Happy Fourth of July From the Pennsylvania Memorial!

Actually, I'm not in Gettysburg, or in Pennsylvania. I haven't even left my apartment. But, I am at the Memorial in spirit.

I bring up the memorial because, while we celebrate the Independence Day today, the just-concluded 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg deserves some note. That's because, while moderately educated Americans can be conversant about the Civil War, it's sometimes hard to understand what motivated the men who fought on the Union side and preserved the union. After all, they could have just as easily said, screw it, let the Southern slave masters keep their plantations and peons. There were plenty in the North who counseled peace, and could not abide the thought of a civil war against their countrymen.

Well, if you want to understand you should visit the Pennsylvania Memorial.

The Gettysburg Battlefield is famously covered in monuments, memorials, statuary, markers, etc. Most of them are dedicated to the exploits of the Union troops, although there are some Southern markers, including one at the top and one at the bottom of Cemetery Ridge. Most of the Gettysburg memorials were placed there by private subscription, rather than by gov't money. Often a regiment or company would get together, raise some funds, and plop something down on whatever scrap of hallowed ground they had fought over. This contributes to the hodge-podge quality of the battlefield, but it also gives you a sense of what the people at the time considered important. The memorials really do follow the lines of battle. There's no way the Park Service, or some academic board, would have managed to do better.

The bigger ones were installed by states to commemorate the veterans among their citizenry. And the biggest one of all of these is the Pennsylvania memorial.

The memorial itself is not some grand aesthetic masterwork. It is, as they say, "busy," covered in friezes depicting battle scenes, statutes of Union generals from PA (and the PA governor who valiantly signed the bill appropriating funds to construct the memorial), and all sorts of other gimcrackery. It's never really achieved national iconic status, but it should. Because the most important part of the memorial can be found wrapped around it: the names of every Pennsylvanian who was on active duty in the Army of the Potomac at the time of the battle. To look at those names, and then turn around and look down Cemetery Ridge is a moving moment for any American. These men fought and died in America, for America, to preserve America. Immortality doesn't get much better than that.

Best of all is a prominent plaque installed by the men of Pennsylvania and dedicated to the ladies of Pennsylvania. We're all familiar with the stories of Confederate gallantry - that was one of the few things we can all agree they had going for them - but the Union side had plenty of gallantry and bravery too, as this charming plaque testifies.

And, with all apologies to my Southern brethren, those gallant men didn't just win a war. They were on the right side of history and humanity. The Confederate armies were as brave and tough as they come. Many of the generals were brilliant, making more out of much less than their Northern counter-parts. The southern gentry were dashing and gallant. Etc. But, for all of that, they were fighting for the absolutely worst cause imaginable.

Slavery - a barbaric system that didn't even rise to the level of feudalism in terms of economic sophistication - was bad enough. The methods that the South used to enforce slavery spread its oppression beyond the plantations and into the wider world. It was against the law to teach blacks to read or write. It was illegal to even disparage slavery as an institution. An ounce of African blood would render one's relatives as little more than chattel. Sally Hemings, for example had less African blood that George Zimmerman. Imagine a system where your cousins or half-siblings - products of a randy relatives sexual exploits with concubines - could be bought and sold, and then worked to death.

Apologists who claim that slavery was "contained" to the South ignore the very real ways in which slavery reached North. There were the hated fugitive slave laws, which eventually cast such a wide net that free blacks could be dragged South against their will.

It wasn't just about slavery. The Antebellum Democrat Party was dedicated to not just preserving, but also spreading the "peculiar institution" throughout the territories, the Northern states, and beyond. Southern Democrats were, of course, up front about this, while Northern Dems like Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan tried to accomplish this through stealth and silence. Many Republicans from Lincoln on down argued that the Democrat presidents of the 1850's had, through benign neglect, created the legal and political atmosphere in which the Missouri Compromise broke down and the Supreme Court rendered the notorious Dred Scott decision.

