First,  let me say that the USSC’s recent (non-)decision was the correct and logical one, if the only issue was the law and the wording within the Constitution. The choice, you see,  was made the moment government made being married a legal matter, hundreds of years ago. That said, however, there are larger things at work, here.

One of the advantages of having a huge library of previous writings on file, is the ability to refer back to those writings and those positions. Saves much in the way of repetitive writing and also, gives you a checkpoint on your own consistency. Back in 2004, I wrote a comment over at Dan Drezner’s place, which addresses some of the issues aside from the law, …

The White House this morning, is serving up fake jobs numbers… again. And they read like a fairy tale. 7.8% unemployment. But notice… the U6.. the real unemployment number… isn’t listed in the reports we all see… It stood at 14.6% as of last month. That’s a fact that has not moved substantially, for months. Here’s the breakdown from the BLS.GOV website.

There’s an interesting trend developing in open to foreign policy, and it’s been there since the outset;  sense Obama speech in Cairo Egypt, his supposed Arab reset, Arab Spring phenomenon and so on, every single attack on our interests, every loss of life, has been labeled a “Lone Wolf” Attack.  Te Obama administration invested quite a bit in the way of news cycles to prepare us for the idea that these were going to be “lone Wolf attacks, and not organized attacks by a AlQuieda or some other agency.

Consider for example Janet Napolitano, who advanced this idea quite a while back. Consider her speech at a Chamber of Commerce event in August of 2011:

WASHINGTON — “Lone

In the spring of 2012, we brought a new addition to The Conservative Reader’s Pages.  Eric Florack at Bitsblog and I spent some time looking at the work we were both doing with our sites and have decided that it would be beneficial to the readers of both to bring BitsBlog into the TCR world.  We have helped each other out by writing for each other from time to time for several years now.  BitsBlog’s format will remain as it has, but you will notice more visibility regarding BitsBlog articles and vice-versa as we build on this relationship and make other changes to The Conservative Reader’s main page in coming months.

The content of BitsBlog remains the responsibility of Eric Florack, similarly to how TCR: …

From the Palm 700P….

Hey Glenn:

London Times: Haiti earthquake: a few more rescues, but aid still slow.“Nobody can go anywhere without security in the city. No aid workers can go anywhere without taking risks with security. That adds to the difficulty of delivering the aid because you not only have to have transport – which is rare – you also have to have some sort of security with you, or you are taking a risk. People are getting angry, people are getting hungry and thirsty.” This is sounding kind of familiar.

As I mentioned before, disaster relief isn’t like ordering a pizza. It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down. I’m

George Monbiot, who is likely the biggest global warming propagandist in the press today, looks at the Global Warming emails that have been the topic of so much discussion lately and admits:

It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

The trouble is, he’s still playing the party line:

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally.

As I told you yesterday and Friday, as well, I suspect this was an inside job, and there is no credible evidence that suggests that the messages were illegally obtained.  …

As goes Energy, so goes the country.

“The worse, the better,” Vladimir Lenin is said to have observed. What Lenin meant was that the worse social conditions became in Russia, the more likely he and the Bolsheviks could foment a communist revolution. President Barrack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently updated Lenin’s maxim, saying, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”Last Friday, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives took those maxims to heart when they pushed through their 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act by a vote 219 to 212. The bill is supposed to address the twin crises of economic recession and climate change by creating millions of new “green” jobs. Instead of an

Have you ever been to Arlington ?
It’s a place like very few others on the planet. It’s true enough; the world would be a better place if places such as Arlington weren’t required to be a part of it, but man is fallible. Our freedoms that so many of us take for granted , come at a very high price. What you see in front of you is but a small part of that price.

Something there is about humans that causes us not to want to be indebted to anyone. It’s perhaps why some are so anti-military. Yet we are indebted to these individuals, and millions more like them, buried on battlefields all around the world. We are indebted in a way that …

Arthur Brooks, at  The Wall Street Journal suggests that there’s a bit of a culture war going on about the future of capitalism.  The headline suggests that “The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism “

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

I dare suggest Brooks in this quote, has this exactly backward.  He’s pointing at a symptom and labeling at the root cause. Not that I blame him, really.  It’s been so long since we’ve dealt with things on the level of principle that even the more learned among …

I am disturbed, but not surprised by some of the comments made by Barrack Obama as regards the role of a Justice of the Supreme Court and thereby, what we will get in the replacement for Justice David Souter, who is retiring, next month. Those comments give us a frightening view of what we have in store from anyone Obama might nominate.

There are many, including the Washington Post… hardly a bastion of liberal thought… who have counseled Obama to look for judicial restraint:

Alas, the once-dominant species of liberal proponents of judicial restraint has relatively few surviving members. Obama should find them – why not Jose Cabranes, the excellent judge whom President Clinton appointed to the 2nd Circuit? – and help