#2
I am not by any means a scholar of warfare but sometimes I think we intellectualize and over-think what winning a war means. We get muddled in our concepts as the result and get bogged down in wars for years. Some of what I read in the article mixes Japanese production methods (Kaizen) with warfare. It begins to sound a lot like part of a Power Point presentation. I wonder what Patton would say to such things. I realize Patton was a "big war" general. One of his quotes was: "May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't."
#3
The best way to win is to make them die in droves and don't stop until they come crawling on their hands and knees to the table to surrender. Anything else just prolongs the war and allows them to accept the idea of a few more and a few more dying.
#4
War is ugly. It should be ugly. The more rules we adopt trying to make it less ugly, the more war we'll get. Don't try to pretty it up. Accept that's it's ugly. Then when you go to war you will really mean it, and you'll do what it takes to win and be done with it.
Some liberals were making a 24-hour pivot from praising Roberts' statesmanship to wondering whether the victory for Obama and congressional Democrats was delivered in a Trojan horse. Did anyone notice Karl Rove sneaking into the Court?
In the opinion that stirred this week's controversy, Roberts wrote that it was the duty of the court to avoid rejecting an act of Congress if there is a plausible reason for saving it. "It is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so," Roberts wrote.
So he rejected the government's argument that requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty was justified under the Constitution's commerce clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.
But, joined by the court's four liberals, he said the penalty operated as a tax, and thus was proper under the taxing clause. Followed by some wild guessing, suggesting Roberts changed at the last minute, looking for clues amongst the differing opinions.
There is nothing improper about a justice changing his or her mind on a case before the decision is delivered. But the insinuation was that Roberts may have been motivated by a desire to spare recriminations from the image of the court's five justices appointed by Republican presidents overturning a landmark bill passed by congressional Democrats and signed by Obama. A silver lining - his decision made it look much less like a political one.
Others thought it unlikely that Roberts had changed his mind. "There are some loose ends in the opinions, to be sure, but it might just be because they were pressed for time," George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr wrote on the Volokh Conspiracy, a Web site on legal issues where much of the speculation found a home.
And it was also clear during the first hour of the lengthy oral arguments that Roberts was exploring the theory he later adopted: that the penalty served as a way to satisfy the government's requirement, making the mandate less of a command. My way or pay is better than my way or die.
Stanford University constitutional law professor Pamela Karlan said liberals should see the decision as strategic. "Is that man clever or what?" she said, adding that Roberts learned a lesson from his predecessor and mentor William H. Rehnquist about when to look for compromise. "He knows he's going to be on the court for years."
While the decision has the immediate effect of saving the health-care law, Karlan said, the opinion contained what could be important and long-lasting principles. The strict reading of the commerce clause is something conservatives have wanted for years. And the court said the law's attempt to force states to expand Medicaid rolls by threatening to withhold federal funds was improperly coercive.
"That truly breaks new ground," said Richard Fallon, a Harvard law professor. "It's the first time since the 1930s that the Supreme Court has invalidated a federal spending statute that gives money to states and attaches strings. A number of other federal spending programs that attach strings will now be attacked as coercive." Job security for the Supremes!
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/30/2012 06:21 ||
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#1
He's inserted an constitution-upholding worm into the legal system.
#2
Seems like a torturous stretch to arrive at the conclusion that the mandate is a tax. Obama said that ObamaCare would bring no new taxes for people making $200K or couples making $250K. He said that people could keep their doctors and their insurance. Both are lies. The entire legislation was premised on a lie. It was rammed down our throats and we were told to shut up, you will like it. Nancy Pelosi otherwise known as "Detestable" told us it had to be passed to read it. These people should all be arrested for fraud or impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
#3
I got a better idea, John - humiliate them. Vote them out of office!
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/30/2012 15:25 Comments ||
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#4
I do not buy all this narrow interpretation stuff. The law forced you to do something or face a fine, in this case, health care. Other things can be added later in the same way, calling it a tax.
Roberts should have struck this POS law down just for that. SCOTUS needed to send a message that this law was unconstitutional and that Congress needed to fix it. It is NOT the job of SCOTUS to rewrite the law. That is up to Congress. They need a good smack down. Writing 2000+ pages of sh*t written by staffers that will cost this country trillions of dollars that the country does not have is unconscionable. And what is worse is that few congress critters read the text in detail.
The issue is rather simple, it is an issue of liberty, but lawyers make the core issue too complicated, thus ducking the issue.
