Maggie's Farm

Roberts is a shoe-in - just my opinion

DO NOT MISS Iowahawk's piece on the Roberts nomination - hilarious

And the NYT - almost as funny as Iowakawk - worries that Roberts will cause dirty air, child labor, restrictions on abortion and - God Forbid! - federalism. At least they didn't put the re-institution of slavery on the list, but it sounds as if they wanted to.

This quote from Roberts says it all (via Michelle via Town Hall):

My own judicial philosophy begins with an appreciation of the limited role of a judge in our system of divided powers. Judges are not to legislate and are not to execute the laws. . . . My judicial philosophy accordingly insists upon some rigor in ensuring that judges properly confine themselves to the adjudication of the case before them, and seek neither to legislate broadly not to administer the law generally in deciding that case.

Deciding the case . . . . requires an essential humility grounded in the properly limited role of an undemocratic judiciary in a democratic republic, a humility reflected in doctrines of deference to legislative policy judgments and embodied in the often misunderstood term “judicial restraint.” That restraint does not mean that judges should not act against the popular will. . . .[T]he framers expected them to be discerning the law, not shaping policy. That means the judges should not look to their own personal views or preferences in deciding the cases before them. Their commission is no license to impose those preferences from the bench."

Re-posted from July 5, 2005

"Bush's Calling"

Wilfred McCay has written a remarkable essay in Commentary, "Bush's Calling," which is not mainly about Bush - it's about American character and American religion. It is so good and so rich, I will quote a chunk of it to entice you into reading the whole thing:

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The Brits: Harbourers of Terrorism

I thought we were at war with terrorists and with those who harbor them. Isn't it clear that the UK is the main harbor for terrorists in Europe, and that London is Jihad Central? The Brits are "tolerant of diversity" unto suicide, but it's unto homicide to us since Brit citizens can so easily enter the US. Foxes welcomed into the hen-house. Their civility is being taken advantage of, and laughed at by their mortal enemies. I know this sounds just a teensy bit harsh and insensitive to say at this time of mourning, and especially about our dear cousins and allies, but...just some of many stories here, here and here. The Brits have made themselves Candide, in an evil world. Will they wake up to the existence of evil now? Let us hope and pray that they will. They have before, God knows. They are slow to anger, but watch out when you get their goat.

From Blamebush:

37 innocent people suffered death without dignity in London today, and hundreds more were injured in a barbaric yet understandable attack by Michael Moore's Minute Men - retribution for Britain's complicity in Bush's illegal and immoral war on terror. But now is not the time for pointing fingers. In the wake of 9/11, progressives waited a good three minutes before blaming Bush, America, and Western Civilization in general, and we should be every bit as reverent now. Let the people of Great Britain mourn their fallen bretheren in peace. There will be plenty of time to exploit their grief for political gain in the weeks ahead.

The Court

Top Contenders: RWN

From 2002, Anderson in City Journal: Click here: City Journal Summer 2002 | Why the Battle for the Court Will Be Nasty by Brian C. Anderson :questions of sex have tempted the Court to bend and twist the Constitution almost as energetically as questions of race. Roe v. Wade (1973) is the most famous case in point. Whatever your views about abortion, it is hard to deny that, as jurisprudence, Roe is embarrassingly shoddy. In a 51-page majority opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun that lacked any discernible legal reasoning, the Court based itself on the “privacy” right of married couples to use contraceptives that it had found in the “penumbras, formed by emanations” of the Bill of Rights in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case. It asserted that this new guarantee of privacy, conjured up like a will-o’-the-wisp rising out of swamp gas, included an absolute right, protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for all women to terminate pregnancy up until the third trimester—a penumbra formed by emanations indeed.

 Q

Lock and Load: The Dems have their strategy, regardless of the nominee: Patterico

Everybody Must Get Stoned: Moslem politicians in New Zealand. In LGF

A Bullet hitting a bullet: That's how difficult it was to hit that comet, but they did. Video here - thanks, Instapundit.

Cap'n Ed reviews Goldberg's new book: Sounds like fun

The Rogue Court, More

A Souter quote in the McCreary County (Ten Commandments) case, in NERepub:

“The divisiveness of religion in current public life is inescapable,” he said. “This is no time to deny the prudence of understanding the Establishment Clause (of the First Amendment) to require the Government to stay neutral on religious belief….”

