We don't know how deep the taint goes. If we find out the Sony music CDs don't infect the PS3 with the rootkit, we'll know there was some collusion between the different branches of the company. Then we can return our PS3s for repair, further increasing Sony's expenses and hurting their launch.
And you thought some folks were upset about descending from apes, wait till they see this.
No kidding. Some people just can't accept God was actually a Reeses Monkey, and the Soddom and Gammorah were really destroyed by a massive rain of terds.
It's Rhesus, Sodom, Gomorrah, and turds.
That ape story is starting to sound more and more plausible.
Again I repeat that you have not spent three words justifying your worldview. I think it is because you can't.
I don't consider the Constitution to be Holy Writ, so why should I believe that the 9th and 10th Amendments say whatever you want them to say? It should be clear that just pointing to the text and saying "I'm right" doesn't work when someone else looks at the same text and says "I disagree."
In fact, you've set up a situation where your mystical intuition (again I use the terms precisely) won't allow you to defend your argument. And the problem is not that I don't know what you're saying. The problem is that you don't have any public basis for your private belief.
I repeat that context controls meaning and you have not permitted criticism of the context you bring to the Constitution.
The longer this conversation goes on, the more I believe that you don't know the truth or falsity of what you're saying about the Constitution, and the insularity of your worldview prevents questions like the ones I have posed from reaching you. If so, that is a harsh indictment of your worldview. Every worldview needs to be judged, in trial by fire. The less a worldview permits question, the more it avoids judgment, the weaker it is.
I recognize the way things work. I was questioning the legitimacy of the people who are making it work that way. You can concede that they're acting illegitimately but don't try to argue that they're at all within their Constitutional authority.
On the contrary, I have defined the Constitution as a living document representing our evolving social contract. It was always meant to be that. As such, the Supreme Court is well within its authority as representatives, elites, whatever you want to call them, to reinterpret the document as the social contract changes. You, on the other hand, have failed to define legitimacy. Let me repeat again: unless the Constitution was written by one of the 12 apostles, talking as if it is not subject to reinterpretation is ludicrous. I'm not sure what country you want to live in, but it is not a country where our social contract evolves.
The precedent set by the courts is extra-Constitutional. As such, we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic. The powers and authorities expressed by our government are no longer those indicative of a Constitutional Republic but rather more closely resembles the powers and authorities of a Socialist or Communist regime.
Once again I call BS on the loaded definitions of these terms. And I call BS too on the idea that a text has meaning without context. It's not like you can just point at the Constitution and say "The Constitution is the Constitution. What do you mean you don't understand me?" We disagree about the meaning of the text, therefore the text is not just the text; like I said before, you impose your interpretation on the Constitution, and we have arguments about interpretation.
That's why it's useless to say that "extra-Constitutional" means "illegitimate". All meaning is extra-textual; all meaning is contextual. The question is about which context is most appropriate. Now, you've talked a lot about Communism and Democracy and the Constitution, but you haven't spent three words justifying the context you bring to the Constitution.
If the government chooses to operate outside the limitations of the 9th and 10th Amendments then the Constitution no longer has any meaning. They might as well justify their arguments using the "might makes right" approach.
You call the 9th and 10th Amendments limitations. But you have no authority for this claim except your extra-Constitutional context, worldview, whatever you want to call it. Your context is not only not magically better than mine, it is not accepted by the authorities on the subject, the Supreme Court, nor is it mainstream in the population, nor is it mainstream in jurisprudence. So justify your worldview.
As I've said, there is not a dichotomy between "might makes right" and "strict construction". I've proposed at least one other way that a text may be related to its interpretation, "living document".
You have a lot of slogans and labels. But they are brittle, and they are unconvincing.
I don't see why I should make any concessions in an argument I am being so clear about. Rather, I think you have been upset all along by my repeating the facts of life to you about the Constitution. You have wished it were otherwise and wanted me to say that I wished it were otherwise as well. I think you mistake my goal in this conversation.
For instance, I disagree with 1) because I don't think precedent has nothing to do with content. Rather, I think precedent shapes the context in which we view the words of the Constitution. I do think that First Amendment cases go before the court all the time and are decided on the basis of what are ultimately First Amendment principles. At the same time, I acknowledge that we have built up a gigantic apparatus of lenses through which to view constitutional issues. A bald example is free speech, where debates surround, for example, the hate speech, flag-burning, pornography issues. I recognize that this apparatus seems to have meandered far from the text.
However, I think it is a paradoxical strength of the Constitution that it need not only mean what it says. You seem to desire a situation where the black ink on the white pages of the Constitution creates a black and white world where it is obvious how to govern, where we haven't accreted all these unfortunate systems of being a society, a simpler time, a happier time. With respect, this desire is misguided; the Constitution can be our rule book or it can be our community. I am happy that the Constitution's interpretation changes as our American community changes. "The letter kills but the spirit gives life" is very relevant to the Constitution in that sense. The Constitution, with judicial precedent and all, is our negotiated settlement with the real world.
I think your use of "real legitimate meaning" is loaded with whatever you conceive to be the legitimate meaning of the constitution. "Constitutional Republic", "Leaders of the Free World", "Democracy" with a capital D, "Communist and Socialist" are also similarly loaded. You call your interpretation of the Constitution strict, but you interpret it eisegetically, with your secret knowledge about what is legitimate and what is meaning and what is democracy. So I call BS on your interpretations of these labels (which you have not defined, but whose thrust is clear from your use).
