Seth Lipsky on The Constitution

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal has a fantastic interview with my old boss, Seth Lipsky.

When The Sun closed down last year, I wrote this post about how much I learned from Mr. Seth Lipsky. At the time, I complimented him on the breathtaking, all purpose style guide he had written. Now it appears he has written a book, The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide, that seeks to do for civics what his style guide has done for journalist writing.

Naturally, the people ought to be reading this book are the reporters and editorialists who seldom think of the document which upholds their liberty. For alumni of the New York Sun, we got our education straight from Mr. Lipsky himself, but still I may purchase a copy of the book, if for no other reason than it helps to have a refresher course.

On Hub Quiz Tonight

There were well over 100 people tonight at Hub Quiz, but you know, when you read Kevin Burke's confused, overgeneralizing piece for The Forum, that no one ever goes to the dry events on campus...

We lost tonight, in large part because the Hub Quiz people deliberately wrote questions that we would not get. That's not sour grapes. That's just what a source informed me. Frankly, I'm a little glad we didn't get all the pop culture and celebrity questions right.

Still, we got 39ish questions right. The winners were at 47. I can't say I'm not disappointed, but there's always next time.

Obama in Japan Is Good, Says Pomona Prof.

Does it surprise you that the narcissist in chief visited Obama, Japan?

Here's the quotation in full from David Arase of Pomona College in The Christian Science Monitor:

"Obama can use his visit to set the stage for a revitalized relationship by focusing on two issues that are priorities for him and for Japan's new leadership: global warming and getting rid of nuclear weapons," says David Arase, an expert in East Asian security relations at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Not only would that reduce the focus on bilateral military issues, he adds, but it would also make both sides feel that Japan is part of Obama's international agenda.

"The Japanese would love it," Mr. Arase says, "and Obama could leave Japan pretty happy."

I think it's bunk. The Japanese are starting to realize what the Israelis, the French, the Honduras, and NATO is: they are on their own with this absentee president.

On the point about global warming, the Japanese are going to do just as our European allies did: ratify any agreement and then refuse to implement it. Which is fine by me, because the evidence is slowly mounting that many folks misjudged this whole global warming thing. (Or at least that the policies favored by the Left are inconsistent with our liberties and solving the problem, assuming there is one.)

On the point about nukes, well, they started it. There would have been no Nagasaki or Hiroshima had there not been a Nanking, a Pearl Harbor, or a Bataan Death March. My sympathies go out to the Japanese people, who were the victims of their failed military government. The fact is that many of them backed that government is almost never mentioned, of course and the fact that dropping the bomb saved more Japanese lives is likewise ignored.

But this is not 1945. Japan is our ally and a good democratic ally at that. I say let them have nukes, let them contend against the real North Korean threat, and stand up for themselves in this world. Why should America continue to subsidize their defense?

Still I feel a lot of trepidation after hearing Obama equivocate on whether or not we should have bombed Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The Iranians are probably laughing at us because they know we have a failed, weakling for a president. If not, just listen to this.

CMC Professor Jon Shields on Abortion, Stupak Amendment, and the Politics of the Pro-Life Cause

There's a fantastic interview with Professor Jon Shields in The New Yorker of all places. Here's his response, in part to a question about why the pro-life movement continues to draw in adherents.

Why, in a rapidly liberalizing culture, has opposition to abortion basically stayed the same? What political steps did the pro-life movement take to shift public sentiment after Roe v. Wade?

The pro-life cause has indeed resonated in a liberal, rights-oriented culture far more than other “culture-war” issues. Even as attitudes toward gay marriage and gender roles have rapidly liberalized, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable since the early nineteen-seventies. The remarkable spread of social liberalism, therefore, has not left our nation any more pro-choice than it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. There is even some evidence that opinion might now be moving slightly in a pro-life direction. Young Americans, for example, are suddenly less pro-choice than older Americans, even though they strongly favor gay marriage and are less religious.

This development, however, is not as odd as it appears. I think the pro-life cause continues to inspire activists and cannot be dismissed by secular, socially liberal Americans precisely because it appeals to common liberal values that we all share. Few other causes associated with the religious right, whether prayer in school or gay marriage, resonate in the same way.

