It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson
Justice Stephen Breyer and the Second Amendment
You have to give SCOTUS Associate Justice Breyer credit for going on Fox News Sunday. (Fox News Sunday isn't to be confused with the conservative/populist cable commentary shows like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, although the show reruns later on Fox News Channel.)
It should not surprise conservatives that Stephen Breyer, who has voted against recent court rulings overturning bans on means of self-defense on grounds of the Second Amendment, proceeded to lecture host Chris Wallace on how they are all wrong on a common sense interpretation of the Second Amendment. Surely the amendment didn't have anything to do with the historical fact that the British occupiers sought to strip the colonists of firearms and ammunition. Surely the Bill of Rights, which focuses primarily on guaranteeing a minimal set of specific individual liberties, can be interpreted in such a way that a tyrannical government can define away the very possibility of a militia by stripping away the right of citizens to defend themselves.
I am not a member of the NRA, and I'm not opposed to certain common sense restrictions and qualifications for gun owners. (For example, I don't think a person needs bazookas or machine guns to protect his family.) But I feel the best public policy is not to focus on stripping innocent civilians from the ability to protect themselves until police come along, but to improve responsiveness, reliability and efficacy of police. Otherwise, one is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The fact that Justice Breyer is willing to throw individual liberties under the bus in some elaborate casuistry in support of dubious, misguided, ineffective public policies speaks for itself.
International Family Child Abductions Continue...
I closely followed the case of Sean Goldman in a number of posts last year. David Goldman's Brazilian wife left him a few years ago without notice or permission with their son Sean, returning to Brazil, where she divorced Goldman, remarried and subsequently died during childbirth. Sean's stepfather continued to refuse to return custody of the boy, and despite the Hague Convention, it took until last Christmas Eve for Brazil to return Sean to his natural father. Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), who took on Goldman's battle even though Goldman wasn't one of his constituents, is sponsoring the International Child Abduction Prevention Act, which I strongly support. The Bring Sean Home Foundation continues its admirable work fighting for desperate parents, all but alone in trying to wade through national bureaucracies in trying to enforce their rights under the Hague Convention. A list of active cases is available here; in the event one thinks that the US government's hands are clean, consider the sad case of a little British girl, Emily Rose Hindle, whom among other things has been allegedly denied medical treatment for her blindness.
One of the featured current cases is the abduction of Emily Koyama by her mother Trina Atwell, whom also had a prior 10-year-old daughter, back to Costa Rica. (Costa Rica has been a popular destination for at least a dozen women with minor children because a security minister declines to extradite women in international child kidnapping cases.) Roy Koyama, an unmarried father with custody of his two young sons and Trina's fiancé, portrays the picture of an emotionally unstable woman whom has had a pattern of running away, e.g., leaving her former husband and their daughter to Costa Rica with another woman. So far Roy, who has won his Hague judgment, has been waiting for almost 2 years to get his precious daughter back.
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| Emily Alina Koyama: A Christmas Without Her Daddy? |
Charles Krauthammer: Swindle of the Year
Charles Krauthammer is one of my favorite commentators, although he and I have differed before on issues (e.g., the "Ground Zero mosque", on which I take a libertarian perspective). In short, in this piece, Krauthammer argues that Obama has been crazy like a fox, that he has managed to get the Dems another $800B stimulus bill just to save the top 2% up to 4.6 points in the highest tax bracket rates (maybe $140B), while Obama is able to once again impeach the fiscal integrity of the newly elected GOP majority in the House. Whereas there is no question that the GOP has agreed to more spending than what they would have given a stronger hand in Congress and the need to get something signed by a progressive President, I disagree with the general argument Krauthammer is making.
First, the decisions made by this lame-duck Congress do not reflect the next Congressional term. Among other things, Speaker-elect Boehner has promised to bring up a spending cut bill every month, and he's indicated, as a first step, he's including Congressional staffing budgets.
Second, most of this bill would have been passed with or without GOP support. At least $600B is for retention of middle-class tax cuts, and it's likely some sort of accommodation would have been made to extend unemployment during the holiday period. Voting against middle-class tax cuts and against unemployment compensation with over 15 million unemployed is not a good start strategy for Republicans to win friends and influence other people (or voters).
