Losing the Republic to a Tin Pot

King v. Burwell Is Much Bigger Than Obamacare | The American Spectator

By David Catron – 3.2.15

The Supreme Court is about to decide whether we are a nation of laws or men.

John Adams, in a 1775 essay referencing the Roman historian Livy and other sources, wrote that a republic was “a nation of laws, not of men.” As recently as fifty years ago, most Americans would have intuitively understood his point and why it was relevant to their lives. Today, it isn’t clear that the President of the United States, the leaders of the Democratic Party, or the members of our “news” media would grasp the meaning of Adams’ words, much less that they still matter today. We will soon discover if the same can be said of the Supreme Court.

The Court will hear oral arguments this Wednesday in King v. Burwell. The petitioners in this case want the justices to rule that the Obama administration must abide by the provisions of PPACA that govern insurance subsidies. The text of that law, better known as Obamacare, requires that all subsidies must flow through exchanges established by the states. But due to the refusal of 36 states to set up such “marketplaces,” the Obama administration cobbled together federal exchanges in those states through which it is now issuing illegal subsidies.

In other words, the President conducts himself in a manner utterly inconsistent with republican principles and his constitutional oath. Obama obviously believes the law is what he says it is, a delusion evidently shared by his party and the press. He behaves as if he possesses the power to unilaterally change laws and create new ones merely because the opposition party actually opposes his agenda. Adams characterized such behavior as that of “a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy.”

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Illegal Aliens Are Now Queers

Perpetual Grievance by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal 1 March 2015

The latest advancement in victimhood links “queer theory” with illegal immigration.

The average illegal alien might be puzzled to see his situation
analyzed under the rubric of “queer theory.” That confusion would only
mean that he has not spent enough time in university circles, where such
pairings spring naturally from the all-consuming campaign to magnify
victimhood and denounce the American status quo. A recent talk
at UCLA’s political science department, “Undocumented and Acting Up:
Queering Sovereignty in the Immigrant Rights Movement,” drew on “the
insights of queer theory” to propose that both illegal aliens and
HIV-positive homosexuals are victims of “simplistic accounts of
individual action.” Their “death and suffering,” according to visiting
lecturer Cristina Beltrán, are unjustly attributed to their own
actions—presumably, crossing the border illegally, in the one case, and
engaging in high-risk promiscuous sex, in the other. Queer theory,
however, understands these problems to be the result not of voluntary
behavior but of “global capitalism, human desire, and government
failure.”

Two years ago, after mockery
in the right-wing press, UCLA scuttled plans for a center to teach
illegal aliens how to become labor- and immigration-rights organizers.
But the desire to induct the illegal population into the growing roster
of preferred academic victim groups remains strong at UCLA and
elsewhere. Being brought under the aegis of “queer theory” is as royal a
reception as one could hope for. Beltrán approvingly notes an irony in
illegals’ “queer” campaign against the state: illegal-alien activists
simultaneously denounce the state while seeking to gain its resources.
As for that latter effort, do they ever! According to the New York Times,
communities across the country are “still struggling to accommodate”
last summer’s surge of illegal aliens, which has taxed local health-care
and educational systems to the breaking point.

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Some Reasons Why We Can't Trust this Administration!

Judge Jeanine Pirro - Opening Statement - February 28, 2015 - Fox News - YouTube

Feb 28, 2015

Judge Jeanine Pirro - Opening Statement - February 28, 2015 - Fox News

NO KIDDING! CPAC, An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

CPAC, An Idea Whose Time Has Gone | The American Spectator

The Ministry of Obamaspeak

Net-Taxes planned, free access and speech to be curtailed as the Net is to be regulated as a utility. 

Right out of George Orwell or more likely, Joseph Goebbels.  m/r

Time for Congress to Gut the FCC | The American Spectator

By Tom Giovanetti – 2.28.15

Under an Obama-appointed chairman it is no longer independent but a travesty.

A couple of weekends ago, when my entire family was down with illness and rain was pouring outside, the Internet was our best friend. What better to do while sick in bed than catch up on all of my Facebook friends’ lives, find new ebooks to download from Amazon.com, catch up on a backlog of movies over Netflix, and tweet until my fingers were tired? And I don’t just mean myself—the whole family was doing all of that, and more. Watching YouTube videos, posting YouTube videos. Between coughs and sneezes.

Here’s what’s remarkable: According to the FCC our Internet connection, which facilitated all of that activity flawlessly, without a glitch, no longer counts as broadband.

There is literally nothing we want to do on the Internet that our connection can’t handle. And we have a teenager, for a clincher. We’re reasonably early adopters of just about every Internet connected device and service. But our Internet connection no longer meets the FCC’s definition of broadband.

Our connection speed was squarely within the definition of broadband until just a couple of weeks ago, when the FCC retracted previous policy standards and redefined broadband.

