I too am part of the 99% and those assholes don’t speak for me.

The Pay for War Act: War costs money. When we don’t pay for it, it costs even more money, because we have to pay interest on the debt we rack up and the absence of fiscal discipline keeps us from making hard choices.

That’s why Sen. Al Franken’s Pay for War Act should be such an easy sell. The resolution says nothing about the legitimacy or desirability of armed intervention. It just says that we, rather than our grandchildren, should bear the cost of the conflicts we start.

As Franken said in an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate, “The idea that we should pay for our wars is not a Democratic idea, and it’s not a Republican idea. It’s not left or right. It’s not antiwar, it’s not pro-war. It’s just common sense.” Or, to put it slightly differently, it’s just a No-Brainer.

His blog post is ostensibly a list of bills that are non-partisan. Well, no Ezra, they aren’t. It may seem that way to a closeted coastal liberal like yourself, but its not quite that clear to us rubes in the rest of the country. How about this, oh purveyor of Journo-list, support a bill that requires us to pay for EVERYTHING. Like say a balanced budget amendment. Apparently paying for fuzzy liberal wealth redistribution programs on credit is fine and dandy, but freeing millions from oppression is not.

Masking rank partisanship as pragmatic bipartisanship is why most american’s are fed up with both liberals and conservatives, Republican’s and Democrats.

Time to grow up.

If that’s the case, though, it says a lot less about Prop. 19 than it does about the overregulated status of the California workplace.*If California employers are already so restricted that they can’t discriminate among applicants based on legal, recreational drug use, is it really Prop. 19’s fault that its passage would result in employers not being able to refuse to hire applicants because they’re potheads? If current regulation requires that employers make “accommodations” for employees who consume mind-altering prescription drugs, is it really Prop. 19’s fault that its passage would result in employers having to make “accommodations” for employees who smoke prescribed marijuana?

From a heighten-the-contradictions approach, the Chamber should welcome Prop. 19 to help show Californians how overregulated employers already are. If, after Prop. 19, employers start getting sued for firing employees who smoked pot on the job, even a state as regulation-happy as California might realize it’s gone too far.

*A little anecdotal information. During my six years in the Golden State, I worked for five paying employers. Since I left several years ago, I have received settlement checks from 2 of them as a result of class action lawsuits. At both of those workplaces, I was subjected to the supposedly illegal activity that resulted in the settlements, but I’m not at all convinced that either employer did anything wrong. In fact, both were, in my opinion, engaged in perfectly reasonable business practices that did not oppress me  one whit. But California is the sort of place where reasonable business practices will cause you to pay the college bills of plaintiff lawyers’ children.

I’ve thought for a long time that the opulence of American higher education – universities with tuition greater than the average income of an American family, fundraising departments raising hundreds of millions to fund endowed chairs for tenured faculty who produce nothing of worth and will earn six figures well into senility, unnecessary administrative employees as far as the eye can see, with most of the actual work of teaching students being done by minimum wage adjuncts and TAs – is unsustainable. It simply makes no sense to have so much of our national wealth and resources tied up in doing so little, when it could be done for so much less.

This probably isn’t the reckoning I’d like it to be (though it would be delicious if said reckoning began in the UC system), but I think we’re going to see much more of this. When soft institutions meet hard times, Reality won’t much care how much it’s denounced in scholarly journals.

We’re now on our third generation of school children (I was part of the second) going through the public education system and being taught that the First Amendment exists primarily to protect hardcore pornography and slanderous journalists. I took a constitutional law course while an undergrad, and am now in my third year of law school, and I can’t recall more than a small handful of discussions about the First Amendment applying to actual political protest.

I’d like to think that’s because we take the right to political protest for granted. That’s normally been the case in America. However, the First Amendment, like every protected right, can only do so much. The less it protects, the better it protects it; the broader its protections are spread, the thinner they become. Libertarians frequently argue that we should protect even the most extreme speech as a sort of outward barrier, as though this will protect all speech that is less extreme. But the fact is that a large number of people simply aren’t that gung ho about protecting the rights of their countrymen to post rape porn videos on the internet. If all speech is equal, rather than protecting rape porn with the vigor with which they protect mundane political speech, a part of the population will instead protect mundane political speech with all the vigor with which they defend rape porn. Which is to say, not much.

Though Balko misses the mark when he says that the G20 summit was when we needed the First Amendment the most. A bunch of foreign leaders gathered in an American city attracting a motley crew of protesters from all around the world grousing about insubstantial abstractions is not, I reckon, what the Founders had in mind. The leaders weren’t there to get a gauge of popular opinion, the issues were so large that no matter how many protesters showed up it would not have given an accurate gauge of the opinion of those effected by G20 policies, and the protesters themselves were a group with a history of violence and disorder. I don’t think much of what Balko complains of should have happened, but my sleep won’t be troubled much.

We’ve seen with the Tea Party movement that American political protest is alive and well when it really “matters the most” – spontaneous and representative demonstrations of discontent with elected officials’ actions on specific matters, performed in a time and place so as to actually convey that message to the elected officials. If libertarians want more than that core of political speech protected by the First Amendment, they need to pick their fights a little better. It may not be as simple as choosing between Hustler and G20 protesters (and what kind of choice is that?), but it might well be. In a libertarian paradise the First Amendment might well protect every fart as free speech and every orgy as a peaceable assembly, but here in our fallen world, one amendment can only do so much.

WHEW! Finally! They have seen the light. I guess this means that they will all now support unfettered 2nd Ammendment Rights, eliminate speech codes as they violate the 1st Amendment and overturn Roe v Wade because an implied right within an implied right is no grounds for interpreting a fairly straightforward document.

Well now that we have all that out of the way I guess we can get back to fighting terrorists and winning in Iraq.

A murderous, gulag running thug like Fidel Castro is “a great leader for his people”. Yes those barely seaworthy “rafts” coming to Florida from Cuba must be because they are testing their vaunted “free” healthcare system.

Give me a damn break.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy groups have filed an amended complaint to their lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service and the city and county of Denver that says protestors and demonstrators may have their First Amendment rights violated by security restrictions.

The ACLU has said it wants to avoid the conditions that existed during the 2004 convention in Boston, where protesters were caged, infuriating First Amendment advocates.

The first phase of the lawsuit asked the court to compel the city and the Secret Service to disclose the information on protest restrictions.

During today’s hearing before Judge Marcia S. Krieger, the attorney for the groups, Steve Zansberg, said the city and the Secret Service had provided the information sought in Phase One.

The second phase of the lawsuit will address whether the restrictions are unconstitutional.

Much as I would enjoy seeing the fence taken down so hooligans could wreck havoc at the convention, I’m forced to side with the DNC on this one.  I think preventing your convention from being disrupted is defending your First Amendment right against people who might not respect these rights.  Republicans, take note: if this lawsuit declares fences unconstitutional, your own convention in Minneapolis will face much worse than the Democrats face in Denver.

1) Hello, I am a judge who believes Ohio’s method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual because it causes excess pain.

2) I love mass-murderering commie thug revolutionary Che Guevara.

Like Jonah, I feel kinda bad for Obama for getting unnecessarily dragged into this.