Writing on the matter of Obama’s 3,000 page health care bill, Charles Kesler notes that the founding fathers’ view on the law was similar to John Locke’s, who saw the law as a community’s “settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.” To be legitimate, “a statute must be ‘received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies’ between citizens.”
Kesler:

This phonebook-sized law that would control a sixth of the U.S. economy cannot be a law by that definition. If you rummage through the text of, say, the House of Representatives’ version of the bill, you find scores of places where power is delegated to administrative agencies and special boards, which are charged to fill the gaps in the written legislation by promulgating thousands, if not tens of thousands, of new pages of regulations that will then be applied to individual cases.

(….)

The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.

(….)

It was against the threat of such a despotism that proper and not so proper Bostonians threw the original Tea Party….Today’s Tea Party movement sees a similar threat of despotism-of monopoly control of health care, corrupting bailouts, massive indebtedness, and the eclipse of constitutional rights-in the Obama Administration’s policies.

The whole thing here.

Trying to save money? Wanna just stay home with your dog and watch TV? Well, if you live in Britain, it’s going to cost you. Since 1946 there’s been a television tax levied on each TV you own that receives a signal; today, the license costs $220 per year. As for that 12-year old Basset Hound of yours who sleeps all day, never leaves the house, and whose most aggressive action involves sighing and blinking once every twelve hours, he’s going to cost you even more: under proposed new measures unveiled today by the Labour government all dog owners would be required to get dog insurance that would cost up to £500 – approx. $770 Canadian – per year.
No matter where you go or what you do, the bony finger of the British state will find you. In Watford, parents who want to play with their children in recreation areas must first go through criminal record checks. Staying home won’t necessarily help you escape the intrusion of the state: several years ago the Labour government’s Children’s Minister, Beverly Hughes, proposed forcing parents to attend special classes where they would learn to sing nursery rhymes to their children. Without Labour’s policies, the Minister pointed out helpfully, “We could be on the road to ruin.”
Not everyone appreciates the help. When the mother of a five year old girl received a letter detailing a litany of health risks her daughter would face in the future because her body mass index was one-percent outside the recommended limit, mom was appalled, and its no wonder: take a look at the child in question. Actually, take a close look, because she might be following you: various local Councils recruit “environment volunteers” as young as seven to report people for offenses ranging from littering to making too much noise to putting out their trash on the wrong day. The little recruits “are given information packs about how to collect evidence….which could later be used in criminal prosecutions.”
In an essay titled Nanny State Britain is Killing Common Sense, Dr. Eamonn Butler writes:

“The organisers of a Christmas party in Embsay village hall were told they needed a full risk assessment, and nut allergy warnings on the mince pies. Schools have banned playground football. Clowns in Zippo’s circus couldn’t use trumpets in a three-minute sketch because they’d need a music licence. Manchester taxi drivers cancelled their annual outing for needy kids because each cab would need a risk assessment, each child would have to be accompanied by an adult, and each adult would need a six-week criminal record check.” (emph. mine)

If you think jettisoning your worldly possessions will put you in the clear, think again: an unemployed man who accidentally dropped a ten pound note was fined £50 for littering.

(The Taliban) has brutally repressed half its population. Women have been stripped of virtually all rights, denied the opportunity for schooling, the right to work or to freely move about. Women doctors, lawyers and tradespeople cannot practice their craft. The windows of their homes must be covered. They can travel outside the home only in the company of a male relative. They have effectively been blocked from receiving health care. For violating these rules, they are beaten in public by Taliban soldiers….

Here in Canada our public broadcaster is greatly concerned about this situation in Afghanistan, and continues to campaign tirelessly on behalf of the men who who wish to impose a brutal, misogynistic theocracy in Afghanistan. Friday’s lead story on The National was exemplary: “Right from the start the opposition has been claiming that government officials turned a blind eye to the torture of Afghan prisoners. But what we’re learning now is a suspicion that those hidden documents may reveal much worse that that: that the Canadians intended some prisoners to be tortured so as to gather intelligence. If true, that would be a war crime.”
As Milewski uttered the words “war crime” an Ottawa academic appeared onscreen. “This is ugly,” he said, grinning oddly as if he was about to laugh, or like he was getting away with something. “This makes Somalia look very small.”
Milewski introduced the vaunted expert – “Amir Attaran is a law professor who’s been digging deep into the Afghan file” – but he neglected to mention one niggling detail: Attaran is Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s friend. When Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center at Harvard where Attaran was a research fellow, Ignatieff “directly intervened in order to save Mr. Attaran’s job” after a dispute with some faculty members, and “gave him office space and mentoring support until he could find another academic home.” On another occasion, Ignatieff stood up on Attaran’s behalf to defy a lawyer’s strongly-worded piece of advice that the “secret anonymous” funding of Attaran’s research must be revealed in order to avoid a conflict of interest; Ignatieff told the lawyer that he’d already looked into it privately and found no conflict, so there was absolutely no need to reveal the source of the funding to anyone – a quintessentially Liberal response, when you think about it, and surely eye-opening to Attaran; it might even explain his oddly eager on-air grin.
A mere two weeks before his on-air accusations – which neither he nor Milewski provided a shred of evidence for – were used by the CBC as the centerpiece of an all-out anti-Conservative smear story, Attaran wrote: “Politicians, such as our Prime Minister….should be dismissed as dangerous ideologues.” In another essay, titled The Ugly Canadian, the American-born Attaran – an Ignatieff donor who recently spoke at a Liberal-organized forum on consular issues – wrote that, although he “probably…could live elsewhere,”