The liberalism at the heart of the pro-life campaign, however, is constantly distorted by a generation of scholars who have insisted the right-to-life movement is really about the preservation of traditional gender roles or male control over female sexuality. Such interpretations tend to ignore that the right to life movement regards itself as today’s civil-rights movement. The failure to grasp this reality renders the passion and dedication of the pro-life movement almost impossible to comprehend.

A Few Questions for the Ambassador from Bahrain

Bahrain is one of the most forward looking Arab nation in the Middle East. It is currently the only Arab nation that allows non-Muslims to become full citizens and it has a progressive record vis a vis women's rights.

As Exhibit A, take the example of her Excellency Houda Nonoo, who is a Bahraini of Iraqi-Jewish extraction and serves as the Bahraini ambassador to the United States and Canada. She is the first Jewish woman to serve as an ambassador from any Arab country. She comes from a political family in Bahrain. (Here's a good interview with her in The Jewish Chronicle.)

Ms. Nonoo will be coming to visit Claremont McKenna on November 18th. She will be giving a talk in Pickford entitled, "Bahrain: The Pearl of the Gulf." Undeniably, she'll be talking up Bahrain, the country she represents to the United States and Canada.

But, lest we repeat the silliness of the time when the Ambassador to Syria came to the Athenaeum, I think it is only fair to ask some questions of the representative of the government of Bahrain.

Some quick questions for the Ambassador. Out of fairness to the Ambassador, I have only picked issues that she could help settle since she became an ambassador in May, 2008.

• Why does Bahrain refuse to acknowledge Israel's right to exist? More recently, why does the lower house of Bahrain's parliament believe it OK to ban its citizens from having any relations with Israel? Why is it willing to establish diplomatic ties with the human rights abusing regime of Burman?
• Why did Bahrain feel it was appropriate to charge a U.S. lecturer with "insulting Mohammed"? Does Bahrain believe in academic freedom?
• Why does Bahrain continue to imprison people for kissing in public? Why did that woman warrant a sentence of 20 days in prison?
• How does she feel about the increased Iranian rhetoric that suggests Bahrain isn't really independent, but a rogue province of Iran? Most recently, Iranian authorities have suggested seating Bahraini representatives in the Iranian parliament and categorizing Ahmadinejad's trips to the island nation as provincial trips. Iranian television has featured interviews with Bahraini Shi'a predicting revolution within a year. Bahrain cut off oil imports from Iran. (To be fair, Bahrain will restart gas import talks with Iran, but that development is still very new and strained.) Rumors had it that Bahrain was going to ban Iranians from entering Bahrain, but it turns out that this isn't the case. Still you have to wonder about a government that tries to ban Israelis, who have no designs on Bahraini sovereignty, and one that continues to have good relations with Iran, despite its suggestions that Bahrain is really a part of Iran.
  

Mitt Romney's Coming to Claremont McKenna?

A source close to the Res Publica committee informs me that next semester's big name speaker will be none other than former Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Chuck DeVore in Real Clear Politics

A few days ago, Carly Fiorina secured the backing of eight GOP senators in her California Republican primary bid against CMC alum, Chuck DeVore.

Kyle Trystad for Real Clear Politics wrote up how this race is the next New York-23, a reference to the failed bid of conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, to be elected congressman from thereabouts. (Of course, Democrat Bill Owens won't get re-elected, now that he's broken four campaign promises in the first hour he was sworn in and Doug Hoffman will assuredly win in 2010.)

It's too early to tell who has a lead in the GOP primary for California's Senate spot, but a recent poll put Fiorina and DeVore exactly even in getting the nomination.

There's no doubt in my mind that DeVore's the principled candidate in this race and this attack on the moderate, weak-willed Republican establishment is right on the mark.

"It's not surprising at all to me that the Republican establishment would come in behind her," said DeVore, who claims the support of 60 percent of Republican state office holders. "The only surprise I have is that it wasn't more than eight."

DeVore said he represents a "principled Republicanism," unlike some of the senators who supported Fiorina.

The Club for Growth has yet to endorse yet, but I suspect that they will endorse DeVore and that he may well wind up getting the nomination. I frankly find it hard to believe that Fiorina will excite the base into donating.

Fiorina wants to regulate the internet and DeVore wants to let us be free, and yet he's the dark horse? Time to stop that.

