A Stitch in Haste

• China’s Communist Thugs + Internet = You Know What: http://snipr.com/9hejs #
• Did you notice that Reid could not make a coherent constitutional argument against Burris on MTP? That’s because there is no such argument. #
• Vandalism is evil, but let’s dispense with the notion that there’s such a thing as a “gay-friendly Catholic church.” http://snipr.com/9hgs8 #
• The New York Times pulls a “Washington Times” and censors the word “gay” — http://snipr.com/9hj2s #
• Obama pre-nominates HLS dean Kagan to Supreme Court. Time to start digging up her paper trail. http://tinyurl.com/92fvnw #
• The majoritarian mob always turns on itself in the end. Especially the bigot mob: http://tinyurl.com/82bmra #
• Why on God’s gray earth would people pay money to read a free blog (or newsfeed) on a Kindle? #
• The latest bailout-seeker (funny): http://snipr.com/9i8jd #
• Since Republicans are not libertarians, the fact that Republicans might be racists does not make libertarians racist. http://is.gd/eDR2 #
• Today’s non-bigot: MSM pic of gay couple makes him “puke all over breakfast table.” (P.S. It wasn’t a gay couple.) http://snipr.com/9icf8 #
• I don’t suppose there’s any point noting that Broadway, now dying, is among the most heavily unionized industries? http://snipr.com/9id58 #
• Must finish important blog post before “Intervention.” Entering Tweek mode in 3, 2, … #
• If I’m addicted to “Intervention,” does that mean I need an intervention? #
• Actually it’s an Intervention marathon! (There’s always an enabler, isn’t there?) #

Note: The “#” links at the end of each entry go to Twitter, not to any external link. You should generally ignore these links.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweet This

Now that it matters not one whiff, Bob Barr is repudiating the federal Defense of Marriage Act (which he authored):

DOMA was indeed designed to thwart the then-nascent move in a few state courts and legislatures to afford partial or full recognition to same-sex couples. The Hawaii court case Baehr vs. Lewin, still active while DOMA was being considered by Congress in mid-1996, provided the immediate impetus.

The Hawaii court was clearly leaning toward legalizing same-sex marriages. So the first part of DOMA was crafted to prevent the U.S. Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause — which normally would require State B to recognize any lawful marriage performed in State A — from being used to extend one state’s recognition of same-sex marriage to other states whose citizens chose not to recognize such a union.

Read that again: Barr knowingly authored a statute — a statute — for the express purpose of negating one of the most important provisions of the Constitution — the Constitution.

That (most un-libertarian) error he doesn’t apologize for. He only apologizes for the political error of miscalculating the impact on states that might in fact want to recognize same-sex marriage; that DOMA — his words — “is not working out as planned.” The pesky fact that (part of) his statute is almost universally thought to be unconstitutional is utterly lost on him.

He’s still an ass. Just like the Big-L Libertarians who nominated him.

Meanwhile, here’s a news flash: DOMA is in fact working exactly “as planned.” It is hurting gays. Cruelly, viciously and in very un-American ways. Exactly as Barr intended it to.

Gays (and libertarians) should not be quick to forgive Barr for his sins.

(Via Hit & Run.)

Previously:
–Obligatory Barr-DOMA Post
–Barr’s Half-Hearted, Half-Truthful DOMA “Repudiation”
–Bob Barr on Lawrence v. Texas, 2003

Tweet This

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell tossed out this scrumptious piece of micro-blather twice on yesterday’s “This Week” (I’m paraphrasing):

Fifty percent of the American people are represented by Republicans in the Senate.

Of course, McConnell can only come up with that ridiculously pointless factoid by counting the 15 states with one Senate Republican and one Senate Democrat. But that’s not the point.

The point instead is that the raison d’être of the Connecticut Compromise — indeed the very raison d’être of the United States Senate — is precisely to tell “fifty percent of the American people” to take a flying leap. The Senate was explicitly designed to ignore population. So how about we ignore it?

Does McConnell really want to open that door? Fine, I’ll walk through it, first by noting that 97% of the American people are not farmers — but farm states control about one-quarter to one-third (depending of your definition of “farm state”) of the Senate’s votes (and about 100% of the Agriculture Committee). Which is precisely why, so long as we have the Senate, we will have obscene farm subsidies and agriculture policies (not to mention the ethanol scandal).

Or a more current-events example: The UAW represents less than 0.2% of the American population, but controls at least 2% of the Senate vote (likely more).

The 25 smallest states have less than 17% of the population, but half the voting power of the Senate. So not only is it not surprising that insane laws (and especially insane appropriations) are regularly passed. What’s surprising is that any sane law or appropriation ever gets passed.

Like I said: McConnell really doesn’t want to open that door.