“….I was attracted to this very Pearsonian country in the 1990s…while I love this country, learning it through its laws has also shown me a dark side….Today’s Canada would not please Pearson, and he would find the country’s outlook on foreign people and international obligations oddly picayune and ignorant.”

Take that, you toothless conservative proles. Oh, and too bad you get to choose your representatives:

“Pearson was an Oxford-educated university professor with a hyperactive work ethic. If finding a comparable candidate requires the prime minister bypassing elected members of Parliament to appoint an outsider by way of the Senate, that is a lesser evil than entrusting a diffident poseur like Maxime Bernier with the job of picturing Canada to the world.”

It’s unprofessional and highly unethical for the CBC to not disclose Attaran’s highly-partisan pronouncements and his longstanding personal and professional relationship with Michael Ignatieff, but that’s just business as usual at the CBC’s parliamentary bureau. It can’t be stopped. Every time a spectacularly biased practitioner like Keith Boag or Susan Bonner is shipped out, he or she will be seamlessly replaced by an equally biased reporter like Terry Milewski or Leslie MacKinnon. Up and coming reporters at the CBC surely know the drill by now: treat anti-Conservative “analysis” by various academics and unidentified Liberal-supporting experts as “news”, assert to Canadians, on the taxpayers’ dime, that these negative views of the Conservatives are widely-held and growing among Canadians, and conclude reports with a warning that the “issue” raised in the report isn’t going away.
They’re right about the last one: it never really does go away, does it?

Last week Liberal MP Bob Rae, NDP MP Paul Dewar, and Block MP Paul Crete held a press conference at which they pushed the Conservative government to “act immediately” to bring Omar Khadr home. “It’s in Canada’s interest and it’s in Mr. Khadr’s interest to allow him to be reintegrated into…Canadian society,” Rae said.
Later the same day a group of Muslim leaders, along with one of Khadr’s lawyers, proposed a reintegration plan: upon his return Khadr would live not with his family, who, as this report notes, “had close ties to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” but with host families, and he would receive spiritual counseling from leading Muslim clerics.
One of the members of the group proposing the plan for Khadr’s reintegration is Zafar Bangash, the organizer of the recent Toronto area conference at which 9/11 was mocked, the actions of the Toronto 18 were described as “nothing of significance,” and Israelis accused of having allowed the so-called underwear bomber to board the plane.
Joseph Breen, who was at the conference, which was held four days after the reintegration proposal: “(Bangash) said he told police that if protesters were to trespass, ‘I guarantee nothing,’ to which the audience responded with chants of ‘Allahu Akbar.'”
In a 2003 article titled “Far too late to avert a clash of civilizations“, Bangash wrote:

Those who claim otherwise, and try to convince Muslims that the West can be lived with, are – knowingly or unknowingly – serving the purposes of those who are bent on destroying the pristine principles of the divinely appointed and ordained faith.

This, from a man who is part of the group who have a “plan” to help Khadr “become a fully functioning member of the Canadian mosaic.”
(h/t blazingcatfur)

On Sunday a conference attended by about 300 people was held at an Islamic centre in Toronto. The National Post’s Joseph Brean describes the festivities:

…the Christmas Day underwear bomber was described as the tool of an Israeli plot; Barack Obama was referred to as “Mr. Black Man”; al-Qaeda was called “the figment of the imagination of the West”; and a video was shown that mocked 9/11 by putting the Muppet Show logo over slow-motion footage of the second plane’s impact, with screams of terror for audio.

The program started with a prayer from the Koran, sung beautifully by a boy in Arabic, and translated to English by another boy who, by his tone, clearly understood its message about the punishment of cities for their depravity.

Seems a bit standoffish, to me…

In an article in The Daily Beast, Nigerian activist and Nobel laureate for Literature Wole Soyinka is quoted as saying that England’s openness to other cultures allowed Muslim extremism to flourish in Britain, and that this openness, a direct result of England’s colonial history, evolved naturally into something resembling an insane tractability:

“England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.”

“This is part of the character of Great Britain,” Mr. Soyinka declares. “Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.” And so it is, he says, that Britain lets everyone preach whatever they want: It confirms a self-image of greatness.