If you haven't read Dred Scott, you should. It's an amazing document from the authority with the supposed final word on interpreting the Constitution. For several years, in the United States, it was a matter of constitutional law that blacks were so inferior as to be literally inhuman, and not deserving of constitutional notice. Imagine being an 1850's-era Irish immigrant, freshly arrived from  a life as a serf on some English estate. Now, you're in the Land of the Free and the highest judicial authority in the land is making distinctions about who is or is not constitutionally inferior. That might make you more than a little nervous, maybe even send you off to fight in a war to resolve the question once and for all.

July 4th celebrates the birth of freedom in this country. Gettysburg and the Pennsylvania Memorial celebrate the new birth of freedom that came 87 years later. We would do well to remember both.

The Republican Party and Our Forgotten Second Founding Fathers

Georgetown law prof Randy Barnett has been doing a slow-rolling study of the abolitionists writers and lawyers who provided the intellectual and moral arguments in support of ending slavery and passing the 14th Amendment. First was his "Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment." Now comes a paper remembering Salmon P. Chase. Here is the abstract and table of contents: 

The name Salmon P. Chase is barely known and his career is largely forgotten. In this Article, I seek to revive his memory by tracing the arc of his career from antislavery lawyer, to antislavery politician, to Chief Justice of the United States. In addition to explaining why his is a career worth both remembering and honoring, I offer some possible reasons why his remarkable achievements have generally unremembered today.

Contents

Introduction: Constitutional Abolitionism.............................654

I. Chase’s Rise to the Chief Justiceship ......................................656

A. Chase’s Early Years........................................................................ 656

B. Chase as an Antislavery Lawyer ...............................................659

C. Chase as an Antislavery Political Leader..............................668

II. The Chief Justiceship of Salmon P. Chase ..........................676

A. Chase’s Duties as Chief Justice..................................................676

B. Chase’s Opinions on Reconstruction.......................................677

1. In re Turner............................................................................................677

2. Texas v. White .......................................................................................679

C. Chase on the Enumerated Powers of Congress.....................683

1. United States v. Dewitt.........................................................................683

2. The Legal Tender Cases........................................................................687

D. Chase on the Privileges and Immunities of Citizens
of the United States..............................................................................694

III. Why Has Chase’s Career Been Forgotten? ..........................697

Conclusion ...............................................................................................701

Chase was a towering figure in his day: governor of Ohio, Treasury Secretary, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He helped found no fewer than three national political parties: the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party (even coining its slogan "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men"), and of course the Republican Party*. He was also an attorney who spent years refining abolitionist legal arguments. And, apparently, Chase Bank was (posthumously) named for him. It's a bit much to say he's "forgotten" - anyone who reads about the Civil War era will come across his name - but it is certainly true that Chase's accomplishments deserve more note than current historic understanding grants to him. 

As Barnett notes, Chase and his cohort, whom Barnett dubs "constitutional abolitionists," successfully found a middle ground between the competing sides of the slavery question. On the one hand, Democrats insisted that slavery was constitutional, and would eventually insist that, as a matter of constitutional law, blacks were mentally inferior and slavery should spread through the territories, and even into the northern states. On the other, full-mooners like William Henry Garrison insisted that disunion - and the rending of the Constitution - was the only proper "solution" to the slavery question. Great, but what if you just want to go to work and raise a family without worrying that the government will fall apart before lunch? Chase, et al.'s middle ground preserved the Constitution through the fire and brimstone of the Civil War.

The Constitutional Abolitionists relied on close readings of the Constitution to point out that (1) there was nothing in the Constitution specifically approving slavery (read the Confederate Constitution to see how that's done); and (2) other parts of the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment made involuntary servitude unconstitutional. Whatever Founding Father nods and winks southerners relied on to support their arguments were meaningless as they couldn't be found in the text. These might be obvious points now, but back then they were literally dynamite. When Abraham Lincoln - the greatest of the Constitutional Abolitionists - won the presidency, the South knew the jig was up, at least with regard to the slavery question. (No, the issue of state's rights was not "resolved" by the Civil War. Only children and Ivy League graduates could believe that).