Meg Whitman Just Lost My Vote

The Griffith R. Harsh IV and Margaret C. Whitman Charitable Foundation in 2007 contributed $100,000 to the Environmental Defense Fund, which is now at odds with Whitman over water policy. The foundation also invested $3 million in hedge funds based in the Cayman Islands — a Caribbean tax haven that's been the subject of political controversy.

. . .

When you're a billionaire, you will do things with money that don't look so good when you're a political candidate," said John Pitney, a government and politics professor at Claremont McKenna College. "Even if they're totally ethical and lawful, they can still be embarrassing."

He added: "Anytime you mention large sums of money and the Cayman Islands in the same sentence, political eyebrows will go up."

Read the full story here. The hedge fund stuff is whatever. Tax competition is actually good for people, so I don't have a hard time with the Cayman Islands being the place where people go to store their money.

Sorry, but if your foundation gives money to the radically anti-business, anti-capitalist Environmental Defense Fund, you've lost my support. (Not that I would have swayed all too many votes, but I'm very, very disappointed with Ms. Whitman.)

On to Poizner or Campbell!

My Pope Center Op-ed on the Ath, Gays, and Communism

A Hand Up for Freedom

I wrote an op-ed for the Pope Center about how the Ath has effectively forgotten the fall of Communism, as it remembers homosexual rights. Titled another, "Another Stone Wall," here's a snippet of the article.

It’s all right for Claremont to host a big event to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Inn raid. But that commemoration stands in stark contrast to the school’s indifference to the twentieth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the wall separating East and West Germany was unarguably one of the most significant events of the last century, but the school has no event or speaker to discuss its implications.

That tells you a lot about priorities on the modern American college campus.

The Claremont Colleges, of which Claremont McKenna is a part, devote substantial attention to—and support of—gays. In fact, homophobic incidents have been fabricated just to make it seem that gays are under attack and therefore in need of special protection. For example, the Student Life, the newspaper of Pomona College (part of the Claremont group of colleges), reported a supposed hate crime against the Queer Resource Center, but subsequent investigation revealed the “attack” as nothing other than some drunken students dispensing a fire extinguisher nearby. And in 2003, the left-leaning newspaper the Claremont Port Side retracted a story that accused professor emeritus Harry V. Jaffa of saying that homosexuals should be shot after he threatened a lawsuit to clear his name. (Those who know Jaffa well knew that he would never say such a thing.)

Last year, following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which recognized marriage as a relationship between a man and woman, David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, sent out an email encouraging students to join him in “expressing support for those who feel negatively affected by the passage of this measure.” Activist students disrupted dining hall lunches and dinners across campus decrying as “unacceptable” Proposition 8’s definition of marriage. Later, some even tried to disinvite Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine Law School, from speaking at Pomona College because he defended Proposition 8. (The event went on anyway, and there was a tasteful protest outside.)

College Jeopardy: The Final Wait

Riley and I auditioned for College Jeopardy today. This is the final hurdle and we hear back in December.

The process was pretty grueling. We got breakfast at the Radisson Hostel in Culver City, which incidentally, is the same hotel where Ken Jennings became a contestant. We then went and walked around Culver City and took a few photos of us in front of Sony Pictures Studios.

I'm not allowed to talk about the test, but it was a lot harder than I imagined it would be and I got quite a few pop culture questions wrong. But hey, you can't win them all.

I want to thank Dan Pawson '03 for the advice he gave me (and by extension, Riley). Following his advice, I think we appeared well spoken and polite, and so we represented Claremont McKenna well. I think that came across best in the interview portion.

The contestant scouts asked what we would do with the $100,000 were we to win. They counseled against saying we'd pay for tuition or student loans.

Everyone came up with some pretty funny answers and took some of my best options. Spending a hundred thousand dollars in Vegas would be a great time indeed, but traveling for the sake of traveling doesn't stike me as the most efficacous use of money.

November 20th is Kick a Ginger Day, so I thought I would create a defense fund for gingers that were beat up. You know, to help pay for medical bills. (But wait, isn't health care free now?)

I also told them that I'd be buying a motorcycle. They told me that I should buy a helmet in addition, to which I replied, not to worry because I'd be an organ donor. Everyone laughed.

