Category Archives: Reason

Updated: Cronkite Dies; News Croaked Long Ago

He reported the news. Nothing but the facts, ma’am. He never pulled faces to demonstrate his exquisitely politically correct sensibilities; he focused on the events, not on himself; he did not promote a brand and an annual book, he wiped a tear once in decades of reporting, and expressed an opinion with the same frequency. He became a personality by default—through the professionalism he evinced and not by cultivating a persona. His political opinions may have been unpalatable, but Walter Cronkite’s professional performance bore little resemblance to the slobbering done by the current crop of cable and TV men and women.

Anderson Cooper, grizzled “newswoman”—who crumbled when the Rev. Wright scandal broke all over his presidential candidate—and cried, “How do we make this go away?”, Don lemon, the Black-In-America disgrace of an anchor, Contessa Brewer, big-faced idiot of the childish, whiny inflection, Obama Boy Keith Olbermann, Hard-for-Obamby-Ball Chris Matthews, FoxNews cleavages for W., Barbara Walters of the “cutting edge” anti-aging reportage and colonic crusader Katie Couric—how dare they claim they are a strand of the Cronkite DNA? How dare they claim to be filling the shoes and following the example of a decent reporter?

But this is precisely what these fools have been doing since Cronkite passed away: cementing their legacy.

The procession of shameless narcissistic, self-aggrandizing and promoting hustlers—these are the news men and women of contemporary America.

Update (July 21): I’m not terribly familiar with Cronkite’s broadcasts, but from the little I’ve seen, he was professional. Those who’re condemning him for his statism and personal politics, of which I’m unaware (and you’d certainly need to know a good chunk of his oeuvre to pronounce on his opinions, as they are not manifest like David Shyster’s of MSNBC are), are in error—exhibiting some categorical confusion and feeble mindedness. For if Cronkite did journalims as one is supposed to, his politics are immaterial. Most journalists are statist. What do you want, a Mencken? But if they stick to their reportorial duties, their personal beliefs should not matter.

Updated: Barbara Boxer Speaks Down To Head Of Black Chamber Of Commerce

Business, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism, Reason

Democrat Barbara Boxer takes a slow, labored, condescending tone with Harry Alfred, Head Of the Black Chamber Of Commerce. The Senator also makes sure that the testimonies she produces to counteract his are all from black groups. Watch Alfred deftly nail her for appealing to his race rather than to his facts. The annoyance in this little vingette is that only a black or Latin person could hope to get away issuing a similar challenge. And: there are very few such crusaders around.

Update (July 18): John Danforth is absolutely right: Mr. Alfred is locked in a performative contradiction. He is a participant in the discussion in his capacity as a representative of a racial organization, yet he objects when his data is discarded and his race addressed instead. Still, beggars can’t be choosy. Truth is in such short supply that we must welcome it even when it comes from imperfect, self-serving sources.

Updated: Vin Suprynowicz On The Immigration Vexation

Classical Liberalism, Crime, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Reason

“Californians are living now what will be America’s future—unless mass immigration is stopped,” writes Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM. I thought I’d beat the daring VDARE folks by mentioning the latest American of note to be picked-off by an immigrant: NFL quarterback Steve McNair. His alleged assailant was a 20-year-old Iranian woman, Sahel Kazemi. But VDARE, being unbeatable on exposing the miseries and contradictions of enforced, centrally planned “third-world immigration and immiseration”—that proved impossible.

I do want you to read “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch,” an eminently reasonable column by another intrepid freedom lover, Vin Suprynowicz. Other than Vin, myself and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I have not come across a libertarian who was willing—and able—to offer a sane, reality-based, countervailing analysis of current libertarian “thinking” on immigration:

“A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists’ League.

As near as I can figure, I’m “not allowed” to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws — or possibly of any laws, even those few (like the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution — because any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of “collectivist police state fascism” against people who have “not initiated force or fraud.”

I’m not sure how you cut through a border fence without “initiating force,” or how you rent an apartment, register a car and go to work every day using someone else’s Social Security number without “initiating fraud.”

I’m further “not allowed” to cite the cost to taxpayers of illegal alien trespassers swarming our public schools and hospitals, lest I be accused of somehow “supporting” tax subsidies for schools and hospitals.

