesel fuel, and it wouldn’t necessarily produce lower diesel fuel prices.

According to a June 2008 article at MSN, entitled: Why is the U.S. exporting gasoline and diesel?, they report that U.S. oil companies were exporting more than 1.8 million barrels of crude oil, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other refined products per day. The top five buyers of U.S. petroleum products were Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, Chile and Singapore. This article also indicated that Venezuela owns three CITGO refineries in the United States, and that about 30,000 barrels of refined products per day are being shipped back to Venezuela, where government-subsidized gas/diesel is currently being sold for a whopping $0.19 per gallon. If we weren’t exporting diesel fuel, there would be more of a surplus, which could result in parity between gas and diesel fuel prices. What can we do? What should we do?

Hey, Maxine Waters and Maurice Hinchey, how about we “socialize” CITGO’s refineries? I’m sure your good buddy Hugo Chavez wouldn’t mind a bit!

In associated news, the same article reports:

Surprisingly, most of the world’s “unconventional” sources of oil exist right here in the United States. These unconventional sources include the vast oil shale deposits called the Green River Formation, which are found spanning an ancient 17,000 square mile lake bed beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming (80% on federal lands). Oil shale can produce anywhere from 22-40 gallons of oil per ton of oil shale. A barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons. Based on current extraction technology, at least 100 billion barrels of “commercially viable” crude oil is thought to exist in Green River Formation. (Note: the total amount of all oil shale within the U.S. is thought to contain a staggering 1.4 trillion barrels of crude oil, which is more than four times the estimated historic levels of oil found beneath Saudi Arabia.) With a current U.S. consumption rate of 20 million barrels per day, 100 billion barrels of crude oil derived from oil shale could meet all of the U.S. oil consumption needs for another 14 years – all by itself. See: www.fossil.energy.gov to learn more.

Shell scientists have created the technology required to economically extract large amounts of crude oil from oil shale without wrecking the environment. In fact, Shell’s method is capable of extracting high quality light crude oil from oil shale deposits utilizing heated wells – not a rock mill operation, which does little damage to the environment. According to a November 2007 article in CNN Fortune – online magazine, a Department of Energy study was referenced that indicates the Green River deposits are predicted to produce 2 million barrels of oil per day by 2020 and as many as 5 million barrels per day by 2040 – assuming of course, that the environmental lobby and Washington could be convinced that the future of the U.S. depends on us becoming energy independent. Indeed, this level of production would rival that of the largest conventional oilfields in the world. 2007 estimates for cost per barrel came in at a low of $30/barrel, while cost estimates for a broader range of oil shale deposits range from a low $30 to as high as $90 per barrel. Shell’s production methods are expected to yield more than one million barrels of oil per acre. Keep in mind that the Green River Formation encompasses 17,000 square miles.

I was certain I’d referenced Shell’s extraction technology, called the “in situ conversion process” here before, but damn if I can find the piece now.

This One’s for Most of the Marbles

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This One’s for All Most of the Marbles

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet…and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths….When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. – Alex Kozinski, dissenting (PDF file) the denial of an en banc rehearing of Silveira v. Lockyer in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, May 6, 2003

On March 9, 2007 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit found in favor of the plaintiffs in Parker vs. District of Columbia, for the first time overturning an existing gun law on the grounds that it violated the individual right to arms that is protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The D.C. Circuit is only the second to have found that the Second Amendment does, indeed protect an individual, and not a collective right. The first was the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. v. Emerson decision of October, 2001 wherein the Court decided that the right protected was an individual right, but the law in question met that court’s understanding of “limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions or restrictions for particular cases that are reasonable and not inconsistent with the right of Americans generally to individually keep and bear their private arms as historically understood in this country” – “albeit likely minimally so”.

Emerson and Silveira (along with the 9th Circuit’s Nordyke v. King and Hickman v. Block before it) represented a “circuit split,” wherein different circuits of the Courts of Appeal held different understandings of a fundamental Constitutional question. Emerson was appealed to the Supreme Court, and the appeal was denied. Silveira was appealed to the Supreme Court, and the appeal was denied.

Parker was appealed to the Supreme Court as D.C. v. Heller, and appeal was granted.

Oral arguments were heard on March 18, 2008.

It is most probable that the Supreme Court will hand down its decision tomorrow, the last Monday of this term.

The fundamental question at hand, and the only one I expect the Court to actually rule on, is whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms, and that handguns are such arms as are protected by that Amendment.

I do not expect SCOTUS to rule on any other topic. Not on the level of scrutiny, not on the standing to sue of the other plaintiffs in the Parker suit (Dick Heller was the only person found to have standing to sue.) Not on the question of what other weapons are protected. And, most definitely, not on whether the Second Amendment is “incorporated” under the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause against infringement by state governments.

This one’s for most of the marbles. IF our side wins (and after the Boumediene decision, I’m no longer quite as sanguine), there’s still a long way to go.

And a Democrat Congress to approve new judges for at least the next two, probably four, and possibly sixteen or more years.

But as early as tomorrow we will get to see, again, just which Justices on the Supreme Court are willing to “constitutionalize their personal preferences.”

UPDATE: As usual, the GeekWithA45 says it better than I can.

Just Wave Your Hands…

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…the obstacles will all disappear! Jeff over at Damnum Absque Injuria links to a particularly Pollyannish post at The Richmond Democrat that begins:

We cannot drill our way out of the current crisis of higher gasoline prices. Why? It is a simple matter of supply and demand. While the supply of oil is finite, the demand for oil is ever expanding. No matter how many holes we drill, we will never catch up to the global demand for oil-based motor fuels as they are currently used.