Riley, for his part, told everyone that he'd like to complete the Seven Summit mountain challenge (as opposed to the Five C challenge) and that he'd use some of the money to do that. Also, that he wants to be a professional rapper and rapped about the big party he would throw at CMC were he to win the money.

I'll have some photos up once I figure out how to extact them from my camera.

My Defense of Craigslist in The Student Life

If you want to read my defense of Craigslist and how you can find anything you want on it, head on over to The Student Life's op-ed page.

The Forum, under Emily Meinhardt, didn't want to publish it, so I went elsewhere. And hey, The Student Life is actually paying me.

Let's hope The Forum changes its policy of not paying me, as I'd rather like dealing with them and my college.

We Won Hub Quiz by Four Points

Bryce Gerard CMC'11, Riley Lewis CMC '11, Alex Berman CMC '12, and I won Hub Quiz tonight. Our team name was Team Ramrod and we won $40 each. We were down and nearly out in the third round, but Bryce got all 16 Disney characters on the identification round, putting us up by four. It took him 15 seconds to get all of them. It was incredible.

Here are some of the questions we missed. No Googling and finding out!

• For how many years did the owners of the Guiness beer company sign their lease?
• What was the name of Maine's ballot initiative banning homosexual marriage? (They're looking for a number, not a name.)
• Who is A.Rod currently dating? (I wanted to put Derek Jeter, but it turns out
  he dates women...)
• What country is Arch Bishop Oscar Romero from? (I knew this, but we
  changed our answer at the last minute to Mexico. Whoops!)
• What country is this flag from? (Careful, it's not what you'd think.)

Riley and I have College Jeopardy Live auditions Sunday. Wish us luck!

Classical Liberalism, Free Speech Found in The Student Life!

There's a fantastic article by Brendan Rowan PO '11 in this past issue of The Student Life. The title pretty much says it all: "Something Offensive is Found on the Internet, Determined to be "Bias-Related." Good on The Student Life for publishing it. Here's a sample from the article:

A recent event, which involved “inappropriately tagged posted photos found on KGI students’ Facebook pages,” may serve as a good example. As per standard operating procedure, the e-mail ends with an invitation to “any student in need of support concerning this incident” to contact the appropriate organization (AAMP, OBSA, etc.), and an invitation to any student who “perceives a racist or sexist incident on campus” to report it to the appropriate authorities as soon as possible. First and foremost, we might ask ourselves whether it is the college’s responsibility (or right, for that matter) to monitor the goings-on of a web site such as Facebook. Even though social networking sites occupy a dubious position somewhere between public and private space, it is a tad frightening that a purported institution of higher learning finds it incumbent upon itself to police its students’ non-academic lives (and we’re not talking about Bob Jones here, this is a liberal institution). Remember that everyone, even chauvinists, have the right to free speech. If a student is offended by some remarks or incidents, then they should contact their local law enforcement agency, or in this case the Facebook administrators. If getting the law involved seems like an overreaction, then maybe the involved parties should reconsider how deeply they have been offended.

Go To This: PSU Events Are Seriously Good Now

Governing with the Gavel?

The Role of the Courts in a Democratic Society

Thursday, November 12^th, 2009

8pm, Edmunds Ballroom

As this summer's confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor showed, the country remains deeply divided on questions of judicial temperament and the role of the judiciary. As the Supreme Court prepares to debate and rule on issues ranging from national security policy to campaign finance law, these fundamental questions will continue to define the terms of the debate.

With that in mind, the Pomona Student Union proudly presents a discussion between Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Stephen Reinhardt ’51, Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Michael Teter ’99 will moderate the discussion. As the title suggests, the discussion will revolve around the proper role of judges and courts in a democratic society. The discussion will address some of the following questions: Are judges merely calling “balls and strikes” when they decide cases or is the interpretation of the law a more complicated, potentially subjective, process? Is there a place for empathy in the interpretation of the law? Does the Senate confirmation for judicial nominees provide a meaningful check on the executive branch?

