Update II: Boycott The Republican Party (Buy Arizona)

Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Private Property, Republicans, States' Rights

When your city is buckling under the weight of mandated diversity—crime, illiteracy, crumbling and crowded schools, closing hospitals—what do you do? Launch a boycott against a state, Arizona, that is attempting to ward off the same fate.

“The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution Wednesday that cuts some of its business ties to Arizona.”

Most repugnant is that the party that “needs not a bigger tent, but a giant tin-foil hat” HAS “unanimously recommended Tampa as the site of the 2012 Republican National Convention,” when Phoenix was a contender.

Slimer Steele, the attention seeking RNC Chairman, assured the WaPo it “was a business decision.”

That’s the extent to which the GOP is attuned to the passions and interests of its base.

Boycott the Republican Party.

Boycotts are the prerogative of private property owners; as their patronage, or lack thereof, affects only those within their economic sphere. LA City pols should go back to doing what they were hired to do: pick up trash, give permits for Gay Pride parades, etc.

The GOP ought to have quietly given a nod to its base and the plank they claim to support—law and order, the right to repel invaders, self-defense—and plonked their pampered behinds in Phoenix. I am sure there are plenty stripper clubs that meet Steele’s exacting standards in that city.

Update I: DICKING AROUND. Is Dick Morris for real? The guy makes Steele look like a man of integrity. His site: there is nothing worth reading there, except for numbers, stats and other probabilities which can be had at Gallop. But Republicans buy his books in the millions.

Update II (May 13): Back to LA-Council clowns. A city that is bankrupt boycotting a state that isn’t—how rich is that? And how well they are serving their constituents!?

If I haven’t yet issued this cri de coeur: Buy Arizona. And write in to tell us what products to look out for.

Update IV: ‘Elena Kagan As Scholar’ (‘Racist!’)

Affirmative Action, Bush, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Race, The Courts

Eugene Volokh thoroughly and soberly assesses the scholarly record of BHO’s SCOTUS nominee, Elena Kagan, and concludes:

“Kagan, it seems to me, is a successful scholar whose interests have extended beyond scholarship, to government service and to educational institution-building. As a result, she hasn’t written as much as she would have had she only been interested in scholarship (though I suspect that her time in the Clinton Administration helped her produce her administrative law articles). But that reflects the breadth of her interests, and not any intellectual limitations.

… On then to my own evaluation of the First Amendment articles: I think they’re excellent. I disagree with them in significant ways (this article, for instance, reaches results that differ quite a bit from those suggested by Kagan’s Private Speech, Public Purpose article, see, e.g., PDF pp. 8–9). But I like them a lot.

The articles attack difficult and important problems (Private Speech, Public Purpose, for instance, tries to come up with a broad theory to explain much of free speech law). They seriously but calmly criticize the arguments on both sides, and give both sides credit where credit is due. For instance, I particularly liked Kagan’s treatment of both the Scalia R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul majority and the Stevens concurrence, in her Changing Faces of First Amendment Neutrality article.

As importantly, the articles go behind glib generalizations and formalistic distinctions and deal with the actual reality on the ground, such as the actual likely effects of speech restrictions, and of First Amendment doctrine. …

Kagan’s First Amendment work suggests a general acceptance of current free speech law, and an attempt to better understand it and make it more internally consistent rather than to radically change it. I can’t tell for sure whether this flows from a judgment about what’s more useful scholarship, from a largely precedent-respecting temperament, or from agreement with the underlying free speech caselaw. But my guess is that it at least in part reflects a general comfort with the current precedents, and a lack of desire to shift them much.

…On so-called ‘hate speech’ and pornography, the two First Amendment topics on which Kagan has most explicitly written, I likewise see little interest in moving the law much”

[SNIP]

Read the complete post.

“The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend,” writes Stephen Bainbridge, “but she’s probably acceptable”: “I don’t know very much about Elena Kagan other than that a couple of Harvard folks for whom I have a lot of respect think highly of her. When I look at some of the lefties who are opposing her and their reasons for doing so, however, I’m tempted to conclude that she’s the most acceptable–from my perspective–candidate Obama is likely to put forward for the SCOTUS. You can tell a lot about a person from who their enemies are.”