Trying to drill our way out of this crisis is a little like chasing the Sun on a bicycle: you can pedal all you want and you may even feel like you are making a little forward progress, but the Sun will inevitably pull away from you. The demand for oil will inevitably pull away from the supply, and the more the gap between supply and demand widens, the higher the price of gasoline will go. We cannot address this crisis on the supply side of the equation because the available supply–even if we were to drill as many holes as we could–is both finite and insufficient.

As Jeff asks, “WTF part of ‘supply and demand’ don’t you understand?”

But it gets even better. This guy swoons over hydrogen fuel cells, hybrid cars and new battery technologies. Hell, for him hydrogen is the fuel of the future!

The other possible technological solution I mentioned, the hydrogen fuel cell, is extremely promising for one reason that ordinary Americans would do well the consider: the technological problems associated with fuel cells are almost entirely concerned with the fuel cells themselves and not with the fuel source!

Hydrogen is everywhere and the technology for extracting it from our environment is relatively simple. Gasoline is extracted from crude oil, which is rare and therefore expensive (supply and demand again). Hydrogen can be extracted from water and water is everywhere, covering three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, and is cheap, cheap, cheap. In fact, the stuff falls out of the sky as rain, free of charge. When you use gasoline as fuel it is gone for good, becoming more and more scarce and therefore more and more expensive. When you use hydrogen in a fuel cell, it becomes water again. The same hydrogen molecules, the “H2” in H2O, can be used over and over and over again. Hydrogen will never become scarce: you cannot corner the market on hydrogen.

He does make faint mouth-noises that none of this is a free lunch:

Batteries could be recharged with electricity generated by coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind or some other technology yet to be invented. The United States has access to all these sources of power.

But nowhere in this wonderful paean to The Future! does he acknowledge that hydrogen isn’t a fuel. It’s just another not-very-convenient or efficient way to store energy converted from some other form. So I wrote a comment. His comments are moderated before being posted, and none had been posted at the time I wrote mine, so I saved a copy. Here it is:

Hydrogen is everywhere and the technology for extracting it from our environment is relatively simple.

Yes. All it takes is energy.

Hydrogen is not a fuel source. It’s just another way to store energy, and the amount of energy you can get out of hydrogen you “extract” from other compounds is less than the amount of energy it takes to do the extraction.

This is fine if you have abundant excess energy, but one of the problems we have today is that such excess does not exist. The simplest way to extract hydrogen is through electrolysis of water. That requires electricity. Most of our electrical generation plants burn oil, natural gas, or coal. There is excess capacity – the plants don’t run at full load at night, for example, but you still have to burn fossil fuels to run them, and the amount of energy required to crack water into H2 and O2 is more than you get back by burning the H2 and O2 back into water, even if you use the H2 in a fuel cell.

Plug-in hybrids? Again, where does that electricity come from? Are you advocating a massive building program for new nuclear generating stations?

The less oil we use, the less oil will cost.

Only if everyone uses less oil. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that oil is used worldwide for fuel, and for feedstocks in the manufacturing of plastics, lubricants, and other vital chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides. Sure, it’s possible to reduce our use, but China and India are ramping up their use, and they’re not alone, so the laws of supply and demand will remain in force. The world usage of oil will continue to increase. We’d better start drilling where we know oil is to try to keep supply somewhere near demand as long as we can.

Will new technologies help? Certainly. But new technologies take time. Hydrogen fusion power has been “20 years away” for as long as I can remember. We’re making great strides forward in battery and supercapacitor technology, but again, where does the electricity come from? Solar and wind have the drawback of not being dependable, or very energy dense. Wave and tide power could be promising, but I’m waiting for the environmentalist crowd to start protesting the construction of anything near a shoreline.

Hell, I’m waiting for the environmentalists to shut down mines where the metals necessary for those hybrid batteries and fuel cells are dug up, and the plants where they are refined. Nickel, lithium, lead, copper, titanium, aluminum, all that stuff comes out of the ground, and the byproducts can be nasty. There’s a proposed copper mine near where I live that they’re bound and determined to prevent the opening of.

Plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are NOT a solution. The energy to charge the batteries or crack the hydrogen needs to come from somewhere.

Face it: The only technology that’s going to help any time soon is nuclear power. (More mining.) It can help ease the transition away from oil – but in the near term we need more OIL, and we’d better start drilling SOON.

And I DARE you to approve this comment, unedited. (I’m posting a copy, BTW, with a link.)

I would ask how in the world did people get to be so clueless, but I’ve already answered my own question.

He did let it through moderation along with several others, kudos to him for that. Then he replied that we “didn’t read his post.” I have another comment pending moderation. We’ll see if that one goes through.

UPDATE: It did.

The Socialist Party

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The Socialist Party

Bernie Sanders (Socialist, VT) is, at least, honest about what he is. Rep. Maxine Waters let her true colors show a couple of weeks ago (Marxist Red, of course). Now, via Unix_Jedi, Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York, “member of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the most-ardent opponents of off-shore drilling” has done the same:

We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.

Thank you, Mr. Hinchey, one more elected official violating the oath you swore to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Do you have a Ché flag in your office?

Stay tuned for the next two Quotes of the Day.

UPDATE: Jeff has a question for Reps. Waters and Hinchey.