If you choose to argue that the Constitution still has any real legitimate meaning in today's world then we must default back to the strictest interpretation of the original document. That is to strive for the smallest and most limited Federal government possible.
I object to the non sequitur. The Constitution can have meaning without rolling in "the strictest interpretation of the original document." Maybe you want to include the interpretation in the original document that a slave counts as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of allocating members of the House of Representatives. The Constitution has had ugly, useless hacks from the beginning. We use them because they're all we've got, but we modify them because they are not adequate to the task of living together.
Every once in a while, we come to decisions as a society that are so momentous that we enshrine them in Amendments to the Constitution. But more frequently, we (or rather the Supreme Court) choose to interpret things a little differently, or more completely to reflect the complexities that the document does not countenance (and there are endless examples here too). I think this is positive on the whole. I don't know what your rollback program is for the Constitution and whether you really think that judicial precedent has been negative for our country on the whole.
Isn't it obvious from all I've said here that I think the Constitution does have real legitimate meaning? And yet I don't agree with you. Maybe there is a hole in your argument somewhere.
I don't know why you want me to agree with these premises. Maybe you are trying to label me, so you can dismiss me. I am not interested in affording you the satisfaction.
I don't see why I should make any concessions in an argument I am being so clear about. Rather, I think you have been upset all along by my repeating the facts of life to you about the Constitution. You have wished it were otherwise and wanted me to say that I wished it were otherwise as well. I think you mistake my goal in this conversation.
For instance, I disagree with 1) because I don't think precedent has nothing to do with content. Rather, I think precedent shapes the context in which we view the words of the Constitution. I do think that First Amendment cases go before the court all the time and are decided on the basis of what are ultimately First Amendment principles. At the same time, I acknowledge that we have built up a gigantic apparatus of lenses through which to view constitutional issues. A bald example is free speech, where debates surround, for example, the hate speech, flag-burning, pornography issues. I recognize that this apparatus seems to have meandered far from the text.
However, I think it is a paradoxical strength of the Constitution that it need not only mean what it says. You seem to desire a situation where the black ink on the white pages of the Constitution creates a black and white world where it is obvious how to govern, where we haven't accreted all these unfortunate systems of being a society, a simpler time, a happier time. With respect, this desire is misguided; the Constitution can be our rule book or it can be our community. I am happy that the Constitution's interpretation changes as our American community changes. "The letter kills but the spirit gives life" is very relevant to the Constitution in that sense. The Constitution, with judicial precedent and all, is our negotiated settlement with the real world.
I think your use of "real legitimate meaning" is loaded with whatever you conceive to be the legitimate meaning of the constitution. "Constitutional Republic", "Leaders of the Free World", "Democracy" with a capital D, "Communist and Socialist" are also similarly loaded. You call your interpretation of the Constitution strict, but you interpret it eisegetically, with your secret knowledge about what is legitimate and what is meaning and what is democracy. So I call BS on your interpretations of these labels (which you have not defined, but whose thrust is clear from your use).
If you choose to argue that the Constitution still has any real legitimate meaning in today's world then we must default back to the strictest interpretation of the original document. That is to strive for the smallest and most limited Federal government possible.
I object to the non sequitur. The Constitution can have meaning without rolling in "the strictest interpretation of the original document." Maybe you want to include the interpretation in the original document that a slave counts as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of allocating members of the House of Representatives. The Constitution has had ugly, useless hacks from the beginning. We use them because they're all we've got, but we modify them because they are not adequate to the task of living together.
Every once in a while, we come to decisions as a society that are so momentous that we enshrine them in Amendments to the Constitution. But more frequently, we (or rather the Supreme Court) choose to interpret things a little differently, or more completely to reflect the complexities that the document does not countenance (and there are endless examples here too). I think this is positive on the whole. I don't know what your rollback program is for the Constitution and whether you really think that judicial precedent has been negative for our country on the whole.
Isn't it obvious from all I've said here that I think the Constitution does have real legitimate meaning? And yet I don't agree with you. Maybe there is a hole in your argument somewhere.
I don't know why you want me to agree with these premises. Maybe you are trying to label me, so you can dismiss me. I am not interested in affording you the satisfaction.
You are not listening. You do not live in the United States of America c. 2005. You do not appreciate the political reality that the Supreme Court decides what the Constitution says. You do not appreciate the jurisprudential reality that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have in fact been interpreted by endless precedents to allow sweeping federal authority.
Instead you want a commerce clause that is interpreted narrowly, you want the single most conservative justice of the Supreme Court to get his membership revoked because he's not conservative enough (!), you want a loose federation rather than a republic. Guess what? They already fought the Civil War, and I hate to break it to you, but you lost.
"That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not."
This is not a jab. This is a statement of fact about how the Constitution is interpreted. I am trying to point out that whatever you think the Constitution says pales in comparison to what the Supreme Court thinks it says. They actually cannot be wrong about what it says, but you seem to want some court of last resort to judge the Supreme Court. Such a court does not exist in the United States.
Your wants and shoulds and oughts and advocating might be justified by real reasons. They might even be true. Like I said, if we were really honest about how the federal government operates now, we would replace the commerce clause with a much broader statement; what I mean is that the commerce clause is inadequate to bear the weight that has been placed on it by the Supreme Court over the course of our history. I agree with you that weed has nothing to do with interstate commerce.
But tough. We don't get to decide how the Constitution should be interpreted. I offer no opinions on how it should be interpreted, especially because your desired interpretation flies in the face of precedents that are as set in stone as a Mafia stoolie. I have no axe to grind. On the other hand you do.
