News from Around America

The 112th Congress has an unprecedented plan. They are going to read the Constitution-the document that each member will swear to uphold-aloud on their first day. When asked on MSNBC to comment, Washington Post writer Ezra Klein replied “It’s a gimmick. I mean, you can say two things about it. One, is that it has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.”

Take that, foolish members of Congress! According to Klein, the Constitution is unknowable, and is only a tool for people to push through idiosyncratic policy proposals. So much for that oath.

But our Constitution’s history and origin is known. In his famous speech to the Federalist Society Annual Lawyers Convention in 1985, Former Attorney General Edwin Meese reminds us that the Constitution is not “buried in the midst of time.” It was not haphazardly written. The Constitution is a careful drafted document: the Founders “proposed, they substituted, they edited, and they carefully revised.” The Constitutional Conventions’ discussions, disputes, and compromises carefully recorded. The Father of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote comprehensive accounts of the convention. “Others, Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, committed their arguments for and against ratification, as well as their understandings of the constitution, to paper, so that their ideas and conclusions could be widely circulated, read, and understood.” Thus, thanks to the pamphlets, letters, and well-documented debates and drafting records from the founding, the meaning of the Constitution is, in fact, knowable.>

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (published in 2005, recent enough that Klein may be able to understand it) offers a clause-by-clause explanation and analysis of the Constitution. In his opening essay, David Forte argues that “Written constitutionalism implies that those who make, interpret, and enforce the law ought to be guided by the meaning of the United States Constitution–the supreme law of the land–as it was originally written.”

An originalist approach to the Constitution is not for the intellectually lethargic. The Constitution is a well-crafted document meriting a particular interpretive approach: “where the language of the Constitution is specific, it must be obeyed. Where there is demonstrable consensus among the Founders and ratifiers as to a principle stated or implied in the Constitution, it should be followed. Where there is ambiguity as to the precise meaning or reach of a constitutional provision, it should be interpreted and applied in a manner so as to at least not contradict the text of the Constitution itself.” The most interesting debates then, focus on the application of constitutional principles-not on whether these principles exist. This approach does not “remove controversy, or disagreement, but it does cabin it within a principled constitutional tradition that makes real the Rule of Law.”

Contrary to Klein’s suggestion, when the members of 112th Congress swear to uphold the Constitution, they are taking on a great and noble task. Those who seek to use the Constitution to supply definitive policy proposals will search the text in vain. The Constitution does not purport to answer every policy question, but answers the question about how problems should be approached and solved in a democratic republic.

Members of Congress must deliberate on tough issues and are obliged to consider how proposals before them accord with the Constitution. That document is not a legislative code inextricably bound to the eighteenth century, nor is it a mirror simply reflecting the thoughts and ideas of those who stand before it. It is “the supreme Law of the Land” which they are bound by oath to support and defend.

If he doesn't say anything about it, that may be the biggest hint of all.

If you thought the fact that RNC Chair candidate, Maria Cino, was an Obamacare lobbyist was outrageous wait until you hear the latest...

The leading candidate in the race – Reince Priebus’s law firm supports Obamacare and says its constitutional!

Yes, you read that correctly.

Reince Priebus’s law firm supports Obamacare and says its constitutional.

Unbelievable.

The far left Think Progress website reported this today:

On January 14, 168 standing members of the Republican National Committee (RNC) will hold an election to select the next national chairman of the party. Current RNC Chairman Michael Steele is running for a second term against a number of challengers, including Saul Anuzis, Ann Wagner, Maria Cino, Gentry Collins, and Reince Priebus.

Priebus, the current state chairman of the Wisconsin GOP, is positioning himself as the true conservative alternative to Steele...

Despite his heated anti-Obama attacks, Priebus makes a living at a law firm far more comfortable with the policies of President Obama. Priebus works as a partner at the Milwaukee law firm Michael Best and Friedrich LLP. Over the summer, the firm created a series of presentations to explain health reform to its clients and to pitch the firm’s services for employers looking to comply with new health reform regulations. In one presentation, John Barlament, a colleague to Priebus at the firm, said that a health reform repeal is not only unlikely, but that the lawsuits brought by Republican Party allies to declare the law unconstitutional probably have no merit. Referring to the controversy over the individual mandate, Barlament explained that the commerce clause of the constitution “gives Congress authority to act on his legislation.”