Alex Kozinski is currently Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and an essayist and judicial commentator. Kozinski graduated from University of California, Los Angeles, receiving an A.B. degree in 1972, and from UCLA School of Law, receiving a J.D. degree in 1975. He went on to clerk for then-Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Kozinski's first judicial appointment was as chief judge at the newly formed United States Court of Federal Claims in 1982. Then, at the age of 35, Reagan appointed him to the Ninth Circuit, making him the youngest federal appeals court judge in the country.

Kozinski’s writings have appeared in mainstream publications such as Forbes and Slate.


Stephen Reinhardt ’51 is a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in Los Angeles. He graduated from Pomona College with an A.B. in Government in 1951. In 1954, he received an LL.B. from Yale Law School. After law school, Reinhardt worked at the legal counsel’s office in Washington, D.C. for the United States Air Force as a lieutenant. Two years later, he clerked for district judge Luther Youngdahl, a former governor of Minnesota, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Reinhardt served as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, California Advisory Committee from 1962 to 1974 and was its Vice Chairman from 1969 to 1974. He also served as member of the Democratic National Committee and as an unpaid advisor to former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and former California governor Jerry Brown. In 1975 he was appointed to the Los Angeles Police Commission, which he chaired from 1978 until his judicial confirmation in 1980.

Tibor Machan CMC '65 on Ayn Rand for Reason.TV

It's no understatement to say that the work of Ayn Rand changed my life. It must have left an impression: I went to an Ayn Rand conference for my 17th birthday. Have a look at what Tibor Machan CMC '65 has to say about it. The run time is five minutes.

Andrew Bluebond Doesn't Get Humor About HIs Global Warming Religion

Careful where you point that finger, Bluebond

After I wrote a my little missive on Charlie Sprague's silly environmentalist suggestion, I wrote something saying that if the college were serious about banning emissions, it should ban East Coast and international students and only admit Riley Lewis, who lives in Claremont.

Andrew Bluebond, over at The Claremont Port Side, fires back with this humorless blog post supposedly attacking my logic, without recognizing that the whole point was to ridicule the kind of logic expressed in Sprague's post.

The college's job to "reduce its carbon emissions." Its mission is to promote education, something he concedes in the post.

Andrew didn't get the joke, probably because I was criticizing his religion. And he didn't see the obvious point I was making by silently comparing it to the tray ban, which never considered the trade offs between trays or no trays. So now I have to spoil the joke by explaining...

But hey, I did appreciate being lectured to about trade offs by a gender studies major. That was funny enough in its own right.

Travel to and From School: The Next Thing To Be Banned?

Riley Lewis: CMC's one future student?

In his usually incoherent column for The Forum, Charlie Sprague writes about how we should "End Fall Break," and leaves this silly one-liner.

For the environmentalist, ending fall break would probably reduce the college’s carbon footprint as many students would travel back home one less time.

Let's extend that to its logical conclusion, Charlie.

While we're at it and to keep our school green, green, green, let's ban all international students and East Coast students from campus. We just can't have them pumping all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In fact, anyone that doesn't bike here is suspect. No students, no students at all! (Except Riley Lewis CMC '11, who can bike here from his house in Claremont.)

An Irreverent Look At All the Gay Rights Speakers Coming to Claremont

Having just turned 21, I sympathize with the gentlemen that got raided by the police at the Stonewall Inn some forty years ago. I rather like having a brewsky (or two or several) at the local pub and would prefer to enjoy the company of my fellows or frauleins without the long arm of the law coming crashing in. (Indeed, if the officers were inclined to come in peacefully, I might even be inclined to buy them a drink.)

What I don’t understand is why an event many years ago encourages the Athenaeum to spend money for three speakers to come and discuss so-called homosexual rights.

I’m inclined to let anyone who wants to serve openly in the military do so, especially as our allies do so too. Call me old fashioned, but I subscribe to the Chris Rock school when it comes to gays in the military.

But, as best as I can tell, no one has died in recent years for being gay and those gays that have been the victim of thuggery, pale in comparison to the millions that have died under leftist regimes. As President George W. Bush put it,

The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history -- and beind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism's brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin's Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin's purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot's Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the "Red Terror"; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.

So why don't we have a speaker to talk about the cold war on the 20th anniversary?

