Presto Agitato

Quote of the Day: Hyphenate This!

There can be no divided allegiance here.  Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. — Theodore Roosevelt

Thought for the Day

In my inbox:

It only takes a second to show someone how you feel.  The police call it ‘indecent exposure’, but whatever….

Quote of the Day: Who Are You Calling a Skeptic?

Perhaps we should stop accepting the term ‘skeptic’.  Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition.  Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition.  Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible.  Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating. — Richard Lindzen, PhD, MIT climate scientist

Quote of the Day: It's Too Easy

#1: Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, you have boobs. — Found on Twitter

Quote of the Day: Self-Esteem

I won’t stop telling you how great I am.  Find someone else for that. — Gene Simmons (to Bob Lefsetz)

(In case you missed it, Bob, Mr. Simmons is also much smarter and cleverer than you are.  And better-looking, which really has to hurt!)

Joke of the day

I rear-ended a car this morning.  The driver got out of the other car, and he was a dwarf!

He looked up at me and said 'I am NOT Happy!'

So I said, 'Well, which one ARE you then?'

Quote of the Day: Feds vs. States

The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection. — Ann Coulter

So it does on the state level (which is her point, although such mandates are clearly unconstitutional at the federal level no matter how one strains the logic of ‘Interstate Commerce’), but most people can't tell the difference when and where they are personally interested.  One must be ever-vigilant of hypocrisy and double-standards. 

But Miss Coulter seems to overlook, at least for the moment, the issue of the ‘Incorporation Doctrine’ (jurispru- dence, not positive law) which applies the Bill of Rights against the states and seems to be so well-entrenched that the best we can hope is for a Court that will say, ‘Thus far and no further.’  Even that hope is probably forlorn.  It is thus, at the least, dubious to argue that the Massachusetts mandate, aka ‘Romneycare’,  is any more legal than Obamacare.

And Ann, dear, let's do be serious: Forced participation is no more a ‘free-market’ solution for the fact that one is faced, in the alternative, with outright socialization, and the pretense becomes more risibly fantastic when one considers the additional regulations and mandates placed upon those ‘freely chosen’ providers.  (What part of the word ‘free’ — i.e. freedom — don't you understand?)  Both solutions are manifestly unfree and are thus, as a matter of policy and right (even if not constitutionally), intolerable — the opinion of some ‘health care analyst’, no matter how he might be spuriously affiliated, notwithstanding.

Quote of the Day: It Looks Tasty, but the Foreign Policy Is Fishy

Ron Paul is a candidate with strong but limited appeal, sort of like anchovies on pizza. — John Hinderaker

 

Quote of the Day: A Wee Small Voice

Our Ear Leader Dear Leader president thinks he's been more successful than all but four presidents.  Charles Krauthammer has a word of advice for him:

When a Roman conquering general returned and had a triumphal procession through Rome with the crowd cheering him and calling him all kinds of godly names, there was a courtier in the back of the chariot who whispered in his ear ‘Remember, thou art but a mortal.’

Obama ought to hire that guy.  He is old, but I think he is still around.

Heh.

 

Quote of the Day: Execute This

[The judiciary] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments. — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 78

President Andrew Jackson is apocryphally quoted* as saying, ‘[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!’, and thus far he was (constitutionally) correct; the president and congress are bound by the constitution, but so is the judiciary (a point which they regularly forget) and they have no power of enforcement aside from the executive power which is wholly ‘vested in a President of the United States of America.’  (Article II, US Constititution — this, by the way, is the ‘Unitary Executive’ so full-throatedly misunderstood and misrepresented by the Left)  In other words, no Supreme Court ruling is binding unless the president considers himself thus bound.  The president is ultimately checked by his own principles, the ballot box, congress's power to impeach and remove him, and the power of a majority of his cabinet to remove him for incapacity.

So Mr. Gingrich's comments on this point are both inflammatory and correct; executive refusal to follow an improper judicial ruling ought to be very — vanishingly — rare, but it is an important constitutional check on what Hamilton called the ‘least dangerous’ branch of our federal government.  ‘Least dangerous’ because its mistakes are easily set right by the political branches.