If you want the Constitution to say something different than the current Supreme Court does, your options are: a) Get on the Supreme Court; b) Invent a time machine and climb in; c) Start a new country and write your own Constitution; or most realistically, d) Start a legal movement that countenances the sorts of changes in the interpretation of the Constitution that you desire, then put judges on the Supreme Court that are likely to listen to you. But I don't think, frankly, that you are likely to succeed at any of these aims.
"You might, and you'd be wrong. It's very clear: Anything not mentioned specifically in the Constitution is not the business of the Federal Government (the 10th Amendment), and you can't enumerate the Constitution to expand the role of the Federal Government (the 9th Amendment)."
Maybe I'm wrong, but how many Supreme Court justices have to disagree with you before you are wrong?
"What makes you think that the Constitutional Authors were writing the 9th and 10th Amendments to allow that to happen again?"
Remember, I'm not an originalist, so I think claims about what the Founders would and would not allow today, given the context of their contemporary situation are irrelevant. They, at least, knew that they were producing a living document, not inerrant Mt. Sinai political gospel. It is much more plausible that no one knows what the Founders would allow today, given the context of our history and our contemporary situation, and that trying to approximate the political realities of 2005 with lessons from 1789 is a project doomed to failure.
You are not listening. You do not live in the United States of America c. 2005. You do not appreciate the political reality that the Supreme Court decides what the Constitution says. You do not appreciate the jurisprudential reality that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have in fact been interpreted by endless precedents to allow sweeping federal authority.
Instead you want a commerce clause that is interpreted narrowly, you want the single most conservative justice of the Supreme Court to get his membership revoked because he's not conservative enough (!), you want a loose federation rather than a republic. Guess what? They already fought the Civil War, and I hate to break it to you, but you lost.
"That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not."
This is not a jab. This is a statement of fact about how the Constitution is interpreted. I am trying to point out that whatever you think the Constitution says pales in comparison to what the Supreme Court thinks it says. They actually cannot be wrong about what it says, but you seem to want some court of last resort to judge the Supreme Court. Such a court does not exist in the United States.
Your wants and shoulds and oughts and advocating might be justified by real reasons. They might even be true. Like I said, if we were really honest about how the federal government operates now, we would replace the commerce clause with a much broader statement; what I mean is that the commerce clause is inadequate to bear the weight that has been placed on it by the Supreme Court over the course of our history. I agree with you that weed has nothing to do with interstate commerce.
But tough. We don't get to decide how the Constitution should be interpreted. I offer no opinions on how it should be interpreted, especially because your desired interpretation flies in the face of precedents that are as set in stone as a Mafia stoolie. I have no axe to grind. On the other hand you do.
If you want the Constitution to say something different than the current Supreme Court does, your options are: a) Get on the Supreme Court; b) Invent a time machine and climb in; c) Start a new country and write your own Constitution; or most realistically, d) Start a legal movement that countenances the sorts of changes in the interpretation of the Constitution that you desire, then put judges on the Supreme Court that are likely to listen to you. But I don't think, frankly, that you are likely to succeed at any of these aims.
"You might, and you'd be wrong. It's very clear: Anything not mentioned specifically in the Constitution is not the business of the Federal Government (the 10th Amendment), and you can't enumerate the Constitution to expand the role of the Federal Government (the 9th Amendment)."
Maybe I'm wrong, but how many Supreme Court justices have to disagree with you before you are wrong?
"What makes you think that the Constitutional Authors were writing the 9th and 10th Amendments to allow that to happen again?"
Remember, I'm not an originalist, so I think claims about what the Founders would and would not allow today, given the context of their contemporary situation are irrelevant. They, at least, knew that they were producing a living document, not inerrant Mt. Sinai political gospel. It is much more plausible that no one knows what the Founders would allow today, given the context of our history and our contemporary situation, and that trying to approximate the political realities of 2005 with lessons from 1789 is a project doomed to failure.
I am referring to the fact that the Constitution says whatever the sitting Supreme Court says it does. That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not. And that's why we have privacy rights, civil rights, and yes the interstate commerce clause. Maybe some argument can be made about what the Constitution should say and how it should be interpreted, or how the Founders would have interpreted it if they were here. I call it mysticism because I, at least, do not know how anyone would know what the Founders would think about today's jurisprudence, given the rest of America's history, other than having some deep, personal, spiritual connection to them. So I was actually being specific.
If the commerce clause were meant to be a trojan for the federal government to do anything under the sun, why would the 9th and 10th Amendments have even been written?
Amendment 9 specifically prohibits the enumeration of any part of the Constitution to apply more broadly than bare minimum face value.
Let me say first that you give yourself away by the words were meant to be. In the words of Austin Powers, "That train has sailed." Why not ask how the commerce clause should be interpreted now? Or how the commerce clause is interpreted now? Again, you have some vision of the ideal version of the interpretation of the commerce clause. I don't. All I have is precedent. Even Scalia thinks that growing and consuming pot in one state, pot that never makes it into interstate commerce, should be governed by the commerce clause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
I might read the Tenth Amendment, for example, as delineating the separation of powers between the federal government and the state governments, rather than the circumscribing of the power of the federal government to the four corners of the Constitution.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Amendment 9 refers to the Bill of Rights being a subset of the rights that the government offers the people, and not the exact set. So there can be a right to privacy that is not explicit in the Bill of Rights. Amendment 9 invites that kind of expansion of individual rights against the power of the government. There is no logical path from the possible expansion of individual rights to a literal reading of the Constitution.