It will be interesting to hear what GOP Leader John Boehner, GOP Whip Eric Cantor and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have to say about this.

Is this really the person who needs to be leading the RNC for the next two years?

As expected, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez received last week extraordinary powers to govern by decree for the next 18 months, just about the remainder of his current term. A servile National Assembly that has done whatever Mr. Chavez has asked them to do made the move in anticipation of the ...

Those death panels that the White House first promised were never a part of Obamacare and then promised had been removed from Obamacare are back in Obamacare, but the White House promises us it's nothing new. If this doesn't trouble you, I'll make a promise of my own: When your ...

Churchville VA—As Britain suffers through its third straight harsh winter, a British watchdog group is calling for an inquiry into the failed recent long-range weather forecasts of the British Meteorological Office. The Met Office has long one of the leading promoters of man-made warming fears and therefore has tended to see warming around every corner.

In July of this year, leftist Feminists were openly, and proudly, rooting for an abortion to be portrayed on prime-time television. And in April of this year, leftist feminists like Jessica Valenti of Feministing were grossly bemoaning the fact that MTV’s show, “16 and Pregnant,” did not portray any teenage girls having abortions. Theywanted sixteen year old girls to have abortions. On television. Way to be pro-woman and For The Children(tm), faux feminists! By For The Children, I of course mean totally not at all for the children – unless they can be used and exploited to further an agenda, natch. You see, it’s never actually about women nor children to them; it’s always about an agenda and an ideology that treats motherhood as a yoke around a woman’s neck. Motherhood is so old school and oppressive and stuff! What with those pesky children wanting to be nurtured and loved, while providing a joy that fills one’s heart so full that it cannot be adequately put into words. Well, and wanting to, you know, live. Who do they think they are?

On Tuesday night, they got their wish. MTV ran a special called “No Easy Decision,”in which Markai, a girl who had previously appeared on “16 and Pregnant,” learned that she was pregnant again.

And she terminated the pregnancy baby’s life.

I watched the “special,” even though I didn’t think that I needed to do so in order to point out how wrong such a show is on so many levels. But, unlike Ana Marie Cox, I don’t like to talk about things that I have neither read nor watched, nor do I like to do things half-assedly. And, it turns out, the show was even worse than I suspected it would be. It was infuriating and horrifying, almost beyond words. It was also heartbreaking beyond belief. My heart aches for Markai, and for the other girls (Natalia and Katie) who appeared in the discussion portion of the show.

The pro-abortion rah-rah sisterhood, of course, praised it immediately, which should indicate just how strong the show’s bias was. If you needed any further proof than the fact that the show was aired commercial-free, in partnership with Exhale, a group who says that they wish to raise awareness that abortion “is normal in the reproductive lives of women and girls.” Yes, every woman’s “reproductive life” (love the fancy-pants euphemism) includes the killing of an unborn child. You women who don’t have abortions? Total abnormal freaks! Just look at Sarah Palin, for cripes sake. Wingnuts!

The show was entirely agenda-driven and these young girls were sickly used and exploited for that purpose only. The token nod to a pro-life position was a quick question in the discussion panel: “Did you consider adoption?” One of the girls said that wouldn’t have been an option because it wasn’t the baby part that was scary; it was that pregnancy is icky. She had an abortion to avoid pregnancy symptoms. She also spoke of the sacrifices (her word) that she had to make to pay the $750.00 abortion fee. Her prom ticket, for one.

Elmo changes from red to green...hmmm.

After the cultural terrorism of the environmentalist group 1010s exploding children, one could be forgiven for asking “what next?” Indeed, it seems that the longer one lives (I was born in 1959), the farther and deeper the intellectual, psychological, and moral corruption wrought by the Left’s politicization of virtually everythingpenetrates and takes root within our cultural environment. Nothing, ultimately, is spared the relentless tectonic drive of ideology.