As it so happens, as a libertarian (not an anarchist) I do stand proudly and publicly against tax subsidies for schools and hospitals. People should pay their own way, and seek private charity if unable to do so. This would bring down costs for everyone. But that’s not enough for my young anarchist friends. Instead, I am apparently obliged to pretend these current, swelling tax burdens do not exist.

Perhaps this is an easier position to maintain if Mommy and Daddy still pay all your taxes, while allowing you to live in the basement, pounding your keyboard.

I do remember hearing my friend Jackie Casey, former head of the college Libertarians at the University of Arizona, regaling me with tales of how she would join her mother to visit rental properties the family owned south of Tucson.

Virtually every night, the human waves pouring north through the area would invade these residence units, using the sinks and other available surfaces for bodily activities which most of us reserve for actual toilets. Jackie and her mom would don elbow-length rubber gloves and go to work with their ammonia and bleach, cleaning up the human feces deposited by our noble wave of “harmless guest workers” who I’m “not allowed” to call trespassers because they “never initiative force or fraud” against anyone, merely going “where landlords and employers want them.” …

“Tara Cleveland was a lovely Las Vegas beauty pageant runner-up, an all-A student who wanted to go to law school and who sang at an annual “Spring Fling” employee party here at the Review-Journal 15 years ago. A short time later she was involved in a minor traffic accident in nearby North Las Vegas in which her car was struck by another car driven by two illegal Mexicans.

These two honored Latino guest workers immediately thought, “What would brave freedom fighters like George Washington and Nathan Hale have done, in these circumstances?” So, of course, they ran away.

Tara pursued and confronted the pair. At that point, channeling the spirits of brave patriots like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these two south-of-the-border freedom fighters shot Tara Cleveland in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun, which had the predictable effect of killing her. They then stole her car and ran away again, eventually reaching Mexico.

It sure puts me in mind of the courage, the principles, the self-sacrifice of the men who risked their lives and their personal fortunes to fight the American Revolution, doesn’t it you?

One of the pair, Joseph Villezcas, was turned over by Mexican authorities in 2006, after they determined he was not actually a Mexican national. He was returned to Nevada and convicted of second-degree murder. But the other, now-33-year-old Fernando Garcia Valenzuela, received sanctuary in Mexico.

Clearly a genius on the order of Ben Franklin, freedom-fighter Valenzuela was not about to stay home, though. He was arrested in California in 1998 and 1999, though authorities there did not link him to the outstanding Las Vegas warrant, possibly because he used fake ID and a fake date of birth — while somehow still not “initiating force or fraud,” you understand.”…

[SNIP]

Read the complete column, “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch.”

This writer has argued that on certain “moral (and legal) matters, patriotic, freedom-loving Americans agree instinctively.” The right and righteous rage Suprynowicz expresses comports with the aforementioned observation.
It also reminds me of my sentiments in “José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band.” To say nothing of my unabashed refusal, in the fractious Comments Section of a BAB debate (scroll down for the referenced exchange), to succumb to Tom Knapp’s egalitarianism-tainted brow-beating and admit that we are all essentially the same, and that—because all immigrants—libertarian scribe ilana mercer and her Ph.D., productive spouse were comparable in their combined contribution to this country to a scum, uneducated, illegal alien, Mexican drug dealer.

In its vim and verve, the Vin piece captures all that stuff. And it’s all good.

Update: Do me the courtesy of at least being vaguely acquainted with my position on immigration (gleaned from going through the Immigration Archive). My policy is not to quote distortions of my positions. I’ve never contended that “illegal immigration” is the country’s demise. Rather, mass immigration, legal and illegal, will indeed be the country’s undoing. I’m an immigration restrictionist for a reason. And those who’re not are rightly termed the “Treason Lobby.”

In response to the tired, so called argument to the effect that, “We have local criminals and welfare bums in the US,” I have countered again and again in articles and on the blog (only the other day) that,
“From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals is morally wrong, why does it follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?”

If the leap is not too difficult, please apply this logic to local versus imported criminals, and please do not again inflict on me the vacuity of the non sequitur, “But, but, we have plenty local criminals in the country…”

So bloody what? The premise of that “argument” is: Importing more detritus is negligible to life and property (the robbed bank analogy), because, once some nationals steal property and snuff-out lives, then non-nationals ought to be allowed to have at these expendable resources.