How does that make sense? Why would the FCC set a standard that so obviously isn’t true? How does a supposedly “expert agency” get something so wrong?

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Hypocrisy, Just a Bit: Pope Francis Rails Against Modern ‘Throwaway Culture’

The Vatican and Obamaland have many similarities. m/r

Pope Francis Rails Against Modern ‘Throwaway Culture’ | TIME

What was that about Freedom of Speech and Expression? Silly Fool, this is Obamaland

When rational thought gets in the way, count on the heat weight of the Spanish Climate Inquisition! m/r

The Warmish Inquisition :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn  February 28, 2015

The news this last week reminded me of a piece of mine from May, called "Michael E Mann: Liar, Cheat, Falsifier and Fraud" (I toned down the headline upon the advice of counsel). Therein I wrote:

It's always fun in a legal battle to have something bigger at stake than a mere victory. In Canada, we put the "human rights" system itself on trial, to the point where the disgusting and indefensible "hate speech" law Section 13 was eventually repealed by Parliament. It seems to me that in this particular case the bigger issue is the climate of fear that Mann and his fellow ayatollahs of alarmism have succeeded in imposing on an important scientific field.

I confess that, until Michael E Mann sued me, I was not fully aware of quite how thoroughly "Shut up, he explained" is now the First Law of Climate Science:

If you're a younger scientist, you know that, if you cross Mann and the other climate mullahs, there goes tenure, there goes funding, there goes your career: you'll be cut off like Briffa's tree rings. I've been stunned to learn of the very real fear of retribution that pervades the climate world.

Well, that was last year, when the Warmanos waiting in the back alley took the hockey stick to, among others, Lennart Bengtsson and Nate Silver. Bengtsson was a former director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, winner of the Descartes Prize and a WMO prize for groundbreaking research, and even a friend and collaborator of Mann's at scientific conferences. But he made the mistake of, ah, seeking to expand his circle of climate acquaintances, and so Mann was forced to sneeringly dismiss him as "junk science". Nothing personal, you understand. Just taking care of business. Nate Silver is the hipster who became a hero to the American left because of his statistical predictions of the 2012 election and then set up his own "538" website dedicated to "data journalism" - just the data, the facts, the numbers, the analysis... Mann was obliged to explain to him that these considerations do not apply to climate science.

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We Always Know When to Expect the Climate Hoax Inquisition from Democrat Rep. Raul "Torquemada" Grijalva

The Climate Hoax SS has new targets thanks to Global Warming Scammers and ignoramuses like Grijalva and Obama. m/r

Fellow Inquisitors-ignoramuses Grijalva and Obama. 

 “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?” 

A Shameful Climate Witch Hunt

by RICH LOWRY February 27, 2015 

Dissenters from approved thinking are the subject of menacing inquiries.

 Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers who harbor impure thoughts about climate change. 

One of the targets is Steven Hayward, an author and academic now at Pepperdine University. As Hayward puts it, the spirit of the inquiry is, “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?” 

Grijalva’s letters were prompted by the revelation that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a skeptic, didn’t adequately disclose support for his research from energy interests. 

Soon’s lapse aside, the assumption of Grijalva’s fishing expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy is a greedy tool of Big Oil and must be harried in the name of planetary justice and survival. Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself. 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414526/shameful-climate-witch-hunt-rich-lowry

Man of the People, Those Country Club People

No More Bushes!! 

Why was Jeb Bush a speaker at CPAC and Ann Coulter wasn't? m/r

Jeb to Booing CPAC Activists: Im Marking You Down As Neutral

Black "Scholar" says Black Students Are Inferior

The tide has risen. m/r

In a memorable phrase, it warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools. That phrase, he said, was a “euphemism.” A euphemism for what? “For us — for African Americans.” 

Trigonometry Is Racist!

by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON February 27, 2015

[Black] scholar says that emphasis on STEM education is bad for blacks.

Earlier today on Sirius XM Urban View, an African-American talk station, the guest was Daryl Scott, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The conversation turned to STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — education, and the origins of the ongoing push to encourage institutions and students to focus on those subjects. 

Can you guess what happened? 

In 1983, the guest explained, a commission empaneled by the secretary of education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform.” In a memorable phrase, it warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools. That phrase, he said, was a “euphemism.” A euphemism for what? “For us — for African Americans.” 

There is nothing that happens in these United States that will not be impugned as secret racism. Nothing. “A Nation at Risk” is in fact full of memorable phrases — “unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” is redolent of the Cold War concerns of the day — any of which might be read as racist code by a 21st-century progressive, because a 21st-century progressive can read the ingredients on a pack of Bazooka bubble gum as racist code. There is, unhappily, an entire cottage industry (is “cottage industry” racist? or just another example of serf privilege?) dedicated to that sort of enterprise. 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414585/trigonometry-racist-kevin-d-williamson