I don't entirely disagree with your point of view. I do think that if we were writing the Constitution to reflect the nature of government today, we might say something besides "govern interstate commerce". It might be "create national agencies to manage matters of national import". Or something. But it is misguided to talk about the fantasy land where we don't have the commerce clause, as opposed to talking about the real world, where it is real, influential, and not going away.
Sorry. I wasn't trying to be rude. But we are talking about regulating companies whose data mining activities extend to anyone from any state who uses their products on the Internet. These activities are broadly commercial because the companies tend to sell the information or use it to produce targeted advertising.
But more to the point, Congress has regulated broad activities under the commerce clause that have little to do with commerce at all.
"[In 2005]... Justices Scalia and Kennedy departed from their previous positions as parts of the Lopez and Morrison majorities to uphold a federal law regarding marijuana. The court found the federal law valid, although the marijuana in question had been grown and consumed within a single state, and had never entered interstate commerce."
That should give you an idea of how broadly the commerce clause is still being applied.
Whether or not it "really" applies is a question you would have to ask an originalist mystic.
If Sony's DRM is being used to aid in the use of unauthorized hacks, then why couldn't they ban you?
Sigh. Of course they can ban you, but the question is whether or not they should. Your solution to Blizzard's solution to their user verification problem is "presumption of guilt" for Blizzard's users. The reason they wrote Warden in the first place, the point of all that process hashing and window-bar-title reading was to find cheaters quietly without interfering with legitimate paying customers. Now that Warden is broken, they're going to start banning people that have run Sony CDs in their drives? Please. That would cause even more false positives than before, drawing so many more legitimate customers into the net (and costing Blizzard valuable subscriptions).
They have the legal right to ban you if they just plain don't like you, much less for something like this that can effectively ruin the game.
Something like what? Playing System of a Down CDs? Backing up your Switchfoot album? There's no easy way now to separate the innocent from the guilty. Blizzard is screwed.
I'll just let him do the talking. This is an excerpt from October 10.
The Federal government has loaned the oil companies crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR contained 700 million barrels of crude when the hurricanes hit. The US uses 20 million barrels of oil a day, of which we produce altogether about seven million barrels ourselves. It is unclear how much oil is coming out of it now, but the last time a president tapped the SPR (Clinton) one million barrels a day were released.
These actions have beaten down the price of crude oil on the various futures markets. At the same time, gasoline pump prices have leveled off from the refinery squeeze. I doubt that the motoring public is driving a whole lot less. The commutes haven't magically gotten any shorter out in Dallas and Denver over the past month. The national fleet of SUVs has not been changed out either.
What's happening, therefore is that we have entered an eerie hiatus. Some band-aids have been applied to our oil and natural gas supply injuries and the bleeding seems to have stopped. But the truth is that our energy supplies are badly compromised and at the worst time of the year -- just as we slide into the home heating season. Here in the northeast, we have barely had to turn on the furnaces yet, but that will change in a week or two.
In the background of this scene, the global oil production peak lurks -- meaning that there does not seem to be any surplus production capacity anywhere in the world, including OPEC's big gun, Saudi Arabia. So all we have here in America is a temporary appearance of normality. When the furnaces go on, the WalMart aisles will be empty. If there is any reduction in car trips, it will be because Americans are making fewer visits to the Big Box stores. There will also be fewer trips out to visit the model homes in the new subdivisions.
Another unpleasant truth about the situation is that the US public wants to pretend that everything is okay as much as its leaders do. The public is not so much being misled as demanding that its leaders in government, business, and the news media continue a game of make-believe -- that we can still run a cheap oil economy without cheap oil.
In the end the consumer will always pay no matter what happens. If they exclusively make financial institiutions responsible for phishing then that just means they will charge us more for their services. If they don't do anything about it, well, then we still pay when some schmuck steals our identy and our money.
There's a name for what you think is so dumb: Identity Theft Insurance. If you know somewhere to buy it, send me the URL.
Just like health insurance, it will be completely useless... that is, until John Q. Mafioso puts his yacht on your Citibank Visa.
"If we, as a nation or world, believe we already know everything, that everything can be gotten from a single book, then no engineering is needed. IMHO, we need to be curious, know that the universe is more interesting than a story told in a few pages, and be humble enough to admit that we cannot completely understand the mind, intent, or complete working of what we each consider holy."
Forgive me for putting words into your mouth, but the causal story you are trying to tell here is a little thin. A belief in supernatural things does not entail an unbelief in proximate physical causes; it just (usually) entails a belief in ultimate supernatural causes. No teaching of my religion informs me that because a guy came back from the dead once, science is bunk.
Rather, my particular holy book, which does not contain the be-all and end-all of human knowledge, does contain the following two interesting tidbits:
Blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver
and yields better returns than gold.
By wisdom the LORD laid the earth's foundations,
by understanding he set the heavens in place; by his knowledge the deeps were divided,
and the clouds let drop the dew.
If we parse this out, blessed are those who try to learn about what the LORD has done; astronomers, geophysicists, and meteorologists are singled out, but even generic understanding and wisdom are better than material things. Sounds pretty good for all the scientists in my religion, then.
I realize that you are talking about a certain limited subset of religious people who say "Foosball (molecular biology) is the devil!" Maybe the same people that have hijacked the image of my religion against my wishes. So maybe you need to meet some religious scientists to cure your overgeneralization. So, Exhibit A, me, the Christian grad student in artificial intelligence.
