Archive for the ‘federalism’ Category

The American Caliphate

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Okay Frank Gaffney, you want your chance to soil your sheets, Leonidas-style, over the silent and perhaps at this point irreversible Islamofascist conquest of America? You don’t need to resort to fantasizing about Muslim sovereign fund managers putting a hex on their bond issues, or, I don’t know, doing a universal find and replace of “New York” for “London” in whatever Melanie Phillips wrote this week. You don’t need to make up anything at all. Because it turns out that the most cunningly disguised Islamofascist sleeper cell ever has just planted the bloody banner of the false prophet Mahound and his demonic minions in a courtroom a mere stone’s throw from the Capitol: (more…)

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Posted in Republicans, abuse of power, federalism, islamofascism, neoconservatives, surveillance/privacy, the war in iraq, torture | 2 Comments »

And to My Liberal Friends, See What A Carte Blanche Commerce Clause Gets You?

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Reason’s Jacob Sullum is dueling it out with Cully Stimson over drug policy in the LAT: Part I, Part II. Stimson decrees that drug laws “protect the public good,” public good, of course, being an abstraction that has neither rights nor duties. Those inhere in individuals. (And even if you do not believe in rights, legislating prohibitions on consensual behavior for “the public good” has historically been a great source for emiserating individuals under the aegis of lofty sounding, moralistic rhetoric.)

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Posted in abuse of power, federalism, police, the drug "war", your friend the state | 5 Comments »

Barrack Obama: Hamiltonian?

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.

A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism.  Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations.  It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”

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Posted in Democrats, corporate state, economics, federalism, liberalism, managerialism | 23 Comments »

Federalism for Me, But not for Thee — Liberals and Conservatives Both Disappoint, But Overall the GOP is Jurisprudentially Worse

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Mulling over Kevin Carson’s superb post below, I’ve been contemplating why it was that I tilted conservative/GOP in the 80s, and even supported the Robert Bork nomination to SCOTUS. For me, it came down to federalism, and a complete aversion to the manner in which the High Court and liberals had been abusing the Commerce Clause to intrude the federal government into matters that were at least Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon’s Commerce. FDR’s court-packing threat (which enabled the jurisprudence of the Commerce-Clause-means-any-area-in-which Congress-legislates) was not, to my mind, something cute to be winked at — if George W. Bush suggested such a measure his critics would rightly decry it as outrageous.

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Posted in Democrats, GOP morons, abuse of power, federalism, libertarianism | 22 Comments »