Historically, this is nonsense. As one blogger pointed out yesterday - I forget who - during the early years of the nation several states had specific religious criteria for candidates for office.  This is pure legislating from the bench, and it is insidious and wrong. In the end, as NERepub notes, public religious behavior and symbols become relegated to a similar status as pornography. Furthermore, if "divisiveness" is ample justification for a ruling, why not ban the Democratic Party? They are very "divisive" too. Heck, ban the NYYankees too - always creating angry division with the Red Sox.

The Christian Left

I reviewed Opie's post from earlier today and surfed the Christians for Progress website. All I can see in the website is that Christ was a socialist revolutionary, but I never saw that anywhere in Scripture. This is just another political movement using Christ as a disguise, just as some unfortunate parts of the Christian Right do. Pure nonsense, and blasphemous too, really.

As I understand it, the whole point was that He was a major disappointment as a political Messiah. Many of His followers who threw palm leaves on the path to Jerusalem hoped he was coming to remove the imperial Romans. But He was a Messiah of the spirit, humbly inviting us to enter the true eternal kingdom, not the kingdom of man but the Kingdom of God, which transcends earthly concerns. Did He not invite us to abandon worldly concerns  - including our families and farms and fishing boats and possessions - and to worry about our souls and to put our faith in God - not man - and to follow Him towards a life abundant in spirit, and eternal? And does that not require a scary leap of faith, to trust something other than ourselves? Or did I miss something in Sunday School? I am not a man of deep faith, and I am overly consumed by earthly and vain pleasures, but I do have a brain, of sorts.

A Rogue Court

Mark Levin has it right tonight on the radio - we have a Rogue Supreme Court. Replacing Rehnquist will make no difference. There is a liberal/leftist majority on this court which sees no limit to federal power, and which sees no limits to its own powers in the Constitution. This is truly strange and deeply worrisome, and takes us one giant step closer to a Royal Govt., as did the California marijuana case on the Commerce Clause, which essentially pushed "delete" on the Commerce Clause (the case involved no commerce, and nothing interstate). Yes, I am beyond t-ed off - I am flabbergasted - in a sense, private property just ceased to exist. A freebie for Mark here. I need a drink.

Two scotches later, I find this in the Daily Standard. And more details on Kelo here - thanks Michelle.

A Very Backward Supreme Ct. Decision (Kelo)

The Lefties on the Court today expanded the Fifth Amendment, regarding eminent domain, to include hotel construction in CT. In my opinion, this is a return to feudalism, and essentially permits any reason for taking of property... including putting a Walmart on my farm. In CNN. What does the Left stand for? Expansion of Federal power, and destruction of the nation's power, traditions, morals, culture, and religion. It's simple. Text of decision here. Is this an argument for new blood on the Court? Sure is. Perhaps Breyer was inspired by British or French court cases (from the year 1325).

Why the Sudden Fierce Anti-War Noises?

Thanks, Powerline, for the intro to Irish Pennants - almost wrote Irish Penance -  which has a good theory - the left wants us to lose before we can finally win:

I suspect Democrats and liberal journalists are stepping up their criticisms because they fear they have only a few months more in which a precipitous American withdrawal could produce a Vietnam-like defeat. If, come January, American troops are still in Iraq in about their current strength, it'll be too late to prevent a glorious American victory, one which the whole unwilling world will not be able to deny.

Here. and Why We will Win, by Max Boot, here.

I Brake for Turtles

From Real Meal Ministries:

 I stop for turtles. I have often even parked my car so that I could pick up and carry one across the road. I do this because of my commitment to be a steward of God’s creation. I can’t help but feel sorry for the slow moving reptiles. I have witnessed on too many occasions motorists swerving to hit turtles. I have had obscenities and objects hurled my way for slowing down so that a turtle could cross. I know that stopping to help a turtle is no great deed. In fact, if the turtles insist on attempting to cut across the heavily traveled roads of Central Forida, I don’t have much hope for the future of the species. But I like turtles. Always have.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat turtles on the road way. People tend to fall into three categories. There are a few people who will actually stop to help a struggling turtle. There are probably an equal number who will happily squash the reptiles under the wheels of their automobiles. Yet, I suspect that the vast majority simply drive by unaware of the creatures or uninterested in their well-being.