I'm just saying that the Democrats did not cover themselves in glory either.
Maybe before we nitpick the details about how hard the Democrats and all those Democrat first responders tried, we should crucify the Republicans. It sounds like you're with me.
"After 9/11, the government's goal in serving people was to assure a coordinated federal, state and local response. The importance of coordination is what led Michael Brown to tie the hands of those most able to respond quickly to the people in New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast. On Aug. 29, Brown issued a news release urging first-responders, such as local fire and emergency services, not to respond to the disaster without a formal request from lawfully dispatched state and local authorities established under federal and state aid agreements. Again that same day, Brown issued a second news release instructing volunteers not to report to the affected areas, but rather to send cash to various volunteer agencies. Many volunteers, including key firefighting units, complained that Brown effectively barred them from doing what they know how to do best: save people and property. Brown, in short, chose to pursue order and control over a quick response to those in need." From http://www.suntimes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt- ref17b.html. Sorry I didn't take the time to find a more objective summary, but the whole thing is worth reading.
Like I said, what are the first responders supposed to do when the feds hamstring them? These problems started at the top.
On August 26, the Friday before the hurricane, Louisiana and Mississippi both declared states of emergency. On August 28, the day before the hurricane hit, the governor of New Mexico offered troops from his National Guard to the governor of Louisiana. The necessary paperwork didn't come back from Washington for 5 days.
Early Monday, the levee broke. Late Tuesday: DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declares Katrina an 'Incident of National Significance', "triggering for the first time a coordinated federal response to states and localities overwhelmed by disaster." Declaration is first use of DHS National Response Plan.
On Thursday, on NPR's All Things Considered, Chertoff claims, "I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water." The same day on Nightline, Michael Brown tells Ted Koppel "We just learned of the convention center -- we being the federal government -- today." This after people went in there on Tuesday.
How Democrats in the state and local government can fill in for the deadly, disorganized incompetence of the one-party Republican federal government is beyond me. When the head of FEMA's emergency management experience is inspecting Arabian horses, accountability does not stop with him! Maybe it should stop with the person who appointed him.
Remember, Bush has already accepted responsibility "to the extent that the federal government didn't do its job right." You need to wake up and smell the spin if you think that this job was done right. Then we can ask how many people Bush's vacation killed.
But Louisiana is controlled by the Democrats 50% - 1 indictable money-hungry lobbyist-happy cronified upper-class-tax-cutting postmodern-PR national-debt-dollar-crisis bubble hellhole! It was a bi-partisan disaster.
Who is supposed to coordinate the local, state, and federal response to natural disasters? Who dropped the ball on the Navy hospital ships? Who sent the National Guard to Iraq? Who sent money for the levees to the Iraq war effort? Who didn't listen to the Army Corps of Engineers? Who decided that tax cuts for the rich are more important than long-term infrastructure? Who dithered and played cowboy music while people were dying of dehydration, in America for heaven's sake, at government-recommended rescue centers?
And this week, what is going on in Florida? Compare and contrast with Louisiana.
Anyone who thinks there is no difference between the Republican 50% + 1 indictable money-hungry lobbyist-happy cronified upper-class-tax-cutting postmodern-PR national-debt-dollar-crisis bubble hellhole and the Democrat hellhole needs to look at a few more pictures of poor black people starving to death in New Orleans.
There's a reason you don't let the inmates run the asylum, and there's a reason you don't drown the government in the bathtub, and there's a reason you don't let the generals run the prisons, and there's a reason you don't give the executive uncontested fiat in "wartime".
At least the Democrats aren't trying to turn Social Security into a giant game of Zapitalism, extend the estate tax into the blue horizon, lead us into destructive wars for no real reason, destroy their political opponents in ways that endanger our national security (Plame is one of many), gut Medicare...
Who could possibly say that if Al Gore had won in 2000, America would be in the same place it is today?
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know how deep the taint goes. If we find out the Sony music CDs don't infect the PS3 with the rootkit, we'll know there was some collusion between the different branches of the company. Then we can return our PS3s for repair, further increasing Sony's expenses and hurting their launch.
So everybody wins. Right?
Oh. Not Sony. Right. But that's good.
http://www.andrewbird.net/
He rules! [On Righteous Babe.]
Well, I've only been playing it for about a year, so the flush of first love hasn't quite worn off yet.
Vampire commercial:
Dracula: I like to eat the omniscience... first.
Announcer: There's no wrong way...
Dracula: Blaa!
Announcer: To eat a deity.
It's Rhesus, Sodom, Gomorrah, and turds.
That ape story is starting to sound more and more plausible.
You become self-knowledgeable...
You are cold-resistant.
You are blind.
This space lichen corpse tastes terrible! You finish eating the space lichen corpse.
Again I repeat that you have not spent three words justifying your worldview. I think it is because you can't.
I don't consider the Constitution to be Holy Writ, so why should I believe that the 9th and 10th Amendments say whatever you want them to say? It should be clear that just pointing to the text and saying "I'm right" doesn't work when someone else looks at the same text and says "I disagree."
In fact, you've set up a situation where your mystical intuition (again I use the terms precisely) won't allow you to defend your argument. And the problem is not that I don't know what you're saying. The problem is that you don't have any public basis for your private belief.
I repeat that context controls meaning and you have not permitted criticism of the context you bring to the Constitution.