Denmark’s Torben Hansen sees France’s importation of a large Muslim population as being similarly rooted in a notion of national greatness, albeit the French policy was borne not of a desire to confirm greatness but an insecure need to assert it:

French foreign policy, among other things, lies at the roots of our problems with the aggressive Islamic ideology. Charles de Gaulle had this idea that France should be a bridge between the West and the Arab world. This had to do with a French inferiority complex. They had been humiliated in WW 2, first by Hitler, and then by the US and the Brits who liberated them. So he cooked up this plan for a French-Muslim alliance…. The apparatus of the EU is in many ways a French construction.

Of all the consequences to European politicians’ lack of foresight on immigration, national greatness isn’t one of them. Sovereignty itself is being gnawed away at, most notably in France: in 2006 there were 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibles – or less euphemistically, “places…that the French state does not control.” Europeans’ right to speech is under assault: a Dutch filmmaker was shot and had his throat slit for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women, and the Somali-born woman who provided the voiceover for the film was forced into hiding; in Denmark, a one million dollar bounty was placed on the head of a mild-mannered cartoonist.
Similar smaller instances happen on a daily basis. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian, asserts that this empowered prerogative of Islamists, not just in Europe but worldwide, can be traced directly back to one single event that happened in England:

“It all began when (Ayatollah Khomeini) assumed the power of life and death over the life of a writer. This was a watershed between doctrinaire aggression and physical aggression. There was an escalation. The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world—as if someone had given them a new stature. Al Qaeda is the descendent of this phenomenon. The proselytization of Islam became vigorous after this. People went to Saudi Arabia. Madrassas were established everywhere.”

The effectiveness of the fatwa (Rushdie was forced into hiding, and briefly “converted” to Islam), the later success of Islamists in causing newspapers to self-censor in the case of the cartoons, the myriad attempts by Islamists since then to assert the predominance of their own laws on European soil — all of these things are inarguably a direct consequence of European immigration policy in the past few decades. The historic, pivotal fatwa had such big teeth not because of the pronouncement of some foreign religious leader , but because his fellow soldiers in faith had Rushdie physically surrounded, on Rushdie’s own soil. The West’s putative generosity backfired, and it continues to do so.
Theodore Dalrymple, referring to an opinion piece in Le Monde that called for the abolition of prisons, coined a phrase that’s stuck with me ever since I read it:

“There is in the article a moral exhibitionism, which is generosity of spirit at other people’s expense. This, I think, is one of the sicknesses of our age, the desire to appear more-compassionate-than-thou.”

Salman Rushdie, Kurt Westergaard, the families and friends of Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, European commoners and editors and journalists who censor their public expressions for the sake of their own safety and comfort, civic police forces who don’t dare enter “microstates” in the middle of what were, for many hundreds of years, their ancestors’ own cities – these people surely understand better than most of the rest of us that the West’s smug, self-satisfying “generosity of spirit” and openness – “accommodativeness“, as Soyinka put it – can indeed come “at other people’s expense.”
Now, if we could just admit it, that would be great.

This post is a friendly counter-point to Cjunk’s earlier post here. I’ll start with an excerpt from a column by a Conservative Senator Michael MacDonald:

With only one previous prorogation in almost four years in office (when Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightly stopped the Liberal-NDP-Bloc “coalition” from subverting the will of the electorate), it’s not unreasonable that the PM ask for Parliament to be prorogued — as all previous prime ministers have done — to write a throne speech, shuffle the cabinet and prepare a budget.

Pierre Trudeau prorogued 11 times in 16 years; Jean Chretien four times in 10 years, including a four-month delay after Paul Martin became PM, to give Martin time to get his government ready. Newly elected governments take over within a few weeks, yet we’re asked to believe a sitting cabinet minister needed four months to set up shop!

Of course, Mr. Chretien’s true agenda was distancing himself from the auditor general’s report on the sponsorship scandal and dropping the mess into Paul Martin’s lap. I don’t recall manufactured outrage at the time by either the press or the opposition — certainly nothing resembling the contrived performance Canadians have been subjected to of late. Senator Moore was in that Liberal caucus and ignores their conduct, yet now expresses concern about an “affront to our democratic process.”

