MSNBC’s commercial for itself as pretty amusing. May favorite features Rachel Maddow waxing rhapsodic about the Hoover Dam. 

I like The commercial is funny because Maddow would fight tooth and nail against the Hoover Dam if it were proposed today. Jonah Goldberg explains:

The reason the ad is so funny is that nobody thinks liberals such as Maddow would support anything like the Hoover Dam today. The Hoover Dam is a marvel. But by today’s green standards, it is a crime against nature. If you tried to build it, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace would be in court tomorrow blocking it, with Ms. Maddow cheering them on.

Indeed, look at all the activists attacking the proposed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. It would create thousands of construction jobs and yet liberals oppose it for the usual petrophobic reasons. Ironically, liberals love building highways and bridges, but loathe making it affordable to drive on them. This is just a small example of the Catch-22 liberalism has found itself in. The Left yearns to “go big” but it wants to do so through the extremely narrow routes it has created for itself. They say government must rush into this economic crisis like firemen into a burning building. But they also don’t want to lighten the useless baggage the firemen must carry or remove the Byzantine obstacle course they’ve decreed the figurative firefighters must run through before getting to work.

Tom Ricks, who was no fan of President Bush, isn’t enamored with JFK has Ricks has studied the Vietnam war:  

As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.

In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.

For sake of argument, let’s assume that people that want to eat or drink raw milk are loons. What justifies charging them with conspiracy and holding them on $100,000 bail? No one was mislead. The only people that were “harmed” by raw milk were people who wanted to drink raw milk, so where’s the actual harm. This seems like an awefully big waste of prosecutorial resources.

Toby Young of the Telegraph writes from England on the debt bargain:

For British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty. Under the terms of the deal, the federal government will cut spending by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years and there won’t be any corresponding increase in taxation. That is to say, the American Government has agreed to tackle its deficit by spending cuts alone. The British Government, by contrast, is planning to cut its deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises – and it’s cutting it by a smaller amount.

Even if the Tory Party had won an overall majority at the last election, it’s hard to imagine it adopting such a bold fiscal policy. Yet the American Government is on the verge of adopting this plan in spite of the fact that the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. A year ago, American conservatives were showering David Cameron with praise for adopting such a radical approach to reducing Britain’s deficit and contrasting him unfavourably with their own spendthrift President. Now, our Prime Minister looks like a weak-kneed liberal in contrast to the hard-headed Obama. Whatever happened to the stimulus?

Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.

That’s it folks. We’ve round out of other people’s money to spend on big government programs.

The Pinal County Sheriff demands to know why the U.S. has more troops protecting South Korea’s border with North Korea than we do to protect the U.S. border with Mexico. 

I kind of thought this was a no-brainer. The North Koreans have nukes and their leaders are eccentric (to say the least). The people sneaking across the U.S. borders aren’t carrying nukes, but are coming to the U.S. to find better paying work.

Today I was interested in understanding what law prof Jack Balkin’s new book Constitutional Redemption is about. On the Amazon page for the book, one of the blurbs is awfully facile. Here’s the blurb:

A wonderful meditation on the American constitutional story. Balkin’s living originalism challenges both those who would unmoor constitutionalism completely from the past, and those who would have us ruled by long-dead white men in hideous wigs.
–Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government, University of Maryland

There may be good reasons to support Balkin’s living originalism, but the left’s claim that constitutional originalism is being “ruled by long-dead white men in hideous wigs” is an unserious and dishonest critique. After all, these “long-dead white men in hideous wigs” included in the Constitution Article V which provides the authority and procedures to amend the Constitution.

We are free to amendment the Constitution at any time. That is the right way to update the Constitution for our times—not ad hoc judicial reinterpretation.

If we don’t like what the Constitution says, the fault is not in long-dead white men in hideous wigs, but in ourselves.

I knew that Obama didn’t agree with me on any economic issues. That’s fine. I can’t complain that he is who his voting record said he was. But I’m disappointed that he hasn’t done much, if anything, to end the wars the U.S. is involved in. Instead, he has now gotten us involved in Libya. It would have been nice if he, and his predecessor, had listened to arch-conservative Russell Kirk:

Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? … Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace comes to pass in an era of Righteousness — that is, national or ideological self-righteousness in which the public is persuaded that "God is on our side," and that those who disagree should be brought here before the bar as war criminals.