Tweet This

Doc Palmer explains:

The concept of a “natural unemployment rate” follows from looking at unemployment as a search process. According to this theory, people search for a new job so long as the expected benefits of additional search exceed the expected costs of additional search. Once the expected costs of additional job search exceed the expected benefits, people stop searching and take the best offer they have found (and that is still available) to that point.
…
In Canada, one reason the natural unemployment rate seems to have declined from its peak in the 1980s is that EI (”employment insurance”, the current euphemism for unemployment benefits) has become less lucrative and other policies have also been altered with the result of somewhat lowering the height of the social safety net. One result has been that people search less and for shorter periods of time when they are unemployed, thus lowering the unemployment rate.

You mean that (socialized-medicine) Canada is, in at least one respect, less welfare-statist than the U.S.? Go figure.

Now comes word, meanwhile, that President-Elect Obama hopes to significantly expand unemployment benefits.

One of the mitigating joys of Career 2.0 is receiving 39 weekly direct deposits of $405 from the New York State government. That’s a puny fraction of the well over $100,000 in state income taxes I’ve paid over the years (not to mention New York City income taxes, state sales taxes, etc.), so suffice it to say that I, qua libertarian, am hardly ethically conflicted about it. And while I do faithfully perform all the required job-seeking activities that attach to receiving unemployment insurance, let’s just say I’m not in any rush. “Expected benefits” versus “expected costs” indeed.

Meanwhile, as I commented over at EclectEcon:

Note that the debates in the U.S. over extending benefits are increasingly focused, not on the “automatic stabilizer” paleo-Keynesian argument, but instead on neo-liberal notions of “humaneness.”

If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So yes I too think the natural rate of unemployment in the U.S. will undoubtedly rise.

And I am Exhibit A.

Tweet This

–Do we really need yet another Ayn Rand biography?

–Who said the following, and in what context?

In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules.

–Will Democrats, either elected or electing, ever do anything about Charlie Rangel? Is there no limit at all?

–A Special Trick Question: What kind of duties does being a UAW boss entail?

–A Special Rhetorical Question: Did you pay too much for your mattress?

Tweet This

• Have you noticed the switch in DTC commericals from “Ask your doctor” to “Ask your prescriber”? The PA revolution is now in full swing. #
• Half the country pays no federal income tax, and still the New York Times bitches about “tax fairness”? Pathetic. http://tinyurl.com/72omqv #
• Yes indeed, nothing says “elite American aristocracy” than — um, you know — “Kennedy” http://tinyurl.com/9ex4ky #
• I’ve installed Google Friend Connect on the blog. Please take a moment and join. (Right sidebar.) http://snipr.com/9g735 #
• Mankiw has some tax progressivity numbers, but they include FICA. If you love the working poor, then you hate Social Sec. http://is.gd/exA7 #
• Barely 10 minutes into “Hancock” and already have to pause from laughing so hard. “Mountaintop!” “Mountaintop!” #
• Ricahrdson out. Must have been something embarrassing, given that it was only Commerce Secretary, which is rather unimportant these days. #
• Retweet @Libertywriter Train search by Border Patrol just another incident from the Constitution-free zone http://tinyurl.com/76n8w4 #
• Time for Dead Space. (I should have known theocrats were the cause of all the ship’s woes.) #

Note: The “#” links at the end of each entry go to Twitter, not to any external link. You should generally ignore these links.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweet This

Time to clean out the aggregator —

ITEM: Yet more allegations of misconduct for House Ways & Means Chairman Charlie Rangel. This time Rangel is accused of soliciting a large donation from executives of AIG to a new school being named for Rangel. Those executives then asked Rangel for a change in the tax code less than a month later. Coincidence? Too many previous Rangel posts to list.

ITEM: China’s Communist thugs arrested a group of parents whose children who fell ill or died from drinking adulterated milk, in order to prevent them from holding a news conference protesting the government’s role in the catastrophe. Previous posts here; Beijing Olympics archive here.

ITEM: Speaking of foreign government thugs, the U.K. is poised to criminalize “extreme” pornography. The U.K. law seems to be targeted at bondage & sadomasochism pornography; in the U.S., “extreme” would be a hopelessly vague term to withstand constitutional scrutiny (not to mention the strict scrutiny required by the First Amendment). Previous post here. (Via Hunter of Justice.)

ITEM: Georgia, notorious for its extremist sex offender laws, is poised to enact yet another restriction, requiring registered sex offenders to provide law enforcement with the passwords to any and all Internet accounts the offender might have. Privacy advocates are considering a legal challenge to the draconian measure. Again, too many previous posts to list.