I suggest that the Canadian broadcast media’s decision to elide, during their coverage of the prorogation “outrage”, such factual context as MacDonald provides is professional malfeasance of the highest order, and that such a double standard, writ large, has an effect on poll numbers, and therefore on public policy.
The fact that one single group of highly influential players on the political scene are uniquely exempt from ever having to account for their actions isn’t a “media issue”, it’s a spanner in the works of our democracy. Producers and anchors and reporters at broadcast networks know full well that they will never be cornered on camera and forced to answer, on the public record, questions about the nature of their campaigning, which is viewed as a private, priestly prerogative. You can see the effects of this special dispensation in the Father Christmas mannerisms of people like Peter Mansbridge, who float above the political scene they affect as they compile and dole out, for private reasons, such partisan spin as they wish to provide to Canadians, all the while pretending to be trusted, impartial observers who are merely providing facts and impartial analysis.
The bottom line is that Mansbridge and the producers at the CBC wouldn’t survive a one-hour, on-the-record grilling at the hands of Conservatives like MacDonald: “In light of the fact that you didn’t make any kind of an issue at all of the Liberals’ far more frequent prorogations – and it’s on the public record – what was the basis, how can you possibly justify as a journalist, your decision to treat what was only the second prorogation in four years by the Conservatives as an outrage and an assault on democracy?”
Fortunately for them they’ll never be in such a position, and if they did find themselves in such a position, they would, unlike all other political figures, be entitled to sneer and walk away without any consequence.

Another quietly-passing story from the land of tulips, tolerance, and rosy-pink cheeks:

Regional newspaper De Gelderlander has decided not to publish an interview with a Moroccan woman after the newspaper was threatened by her son. Nonetheless, the editors deny they gave in to intimidation.

Two Moroccan criminals ran over a 50 year old man with their scooter last month while fleeing from the police after robbing a hotel. The perpetrators then went to the hospital where doctors were trying to save the man’s life. He died because they made their work impossible.

The brother of one of the suspects visited the editorial staff of De Gelderlander last Friday and demanded that the newspaper drop publication. The youth also threatened an editor, according to the newspaper….

Meanwhile, Geert Wilders is on trial in Holland for warning about the dangers of radical Islamism.

“We have politicians who hate politics other than that bureaucrats deal with…We have bad politicians because they do not want unpredictable events, and that is what we have right now. This was not predicted by the politicians ten, twenty years ago.” — Torben S. Hansen, in an interview with Asger Trier Engberg

In Britain, two recently released documents paint contrasting pictures, of a particular government’s “social objectives” on the one hand, and an elder stateswoman’s realism and foresight on the other. The first document is a draft report written in 2000 during Tony Blair’s reign. The unedited version, released after a FOI request, shows that “Labour’s migration policy (was) aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s ‘social objectives.'” Although these so-called ‘social objectives’ were never spelled out, Tony Blair’s former adviser Andrew Neather recently said that Labour’s immigration strategy was intended to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
The other document, recently released under the thirty-year rule, shows a quite different mindset: Margaret Thatcher believed that too many Asian immigrants were being let in, and that “with some exceptions there had been no humanitarian case for 1.5 million immigrants from south Asia and elsewhere.” “It was essential to draw a line somewhere,” she said.
Thatcher also expressed her views publicly: during an appearance on a British TV show she said “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture. If we do not want people to go to extremes we ourselves must talk about this problem and we must show that we are prepared to deal with it. We are not in politics to ignore people’s worries. We are in politics to deal with them.”

All over Europe you see the electorates moving slowly in a certain direction, and the politicians are far behind, but in the long run they will be forced to confront these problems.

Addressing the recent murders of two women, allegedly by Col. Russell Williams, Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight has a couple of questions, one for the Canadian Armed Forces and one for Canadians in general:

Is (the Canadian Armed Forces) using the psychopathy checklist, which was pioneered by retired UBC psychology professor Bob Hare, to ferret out psychopaths? I emailed a question to the Department of National Defence, and I received a call back saying the inquiry couldn’t be answered this evening. However, someone will call back tomorrow.

In the meantime, perhaps we should ask ourselves if this is another cost of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament…

Honestly now…
(h/t blackash)

Elizabeth May on the hidden talents of Stephen Mesmer-Harper:

Murray Dobbin: “Do you think Harper has deliberately set out to discourage people from voting?”

Elizabeth May: “Absolutely. People thought that Harper had become more popular between the 2006 and 2008 elections but not so: 170,000 fewer people voted for a Conservative candidate in 2008 than in 2006. His larger seat count is a tribute to his ability to discourage people from voting.”

Apparently his special powers work best against potential Green Party voters.

Here’s Phil Jones, who recently stood aside as director of the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia, gravid with data in a 1996 email:

In our maximum latewood density reconstruction from the polar Urals to AD 914, the most anomalous summer is AD 1032. A lot of other volcano
years are there with summers of -3 to -4 sigma such as 1816,1601,1783 and
1453 (I think this later one is Kuwae that is being found in the Ice Cores
in the Antarctic. However 1032 is 6 sigma and it may be the Baitoushan
event which you say is 1010 +/- 50 years or the Billy Mitchell event.

Jones nine years later in a 2005 email:

(McKitrick and McIntyre) have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a freedom of Information act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Jones three days ago:

We interpret data. We don’t create or collect it. It’s all available from other sources.