The longer this conversation goes on, the more I believe that you don't know the truth or falsity of what you're saying about the Constitution, and the insularity of your worldview prevents questions like the ones I have posed from reaching you. If so, that is a harsh indictment of your worldview. Every worldview needs to be judged, in trial by fire. The less a worldview permits question, the more it avoids judgment, the weaker it is.
On the contrary, I have defined the Constitution as a living document representing our evolving social contract. It was always meant to be that. As such, the Supreme Court is well within its authority as representatives, elites, whatever you want to call them, to reinterpret the document as the social contract changes. You, on the other hand, have failed to define legitimacy. Let me repeat again: unless the Constitution was written by one of the 12 apostles, talking as if it is not subject to reinterpretation is ludicrous. I'm not sure what country you want to live in, but it is not a country where our social contract evolves.
Once again I call BS on the loaded definitions of these terms. And I call BS too on the idea that a text has meaning without context. It's not like you can just point at the Constitution and say "The Constitution is the Constitution. What do you mean you don't understand me?" We disagree about the meaning of the text, therefore the text is not just the text; like I said before, you impose your interpretation on the Constitution, and we have arguments about interpretation.
That's why it's useless to say that "extra-Constitutional" means "illegitimate". All meaning is extra-textual; all meaning is contextual. The question is about which context is most appropriate. Now, you've talked a lot about Communism and Democracy and the Constitution, but you haven't spent three words justifying the context you bring to the Constitution.
You call the 9th and 10th Amendments limitations. But you have no authority for this claim except your extra-Constitutional context, worldview, whatever you want to call it. Your context is not only not magically better than mine, it is not accepted by the authorities on the subject, the Supreme Court, nor is it mainstream in the population, nor is it mainstream in jurisprudence. So justify your worldview.
As I've said, there is not a dichotomy between "might makes right" and "strict construction". I've proposed at least one other way that a text may be related to its interpretation, "living document".
You have a lot of slogans and labels. But they are brittle, and they are unconvincing.
I don't see why I should make any concessions in an argument I am being so clear about. Rather, I think you have been upset all along by my repeating the facts of life to you about the Constitution. You have wished it were otherwise and wanted me to say that I wished it were otherwise as well. I think you mistake my goal in this conversation.
For instance, I disagree with 1) because I don't think precedent has nothing to do with content. Rather, I think precedent shapes the context in which we view the words of the Constitution. I do think that First Amendment cases go before the court all the time and are decided on the basis of what are ultimately First Amendment principles. At the same time, I acknowledge that we have built up a gigantic apparatus of lenses through which to view constitutional issues. A bald example is free speech, where debates surround, for example, the hate speech, flag-burning, pornography issues. I recognize that this apparatus seems to have meandered far from the text.
However, I think it is a paradoxical strength of the Constitution that it need not only mean what it says. You seem to desire a situation where the black ink on the white pages of the Constitution creates a black and white world where it is obvious how to govern, where we haven't accreted all these unfortunate systems of being a society, a simpler time, a happier time. With respect, this desire is misguided; the Constitution can be our rule book or it can be our community. I am happy that the Constitution's interpretation changes as our American community changes. "The letter kills but the spirit gives life" is very relevant to the Constitution in that sense. The Constitution, with judicial precedent and all, is our negotiated settlement with the real world.
I think your use of "real legitimate meaning" is loaded with whatever you conceive to be the legitimate meaning of the constitution. "Constitutional Republic", "Leaders of the Free World", "Democracy" with a capital D, "Communist and Socialist" are also similarly loaded. You call your interpretation of the Constitution strict, but you interpret it eisegetically, with your secret knowledge about what is legitimate and what is meaning and what is democracy. So I call BS on your interpretations of these labels (which you have not defined, but whose thrust is clear from your use).
I object to the non sequitur. The Constitution can have meaning without rolling in "the strictest interpretation of the original document." Maybe you want to include the interpretation in the original document that a slave counts as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of allocating members of the House of Representatives. The Constitution has had ugly, useless hacks from the beginning. We use them because they're all we've got, but we modify them because they are not adequate to the task of living together.
Every once in a while, we come to decisions as a society that are so momentous that we enshrine them in Amendments to the Constitution. But more frequently, we (or rather the Supreme Court) choose to interpret things a little differently, or more completely to reflect the complexities that the document does not countenance (and there are endless examples here too). I think this is positive on the whole. I don't know what your rollback program is for the Constitution and whether you really think that judicial precedent has been negative for our country on the whole.
Isn't it obvious from all I've said here that I think the Constitution does have real legitimate meaning? And yet I don't agree with you. Maybe there is a hole in your argument somewhere.
I don't know why you want me to agree with these premises. Maybe you are trying to label me, so you can dismiss me. I am not interested in affording you the satisfaction.
[Sorry about the bad formatting; corrected here]
You are not listening. You do not live in the United States of America c. 2005. You do not appreciate the political reality that the Supreme Court decides what the Constitution says. You do not appreciate the jurisprudential reality that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have in fact been interpreted by endless precedents to allow sweeping federal authority.
Instead you want a commerce clause that is interpreted narrowly, you want the single most conservative justice of the Supreme Court to get his membership revoked because he's not conservative enough (!), you want a loose federation rather than a republic. Guess what? They already fought the Civil War, and I hate to break it to you, but you lost.
"That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not."
This is not a jab. This is a statement of fact about how the Constitution is interpreted. I am trying to point out that whatever you think the Constitution says pales in comparison to what the Supreme Court thinks it says. They actually cannot be wrong about what it says, but you seem to want some court of last resort to judge the Supreme Court. Such a court does not exist in the United States.
