Month: December 2010

The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal in an eminent domain case pitting Columbia University against Manhattan business owners whose land they're stealing. And hardly anyone cares:

We're talking about taking taxpaying private properties and transferring them to a non-profit which will not pay taxes, and will turn a large swathe of Manhattan into a quasi-compound for some of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the city.

Which is, of course, the most sick-making aspect.  I am not against eminent domain for public uses like hospitals or railroads.  But by no stretch of the imagination could Columbia University be called a public accommodation.  One's gut and one's social conscience rebel at the seizure of private property which is taken precisely because it serves, or is owned by, poorer people.  One's gut and one's social conscience positively riot at the thought of taking this seized land and handing it over to wealthy private institution that almost exclusively serves the affluent class.

I don't understand why this is an issue that only fires up libertarians.  Can't we all agree that it would be better to live in a world where Columbia cannot do this sort of thing?  I guess not, though.

Here's a statement from one of the litigants:

My family is profoundly disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear our case.  This is truly a dark day for all Americans who care about the sanctity of private property rights.  It is my hope that the loss by my family and the West Harlem community to the greed of Columbia University shall be looked upon as a clarion call to the citizens of our country that what has transpired here cannot be allowed to occur in other places. Americans must stand together and demand louder and more forcefully than ever that we be reunited with the basic civil right of true ownership of our homes and businesses. Until then, no one should feel safe from the collusion of unethical politicians and their favored private beneficiaries.

Background on the case here.

Unusually, removing Rasmussen gives us the very recent uptick in disapproval. But the general picture for the last few months reveals something somewhat at odds with the Beltway post-midterm conventional wisdom. Obama's approval ratings are remarkably stable in the mid to upper 40s. In a period of ten percent unemployment, it seems to me that the durability of his support is the more accurate story.

On a daily basis, the Andrew Breitbart family of Web sites posts a lot of poorly researched, badly reasoned commentary on all sorts of subjects, all crafted to flatter the ideological prejudices of the audience. Take Big Government, where a recent post bemoaned the fact that Nevada is one of the western states that is receiving money to help restore salmon populations.

Hmm…Last time we checked, Nevada was landlocked and didn’t remotely touch the Pacific Ocean or any of the tributaries of the Columbia River (which run extensively through Idaho.) Now, how would Nevada get to be eligible for grants to protect the Pacific Salmon. Do the fish have a gambling addiction?

Well, no, actually. The reason, in this case, is that Nevada long enjoyed access to Pacific salmon, as anyone can discover by spending less than a minute on Google. That's how long it took The Dish to come across this informative article:

Salmon were so important that 19th century Nevada law prohibited dams without fish ladders. So when Peterson built a dam on the South Fork of the Owyhee that prevented chinook salmon from reaching this part of northeastern Nevada, local sportsmen demanded that the state fish commissioner force him to tear it out. "An effort will be made to have the obstruction removed," the Tuscarora Times-Review reported May 3, 1889.

But Nevada's fish-passage law, still on the books, ultimately failed to save the state's chinook runs. In the early 1900s, private power and irrigation companies started building permanent dams in Idaho and Oregon, blocking the return of salmon and steelhead to this far-flung stretch of the Columbia River Basin. The federal government joined the dam-building frenzy, and Nevada's last salmon vanished after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates on Owyhee Dam in December 1932. Any hope of modifying those dams to restore fish passage ended when the three massive Hells Canyon dams were added to the main stem of the Snake River between 1958 and 1967.

Nevada's love for its native wild salmon nevertheless survived, and the state's sportsmen now are campaigning for their return.

Whether the costs and benefits of salmon restoration in Nevada make it worthwhile to spend money on the project is a matter of legitimate debate. Ignorantly mocking legislation when a quick Google search demonstrates the grounds for your criticism are nonsense? That's doing a disservice to your readership, and worth highlighting here because while every Web site makes mistakes – as Dish readers well know – this is typical behavior at the Big Breitbart sites, and all too often follow-up posts that would set readers straight are never published.

Sargent pushes back against the Marine Corps Commandant's combat warning:

Marines combat arms units were actually less likely to think the impact on unit effectiveness would be negative in an "intense combat situation." Under those circumstances, negative predictions from Marines combat arms units dropped from 58 percent to 48 percent — less than half. In other words, the survey suggests a majority of the Marines combat arms units serving under Amos believe the opposite of what he said.

"On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?" – Megan.

This time against Iran.

Ross defends himself against the Hitchens onslaught:

It wasn’t Glenn Beck who mired the United States in two neverending overseas occupations, where “gun brandishing” is the least of the everyday horrors that flow from our policy failures. It wasn’t the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn’t kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess. It wasn’t the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn’t the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts without any plan to pay for it.

… The Tea Party’s politics are not my politics, but the movement has virtues as well as vices, and at the very least it represented a possible alternative force at a time when our politics desperately needs alternatives, whether right-wing or left-wing or something else entirely, to the policies that have led us to our present pass.

I don't disagree, which is why I have found the last eighteen months highly uncomfortable. I have long thought that the problem with conservatism in the last decade was that it wasn't conservative enough in its free-spending, country-invading, tax-cutting, prisoner-torturing binge. But when an epic recession hits, that's the one time you ease up a little on fiscal tightness. And the bitter partisanship and cultural warfare and religious extremism that the grass roots feed off simply leave me cold if not alarmed.

But isn't the solution criticizing the failed record of the political establishment and calling out charlatans like Glenn Beck? Isn't the answer to take necessary short-term steps to grapple with the recession, while forging a real compromise on taxes and spending for the long term in the next two years? That's the realistic standard for the Tea Party and, for me, a litmus test for their success. Do they bend the entitlement and defense spending curve sharply downward over the next two decades in what will require a compromise with Obama on such a path?

Do they not yet realize that their future now relies not on demonizing Obama but reaching out to him? The voters are very clear: they want cooperation and compromise. Whoever gets there first will keep more of her principles than the late-comer.

(Photo: Clonnie Lawson of Meadowview, Virginia, attends a rally organized by Americans for Progress on Capitol Hill November 15, 2010 in Washington, DC. Associated with the Tea Party movement, Americans for Progress members and supporters rallied to 'send a clear message to Washington that voters have spoken this November and that politicians should not pursue big government policies in the Lame Duck session.'B y Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

"Paul's commentary on, and cross-examination of, the Federal Reserve has only seemed less crazy with the passage of time. It sounded crazy when he kept pestering Bernanke or whoever about whether the Fed was involved in various overseas bailouts. But then the Fed was involved in various overseas bailouts! ‪By trying quixotically to End the Fed, he will succeed in doing more to audit the Fed, because there is a growing interest/concern in the post-TARP world about the unprecedented and not-very-well-controlled power that the institution has to do whatever it wants," – Matt Welch, editor-in-chief, Reason.

A little story about three car breakdowns that Tom Tancredo might do well to read.