Previous Posts:
- July 16 — The Case Against Mitt Romney: Series Introduction

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In his groundbreaking column, “History and the Judiciary,” carried in its entirety at UndergroundJournal.net, conservative icon Paul Weyrich explains how deep this country’s problems have become:

….. I have listened as a debate is occurring over the proper powers of the courts and the tendency of some Americans to cede to the advocates of unrestrained judicial power victories to which they are not entitled.

I am occasionally referred to as a “founder of the modern conservative movement.” Such an honor places upon me and others to whom such a description applies a special duty to warn our fellow citizens. Americans today are witnesses to the realization of the great fear of our Founding Fathers: the passing away of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Abraham Lincoln stated, in the United States of America. With respect to the courts, we need a revival of the rule of law based upon the constitutional principles laid down by those who founded this nation.

….. Regardless of our votes, the defining judgments in our collective and personal destinies often are made by persons whom the American people have not elected to rule.

We gave judges their robes and gavels so that they might resolve specific disputes between specific plaintiffs and defendants. We never gave them authority to issue commands to our elected lawmakers, forcing us down roads which we have not chosen to travel.

Judges have no constitutional authority to make laws or to amend our national and state constitutions. They have no authority to redefine words and concepts in our laws to mean what they and their ideological partisans wish for them to mean.

To Americans of previous generations this was obvious and fundamental. But for many in America today, this is meaningless, a mere technicality: judges are supreme because, well, because they just are.

When several judges opined that there ought to be no more prayer in American schools, lawyers, politicians and journalists told us that after three centuries of prayer in our schools, judges had suddenly “outlawed” it. Court opinions interpreting law and social custom magically became the law itself.

….. Likewise, judges ….. opined that the American people may neither protect children from violent murder in their mother’s womb, nor outlaw sodomy, nor restrict their civic blessing upon marriage to nature’s definition of it …..

….. Many of us received in shock and sadness the Goodridge v. the Department of Public Health of Massachusetts opinion on homosexual marriage. Why do self-styled “conservatives,” lawyers, politician and pundits among them, spread the assertion that judges have powers that the American people have never given them?

The truth is that the ruthlessly enforced illusion of judicial supremacy did not merely empower judges and disenfranchise the American people. It made journalists, lawyers and clever politicians more influential culturally. Most, after all, are of the same ideological bent as many judges.

And those who were not, the “conservatives,” played within the new rules: judges’ opinions are “the law” in the United States of America.

….. Not a single signer of the Constitution (or of the Declaration of Independence) would have taken seriously the purportedly “conservative” view today that to restrain judges we need to replace them through attrition over decades.

….. For the sake of this republic I urge my friends, fellow leaders and Americans to emphatically repudiate the devastating myth that judges have the power to make and redefine our laws.

….. In the last century cultural elites created an illusion of judicial power that would be unrecognizable to earlier Americans, lawyers and laymen.

….. I fear the conservative elites are putting the final nail in our coffin. I know these men. They mean well. They are not pursuing their view out of malice. They believe what they are doing is right. ….. I look at results, and it seems to me that proponents of the status quo are allowing the legal profession and the courts to impose moral and civil codes which cannot pass federal and state legislatures.

They foolishly are handing absolute power to anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-family ideologues.

Weyrich’s column, written after lifetime of conservatism, is a tacit acknowledgment that much of conservatism has been misdirected for decades.

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July 24, 11PM Note: This next paragraph replaces a muddier one that was previously posted.

Those of us who believe in the constitution and the rule of law must fiercely fight to roll back the poisonous notion of judicial supremacy. We must forcefully argue our points in the public square without compromise; elect those who share and will advance our sentiments; remove from office those who don’t, or won’t; and expose and marginalize those, including so-called conservative movement leaders, talkers, commentators, and lawyers, who don’t or won’t advance our cause. The notion of judicial supremacy is completely contrary to the Constitution Our Founders wrote, and to what they intended.

The executive and legislative two branches, as well as other courts, are not required to, and indeed MUST NOT obey court opinions if they believe that a court’s opinion violates the plain-English meaning of a state or the federal constitution (or legislature-passed statutes consistent with a state or the federal constitution).

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While he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, with the help of the supposed “elites” of conservatism who should have known better, did more to support and cement the “devastating myth” of judicial supremacy Weyrich refers to than any single man in America. What Romney did has had profound consequences already, and promises worse. His selection to the vice presidency by John McCain would gravely worsen the situation; Romney’s ascension to the presidency threatens to make surrender of the executive and legislative functions to the judiciary permanent.

More on that is coming tomorrow.

This report about the big drop in the barrel price of oil in the past two days had an annoying assertion that is all too common when the price of something, particularly oil, goes down:

The price of oil has dropped by almost $10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in the past two days—so why has the price of gas remained stagnant?

The theory is that it takes a few days.

Geez, are we ever impatient, and it isn’t even “a few days.” At least around here, it’s more like 24-36 hours.

Tuesday, I don’t think there was a gas station in Metro Cincinnati besides a couple of Sam’s Clubs selling gas for less than $4, and $4.08 was typical. Now look (prices at the link will obvious change over time):

I see 15 stations at the link that are at $3.93 or lower. No cause for celebration, but the reaction seems pretty quick to me.

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Congress’s approval rating at Gallup is down to an alltime low of 14% (HT American Thinker).

Two points:

• Perhaps this explains why “Mr. Irrelevant,” who, according to text at the Gallup link, is at 31%, got his FISA bill easily passed and got his signature after all the posturing.
• I suspect that it is beginning to dawn on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid that most people, and an ever-growing number, actually know that Democrats are in charge of Congress. This would not be a favorable development for them.