With the Green Dragon still prowling about, and as yet another record breaking winter makes Gisele’s Green Team don their winter gear as they fight the capitalist evils of creeping development and strip mining, the pop cultural Left’s interest in the impressionable minds of American children continues.

So here we are at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and its finally happened. The venerable “Sesame Street” has “gone green.” A new two year curriculum known as “My World is Green and Growing,” intended to celebrate the show’s 40th season, is now in the works. But this is only the tip of the CO2 laden melting iceberg. In point of fact, “Sesame Street” has been somewhat “green” for quite sometime, as have a number of other “old school” children’s programs, as a recent Huffington Post article makes clear.

Why would the HuffPo wish to remind us now of the historical politicization of children’s television? Why, as 2011 is upon us, is the HuffPo interested in pointing out to us the “green” aspects of a 20-year-old “Sesame Street” episode? Could it be that, after years of unusually long and harsh winters, the long, progressive empirical demolition of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis, and two years after the revelations of the Climategate emails and computer code, the pop cultural Left perceives the need to double down on the all pervasive theme of “green” this and “green” that?

The very first sentence in the Huffington Post‘s recent article on the greening of children’s “educational” programming is perhaps as startlingly revealing as anything numerous conservative/libertarian intellectuals have long been saying about the overall meaning and intellectual origins of the environmental movement:

Teaching kids about the environment is most effective when they’re unaware that they’re being taught...

Well...yes, and this is true as well of innumerable concepts and beliefs when they comprise the kind of dissemination of ideas we call propaganda. The term “propaganda” doesn’t necessarily imply poor arguments, wrong beliefs, or intellectual deception. I may propagandize for true beliefs and I may use rigorous, critical argumentation in my propaganda. What it does connote, under most circumstances in which it is used, is a form of idea dissemination the purpose of which is to influence attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately, behavior in the name of a cause or ideological vision.

Even more critical here is the dissemination of ideas in the guise of education to influence attitudes and assumptions about various aspects of the world that come from worldview specific movements such as environmentalism. Such movements seek to indoctrinate others – including intellectually uncritical children – into that worldview, not simply to provide “education” about otherwise unremarkable phenomena.

The HuffPo piece provide 7 examples here, from Sesame Street’s green growing world, to “Widget the World Watcher” (a show with an uncanny resemblance to the new Gisele and the Green Team), and Bill Nye the AGW guy’s leftist cause activism. Some of these shows provided “green” themed episodes, while others (Captain Planet etc.) were entirely ideological in nature.

Nye himself stands out not for any particular episode of his popular show but for his general background of issue advocacy. Nye was a member of the advisory board of the leftist advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists from 1979 to 2009, and an active promulgator of global warming ideology (see the distinguished climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen surgically dismantle Nye here).

And yet, with all of this, could even Elmo have really “gone green?” Yes, and an article at the very fashionably green National Geographic Web site tells us, again in revealing terms, what motivates the new “two year curriculum”:

...the show’s producers hope that children who develop positive feelings about the environment at a young age will grow up to be advocates for the earth. Truglio explained that ”when you love something, you want to take care of it.”

Yes, and the rest of us want very much to take care of our children’s minds and want to ensure that, when we are gone, they will still be living in a free, prosperous, and civil society governed by both the rule of law and endowed by their creator with those pesky inalienable rights that stand, like towering glaciers, between the Left and its better world.

By S. Fred Singer; International climate negotiations collapsed in December 2009 in Copenhagen (soon dubbed "Flopnhagen")--and the just-completed round in Cancun, Mexico, achieved little. Ba...

Dick Meister: There are lots of thieves in this country ... [none] more blatant than the U.S. employers who steal millions of dollars from their own employees -- often right out in the open, unchallenged. It's called "wage theft," and it happens everywhere. The cheating bosses don't take the money directly from their employees. No, nothing as obvious as that. The employers practice their thievery by underpaying workers, sometimes by paying them less than the legal minimum wage. Or they fail to pay employees extra for overtime work, or even force them to work for nothing before or after their regular work shifts or at other times.