Roberts did not need to pull a fast one. He needed to write his opinion and keep the law or throw it out. He is not in the legislative branch of the US. That's it.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
06/30/2012 15:25 Comments ||
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#5
Dr. Krauthammer had it correct last evening. Roberts actions this week were all about the external "perceptions" of the court, not about jurisprudence. Most of the older members appeared to follow a strict interpretation of the law. The younger and more left leaning members went with the emotion centered egalitarianism which is the hallmark of our education system today.
We are now ruled by mandates set forth by a Dictator formed by infatuation of his third world father and extreme leftist mother. A host of appointed Czars that have replaced Congress and a faltering Judicial Branch that is caving from the top down.
The options are a struggle for the restoration of Liberty or toiling under mandates that run counter to general consensus.
#7
notice that it's always the conservatives and centrist (Kennedy) whose votes are in play. Nobody questions the leftwing maggots who vote in lockstep.
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/30/2012 16:34 Comments ||
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#8
I still say, it could have been a lot worse. Roberts left only one problem outstanding, properly to be dealt with by the elected branches. What's surprising is not that he joined the left wing of the court, but that they joined him.
#9
Ginsberg did, with bitterness. She should be a replacement project by President Romney. F*&k their "this was a liberal seat, you need to nominate a liberal".
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/30/2012 19:23 Comments ||
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#10
Submitted for your approval, an interesting analysis:
#11
There still may be hope - a variety of Catholic institutions have filed suit based on religious liberty concerns. Obamacare requires all employers, except churches and religious institutions like convents, to cover birth control pills (with no co-pay) for everyone. Catholic colleges and hospitals are not exempt. So they have sued, saying Obamacare forces them to go against their core religious principles.
Of course, it will take years for this to reach the Supreme Court, if it ever does. Hopefully, by then, President Romney and the newly elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate will have repealed this monstrosity.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
06/30/2012 21:29 Comments ||
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Stolen Kremlin records show how the Soviets, including Gorbachev, created many of today's Middle East conflicts
A taste from a four-page long article. No doubt you, dear Reader, knew some of the facts presented therein, but it's lovely to have it confirmed from the Kremlin's own archives.
The dominant narrative of modern Middle East history emphasizes the depredations visited upon the region by European colonization and accepts as a truism that the former colonial powers prioritized the protection of their material interests--in oil, above all--above the dignity and self-determination of the region's inhabitants. Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability. The most intractable of the regional conflicts to which this gave rise, that between the Arabs and Israelis, is attributed in this narrative to Israel's unwillingness to accede to Paleostinian national aspirations. Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region's meddling overlords. Then came Mikhail Gorbachev--a Westernizing reformer. At last, the Cold War was over. A new world order was at hand.
What if this conventional wisdom is nonsense? Russian exile Pavel Stroilov argues just this in his forthcoming book, Behind the Desert Storm. "Not a word of it is true," he writes. "It was the Soviet Empire--not the British Empire--that was responsible for the instability in the Middle East."
Stroilov, a historian now living in London, fled Russia in 2003 after stealing 50,000 top-secret Kremlin documents from the Gorbachev Foundation archives, where he was working as a researcher. He was given access to the archive in 1999, but Gorbachev refused him permission to copy its most significant documents. Having observed the network administrator entering the password into the system, Stroilov reproduced the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
Stroilov's cache includes hundreds of transcripts of discussions between Gorbachev and foreign leaders, politicians, and diplomats. (The originals are still sealed under Kremlin pressure.) There are notes from Politburo and other top decision-making meetings, notes written by Gorbachev's aides Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. None were ever available to independent researchers, although some were published by the Gorbachev Foundation in a heavily censored version. Stroilov also stole the 1972-1986 diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, deputy chief of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union International Department and Gorbachev's principal aide on international affairs from 1986 to 1991. He stole reports dating from the 1960s by Vadim Zagladin, who was deputy chief of the International Department until 1987 and Gorbachev's adviser from 1987 to 1991. (Stroilov also draws upon Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky's vast, stolen collection of documents, as well as the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes taken secretly by the defector Vasili Mitrokhin during his 30 years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate.)
Stroilov's book about these documents, many only now translated into English, challenges the conventional wisdom that Western colonialists are to blame for the chaos in the region. All of its major conflicts, he argues, were caused by Soviet expansionism. Terrorism and the rabid anti-Israeli animus of the Arab world were Soviet inspirations. And the revolutions we are seeing now were inevitable, for the Soviet client states were socialist regimes, and sooner or later socialism exhausts economies and thus the patience of the people who live in them.
#1
I would go one further and say it was Arab's fault. The European empires and the Turks before them kept the peace. The Soviets might have armed different factions but the motivations come from deep within Arab culture and its near total failure in the modern world.
#4
The Russians always had a huge advantage over Westerners when dealing with Arabs---they have no self-imposed illusions as to what it is they're dealing with.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
