For 8 years, liberals have accused George W. Bush of "shredding the Constitution".  But as Rasmussen Reports notes, Obama supporters don’t even seem to take the Constitution seriously.

OK, civics question:  The job of the Supreme Court is to … what?  What is their primary purpose?  Wikipedia tells us that, while the Court’s purpose was a bit hazy during the early years of our country, it finally congealed.

Initially, during the tenures of Chief Justices Jay, Rutledge, and Ellsworth (1789–1801), the Court lacked a home of its own and any real prestige.

That changed during the Marshall Court (1801–1836), which declared the Court to be the supreme arbiter of the Constitution (see Marbury v. Madison) and made a number of important rulings which gave shape and substance to the constitutional balance of power between the federal government (referred to at the time as the "general" government) and the states. In Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, the Court ruled that it had the power to correct interpretations of the federal Constitution made by state supreme courts. Both Marbury and Martin confirmed that the Supreme Court was the body entrusted with maintaining the consistent and orderly development of federal law.

The Supreme Court is to rule on the constitutionality of the cases, and the laws involved with them, which are brought before them.  That’s their job.  But then, if you don’t know that, or consider the Constitution to be two-century-old Silly Putty, that may alter your perception.

Which takes us back to Rasmussen, where, for starters, the overall numbers seem passable, but not what I would have hoped.

Most American voters (60%) agrees and says the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided on the judge’s sense of fairness and justice.

But take a closer look, and you’ll note that one’s perception of the Constitution alters your vote.

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

The better your grade in social studies, or the better you know how the US government was intended to work, the more you’re likely to vote Republican.  If you think that, in order to change the laws, you just need to change the courts, you’re both badly mistaken from a civics point of view (that’s for the legislature) and likely to misuse the system (e.g. gaining same-sex marriage by judicial fiat rather than legislation). 

And you’re most likely a liberal.

Shire Network News #145 has been released. The feature interview is with El Marco, whose photoblog, Looking At The Left is doing sterling work in exposing the reality of leftist protests. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News asking you to "Consider This!"

In 1939, Frank Capra directed a classic film entitled "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", which won an Oscar for Best Writing.  In it, Jimmy Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, leader of the state’s Boy Rangers, and is appointed, mostly as a joke, as an interim to fill out the term of a recently deceased Senator.  While there, Smith doesn’t just sit back and idly do what he’s told.  Instead, when he sees corruption and graft, even in his own political party, he acts against it, culminating in the films filibuster scene on the floor of the Senate.  (That’s when filibusters were filibusters.  None of this "cloture vote" stuff.) 

Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith is the Everyman in Washington, the small town boy who makes good, and what each of us believes we would be like if we only had the chance. 

Moving from the theater screen to the political scene, John McCain chose Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his Vice Presidential running mate.  To rousing shouts of "Sarah who?", the American political scene, and the media trying to cover it, were thrown into a tizzy.  Immediately, they fired up their dirt-digging Ditch Witch because they had less than a week to fill up their buckets of mud. 

What they found was a women’s basketball player who led her small town team in prayer before the game, and nicknamed "Sarah Barracuda".  A beauty queen pageant winner who won both the "Miss Congeniality" award and a college scholarship.  A college graduate with a major in journalism and a minor in political science.  A hockey mom, and a PTA member.  A moose hunter, with better aim than Dick Cheney.  A 2-term city councilwoman.  A 2-term mayor who was voted into office on a platform of fighting wasteful spending and higher taxes (which she did).  An ethics supervisor who actually supervised ethics; she quit her position because of ethics violations in her own party, and she continued to pursue those violations resulting in record fines.  (Did I mention the guys were in her own party?)  A governor of the state who ran on a clean government platform against a governor of her own party and won, and who sold the previous governor’s jet for starters.  And someone who, throughout all this, maintained a huge popularity rating.

>whew<  So then, with their mud buckets still clean as a whistle, the press, the Democrats and the liberal bloggers had to come up with something.  So they did.  One anonymous diarist on the Daily Kos (where else?) started the rumor that Sarah’s 5th child was really her daughter’s, and that Sarah faked the pregnancy to cover it up.  When it ultimately came out that Bristol Palin was pregnant now, the shock value had already worn off.  As hard as the NY Times tried, putting Sarah and/or Bristol on 3 front page stories on the same day, they just couldn’t get past the fact that the family, given a bad situation, was acting on their principles. 

The same went for Trig, their Down’s Syndrome baby.  Knowing what was ahead they chose life.  For that, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards proclaimed that "Women voting for this ticket is just like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders."  Right.  So allowing children to live is like poultry suicide.  And vacuuming them out when they’re inconvenient is…what, exactly?