I like this blogger. We at Maggie's are also all certified turtle-lovers, as is well-known. "Howsoever you do unto the least of these..." Just do not pick up a big snapping turtle with your hands - it will not behave gratefully: they have terrorist brains. This is the time of year when turtles wander to lay their eggs, but dealing with roads is not in their genes. (photo of the delightful Eastern Box Turtle)

Why get bogged down in technical points of the Constitution?

Mauro in USA Today: Conservatives who believe in a limited role for judges say the Supreme Court should stick to its knitting, namely interpreting the U.S. Constitution as written, and should ignore current fads here or abroad. But the counter-argument is strong. If globalization has flattened the world in terms of the economy and culture, isn't it time that our legal system also look beyond our borders? Are we so arrogant that we think we have nothing to learn from judges and lawmakers around the world who have faced the same issues we face?

No, it isn't "about time," not until we decide to totally trash our Constitution, at which point there will be no limit to the power of the judiciary. I find Mauro's piece astonishing in its arrogance. Right Wing News has the same feeling.

Those Evil Boy Scouts

The Left, not just the ACLU, has been in a fit about the Boy Scouts for years. I can only assume it is because they represent "honorable values," which are anathema to the Termites. Heck, the word "honor" itself seems to have disappeared from the lexicon of the Left, has it not?... if not from the lexicon of our culture. I am hanging on to it, although it ain't easy to do.

Is the concept of the Boy Scouts innocent? Yes. Is it old-fashioned? Yes. Is it religion-based? Yes. Does it represent the traditional core of our nation? Yes. Does it represent a love of nature and wilderness? Yes. Does every American lad of today -urban, suburban, or rural - need this? Yes.

Ernest Thompson Seton, of Connecticut, has been a life-long hero of ours. His books on the outdoors and natural history here. His "Woodcraft Indians League" has been an aspect of Traditional Scouting since the beginning. How evil is this: Campfires? Woodcraft? Arm-wrestling? Seamanship? Duty? Honor? Or is it all just too masculine?

Ankle-Biter Gets It

This mini-tantrum coming from the excellent Ankle-Biter is what many of us feel whenever we encounter the news:

 It pains me greatly to have to say this because it makes me feel like a rightwing crank when I do, but there’s no escaping it: the Left truly does hate America. They hate everything about it; it’s Judeo-Christian heritage; the God-given rights it protects for its citizens; its free markets; you name it, they hate it. It’s a harsh judgment and normally I couldn't care less what these fools think, but just consider the two big stories in the paranoid, angry little minds of the extreme Left, also known as the moonbats.

Indeed. Self-hating Americans. Where do they all come from? They are relentless, because they have a religious-like mission, fueled with hate and self-righteousness.

Waiting for the Revolution

Eugene McCarraher, a thoughtful, earnest, but clearly impatient and irritated Christian Leftist from the old school (ie, appearing more passionate about politics than about saving souls), is awaiting an uprising from the pews to bring a Christian-socialist utopia to earth. Naturally, "corporations" and Bush are the main obstacles, plus that tired old bugaboo "American imperialism". You know how much utopians frighten me - wasn't Hitler a Socialist Christian? I always figure socialists want to own me and control me, crush my spirit and to make me a dependent. Tell me, who are the more worldly - the (few but vocal) members of the termite Christian Left or the traditionalist Christians? It's worth hearing about how they view the world, in Christianity Today: Click here: The Revolution Begins in the Pews - Books & Culture

Gentleman and Gentlewoman Farmers

I know Dr. Joy Bliss gets Yankee Magazine, but does she know about Progressive Farmer? Fine site and fine magazine. No, it's not politically progressive.

"Turban" Durbin and Treason

Excerpted from Scrapple-Man, but...

"The unspeakable cruelties that Sen. Durbin decried on the Senate floor must stop before his own detention on treason charges," said Mr. Rumsfeld. "After all, Dick Durbin is an American citizen, not an ordinary enemy combatant bent on destroying this nation and increasing the danger to our troops by inflaming the passions of the Muslim world."