Pitney, Pestritto, and Voegeli on Year One in the Age of Obama

First, here's R. J. Pestritto [quoted in part] in National Review:

Democrats said something else during the campaign that we should have listened to. With remarkable consistency, they identified themselves with progressivism and made clear that they aimed to revive the principles and policies of the Progressive Movement from the turn of the 20th century. Many assumed this to be mere rhetoric — “progressive” was simply thought to be a nicer way of saying “liberal,” which had become dirty word in American politics. But the Democrats clearly had more in mind, and have now pursued the main planks of the progressive agenda originally laid out by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

That agenda was as clear as it was radical: Wilson and Roosevelt loathed the Constitution’s limits on federal authority and sought various ways to undermine them, sometimes through a direct frontal assault but more often through a creative or “living” interpretation of the Constitution’s language (think of how today’s Democratic leaders dismiss the slightest questioning of Obamacare’s constitutionality). They also planned for the national government to take on a much-expanded role in regulating society and private wealth by delegating significant discretionary authority to expert bureaucracies (think of our present TARP program and its progeny — and thank the Bush administration for helping to give the Democrats a running start).

Second, here is Professor John J. Pitney, talking about Andrew Sullivan, the ultimate birther, and how dirty Obama's style politics is.

In a way, President Obama does match up to Candidate Obama. For anyone willing to look carefully, the 2008 campaign showed that he would speak of civility and unity while his crew engaged in hard-edged, polarizing tactics. After Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became public, for instance, he won praise for saying that candidates’ family lives were off-limits and that he would fire anyone in his campaign who spread rumors about the Palin children’s parentage. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, of course, was busy at the time doing just that, which didn’t prompt Obama’s staff to remove the samples of Sullivan’s writing it had re-posted to the official campaign site or prevent the president from quoting him in speeches. A week before his inauguration, Obama met with a group of center-left journalists that included Sullivan.

And family certainly wasn’t off-limits for Howard Gutman, a member of Obama’s national finance committee, who criticized Sarah Palin’s parenting. After the election, Obama made Gutman a trustee of his inauguration committee and then appointed him to be ambassador to Belgium.

Petty political warfare has continued. Earlier this year, the Obama White House directed an effort to demonize Rush Limbaugh. More recently, the staff has been waging a campaign against Fox News. In the beginning, some Republicans may actually have believed the president’s rhetoric about setting aside “the smallness of our politics.” Now they know that he didn’t really mean it.

Here is William Voegeli, talking about the luck that Obama's had and how it will run out.

It’s as hard to get a fix on the president’s political beliefs as it is to get a fix on his political skills. The Zelig-like Barack Obama fit into Jeremiah Wright’s congregation when establishing himself in a black district. Once his political ascent there was blocked, he acclimated to the Hyde Park ethos that regarded Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as having picaresque but morally unproblematic pasts. He fit in with ethically flexible Chicago pols like Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich when he needed to build a political network for a statewide campaign. And, despite signals in 2008 that his time at the University of Chicago had left him conversant with and tolerant of arguments about what government couldn’t and shouldn’t do, he now fits in in Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s Washington. He has spent the last twelve months as their enabler, which is looking more and more like a role that will hasten the day that his luck runs out.

Conor Friedersdorf PO '02 Open Letter to Jonah Goldberg

Over at True Slant, Conor Friedersdorf PO '2002 writes an open letter to Jonah Goldberg, in which he mentioned his time at Pomona College:

It is actually surprising that the gulf separating our attitudes is so deep. As a native of Orange County, California, the people I most respect in this world – my parents and two sets of grandparents – are all self-described conservative Republicans. My involvement in politics began in response to what I regarded as grave flaws in leftist campus politics at Pomona College, and the dubious actions of Democrats during the Gray Davis era in California, when I witnessed giveaways to public employee unions that were arguably the most fiscally irresponsible measures in state history. The political writers I’ve read whose work most resonates are Burke, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The bulk of President Obama’s domestic agenda strikes me as ill conceived at best—I worry about the unabated growth of the federal government, America’s perilous fiscal situation, and an approach to governance that relies on the enduring wisdom of elected and appointed officials.

Elsewhere, Friedersdorf wrote an interesting take on a NextGen conference that I attended earlier last year with Bryce Gerard and Sam Corcos. I pretty much agree with his assessment about how the right needs to get over its fears of marginalization and do its thing, regardless of the naysayers.

