Comments on The Belmont Club,"Sitting in judgement"

bogie wheel,
Within living memory in England a man's home was his castle and the King himself could not enter uninvited without showing cause before a magistrate and obtaining a warrant.

Anything can be done in the name of health. The Nuremburg Codes The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour that set the legal basis for Nazi racial policy were considered part of the Public Health Code. Less then 50 years ago decent liberal people understood this. Listen to Spencer Tracy in Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremburg.

In The Lives of Others the Stasi agent has to sit in the attic in secrecy as he listens in to those suspected by the State.

In the future the State will be able to insist on monitoring equipment everywhere, for your own good, and will feel free to censure any conduct that might impose a cost on the public purse. How will this differ from the world of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its two way telescreens?

Liberals often justify nuisance laws on seatbelts and smoking by saying that those who violate the policy will use the public hospitals so, "We will all have to pay." When I ask who invited them to they lash out and accuse me of wanting to close all the hospitals and leave the poor defenseless. The natural instinct in the face of such idiocy is to either walk off in disgust or get physical. Either would please the adolescent ignoramuses. Like the bum on the subway they act as offensively as possible to preclude the possibility of being challenged.

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The Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, Instapundit follows Gallup but I believe that Rasmussen has proven more accurate over the last couple of election cycles, continues to provide comfort. Both polls are trending against Obama which is more important then any transient perturbation. My thoughts on this were laid out in more detail on the "Cloudy Crystal Ball" thread.

The next 15 months will be decisive for three (my magic number again) reasons.
1) The Census and related efforts to effect permanent change will either be rammed through or fail.
2) The mid-term elections will be determinative for both parties for the next 20 years.
3) The $3,000,000,000,000 bill will come due. Since China is in no position to swallow this we can expect a hard crash.

OK, add a fourth reason in the spirit of Monty Python's benefits of Roman occupation.
4) The 3:00 AM phone call will happen, maybe several of them at once from Caracas, Tehran and Pyongyang.

Aug 18, 2009 - 10:39 pm

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Gaffe Prices,
You are correct about how bad a ruling Dred Scott was. Sotomayor looks to be a hack capable of coughing up something equally bad. You are also correct that Roe v Wade has roots as solid as Birnham Wood that came to Dunsinane. There were however thousands of free blacks in the South at one time. New Orleans had an especially strong free black community. The legal fiction, using the words of the 1795 Militia Act, under which Lincoln fought the war, was that since in the Southern states "the execution of the laws of the United States was obstructed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or the powers vested in marshals" he could call out the State Militias.

Aug 19, 2009 - 7:29 am