Anglosphere rock start and former SNN contributor Andrew Ian Dodge pointed me to more sources of left-wing media smears.  One Washington Post story, later picked up by the NY Times, claimed that Palin slashed funding for teen mothers.  What they failed to note in the story, however, was that she actually tripled the spending on it.  The "cut" came when she wouldn’t quadruple it.  That, of course, is the liberal mindset that comes free with an Obama presidency.

The "Troopergate" allegations of firing a public safety commissioner are probably the worst thing to come out.  I mean, the governor firing someone who the courts agreed served at the sole discretion of the governor must be a scandal, right?  Palin denies that the firing was over the fact that Walter Monegan didn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law Mike Wooten, who himself, it has already been established, tasered his son, drank on the job, and threatend Palin’s family; firing offenses all.  So the firing of Monegan was legal, and if you want to make a connection to Wooten you do so at the peril of your own credibilty.  Yeah, there’s a scandal for you.

The Left is just waiting eagerly for something — anything — to come out that will allow them to brand her a hypocrite, and will manufacture it if necessary.  Don Surber said it best:  "You can be an unrepentant terrorist.  You can be a perjurer.  You can be an ex-klansman (Exalted Cyclops at that).  But Lord help you if you are a conservative and you run a stop sign."

And I would add, "or a Republican woman with hair that is out of fashion".  Yes, they’re even going after that.  Sarah, just prepare yourself for the photographs of you at the scene of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, or in the crowd at the Kennedy assassination.  Y’know, it would be nice if there were a national organization for women to defend her against this treatment.  But I imagine she can handle it herself.

Lisa Schiffren at the National Review Online noted another Veep selection similar to this one.  He’d only been governor of New York for 2 years before getting on the big ticket.  He was an anti-corruption reformer when he was the New York City Police Chief.  He also did a lot of hunting (but no moose, as far as I know).  Maybe Sarah Palin is no Teddy Roosevelt, but he turned out rather well, don’t you think?

Look, Democrats, media, leftist bloggers; please listen to me.  You are watching the movie "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" and you’re booing the Jimmy Stewart character.  Loudly.  Granted, he’s in a brilliant disguise, but it’s still the Everyman (or Everywoman) looking at you from your TV screen.  Politically speaking, Sarah Palin is the anti-corruption, cost-cutting, true-to-her-values type that everybody says they want to see in Washington.  Well, at least they say they want it.  Consider that.

Yesterday, before McCain’s VP announcement, the Democracy Project blog put put their top 10 reasons why she should be VP.  Definitely worth a look.  My favorites ones are 9, 7, 5 and 2, but read the whole list.

Not Romney, Pawlenty, and not Lieberman.  John McCain has made either party choice in November a historic one by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.  This is so big, the Drudge Report website is overwhelmed with readers (I can’t get a link in edgewise).

Aside from the obvious appeal to history, and the disenchanted Clinton voters, Palin brings experience.  "Experience?", you may say, "She’s not even been governor a full 2 years."  Indeed, but that’s 2 years more executive branch experience that the other 3 candidates — Obama, Biden and McCain — combined.  Prior to that (via Wikipedia):

• Became mayor of Wasilla, AK on a platform of cutting spending and taxes.  She did both, with cutting her salary being the first thing.
• Appointed by then-governor Murkowski to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as the Ethics Commissioner.  She quit over ethics issues in her own party, so she’s not afraid to call it like she sees it.

The Wikipedia article has much more about her that I find absolutely excellent.  Great job, Senator McCain. 

I’m currently on vacation in Ithaca, NY. My dad’s father, my dad, his 2 brothers, and a whole host of family in-laws and friends have purchases homes here and retired to the beautiful central New York region. Ithaca is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and over the years students from those schools essentially paid for the homes while they rented them during the school year. We would take our 3 weeks vacation here every year to mow the lawn (5 feet high by summer; students don’t typically mow lawns) and see our cousins. Because the brothers and their sister tried to coordinate vacations, we got to know our first cousins very well, as well as some second cousins and others of various once-removed or twice-removed situations.

Ithaca lives up to the stereotype of a very liberal college town, politically speaking. Obama will carry this town with greater than 95% of the vote. For a very long time, large, “big box” stores — Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Home Depot, for examples — were kept out of town so as not to ruin the local town charm. The problem was, suburbs just outside the town were quite accepting of these stores, and they saw their tax revenues jump as the stores came in, while Ithaca found itself in a bit of a crisis. Money came in to the town, but it flowed out to the mall just on the other side of the town line or in burgs 20-30 minutes away. In the end, the “CAVE” people (liberal folks who were labeled “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”) had to relent to the fiscal realities. Ithaca now has a thriving shopping area for those that want the big stores, and after 5 or so years it still has The Commons where you can stroll around to find that corner bookstore.

