Right Side of the Rainbow

We have a market:

The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. Are we to assume that last year, when housing prices were, say, 10 percent higher than they are now, they were exactly right? If so, why is that so? Because the market had set those prices, therefore they were where they belonged? But if the market was the proper arbiter of value then, why is it not the proper arbiter now?

Can the Republican Party be saved?

The name of the agenda doesn’t matter, but the substance does. Voters no longer think lean government, smart and strong defense, and good old-fashioned family values when they think Republican. They think reckless spenders, misguided war and hypocrisy. Republicans “don’t have a vision,” says former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Their behavior is being governed by a bad political model, and we’re losing races.”

Republicans need to focus on cutting taxes, slashing spending and rediscovering their edge on national security matters. More important, they need to jump ahead of Democrats in thinking anew about entitlement programs, health care, technological innovation, global trade and new energy plans.

If a Republican renaissance depends on fiscal probity, then all hope is lost.

From the court’s opinion:

Accordingly, in light of the conclusions we reach concerning the constitutional questions brought to us for resolution, we determine that the language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

Mayday! Mayday! The ship’s going down says Republican campaign chairman Tom Cole, and it’s every man for himself:

I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election.

Myself, I couldn’t quit laughing. I just kept thinking, “What if a gay boy showed up dressed like this, especially if they suspected he didn’t have any drawers on?”

[HT: Hot Air]

It changes nothing — Obama will still be the Democratic nominee — but give our gal credit. She blew that ass out.

The party has now lost three consecutive special elections, all of them in (formerly) Republican districts.

My friends, we’re going down like a $5 whore on Royal St. I predict a loss of 40 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

George F. Will has another series of his patented questions.

Comes now further evidence, from his days as host of Inside Edition, that the man is a hair hole:

Added. YouTube has disabled the video, but you can still watch it here.

To the mammoth deficit confronting federal entitlement programs, add the gargantuan deficit confronting state and local pension funds. But don’t worry. Your government is cooking the books:

The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.

But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.

State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.

Some analysts say public employees should brace for a “massive breach of faith.” For when you add these shortfalls to the ordinary care and feeding of the Leviathan, we will soon be unable to pay our bills even if we tax people at 100%.

What’s a polite synonym for “screwed”?

Already deep into GOP territory, the Democrats have ordered an advance. The battle is desperate.

Though not religious, I’m reminded of an observation from Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Los Angeles has become a pit:

A fight that broke out at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campus-wide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police in riot gear.

The melee, which students said started around noon Friday between rival black and Hispanic gangs, forced authorities to shut down Locke High School and keep students in their classrooms.

Where’s Joe Clark when you need him?

The bill was sponsored by the delightfully named Sen. Doug Stoner.

In an editorial on John McCain’s judicial philosophy, the editors of USA Today show themselves to be shallow and uninformed:

Social conservatives are a key part of the Republican coalition, and their top priority is control of the courts. They hope judges will implement social policy goals that have proved impossible to legislate, particularly reversing the court’s pivotal abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade.

Reversing Roe v. Wade is legislatively impossible, but only because you can’t legislatively override the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions. If the Court itself overruled Roe and returned the nation to the status quo ante, social conservatives could legislate easily in one state after another.

The judiciary is supposed to be an independent branch of government composed of serious jurists with the unenviable task of applying the law, legal precedent and constitutional principles to cases that are by their very nature ambiguous.

No one disagrees with that. The debate is about the nature of the constitutional principles to be applied. In other words, how shall we construe the constitution? The way Justice Scalia wants it construed, or the way Justice Ginsburg wants it construed? USA Today has a lot of resources. What can’t it keep up with the discussion?

The Supreme Court, in particular, is in need of fewer ideologues and more pragmatic consensus builders such as former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a role that has been filled to some degree by Anthony Kennedy after her retirement.

Every member of the Court, including Justice Kennedy, is an ideologue. You cannot avoid ideology, i.e. a system of ideas and ideals. Even the notion that the court should be “pragmatic” is ideological (ideological pragmatism). All USA Today is saying, in other words, is that it wants the court to adopt to its ideology, namely liberalism recast as pragmatism. We all want the court to adopt our ideology.

The kind of ideological conformity demanded by religious conservatives or their counterparts of the left threatens to undermine confidence in the courts as independent, unbiased finders of fact.

Here the editors are just ignorant. Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not triers of fact. The facts of a case are established at trial. Appellate courts resolve questions of law: How does the law apply to these facts?

Until they marshall an elementary understanding of its functions, the editors of USA Today should stop writing about the Supreme Court.

They don’t want the store owner raising his constitutional rights as a defense:

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

[…]

City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

The correct answer is Banana Republic. But Barack Obama must receive partial credit for having answered “Abercrombie and Fitch.”

A racist informant gets a police officer shot to death and an innocent man sent to death row. This is the war on drugs:

Question: Does a foreign citizen have a right under the Fifth Amendment to just compensation for the U.S.-inspired taking of property in a foreign country?

Backstory:

According to her allegations, Ms. Atamirzayeva is a citizen of the Republic of Uzbekistan. She resides in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Prior to the events that are the subject of her claim, she was the sole owner of a cafeteria located on property next to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent. The property on which her cafeteria was located was owned by the Republic of Uzbekistan, but Ms. Atamirzayeva owned the buildings on the property.

Ms. Atamirzayeva alleges that in December 1999 officials at the U.S. Embassy made a verbal demand to local authorities in Tashkent that they destroy Ms. Atamirzayeva’s cafeteria in order to increase the security of the U.S. Embassy. The following day, local authorities forcibly expelled Ms. Atamirzayeva from her cafeteria, then destroyed it while officials from the U.S. Embassy oversaw the demolition. Ms. Atamirzayeva sought compensation from local authorities and from the U.S. Embassy, but those efforts were unsuccessful. She then initiated this takings action in the Court of Federal Claims.

Did Ms. Atamirzayeva prevail? Get the answer, in pdf, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.