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The basic right of self-defense has been restored in Britain (HT Hot Air). Good, and long overdue.

Meanwhile, the District of Columbia Mayor and Council, having lost the Heller case in the Supreme Court, which established once and for all the perfectly obvious fact that gun ownership is an individual right, is working feverishly to make sure that the basic, natural right of self-defense still won’t exist in DC:

Public Safety Committee Chairman Phil Mendelson released a statement saying that these proposed rules are just a first step.

….. Here’s what they’re proposing:

• Allowing an exception for handgun ownership for self-defense use inside the home.
• If you want to keep a handgun in your home, the MPD (Metro Police Department) will have to perform ballistic testing on it before it can be legally registered.
• There will be a limit to one handgun per person for the first 90 days after the legislation becomes law.
• Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.
• Residents who legally register handguns in the District will not be required to have licenses to carry them inside their own homes.

The bolded item means you might as well be disarmed.

Of course, this would not stand up to a court test, and they know it. But they don’t care. They’re going to make somebody go through years of litigation and lose again. Then they’ll figure out other ways to be “creative.”

A sane electorate would throw the entire lot of them out of office at the first opportunity.

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Hot Air has the Headline of the Day, in reaction to this pitiful New York Times story, saving me the need to comment further — “Iraqis love Obama, think his withdrawal plan is stupid.

A visit to the Vanderbilt TV News archives (no link; registration is required) reveals that on September 20, 1996:

• GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole was trying to make up lost ground against incumbent President Bill Clinton, while Ross Perot was filing a Federal Elections Commission complaint over being excluded from televised presidential debates.
• The entire hour of ABC’s 20/20 show that night was devoted to a Barbara Walters interview of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
• It was disclosed that Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski had kept a journal in which he admitted to all 16 bombings he was accused of.
• There was a “change in the FBI’s working theory that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb,” based on a “revelation that plastic explosives were placed on the plane a month before as part of a training exercise for bomb-sniffing dogs.” The plane had crashed shortly after takeoff from New York’s Kennedy Airport in July, killing all 230 aboard.

Separately, the New York Yankees were on their way to the playoffs, and their first World Series Championship in 18 years, beginning a run of four titles in five years.

Per Wikipedia, in about 1996 it became apparent “that it was impractical to review full lists of Internet search results.”

Friday, September 20, 1996 is also the last time New York Times Company stock closed lower than its July 16, 2008 close of $12.59:

Yesterday’s 2% plunge occurred while the Dow and the S&P 500 indices each went up by 2.5%.

Recent months have been especially frightening for NYT shareholders, as the stock has plunged about 40% since April 25.

Industry veteran Alan D. Mutter at Newsosaur believes that NYT is one of many media companies whose share prices have dropped so low that they have “become candidates for transactions that could convert them to private ownership.”

Perhaps that’s what the Sulzberger family, which controls the company, wants. But the family may not get to go private, even with its dual stock structure, which gives it voting control of the company even though it owns only a minority of its common shares. Newsosaur notes that in the past year, “Rupert Murdoch demonstrated in his successful acquisition of Dow Jones that a clan’s resolve can be worn down with a sufficient amount of cash.”

It almost seems that the Times is deliberately working to hurt the value of its brand, and not just in the way it routinely distorts the news.

Have you tried the nytimes.com search engine lately? It’s a horrid, hollow shell of what it used to be:

Note how the Advanced Search feature common to so many search engines these days has completely disappeared. The ability to search on a date range, or to find results before a certain date, is gone.

Users filling out its reader survey on the new search engine are not pleased (red box is mine; I added my own comments later, which are not in the list below):

Unless I’m missing something, the Times’s new search engine makes it painstakingly difficult for readers to compare what it has reported or editorialized about more recently to its past renderings on the same topics, like the TWA 800 crash and Ted Kaczynski’s rants. Maybe that’s the point.

But I expect that the Times will pay a price in lost traffic, and ultimately reader and user interest, making its brand even less valuable than it is now.

As noted previously, maybe that’s also the point.

Cross-posted in slightly abbreviated form at NewsBusters.org.

From Hyannis, Massachusetts:

June 28, 2008

HYANNIS — Town Treasurer Debra Blanchette was sitting at her desk yesterday when a man came out of a nearby office at the Barnstable School Administration Building and said, “He’s gone, he’s had a heart attack.”

Everyone else froze with panic. But Blanchette leapt from her chair, ran to the man sprawled on a chair, and immediately began CPR.

After three minutes of administering life-saving breaths and chest compressions, Robert Steenstra of West Barnstable revived.

And Blanchette, 51, was pronounced a hero.

“I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hero,’” retired Barnstable District Court Judge Joseph Reardon said after the rescue yesterday.

“She just looked at me and smiled. It was just quite remarkable. I watched her bring this man back to life.”

Reardon and Dave Anthony were meeting with Steenstra to review the West Barnstable man’s rent and tax payment as a tenant on the Lombard Trust, a West Barnstable piece of land bequeathed to the town to raise money for the poor. Anthony, chief procurement officer for the town, does record keeping for the land trust, which Reardon manages.

At some point during the meeting, it became apparent Steenstra was not feeling well. At about 2 p.m., Steenstra took a nitroglycerin tablet. Ten minutes later, he took another.

“I said, ‘Are you alright?’ He didn’t answer,” Reardon said.

Steenstra slumped slowly backward, Reardon said. His lips turned purple.

Anthony ran to call 911.

Blanchette appeared within one minute, Reardon said.

She performed CPR without a mouth barrier — a device used to prevent fluids such as vomit from entering the rescuer’s mouth — because there was none available.

“It did cross my mind,” Blanchette said. “But I couldn’t not do it, let’s put it that way.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.