Archive for December 4th, 2013
Daily Glimpse December 4, 2013
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on December 4th, 2013
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- Liberals Lose Effort to Defund the Right Via SEC Disclosure
Via Bainbridge, quoting Marc Hodak: Mary Jo White, former United States Attorney, is bringing a strong prosecutorial agenda. This shift in priorities appears to have manifested itself in a new Rule List that, at least for now, drops the push for disclosure of corporate political contributions. The pro-regulatory crowd is not going to be happy. … Corporate political spending […]
- Using Nanographene Oxide to Destroy Tumors
More nanotechnology promises: Scientists have learned over the years that the cells in cancerous tumors are more sensitive to heat than normal cells in the body (it makes them more porous). To take advantage of this property, researchers have developed techniques for heating such cells before applying other techniques meant to kill them—heating tumors before using chemo or radiotherapy […]
- Origins of Common UI Symbols
Not all of them got their start with Tech.
- A New Book On the Mumbai Massacre
The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark gets a favorable review at Lawfare. The Siege discloses a new intriguing wrinkle about Headley. The two British authors’ investigations in Pakistan, India and the US led them to believe LeT and the ISI became suspicious that Headley was a double agent, secretly […]
- LA’s Former Forest of Oil Rigs
LA used to look like this: They’re still there, often hidden under a building or a decorative shell, but there are some down near the airport, if I recall. I do remember a season of 24 opening with Jack working at one of today’s oil pumps.
- 3D-Printed Modular Cell Phones?
So say Motorola and 3D Systems: Last month, Motorola announced a plan for a modular smartphone. Project Ara, the company said, will be a simple way for users to individualize their phones, swapping out parts like the battery and camera until users have a phone that’s just for them. How do they plan on doing that? With 3-D […]
- The 5 Coldest Places To Live
Congratulations, Fraser, Colorado!
- Pensions, Midwestern Style
Detroit finally gets a break: Rhodes — in a surprise decision this morning — also said he’ll allow pension cuts in Detroit’s bankruptcy. Rhodes emphasized that he won’t necessarily agree to pension cuts in the city’s final reorganization plan unless the entire plan is fair and equitable. Illinois is considering its own pension reform plan, and […]
- Thanksgiving, The Founders, and Religion
There’s a reason that religious liberty was specifically written into the 1st Amendment. If we seek evidence of the broadly shared public view of the meaning of the Establishment Clause at the time of the Founding, we find not an insistence on strict separation of church and state but instead a largely uncontroversial willingness to see the […]
- How Elon Musk Thinks
Reason things out from “first principles” rather than by analogy: The benefit of “first principles” thinking? It allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists. Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the […]
- Young Adult Readers ‘Prefer Printed To Ebooks’
Hope from, of all places, the youth of Britain: Sixteen to 24-year-olds are known as the super-connected generation, obsessed with snapping selfies or downloading the latest mobile apps, so it comes as a surprise to learn that 62% prefer print books to ebooks…. The top-rated reasons for preferring physical to digital products were: “I like to hold the […]
- Happy 250th, Touro Synagogue
One hundred years to the day before the completion of the Capitol Dome, the current building of the recipient of Washington’s famous letter was dedicated. Documents associated with the letter are much sought after by collectors today, not least because contemporary printings of Washington’s letter in Rhode Island newspapers, the Newport Mercury and the Providence […]
- Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe
Along with everyone else: So almost everywhere in Europe, people are living longer but having fewer years of healthy life. Only in the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands did people buck this trend with the numbers of years of healthy life increasing in these places since 2003. That raises an obvious question: what happened in […]
On the Recalls, the Dems Have No Standing to Complain
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, National Politics on December 4th, 2013
In 82 BCE, Sulla returned to Italy, and touched off three years of Civil War. By the end, he had killed tens of thousands of people, entered Rome by force, butchered thousands in civic buildings, and ordered the deaths of perhaps 5000 of the most prominent Romans. He not only broke the taboo against using legions against Rome itself, he killed pretty much any Roman who had even thought to oppose him, and many who hadn’t. As a result, he was able to leave office voluntarily, and wander the streets of Rome unprotected by any bodyguard. His reforms took Roman governing law back to the rules it had operated under prior to the rise of Tiberius Gracchus about 60 years earlier, while still trying to deal with the land and military issues that led to Gracchus’s rise in the first place.
Sulla used radical means to achieve arch-conservative ends. And yet, in the end, it was the radicalism that endured and the restoration that was forgotten.
To listen to the Denver Post, you’d think that the Colorado recalls were a similarly seminal moment in the destruction of our Republic. And some Democrats agree.
Whatever the merits of using unconventional, if perfectly Constitutional, means to achieve politics ends, the Democrats have no room to complain.
The Democrats are the party that invented changing the rules in the middle of the game, and it didn’t start with Harry Reid and the Magical Disappearing Rulebook, or the Florida Supreme Court’s creative ballot accounting.
This is the party that has, here in Colorado, weaponized vote fraud this past year. They’re the party who, in 2004, sued to allow anyone to vote a full ballot, non-provisional, in any precinct, without ID.
They’re the party that is suing its own citizens to overturn a 20-year-old Constitutional Amendment in order to raise their taxes without end. It is the party that filibustered its own redistricting bill because it preferred its odds in court to having to negotiate Congressional districts with the other party.
The Democrats are the party that passed out of the State House a bill to overturn the Electoral College, by joining an interstate compact without Congressional sanction. They cheerfully accepted out-of-state money for a popular referendum to apportion our Electoral votes proportionally, which would have reduced the value of winning the state from nine votes to one.
They sued to get an ineligible school board candidate declared “duly elected,” in order to have her disqualified, so that a favorable committee could appoint her successor.
It’s not as though Colorado Dems invented this game, they just learned it from their brethren elsewhere. They’re the party that popularized the recall election in Wisconsin, after occupying the state capitol failed to achieve the desired results. (I have half a mind to just blame this tantrum on recall-envy, given the different parties’ relative success in making the tactic stick.) There, too, they politicized a state Supreme Court election, in an effort to overturn the laws that caused the uproar in the first place. Most Wisconsinites weren’t aware that Supreme Court elections were partisan affairs, complete with allegations of physical assault.
In New Jersey, the late Senator Frank Lautenberg was only Senator at all because the party got a judge to agree that even though the law said they couldn’t replace Bob Toricelli on the ballot within 30 days of the election, it didn’t really mean it.
The Democrats will claim that this is just politics as usual, that the game is played by trying to change the rules on the fly. If so, it reduces the Republicans’ sin to one of not being sufficiently shameless.
In other words, of not being enough like Democrats.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for Wednesday, December 4th, 2013