Barnett rightly laments that the Constitutional Abolitionists, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, are largely obscure as historic figures and rarely register in high or low culture. Well, join the club. Unless you are a progressive princeling or a member of an oppressed class, your would-be admirers have to actively work to seek out your biography. Plus, how can the likes of Lysander Spooner (google him) measure up to Beyonce'? 

Still, there is one group of Americans who should rectify their ignorance in this area: members of the Republican Party, who are often as ignorant of the noble origins of their party and philosophy as anyone else. Read Whence Comes Section One. It is literally inspiring (and ought to provide the basis for a very good book). On the most important political questions in American history, our guys were 100% right. Modern-era Democrats might claim their pursuit of "social justice" should take pride of place, but nothing can compare to the freeing of the slaves. Republicans seeking inspiration in these times would do well to learn more about their own founding fathers. 

* NB: Chase started and ended his political career as a Democrat, however, even running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1868.

Rise Again: What About Southern Heritage?

This excerpt from a book titled "The Mind Of the South" by Tracy Thompson (hint: the thesis of the book is that the South has no mind) recently passed through my Facebook timeline. The idea is that the South "still lies" about the Civil War, denying the War was about slavery, and playing up the states' rights angle. She tells this tale as an example of how things work in the Dear Ol' Southland:

In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. The next day, Kout said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a message: This is our heritage.

Now, first I have to say that, if you Google "East Randolph High School Cinco De Mayo" or some other combination, the only results you get are the above excerpt and commentary thereon. I can't find anything about this supposed racist incident independent of Tracy Thompson's tendentious tract. 

Second, memo to prideful southern high school students: here in Amurrica, we got this here thing called the "American Flag" AKA the "Stars & Stripes." It looks like this:

Try waving that next time, guys. That's what kids do here in California in response to displays of the Mexican flag. 

Third, don't want to hurt any feelings, but if you're going to choose "Southern Heritage" versus "Mexican Heritage" (I know this is one of those "would you rather be blind or deaf?" kind of questions), wouldn't Southern heritage be the better choice? The Confederates, after all, considered themselves Americans. I don't know what message Mexican kids are trying to send by waving around the "Eagle & Snake," but it doesn't strike me as being "pro-American."  

Whatever southern heritage meant 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, today - ca. 2013 - it's a combination  of regional pride, bread pudding, and cussedness. It's about admiring the gallantry and bravery of the doomed southern armies who fought to the end for a cause that everyone now agrees was an awful one. One of history's ambiguous after-effects is the grudging admiration we can have for history's losers - I'm thinking of Napoleon's Grand Armee' or the Japanese in the Pacific War - who, whatever you might say, fought like hell, even if for the wrong reasons. 

If southern heritage means high school students in 2013 are going to saddled with the full panoply of southern sins, then the same should apply to the yokels displaying the Mexican flag. There's the massacre and enslavement of the Aztecs; a feudal agrarian system that keeps Mexican peasants in peonage to this day; a third world political system that overlays a corrupt crony capitalist oligarchy onto a huddled mass of poor kept in the thrall of pseudo-socialist slogans; and so on. The Mexican War with the US ended with Santa Ana and his cronies taking bribes in exchange for signing away the American Southwest. If southern heritage is problematic, so is Mexican. 

Then there's Mexico's frankly bizarre approach to race relations, as this graphic illustrates:

Wow! Where's a Mexican flag for me to wave? 

Call me old fashioned, but Confederate history is part of American history. Mexican history? It's about as important to America as Cuban or Canadian history. One clearly outranks the other. 

]I'm not going to go waving the Stars & Bars, but I won't begrudge someone else doing so; so long as they behave themselves. But the kids waving Mexican flags are just as obnoxious as any modern day neo-Confederate. 

A Little Perspective:

Did you know that 182 years passed from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the drafting of the US Constitution in 1789? 182 years from 1789 is --- 1971!

Shakespere was still writing and producing plays when Englishmen sailed up the James River. The colonists couldn't bring the King James Bible with them because it was still in development. And so on.

All of which is to say we've been here for quite a bit longer than most of us realize, and that we've survived worse than arrogant community organizers playing at socialism.

