(if I were the) King of the Forest

So yes, if you want to be pedantic about it Social Security is not in trouble at all. It is covered by the trust fund. The managers of the Social Security Administration can sleep well at night knowing they’ve served us well in securing the benefits they’ve promised.

But unless we do something clever, and fairly soon, the federal government as a whole will be in trouble because of Social Security. To me that is a distinction without a difference.

Words matter. If the left succeeds in re-defining the very terms of debate to the point that it becomes difficult or impossible to describe the judicial behavior that is objectionable — if they usurp the term “judicial activism” (and how many others?) and replace its meaning with something less objectionable — then they win by default.

Here is my take on Barack Obama and the Reverend Wright: most people and especially Obama partisans, have missed the point.

Anyone who has lived in a community with a large student population can tell you that they are admirably idealistic and will reflexively support any and all expensive or intrusive solutions to local problems that they judge to be of paramount concern. Unfortunately, their insulation from the community distorts their perspective on such judgments, and the fact that their relative poverty and short tenure means they will never live with the consequences of supporting such solutions, either monetarily or socially, blinds them to the tradeoffs involved.

In short, students learn their lessons about politics at the expense of the locals. They vote their ideals with no need to consider costs, free to congratulate themselves on their virtue and walk away from their mistakes when they graduate — while those left behind must live with the long-term consequences.

Has anyone noticed that those “unrepresentative” and “92 percent white, more rural and older than the rest of the nation” Iowans just favored the intellectual black man (and, by the way, a genuine “African American” given that he had an African father and an American mother) over the white populist by a rather large margin?

…assuming that things will continue to behave as they have always done — particularly after hundreds or thousands or millions of observations have failed to find an exception to that behavior — does not constitute or require a leap of faith. Faith is not belief despite the absence of proof but belief despite the absence of evidence.

I would be comfortable with a President who serves a philosophical ideal. I would not be comfortable with a President who serves a Master.

Recently the New York Times has taken to criticizing the newly ‘conservative’ U.S. Supreme Court for rulings that respect and enforce Constitutional limits on the authority of the Congress and of regulatory agencies and of lower courts and of individual citizens to extract money and penitence from “powerful” individuals and corporations for perceived misdeeds. […]

Notwithstanding the popular mythologies of “Democratic Accountability“, under the best of circumstances our control as individual citizens over the actions of our government is diffuse and indirect, and under the worst circumstances it is all but nonexistent. In the absence of large-scale corruption, conflicts of interest, and bureaucratic inertia democratic government may reflect the general moral consensus of society as a whole but it can never reflect all the subtleties of an individual moral outlook. There is probably no one in America, now or in any earlier golden age, who can say that all their tax dollars are wisely or even agreeably spent. Even good government is by nature a compromise.

If you really believe in ensuring your economic activities, including charitable giving, reflect your individual moral values and your individual social vision and your individual voice you would be wise to remove as much of that economic activity as possible from the control of others who might see the world differently – to remove as much of that economic activity as possible from the control of any communal agent, including and especially from the control of government.

The complaint is not and has never been that judges are acting to enforce constitutional boundaries on the legislature; it is and has always been that they fail to act to enforce those boundaries — or act without constitutional warrant to make up new boundaries to enforce out of whole cloth — when reading the constitution rigorously would undermine some extralegal cause to which they have committed themselves. The complaint is not that judges act, but that they act in deference to some cause other than the rule of law that they have sworn to uphold.