Third, the President had to blink on the class warfare issue. And it doesn't just reflect the marginal tax rates, but the President had to agree to keeping all investment tax rates constant (short- and long-term), not to mention a higher exemption and lower rate for estate ("death") taxes. There are multiple aspects: for instance, the issue isn't just the rate changes themselves (including the adverse economic costs of raising rates on GDP), but the uncertainty. Tax rate increases would likely have resulted in a sharp stock market correction later this month as investors looked to push up lower-tax capital gain realizations, not to mention adverse effects on economic growth (counteracting Bernanke's attempts to bolster a struggling economy recovery).
Fourth, the Republicans got more of a conservative stimulus mix. The Democrats wanted to extend the stretched-out stimulus middle-class tax cuts (barely enough to cover a takeout pizza each pay period). Instead, the GOP won a 2-point payroll tax cut across the board; that means more money to consumers instead of progressive political slush funds. As others have suggested, this is more of McCain-style stimulus measure.
Fifth, the President is vested in the same compromise measure. If any discernible benefits follow the tax cut initiative, both the President and the GOP can claim credit. However, the President will be hard-pressed to explain why he didn't make the same decisions earlier.
Finally, the GOP has demonstrated that it can lead in a bipartisan fashion and also drive a hard bargain with the President. I think the GOP has been able to clear some contentious issues off the table, which gives it two years to revamp health care, tax and budget reform.
My Favorite New Holiday Flick
I am a perfectionist as a writer; one of my interests is creative writing. I've got some story ideas in various stages of development. I won't go too much into details, but on a number of occasions you can think out of the box on well-known story lines. I love Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", although, as you might expect from my political views, I'm not thrilled with the way that the elderly miser Scrooge reclaims his inner-child progressive "spread the wealth around" philosophy (although progressives might argue otherwise, saying that the philanthropic Scrooge wasn't competent enough how to wisely invest his fortune and should have left it to those whom are much more knowledgeable, i.e., government bureaucrats).
Let me just give as one example of how I might twist the tale: Bob Cratchit is an inventor on the side but can't find anyone to back his ideas. At the end, Scrooge becomes a venture capitalist, investing in Cratchit and mentoring him, as it were passing on Fezziwig's example (yet another unresolved thread in the original story).
However, keeping politics out of the story, another unresolved threads was Scrooge's broken engagement with Alice. I probably would have tweaked the story to provide closure--that he rediscovered love (e.g., a widowed Alice whom rediscovers her love for the liberated Ebenezer). At least one American variation of the story, Bill Murray's "Scrooged", takes on this twist with the character Claire in the Alice role.
I do like Lifetime's imaginative twist on the James Patterson Sundays at Tiffany's fantasy, but my favorite new one is a delightful Hallmark offering:
- "Farewell, Mr. Kringle". The protagonist blogger is a young widow, swearing off new relationships; she is sent on an assignment to a town curiously named 'Mistletoe' to cover the human interest story of a local resident whom has been playing the role of Kris Kringle for 50 years. The love interest in this film is a cafe owner, a former divorce lawyer whom had a "come to Jesus" moment when the 10-year-old daughter of a client asked him why he was tearing their family apart. Mr. Kringle is probably the most affective Santa Claus character I've ever seen in a movie; he is a widower whose wife had loved Christmas, and this is his way of keeping her memory alive and honoring her. But kids have gradually stopped coming to see an increasingly discouraged Kris Kringle as traditions melt away in modern-day America. My favorite scene in the movie is when Kringle encounters a painfully shy little girl, initially reluctant to sit on his lap; he finds a way to gain her confidence and then starts enunciating this song in a brilliant, affective interpretation--just flawless cadence; it reminds me of the scene from Miracle on 34th Street when Kringle speaks to the lonely sad little Dutch girl--in her own language. The plot is somewhat predictable with an ending reminiscent of the ending to It's a Wonderful Life.
Political Humor
On a recent worldwide math test, American teens ranked 25th out of 34 countries. American teens said, "Yeah, right. Like there are 34 countries." - Conan O'Brien
[Have no fear: Barack Obama is going to tour all 57 states to emphasize the importance of math education.]
"Because of a printing error nearly a billion $100 bills will have to be destroyed. Hey, if these bills are worthless, don’t destroy them. Use them to pay off the Chinese." –Jay Leno
[And how exactly is that any different from the nearly $6T that the Democratic-controlled House of Representative have added to the national debt since taking power in 2007? After all, look at all those Keynesian multiplier effects from the Democratic stimulus job-creating investments in monkeys, ants, dogs, and dinosaur eggs... ]
Musical Interlude: Holiday Tunes