Your wants and shoulds and oughts and advocating might be justified by real reasons. They might even be true. Like I said, if we were really honest about how the federal government operates now, we would replace the commerce clause with a much broader statement; what I mean is that the commerce clause is inadequate to bear the weight that has been placed on it by the Supreme Court over the course of our history. I agree with you that weed has nothing to do with interstate commerce.
But tough. We don't get to decide how the Constitution should be interpreted. I offer no opinions on how it should be interpreted, especially because your desired interpretation flies in the face of precedents that are as set in stone as a Mafia stoolie. I have no axe to grind. On the other hand you do.
If you want the Constitution to say something different than the current Supreme Court does, your options are: a) Get on the Supreme Court; b) Invent a time machine and climb in; c) Start a new country and write your own Constitution; or most realistically, d) Start a legal movement that countenances the sorts of changes in the interpretation of the Constitution that you desire, then put judges on the Supreme Court that are likely to listen to you. But I don't think, frankly, that you are likely to succeed at any of these aims.
"You might, and you'd be wrong. It's very clear: Anything not mentioned specifically in the Constitution is not the business of the Federal Government (the 10th Amendment), and you can't enumerate the Constitution to expand the role of the Federal Government (the 9th Amendment)."
Maybe I'm wrong, but how many Supreme Court justices have to disagree with you before you are wrong?
"What makes you think that the Constitutional Authors were writing the 9th and 10th Amendments to allow that to happen again?"
Remember, I'm not an originalist, so I think claims about what the Founders would and would not allow today, given the context of their contemporary situation are irrelevant. They, at least, knew that they were producing a living document, not inerrant Mt. Sinai political gospel. It is much more plausible that no one knows what the Founders would allow today, given the context of our history and our contemporary situation, and that trying to approximate the political realities of 2005 with lessons from 1789 is a project doomed to failure.
You are not listening. You do not live in the United States of America c. 2005. You do not appreciate the political reality that the Supreme Court decides what the Constitution says. You do not appreciate the jurisprudential reality that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have in fact been interpreted by endless precedents to allow sweeping federal authority. Instead you want a commerce clause that is interpreted narrowly, you want the single most conservative justice of the Supreme Court to get his membership revoked because he's not conservative enough (!), you want a loose federation rather than a republic. Guess what? They already fought the Civil War, and I hate to break it to you, but you lost. "That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not." This is not a jab. This is a statement of fact about how the Constitution is interpreted. I am trying to point out that whatever you think the Constitution says pales in comparison to what the Supreme Court thinks it says. They actually cannot be wrong about what it says, but you seem to want some court of last resort to judge the Supreme Court. Such a court does not exist in the United States. Your wants and shoulds and oughts and advocating might be justified by real reasons. They might even be true. Like I said, if we were really honest about how the federal government operates now, we would replace the commerce clause with a much broader statement; what I mean is that the commerce clause is inadequate to bear the weight that has been placed on it by the Supreme Court over the course of our history. I agree with you that weed has nothing to do with interstate commerce. But tough. We don't get to decide how the Constitution should be interpreted. I offer no opinions on how it should be interpreted, especially because your desired interpretation flies in the face of precedents that are as set in stone as a Mafia stoolie. I have no axe to grind. On the other hand you do. If you want the Constitution to say something different than the current Supreme Court does, your options are: a) Get on the Supreme Court; b) Invent a time machine and climb in; c) Start a new country and write your own Constitution; or most realistically, d) Start a legal movement that countenances the sorts of changes in the interpretation of the Constitution that you desire, then put judges on the Supreme Court that are likely to listen to you. But I don't think, frankly, that you are likely to succeed at any of these aims. "You might, and you'd be wrong. It's very clear: Anything not mentioned specifically in the Constitution is not the business of the Federal Government (the 10th Amendment), and you can't enumerate the Constitution to expand the role of the Federal Government (the 9th Amendment)." Maybe I'm wrong, but how many Supreme Court justices have to disagree with you before you are wrong? "What makes you think that the Constitutional Authors were writing the 9th and 10th Amendments to allow that to happen again?" Remember, I'm not an originalist, so I think claims about what the Founders would and would not allow today, given the context of their contemporary situation are irrelevant. They, at least, knew that they were producing a living document, not inerrant Mt. Sinai political gospel. It is much more plausible that no one knows what the Founders would allow today, given the context of our history and our contemporary situation, and that trying to approximate the political realities of 2005 with lessons from 1789 is a project doomed to failure.
I am referring to the fact that the Constitution says whatever the sitting Supreme Court says it does. That's why they are the Supreme Court and you are not. And that's why we have privacy rights, civil rights, and yes the interstate commerce clause. Maybe some argument can be made about what the Constitution should say and how it should be interpreted, or how the Founders would have interpreted it if they were here. I call it mysticism because I, at least, do not know how anyone would know what the Founders would think about today's jurisprudence, given the rest of America's history, other than having some deep, personal, spiritual connection to them. So I was actually being specific.
Let me say first that you give yourself away by the words were meant to be. In the words of Austin Powers, "That train has sailed." Why not ask how the commerce clause should be interpreted now? Or how the commerce clause is interpreted now? Again, you have some vision of the ideal version of the interpretation of the commerce clause. I don't. All I have is precedent. Even Scalia thinks that growing and consuming pot in one state, pot that never makes it into interstate commerce, should be governed by the commerce clause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
I might read the Tenth Amendment, for example, as delineating the separation of powers between the federal government and the state governments, rather than the circumscribing of the power of the federal government to the four corners of the Constitution.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Amendment 9 refers to the Bill of Rights being a subset of the rights that the government offers the people, and not the exact set. So there can be a right to privacy that is not explicit in the Bill of Rights. Amendment 9 invites that kind of expansion of individual rights against the power of the government. There is no logical path from the possible expansion of individual rights to a literal reading of the Constitution.