I'm all for ideological diversity on the right, but it seems just as there have been a lot of right leaning gents who make a career of the victimization mentality of the right, there have been a bunch that have made a career over calling these guys out. At the end of the day, what the right needs isn't some kind of post-modern critique of itself, but some serious, conservative ideas that address the challenges of the day and that move the debate, however incrementally, in the proper direction of maximizing the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

Against Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Let me surprise a few people here: I'm in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

First off, let me just say that I think Dan Choi is a patriot and I can't believe that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is still a serious policy in America.

Let's think about this: We allow the Australians, the Austrians, the Belgians, the Canadians, the Czechs, the Danes, the Estonians, the Finns, the French, the Irish, the Israelis, the Italians, the Lithuanians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Slovenians, the South Africans, the Spanish, the Swedish, and the Brits to serve alongside our troops. They all allow homosexuals to serve openly.

The same kinds of "scientific" studies that purportedly find something wrong with homosexuals serving openly are the same kinds of studies that stupidly affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board in that bunk doll test. The court should simply have affirmed Harlan's dissent in Plessy. These studies are the same kinds of studies that essentialize race on our campuses. They are not worth the paper upon which they are printed.

But seriously, why is the Athenaeum bringing yet another speaker to talk about an issue that few on campus find at all controversial? This will be the third speaker to talk about gay issues this semester.

Neo-Liberalism and Latin America

I've been asked to write something regarding neo-liberalism in Latin America for a friend. It's a paying gig, so I'm naturally excited, but what to say, what to say and what was so wrong with the classical liberalism, anyways?

Have a look at how awesome liberalism in immigration has been for the world's poor. I have a suspicion that it has been much better for the poor than any foreign aid scheme designed.

Matt Spaulding's New Book Profiled in National Review

Matthew Spaulding, CMC alum, wrote a new book, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future that is the subject of a profile in National Review.

I've been reading Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader by Jonathan Bean about how it's really been these classically liberal thinkers, grounded in natural law, that have been able to offer a compelling alternative to the statism and de facto racism of progressives like FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

A Few Short Links

From the Claremont blogosphere:

• The Forum's laughablly vague "Rules of Conduct." It really is ridiculous. Good thing it is almost never enforced. But I really don't think anyone should have this kind of power...
• Amy Jasper suggests that CMC is male-dominated. It isn't. 52 percent of the freshman class is female, but even if we suspect that it is, so what? What's wrong with masculinity?
• William Voegeli, a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna's Salvatori Center and sometime government professor, has two great City Journal essays on California's growing and incompetent public sector. They remind me of what Fareed Zakaria said, that while Californians like to brag that we would be the 7th largest economy in the world, we'd also be under IMF receivership.

From the rest of the blogosphere

• The Institute for Justice is suing to open up bone marrow to economic competition. They say that a law regulating it is unconstitutional. I agree, but why stop at bone marrow? Why not make the case for blood as well? (As I did in The American.) The empirical case has been building: my friend and co-worker, Dane Stangler, sent me someting earlier about blood donation compensation via Robin Hanson.
• Riley Lewis (CMC 2011) and I are preparing for Jeopardy auditions on November 8th. I sure hope the categories I get are as easy as this one about economic history and that my opponents know as little as these folks do!

Cuss (And Veto) Away, Ahnold!

I don't like cussing myself. I find it one of the vices least tolerable in others and least commendable in me, but I have to disagree with Professor John J. Pitney Jr.'s post on The Corner regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto message.

Professor Pitney dislikes it because,

It probably took his staff a good deal of effort to devise the acrostic. So think about it: Amid a fiscal crisis requiring severe cutbacks, a public employee had to use government time and resources to carry out the governor’s potty-mouth prank. This incident sends the message that he does not take the crisis very seriously. And one hopes that he did not assign a female aide to the task: Such is the stuff of sexual-harassment lawsuits.

Nobody should expect elected officials to be perfect in their private lives. But we can expect them to behave like adults in their public lives. By pulling a stunt that would land a junior-high-school kid in detention, the governor has flunked this standard.

Say what you want, but the more time the government wastes sending cryptic or not so cryptic notes to one another is time they don't spend spending money or figuring out ways to waste it. I hope he sends veto messages to nearly all of the Democratic legislature.