Yes, Old Olby doesn’t much like Kagan.

Update (May 11): The issue of Kagan’s scholarship, although narrow, is relevant as it goes to her intellect. I am pretty sure that if Volokh is impressed—if not necessarily in agreement—with some of her journal papers, that she is intellectually well-equipped. This is more than we can say about SotoSetAsides Mayor.

Kagan’s statism is, on the other hand, guaranteed too. I believe this is a prerequisite for a SCOTUS nomination.

Update II: I’m sorry that Kagan, “as dean of Harvard Law School, … aggressively restricted the U.S. military’s ability to recruit some of the brightest law students in the country” only “because Dean Kagan opposed President Clinton’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

She should have kicked the military bloodsuckers off campus as a matter of principle.

The lawful reach of army recruiters notwithstanding, I’d want to keep those body snatchers away from gullible university kids. The excellent series—it’s non-political but patriotic—“Army Wives” depicts the ugliness of recruitment. Granted, in “Army Wives,” the job of picking up vulnerable poor kids, pumping them up, and shipping them off to serve as cannon fodder in our wars is depicted as a noble one.

Update III (May 12): She’s a racist; the good kind—which is that she is more likely to privilege merit than skin color. And how do we know that she probably sins by trending toward meritocratic hiring? From the fact that as Dean and solicitor for BHO, she has hired few “blacks and browns,” as her detractors refer to themselves.

So that our hopelessly Republicanized and Palinized readers know, the hue and cry over Kagan’s “racism” is coming from the Stupid Party:

“31 of Kagan’s 32 Hires at Harvard Were White,” write the screeches at “RedState.com.” These people have few principles, but worse; they’re bereft of brains.

Besides which, if you are going to be a stickler for quotas, Kagan is probably in the color-coded clear, since her hiring practices no doubt comport, at the very least, with the proportional representation in the general population of the groups she has affronted.

“Wingnuts Furious About …. Kagan Not Hiring Enough Black People/Women,” notes Wonkette. It doesn’t take much—one feeble-minded fem—to recognize Republican frailties.

I quite like that she’s failing the wise Latina test.

Update IV (May 13): What I observed tongue-in-cheek about Bush and the left actually applies to all the actors in the farce of our politics:

“Left-liberals … believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.”

Bush, BHO and their respective political gangs and judicial picks don’t go by the Constitution; they go by judicial precedent. That’s the thing that is revered. To reverse precedent is considered a heretical.

Freddie & Fannie Come Calling … Ad Infinitum

Affirmative Action, America, Bush, China, Debt, Fascism, Sarah Palin, Socialism

“Spare some change, please? Forget that. Hand over another $8.4 billion to “Fannie Mae and sister company Freddie Mac.” “The Obama administration,” reports “My Way,” had “pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie, lifting an earlier cap of $400 billion.”

This via Jeff Tucker, in case you forgot who and what contributed to this affirmative-action driven downturn, here’s a New York Times’ story from 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans….
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

Back in 2008, some analysts had quipped that only North Korea and Cuba were more socialist than the US in the wake of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts. This space has regularly excoriated Republican hacks for referring deceptively to our cherished “American freedoms.” (Also see BAB’s “Fascism Rising” series of posts.)

As Jim Rogers pointed out, you have a free market in housing in China. If you watch this clip, be reminded not only of Bush socialism, but of the socialism of Palin, “Bush In A Bra.” Rather than shutting F&F down, a solution to which Repbulicans are now paying lip service, Palin wanted to fine tune the mortgage miasma; make it smaller and smarter.

I would add that, as a prelude to the discussion of our economic woes, it has become fashionable for commentators to condemn socialism for the rich; this makes one look benevolent. As execrable as corporatism is, it is no reason to ignore the massive wealth transfer from taxpayers to the poor in the context of F & F, a commitment that has contributed immeasurably to the economic meltdown.

Freddie & Fannie Come Calling … Ad Infinitum

Affirmative Action, America, Bush, China, Debt, Economy, Fascism, Sarah Palin, Socialism

This via Jeff Tucker, in case you forgot who and what contributed to this affirmative-action driven downturn, here’s a New York Times’ story from 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans….
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.