Medicare Bound to Bust 'by 2017' as First Boomers Hit 65...

(First column, 1st story, link)

Abengoa Solar expects to start construction in 2011 on a plant in Arizona that will store sun-generated heat to provide six extra hours a day of electric-generating capacity.

Growth in Chinese manufacturing activity slowed this month for the first time since July, but the reading remained relatively strong and analysts predicted further inflation-fighting measures from the government.

When the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia rings in the new year, it will become the latest addition to the euro zone—and the poorest member of a currency bloc that is struggling to restore financial stability.

Venezuela will devalue its "strong bolívar" currency on New Year's Day, the second such devaluation within a year and at least the fifth major devaluation during the government of President Chávez.

The New York Times, bless its heart, is looking out for Grandma. In a front page lead story on Christmas Day, the Times reported that the Obama administration is planning to enact a new Medicare regulation, effective January 1, 2011, under which the government will pay doctors who advise elder patients annually on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment. In other words, the Obama administration will ensure that doctors will be incentivized to badger Grandma year after year whether she wants to pull the plug rather than seek treatment if and when she becomes seriously ill.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), the independent statistical agency in the U.S. Department of Energy, released their reference case forecasts from the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) 2011 last week. The AEO contains projections of U.S. energy supply, demand, and prices through 2035 and serves as a base line for government and industry projections of future energy policies.

Former Obama "car czar" Steven Rattner accepted a five-year ban on pension-fund business in New York and will pay $10 million under a deal with Andrew Cuomo.

Discovery presents new opportunities, challenges for energy-poor country

Many of these cats rake in $100k and over for their jobs. That’s some swanky sanitation work. Many folks on Twitter have made the astute observation that these workers get paid more than our troops.

There have been multiple deaths as a result of the union bosses tantrums:

A blizzard baby delivered inside the lobby of a snowbound Crown Heights building died after an emergency call of a woman in labor brought no help for nine excruciating hours.

The baby’s mother, a 22-year-old college senior, was recovering Tuesday night at Interfaith Medical Center, where her newborn was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. on Monday. That was 10 hours after the first 911 call from the bloody vestibule on Brooklyn Ave. in Crown Heights.

“No one could get to her. Crown Heights was not plowed, and no medical aid came for hours,” said the student’s mother.

More deaths:

- In Queens, a woman tried to reach 911 operators for 20 minutes Monday and then waited for three hours for first responders to arrive. By then, her mom had died, state Sen. Jose Peralta’s office said.

More sadness:

- In Queens, a woman tried to reach 911 operators for 20 minutes Monday and then waited for three hours for first responders to arrive. By then, her mom had died, state Sen. Jose Peralta’s office said [...] One of the callers reached an operator at 8:20 a.m., but responders stymied by snow-clogged streets didn’t reach the Corona home until 11:05 a.m., said Peralta, who wants the death investigated.

[...]

- A woman in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was forced to spend the night with her dead father after the medical examiner’s office took more than 24 hours to claim his body. Ismael Vazquez died at 10:31 a.m. on Monday, and the 82-year-old man’s body remained in his bed until 1 p.m. yesterday. His daughter kept vigil in the living room.

[...]

- A 76-year-old Bay Ridge heart attack victim nearly died when an FDNY ambulance became stuck in a snowbank, but he was rescued by a gang of good Samaritans lugging him through the unplowed streets on a sled fashioned from a gurney.

If union bosses are trying to send a message by refusing to do the work that they get paid six figures for, then message received: they’re extortionists and irrelevant. Every single one of them, from the bosses on down – except for the brave souls whose hearts are soft and felt the need to blow the whistle – should be fired and responsible for any suit by the above listed who suffered.

The brave souls who confessed:

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

Media Matters Soros-Funded Faux Media Outlet Here is predictably too busy stalking Fox/Andrew Breitbart/Sarah Palin/whomever and whatever Soros tells them to stalk to report on this. I’m sure they’re still strategizing on which narrative would best make it all Fox News’s fault.

'There is perception judicial appointments have been made with expectation of favors'