What the CAVE people were worried about didn’t really happen, or at least not nearly to the extent that they predicted. The Meadow Court and the Grayhaven motels, longtime residents of Ithaca, have survived the introduction of the Hampton Inn chain. The Grayhaven caters to dog owners, one of the ways they stay competitive; defining their market. The local Wicks Lumber, which has a small hardware store attached, is still in business, even with Home Depot less than 2 miles away. The “mom & pop” establishments are essentially still here. The free market didn’t kill them off, and the CAVE people have grudgingly accepted it. (Well, some were simply out-voted. Acceptance isn’t always a given.)

In the end, capitalism worked. People got more choices, and the existing businesses survived, either by defining their markets, trading on their nostalgic or hometown quality, or enjoying customer loyalty going back decades. In Ithaca, both kinds of consumers — for the large and small businesses — exist, and businesses of both types can exist, side-by-side, in a capitalist society.

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Shire Network News #137 has been released. The feature interview is with Guy Earle, who committed the unpardonable sin of having a go at some hecklers at a show in Vancouver who were members of a protected class. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News, asking you to "Consider This!"

This is a "Next Generation" update; stories that cover what’s going on in the world regarding the children, how they’re being brought up, brought down, pampered and hampered. 

We start with a doctor in Boston, Massachusetts that is prepping children as young as 7 for…a sex change.  Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatrician at Boston’s Children’s Hospital is taking in clients to give them drugs that delay the onset of puberty so these kids can decide what gender they really want to be.  So now, we’re doing with drugs what they used to do to boys in the middle ages in order to keep their high-pitched voices for the choir.  Only now, it’s "for the children".

Spack says that the permanent infertility is worth the trade-off, because, as he says, these kinds of kids are deeply troubled and have a high level of suicide attempts.  OK, so now, instead of addressing this deep troubling, we indulge their confusion?  Drug addicts are deeply troubled, too.  I suppose the next thing is giving them free needles and free drugs.  Oh, wait, they’re already doing that, especially in Canada.  Well, then, it’s be like giving cutters, those who inflict pain on themselves, clean razor blades.  Ah, nope, already been proposed by the Royal College of Nursing.  OK, something that even liberals would…ah ha, got it!  It’s like giving cigarette smokers free cigarettes!  They may not be as deeply troubled, but many do die early from the addiction, and as liberals like to remind us, even it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

Anyway, there are number of other doctors at prominent hospitals against it, so we have ways to go on this front.  Stay tuned.

In other news, the National Children’s Bureau in Britain has issued guidelines for nursery workers to be on the lookout for racist behavior in children.  This include things like a 3-year-old turning up their noses at unfamiliar foreign food.  I’m sorry, but when my kids were younger, they all had a penchant for saying "yuk" to unfamiliar food of any sort, foreign or not.  I don’t think they could tell what was domestic and what wasn’t.  Three-year-olds don’t ask, "Is that an imported cheese?  I’m sorry, but I only buy American; Wisconsin, specifically."  Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents from this 366-page guide as possible.  The guide says, "Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."  Heh, indeed.  It means more money for this government program to strain at gnats with.

Moving over to Germany, a new bill, which has the backing of dozens of big-time German politicians, would lower the voting age…to 0.  Babies could voice their opinions on the economy, and toddlers could weigh in on their education.  If you want to pass a bill on military deployment, you’ll have to get that crucial 3-10 year-old demographic on your side.  Again, not likely to happen soon — they tried before as recently as 3 years ago — but as with other efforts "for the children" and against disenfranchisement, it’s not dead yet.

And finally, from Pakistan, we have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that 2000 women took a group vow last Wednesday.  They raised their voices in unity.  "I am woman, here me roar."  The bad news is that these burqa-clad Islamic women all vowed to raise their children to be Jihadis. 

Well it could be worse.  It could be a bunch of gender-confused kids going out to vote to send themselves out to holy war against people who call them "racist" for saying "yuk" to pork.

Consider that.  (Well, no.  Don’t.)

Technorati Tags: podcast, Shire Network News, children, Dr. Norman Spack, Boston Children’s Hospital, National Children’s Bureau, Britain, racism, Germany, Pakistan, jihad

(Dan Trabue, frequent commenter on "Stones Cry Out", the group blog I run, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

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As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

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Is Internet access now a "right" that must be administered by the government?  Google apparently thinks so.

Technorati Tags: Google, socialism, Internet, broadband

Your taxpayer dollars at work.  Michelle Malkin has the story.

If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?

OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics?  A real yawner, right?  What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue? 

Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.

Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market. 

Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe).  If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN.  A small excerpt:

To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for. 

For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself.  Well, until he actually joined it.

So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next?  He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin. 

If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident.  If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past.  Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, Barack Obama, community organizer, Chicago, socialism, Sol Stern