ITEM: Litigious atheist Michael Newdow is the lead plaintiff in an effort to block the appending of “so help me God” to Barack Obama’s inauguration oath. The lawsuit also seeks to enjoin the invocation and benediction as church-and-state violations. As I noted in a comment elsewhere, Newdow & Company might achieve more if they focused less of doomed-to-fail lawsuits and more on exposing the deliberately created myth of George Washington and the oath.

ITEM: Facebook has come under fire for deleting a photo showing a member breastfeeding her infant child. I have defended the right of property owners to ban breastfeeding on their premises previously; Facebook should of course be afforded the same respect for its private (cyber) property.

Tweet This

• Reminder: Health care is a scarce good and must be rationed. Do you really want bureaucrats doing the rationing? http://tinyurl.com/76la4w #
• I would focus less on “working in the cold” and more on “working for an asshole.” Either way, is the pay worth it? http://tinyurl.com/9gl5sy #
• Poor kid looks like he was auditioning for Doctor Who. RIP. P.S. Pointing weapon at police = bad. http://snipr.com/9en2c #
• Finally replaced the digital camera that I lost at Seaword in July. Fuji Finepix A805 (refurbished, the true mark of unemployed poverty). #
• My brief experiment with being a Joe.My.God reader is now over. “And not short enough it was.” http://snipr.com/9ewv1 #
• Rainbow Room closing. NYC economy will get worse before better. But Bloomberg’s a financial genius and should stay another term, right? #
• U.S. to invade Mexico. At least that’s what the Grand Warlock says. And who are we to doubt the Grand Warlock? http://is.gd/euQ8 #
• God apparently getting ready to smite Utah (and possibly Dick Cheney & Larry Craig): http://snipr.com/9f64r #

Note: The “#” links at the end of each entry go to Twitter, not to any external link. You should generally ignore these links.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweet This

Here’s a case about marriage where the more purist libertarians are spot on:

There was good news yesterday for Jason and Jennifer O’Neill, a Philadelphia couple whose 2005 Bucks County marriage had been thrown into question because they used a minister ordained online. For many other similarly situated couples, too.

Bucks County Court Judge C. Theodore Fritsch Jr. declared the marriage valid, even though the minister — Jason O’Neill’s uncle, Robert A. Norman — had been ordained in a matter of minutes by the Universal Life Church after completing a short form online.

In the 2007 case that threw the O’Neills’ marriage and hundreds of others into question, a York County judge declared a marriage there invalid because the online minister “did not regularly preach in a church or have an actual congregation.”

But Fritsch ignored the issue of a church building and congregation, ruling instead that the sole question before his court was whether a Universal Life Church (ULC) minister met the Pennsylvania Marriage Act criterion that a minister, priest or rabbi have “a regularly established church.”

I used to worry about this issue in law school — but in Evidence class, not Con Law. If the law is going to recognize a “cleric-penitent privilege” (or the even worse term, “spiritual advisor”), then that invariably means the law deciding who is and is not a cleric. And that notion distresses me.

And this judge, while reaching the correct conclusion in this particular case, didn’t really help matters all that much. He merely kicked the can down the road a bit. Instead of deciding who is and is not a cleric, the government will instead decide what is and is not a “regularly established church”? That’s not much better — indeed it could be much worse.

Much of the folderol surrounding the marriage ceremony is legal or contractual in nature — and therefore perfectly reasonable. Marriages must generally be witnessed, for example, for much the same reasoned that wills must generally be witnessed — there is an objective rationale behind the requirement.

But what exactly is the objective rationale of requiring that a religious wedding be officiated by a cleric from — ugh — a “regularly established church”? Why can’t any marriage, whether civil or religious, simply be performed by any competent adult who stands at arms-length from the spouses? (If anything, the fact that the officiator here was an uncle of one of the spouses might be problematic. But even that’s a stretch.)

If the state feels some deep-seated urge to bureaucratize the wedding officiating function, then fine: require officiators to register, but allow any competent adult to do so — something like the system for notary publics.

But please let’s keep government out of the “what’s a ‘real’ church” business. That way lies nothing but wailing and gnashing of teeth.

(Via Religion Clause.)

Previously:
–If You Want to Curse a (Supposed) Libertarian, Here’s Your Chance
–More on Marriage and the “Party A / Party B” Bigots

Tweet This

• California’s Big-L Libertarians (finallly) oppose Prop 8: http://is.gd/ep3Y #
• Air security is everyone’s responsibility. Did I say “air security”? Sorry, I meant “paranoia and xenophobia.” http://tinyurl.com/7av5k7 #
• Who is Morrissey? Morrissey is Who! (Maybe.) http://snipr.com/9duq6 #

Note: The “#” links at the end of each entry go to Twitter, not to any external link. You should generally ignore these links.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweet This