Spitzer Also Edited The Harvard Law Review

Business, Constitution, Democrats, Ethics, Justice, Law, Natural Law

(The title of the post is a tad unfair to Obama, I know. But editing The Harvard Law Review is clearly no litmus test for purity of intellect or ethics.)

One thing is for sure, Spitzer did not forge his political and fiscal fortunes by means of voluntary exchanges on the free market. The Spitzer piranha didn’t give law teeth; but used bad law to bite business to the bone.

Daniel Gross of Slate had this to say back in 2004:

Spitzer made maximum hay out of the “New York State’s Martin Act. The 1921 legislation, as Nicholas Thompson noted in this Legal Affairs piece, gives extraordinary powers and discretion to an attorney general fighting financial fraud. He can ‘subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state,’ make investigations secret or public at his whim, and ‘choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants.’ Extraordinarily, Thompson notes, ‘people called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination. Combined, the act’s powers exceed those given any regulator in any other state.’”

Spitzer embodied abuse of power. As a government goon, he was an extortionist extraordinaire. “He didn’t simply indict. He issued press releases. When Spitzer published a press release detailing a shocking betrayal of trust by” this or the other “of Wall Street’s most trusted names,” the company would lose billions in market value in a matter of days and would quickly settle with the thug.

I know I’ve defended the naturally licit actions of scum such as Scooter Libby against naturally illicit prosecutions. And yes, I support the decriminalization of prostitution (but not its moral elevation). Yes again: I believe Spitzer’s funds are his to move about, and that his transactions were perfectly licit. So call me inconsistent on this count, but this character is so evil, contemptible, and uncontrollable (and nauseatingly hypocritical), I consider it a mitzvah that he has been removed from office and taken DOWN, if by unjust means.

I want to see Spitzer’s name live on in infamy; he ought to ultimately die disgraced, and if we lived under a just legal system, be prosecuted—but for his crimes against innocent members of the business community. Unfortunately—and I guess I’m nothing if not consistent—I’m with Alan Dershowitz on the following count: Spitzer ought not to be prosecuted for his moral failings. Although I’m filled with schadenfreude at the spectacle of Spitzer, there is no case to be made for his prosecution in libertarian law.

More later on Spitzer’s ho—or rather on the manner in which media have infantilized the girl and turned her into a victim.

Update 3: Rev. Wright’s River Of Racism Will Run Through Washington

Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Pseudoscience, Racism, The West

What can I add belatedly to the debate over Obama’s spiritual adviser, other than that he sounds like Chris Rock, and is probably overcompensating for not looking like Kunta Kinte? (Say you haven’t missed me.)

Much-missed Mercerisms aside, what Boobus Americanus cheering for Obama needs to take away from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s words is not this or the other political message. Some of his statements have a core of truth; others are purely phantasmagoric.

What’s crucial here is the tenor of the message uttered by Obama’s mentor—it bespeaks a vile, vociferous, overwhelming hatred of whites.

Rev. Wright’s river of racism runs deep in America and manifests in, for example, violent crime against pale faces, as well as in an ideology that has slowly permeated all cultural products and institutions.

And it has now arrived at the White House.

The Obama presidency will bring this dark force to the White House—and don’t mistake me for claiming said abode has not been infested by the most demonic of forces. It has. Courtesy of the Clintons, the illiterate “poet” Maya Angelou—about whose oeuvre the Times Literary Supplement often has a hearty, cleverly-disguised laugh—became a national name. And worse, of course: Manufactured wars. Lies. Destruction of lives here and abroad.

However, with “Militant Mama Obama” prodding the president, whites will be the only group filled with more hate for Honky than are Michelle, her minister, and his many followers across hijacked American institutions.

I don’t mean whites of the liberal left variety pushing Obama. They love themselves, but do not consider that they are anything but a colorless, divine manifestation of justice on earth. I mean ordinary, self-effacing, brow-beaten, timid whites, who lose jobs daily to anointed “minorities,” and who’ve ceded historical truth to the minority’s “history from below.”

With Mama Obama prodding the president, history from below will blanket America. About the replacement of “the impartial, non-ideological study of American history and its heroic figures with ‘history from below,’” I wrote the following:

“This post-modern tradition regularly produces works the topics of which include, ‘Quilting Midwives during the Revolution.’ Or, ‘Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America.’ It seeks to obliterate memory of the “predominantly British Christian origins of the people who established the political order described by Thomas Jefferson as ‘a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, … derived from natural right and natural reason.’”

The establishment’s holy men are down with these humbugs. The corrupt media, as part of what I’ve dubbed the media-military-industrial-congressional complex, will proceed to propagate these perversions high-and-low.

Remember, when the Wright scandal percolated with great difficulty into cable’s quarters, that grizzled “newswoman” Anderson Cooper responded thus: “How do we make this go away?” Those were his words.

However, Rev. Wright’s wrongs are what the inimitable Diana West has dubbed an existential issue for Obama.

And for America.

Updated 1 (March 17): The chronically incurious media has fallen silent on investigating what may be the philosophical underpinnings of Obama—and certainly Mrs. Obama.

The impoverished argument according to which an anti-war candidate is being smeared has popped up here and there. This is in itself a smear—instead of investigating Obama’s worldview, those inquiring into this murky miasma are being discredited. Answer the questions; don’t cover them up!

It is not about what Rev. Wright said on this or the other date, and whether Obama was in the pews at the time; it’s about what he stands for with all his being, and whether the man he mentored holds the same despicable worldview about whites.

We are told by Time that Obama plans a major speech on race. He has indeed been very astute in subtly and genteelly ensuring any questions about His Illusiveness are framed as a racist. It appears Obama also plans to “explain” the black church. Read sanitize.

The pan-Africanism associated with Black Liberation Thinking has a proud tradition of fabrication—it invented an Afrocentric “Safari Scholarship” to finesse unpleasant historical realities:

“Afrocentric books such as Black Athena by Cornell’s Martin Bernal, Stolen Legacy by George G. M. James, and the school tracts known as the “Portland African-American Baseline Essays” [adopted in some American schools]…[claim] no less that thousands of years ago Egyptians-cum-blacks ‘flew in electroplated gold gliders, knew accurately the distance to the sun, and discovered the Theory of Evolution.’ According to Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese Afrocentrist, Africans invented everything from Judaism, to engineering, to astronomy, including dialectical materialism (although Marxism is no cause for inventor’s pride.)”

In the same essay I posed “one nagging question”:

“Afrocentrics claim that practically every reprehensible occurrence in history is the doing of the Great White and his linear thinking. Why, if Eurocentric culture is so horrible, would they want to lay claim to it? By coveting it, aren’t Afrocentrists providing the ultimate validation of Western Civilization?”

Obama is certainly a product of Western culture. Outrageous as it may seem to some, I’d like to know if he holds it and its originators in contempt.

Update 2: “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself.” This, from a press release courtesy of the Obama camp a year ago, when the senator was about to announce his candidacy. Back then, Obama intended to begin the event with a public invocation by Rev. Wright.

Where’s the pride now?

Update 3: The focus of most “analysis” vis-à-vis Obama and his preacher has revolved around whether the candidate has been sufficiently politic and strategic about his association with the repulsive Rev. Wright. He should have distanced himself from the man sooner goes this impoverished “argument.”

The tack tackles the patina of politics. Is Obama a sufficiently slimy operator to have slithered efficiently from under a tricky situation? Suppose he had come out swinging against Wright. That would not have obviated the only issue at hand here: does Obama too feel the filthy feelings Wright so obviously feels about white Americans; is Obama as rank a racist as Wright is.

There is no question that Obama has a deep bond with Wright; there is no question as to his loyalty to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The question as I posed it in this post is this: why has Obama been spiritually enmeshed in a church which holds such an unchristian, unevolved, hatful philosophy. Could it be that Obama doesn’t think Wright’s worldview is that hateful?

Avoid FrontPages Web Hosting Network

Barely A Blog, IlanaMercer.com, Technology

Those who frequent Barely a Blog know by now that we’ve been down for close on two weeks.

Our host, the FrontPages Web Hosting Network, crashed the server, bungled the backup (or didn’t backup), and corrupted the “backup” data. All this, during a sloppy upgrade/transfer. Forensic recovery service was apparently initiated, but we saw no evidence of a positive outcome.

Follow-up service, moreover, was non-existent. I cannot speak for the hundreds of clients affected, but I was not informed of the bungle, or of the steps being taken to put things right. Hell, as far as I’m concerned nothing was done to correct matters. We were left hanging.

FrontPages Web Hosting is a Third World operation by any other name.

IlanaMercer.com is on the Microsoft FrontPage System, a clunker of a system, but extremely reliable—the site is automatically backed up on one’s PC. (Now that I’m in the process of having a new website designed, I also realize the FrontPage System offers the best editing tools.) We could easily have uploaded IlanaMercer.com right away on one of their functioning servers, but we decided that this would give the incompetents a way to wiggle out of forensically resurrecting the blog. So we waited until it became untenable. After contacting what goes for technical support at FrontPages Web Hosting repeatedly, it transpired that they were unable to locate the blog data base. Lost it; couldn’t find it, whatever.

Naturally, I had been backing my blog up diligently. As you know, BAB is a companion to my main site. On it I offer original daily commentary; not mere links to other reports and commentary. FrontPages Web Hosting appears to have made changes to the backup procedure, so that my backup had been incomplete for close on a year. The consequence of this is that a large portion of the blog has now to be restored manually. Your comments for the last year were lost.

If you are Fujifilm, Honda, and Intel—big customers with dedicated servers—you’re, no doubt, treated well by FrontPages Web Hosting. My business they handled with contempt. I would go so far as to say that this company operates in bad faith (not toward Boeing and the Library of Congress, I’m sure). What else would you call an Internet host that fails to back up its (smaller) clients’ data properly, or does so carelessly? Reliability, after all, has to be the most important feature in a hosting company. Suffice it to say that this isn’t the case with FrontPages Web Hosting. In fact, their advertising here is nothing but a farce. “Expertise, security, highest ranking in reliability”—are you kidding me?