Holy and Unholy; Moral and Immoral; Animal and Divine

Prager:

The human being can be said to be created in the image of God and in the image of animals. We are biologically animals, and we are spiritually, morally and theologically God-like (at least in our potential). God is the most holy; and animals, as helpful, loyal and lovable as many are, are at the opposite end of the holiness continuum. This is in no way an insult to animals. Saying dogs and lions are not holy is no more degrading to them than saying men are not women or women are not men. That is how they are created.

Read his enitre Judeo-Christian Values, Part 4

Finally

I guess Rove and Bush finally woke up after their long winter's nap. It's about time we heard some push-back from the White House. Long overdue.

Stalin

Fascinating book review by Fairbanks in Claremont. I knew he was evil, but he was interesting evil.

The Harvard Details

Sounds like ScrappleFace, but this is real:

The report on women in the sciences and engineering recommends that doctoral students in those fields (and eventually grad students in all departments) be required to complete a training course with a component on gender bias. The report also recommends that search committee members undergo mandatory training in implicit bias. Implicit bias (a concept pioneered by Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, among others) refers to supposed unconscious or hidden prejudices that don't manifest themselves overtly.

Read entire on FIRE

Harvard's PC

We Yalies always enjoy winning in football, but now the crimson has pooped in its pants in public, and you almost have to feel sorry for them. Our team here has done the "Larry is a weenie" bit endlessly over recent weeks, but Powerline has taken the story a bit beyond name-calling (not that it isn't entirely justified). Scott has also quoted our favorite and most essential essay of all time - Politics and the English Language. Watch a once-grand institution try to commit slow suicide on the altar of PC:  Here.

Abortion, Iraq, Morality, and a Strange New Political Grouping

Is there any way to make sense of the emerging political alignments? It isn't Conservative exactly, in the usual sense. Bottum in First Things:

The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home.

In the new fusionism of the pro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, a number of traditional issues seem, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have gotten muted along the way. Where exactly is tax reform and social security and the balanced budget in all this? Where is much concern for economics, which once defined the root of American conservatism?

Perhaps they are missing because, however important, they do not bear hard on the immediate question of social defeatism—on the deep changes that might reawaken and remoralize the nation. The one thing both the social conservatives and the neoconservatives know is that this project comes first.

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.

Read entire.

More from Thompson

An interview with Thompson, from Thompson at Large:

"The left/right divide is not what it used to be — that's my point. Let me add that there many liberal Democrats are excellent on human rights issues. Back to your question: Have I moved right? What today is called liberalism is almost unrecognizable from the liberalism of the late 1960s. This is not to be nostalgic about the past — it's a question of being accurate. In his 1966 Cape Town speech, Bobby Kennedy declared himself unwaveringly opposed to communism because it exalts the state over the individual and over the family. He said the best way to oppose communism is to enlarge individual human freedom. Ronald Reagan understood this, but he added another element: increased defense spending as a means of bankrupting the Soviets. Powerful combination, and it worked.

Now what's interesting is that Bobby's speech about freedom is not one his brother is likely to make today. Not because Ted Kennedy is pro-Communist, but because it's a matter of record that he strongly favors increasing government control in and management of the economy and society as a whole.

The worldview that captured the imagination of left-liberals around the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century, the New Deal, has essentially exhausted itself. The New Deal was a sharp departure from the principles of limited constitutional government. We created a bureaucratic welfare state, and the results were terrific — assuming we were trying to foster generations of dependent citizens, broken families, and oppressive government regulations."
Read entire.

Truth about Hillary

Pile on Dean, pile on Hillary. Gee whiz, guys - it's summer. Well, gotta break their momentum and their spirits, I guess as soon as convenient, especially if they deserve it. And Hillary does need a little truth applied to her. Here it comes, in Vanity Fair and in Klein's book. We will see whether she is covered with teflon or not. Doubt it - she is charmless, visibly calculating, and a left-wing nutjob regardless of her camo-of-the-week. Tip to Repubs: show her rabid Wellesley graduation speech and she's a goner.  Maybe Dan Rather will show it on 60 Mins. - aw, no, I guess he is off the air. Otherwise, no doubt he would have wanted the story. Well, someone can show it 4 days before the election...and it's real.