Update III: BAB’s Pick For The Supreme Court

Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Race, Reason, The Courts

Who said the following: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract”? Answer: Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the black, conservative judge Bush passed-up on nominating for the SCOTUS. This is just one of Brown’s many just utterances. At the time, President Bush’s lickspittles refused to concede that he too considered Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ line.

By now you’ve heard that the president intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. The Sotomayor quotes making the rounds on the blogs are:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. … Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

Janice Brown quotes … Thucydides, F.A. Hayek, and Burke. That’s so white male, so yesterday; so wrong.

Well, King Obama did say he was looking for “empathy” in a nominee, also “code for injecting liberal ideology into the law.”

Race hustler the Rev. Al Sharpton “called the choice ‘prudent’ and “groundbreaking.'”

Just in case anyone’s taken in by the Republicans’ new-found fidelity for the Constitution, Liz Cheney babbled on FoxNew about the wonders of the shattered glass ceiling, adding a couple of Constitutional caveats with respect to the impending shoo-in. It’s hard to keep up with these shifty neocons.

Update I:In “The Case Against Sotomayor,” Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor at The New Republic, confirms, indirectly, what we’ve all known all along: 1) If a candidate is a minority with degrees from the Ivy League, then he or she is invariably a mediocrity. 2) Obama, who’s married to a woman of this class, is also wedded to entrenching her ilk everywhere. 3) Don’t forget that Bush’s goofy Harriet Myers had neither the required education, experience, or intellect.

Writes Rosen:

“The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was ‘not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,’ as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. ‘She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.’ (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, ‘Will you please stop talking and let them talk?’) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: ‘She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.’

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel’s opinion that contained ‘no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case.’ (The extent of Sotomayor’s involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)”

Update II (May 27): I find the media’s judicial jiu-jitsu absolutely unconscionable. I think they don’t know what they do, so corrupt are they. Instead of reporting the record of Sotomayor, good and bad, the menagerie of morons that is the American media has taken on the construction of a meta-argument against the GOP’s yet-to-be-made case against Sotomayor, if you get my drift. This time, the media morons are doing Obama’s bidding in the most subtle of ways.

This is the argument issuing equally from MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell as well as from the lowliest Democratic strategist: Republicans cannot oppose Sotomayor without risking the ire of Hispanics, which they need to court in order to avoid death by demographics. In one fell swoop, and contrary to the mandate of journalism, the Obama media has established two, allegedly incontrovertible truths:

1) That the GOP’s appeal is altered by Hispanics. As far as I can tell, the GOP has never enjoyed even the tentative support of Hispanics.
2) The GOP needs Hispanics to stay alive. That’s like saying that an anaerobic organism needs oxygen to survive. Sure, he can handle oxygen; but does he need it to live? Hardly.

Watch and see: now the media, always slightly smarter than the Republicans, will have the latter twisting like Cirque du Soleil contortionists, so as to, 1) appease and court Hispanics. 2) Do the diversity dance. 3) Water-down a substantive critique of Sotomayor.

Mission accomplished.

Update III (May 28): As someone who has written on anti-trust, and understands the issues, I find this article highlighting Justice Brown’s misapprehension of one such case, smarmy in the extreme — and typical of the apples oranges error, to say nothing of the fanaticism found in so many libertarian quarters. From the fact that Brown does not adhere to my own purist understanding of anti-trust legislation — an understanding that is quite radical—I must conclude that she is an enemy of property? Are you nuts?!

This is a childish tantrum aimed, not at reasoned argument, but at displaying the writer’s rad credentials. It is, moreover, a disingenuous diatribe because intellectually dishonest; it ignores that there is a debate about anti-trust among freedom-loving intellectuals.

The same case can be made with respect to a judge who enforces patent and copyright law. I vehemently disagree with this branch of the law, but for me to pretend there is not a vigorous debate among libertarians about copyright and patent law would be worse than intellectually dishonest; it would be shameful.

Ultimately, if you can’t distinguish a patriot like Brown from a Sotomayor, well then, you deserve to labor under a statist, old succubus such as Sotomayor — literally.

I’m trying to keep it real, here.