I don't entirely disagree with your point of view. I do think that if we were writing the Constitution to reflect the nature of government today, we might say something besides "govern interstate commerce". It might be "create national agencies to manage matters of national import". Or something. But it is misguided to talk about the fantasy land where we don't have the commerce clause, as opposed to talking about the real world, where it is real, influential, and not going away.
Sorry. I wasn't trying to be rude. But we are talking about regulating companies whose data mining activities extend to anyone from any state who uses their products on the Internet. These activities are broadly commercial because the companies tend to sell the information or use it to produce targeted advertising.
... Justices Scalia and Kennedy departed from their previous positions as parts of the Lopez and Morrison majorities to uphold a federal law regarding marijuana. The court found the federal law valid, although the marijuana in question had been grown and consumed within a single state, and had never entered interstate commerce."
But more to the point, Congress has regulated broad activities under the commerce clause that have little to do with commerce at all.
The Wikipedia article is a good primer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
"[In 2005]
That should give you an idea of how broadly the commerce clause is still being applied.
Whether or not it "really" applies is a question you would have to ask an originalist mystic.
-- Dan --
Gain exposure for the leaders of the majority party who are not being indicted. [/cheap shot]
I'll just let him do the talking. This is an excerpt from October 10.
There's a name for what you think is so dumb: Identity Theft Insurance. If you know somewhere to buy it, send me the URL.
Just like health insurance, it will be completely useless... that is, until John Q. Mafioso puts his yacht on your Citibank Visa.
Forgive me for putting words into your mouth, but the causal story you are trying to tell here is a little thin. A belief in supernatural things does not entail an unbelief in proximate physical causes; it just (usually) entails a belief in ultimate supernatural causes. No teaching of my religion informs me that because a guy came back from the dead once, science is bunk.
Rather, my particular holy book, which does not contain the be-all and end-all of human knowledge, does contain the following two interesting tidbits:
If we parse this out, blessed are those who try to learn about what the LORD has done; astronomers, geophysicists, and meteorologists are singled out, but even generic understanding and wisdom are better than material things. Sounds pretty good for all the scientists in my religion, then.
I realize that you are talking about a certain limited subset of religious people who say "Foosball (molecular biology) is the devil!" Maybe the same people that have hijacked the image of my religion against my wishes. So maybe you need to meet some religious scientists to cure your overgeneralization. So, Exhibit A, me, the Christian grad student in artificial intelligence.
"After 9/11, the government's goal in serving people was to assure a coordinated federal, state and local response. The importance of coordination is what led Michael Brown to tie the hands of those most able to respond quickly to the people in New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast. On Aug. 29, Brown issued a news release urging first-responders, such as local fire and emergency services, not to respond to the disaster without a formal request from lawfully dispatched state and local authorities established under federal and state aid agreements. Again that same day, Brown issued a second news release instructing volunteers not to report to the affected areas, but rather to send cash to various volunteer agencies. Many volunteers, including key firefighting units, complained that Brown effectively barred them from doing what they know how to do best: save people and property. Brown, in short, chose to pursue order and control over a quick response to those in need." From http://www.suntimes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt- ref17b.html. Sorry I didn't take the time to find a more objective summary, but the whole thing is worth reading.
Like I said, what are the first responders supposed to do when the feds hamstring them? These problems started at the top.
On August 26, the Friday before the hurricane, Louisiana and Mississippi both declared states of emergency. On August 28, the day before the hurricane hit, the governor of New Mexico offered troops from his National Guard to the governor of Louisiana. The necessary paperwork didn't come back from Washington for 5 days.
Early Monday, the levee broke. Late Tuesday: DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declares Katrina an 'Incident of National Significance', "triggering for the first time a coordinated federal response to states and localities overwhelmed by disaster." Declaration is first use of DHS National Response Plan.
On Thursday, on NPR's All Things Considered, Chertoff claims, "I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water." The same day on Nightline, Michael Brown tells Ted Koppel "We just learned of the convention center -- we being the federal government -- today." This after people went in there on Tuesday.
How Democrats in the state and local government can fill in for the deadly, disorganized incompetence of the one-party Republican federal government is beyond me. When the head of FEMA's emergency management experience is inspecting Arabian horses, accountability does not stop with him! Maybe it should stop with the person who appointed him.
Remember, Bush has already accepted responsibility "to the extent that the federal government didn't do its job right." You need to wake up and smell the spin if you think that this job was done right. Then we can ask how many people Bush's vacation killed.
And this week, what is going on in Florida? Compare and contrast with Louisiana.
There's a reason you don't let the inmates run the asylum, and there's a reason you don't drown the government in the bathtub, and there's a reason you don't let the generals run the prisons, and there's a reason you don't give the executive uncontested fiat in "wartime".
At least the Democrats aren't trying to turn Social Security into a giant game of Zapitalism, extend the estate tax into the blue horizon, lead us into destructive wars for no real reason, destroy their political opponents in ways that endanger our national security (Plame is one of many), gut Medicare...
Who could possibly say that if Al Gore had won in 2000, America would be in the same place it is today?