A Failure Of Memory

James Pethokoukis, writing about the left's obsession with income inequality and the government's role in remedying this alleged problem (but don't call them socialists! That's H8!), reminds us that we should all know better:

This is the one-sentence story now being sold to America: “The middle-class is no better off than it was 30 years ago because the rich greedily grabbed all the money.” If this narrative—that America’s experiment with freer markets, lower taxers, and lighter regulation was a failure—can be successfully planted, it will be easier for Washington to tax, spend, and regulate in the future. And to elect politicians pushing that agenda. 

On its face, the whole storyline’s a laugher—at least to anyone who lived through both the terrible, volatile, inflation-wracked 1970s and then the 25-year boom that followed. Indeed, brand-new research from the University of Chicago and Notre Dame finds “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.” Incomes are never equal, of course. And the rich did somewhat better for a variety of reasons, including America’s failed government school system that can’t produce enough skilled workers for America’s high-tech economy.

I was in elementary school during the Carter years. Even us kids were aware that things sucked, and that whiny liberals were a big part of the problem. Shame-faced liberals know this too. I was eating lunch at Le Central in SF a few months ago. As it happened, Willie Brown - that's former SF mayor and CA Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to you, mister - was sitting at an adjacent table with a guy trying to raise $$ for some noble effort. The conversation turned to the Seventies, and Willie's companion admitted that things were so bad back then that he voted for Reagan. Brown said nothing, but his grim silence spoke volumes. How quickly we've forgotten.


It should be the easiest thing in the world to defend the economic and political record of the 25 years that preceded the Crash of '08, especially the Reagan years, but a lot of folks on our side haven't been willing to make that argument. Instead, they followed the Reagan Revolution by arguing for a "thousand points of light" and compassionate conservatism, buying into the idea that conservatives are heartless ideologues who only want the poor to suffer. No, we want everyone to be prosperous enough that they don't need to look to the government for succor.


Voters know the truth. They know what works. Given the chance, they will vote for principled free market conservatism. But, the usually don't have the chance. The media makes life intolerable for popular right-wing politicos, meaning there can never be a conservative equivalent to Ted Kennedy - a movement leader who can draw on decades of life and legislating in the public eye. Meanwhile GOP moderates lose elections on platforms that do little more than nibble at the edges of the welfare state. And, leftists enjoy a political halo that can't dim until their destructiveness becomes so total -whether you are talking about Occupy Oakland or the ruinous Jon Corzine - that even their allies can no longer ignore them. 


Honestly, this sh*t shouldn't be so hard. That's why it's so frustrating to watch the GOP's two "serious candidates." Rick Perry is literally inarticulate, which tells me he doesn't really understand conservatism or free market economics, even if he is instinctively in favor of them. Mitt Romney might be speaking out about cutting spending now, but he is undeniably a part of the wing of the GOP that has spent the last 20 years running away from the Reagan legacy. Is it any wonder there's been some "second look at Gingrich" talk? At least the guy's articulate. 


Again, we know what works. The only people who don't know, alas, are our leaders because they never bought in to what works.

Sex Scandalous: Renewing the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

Not sure why anyone would want to wade into the swamp of 21st century sexual politics as seen through the prism of a coupling from the early 1800's, but .....a new book argues that the conventional wisdom (which is only 12 years old) that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves is R-O-N-G, wrong:

The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, is a new look at a very old dispute, except this time the dozen scholars behind the book are disrupting years’ worth of research that suggests that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.

The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, a group that seeks to defend Jefferson’s image, is behind the book, which documents the results of a yearlong research

inquiry by a dozen scholars across the nation working without compensation for the Heritage Society. Carolina Academic Press will release the 400-page book Thursday.

Ever since a 1998 DNA test was performed on Sally’s youngest child, Eston, scholars have thought for years that a Jefferson male, assumed to be Thomas
Jefferson, fathered the boy. But those tests didn’t even involve DNA from Thomas Jefferson and only established that Eston was probably fathered by any one of more than two dozen Jefferson men living in Virginia at the time, “The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy” asserts. In fact, the scholars point to Jefferson’s brother, Randolph, as the likely father of Hemings’ son.

The book also disputes accounts that Hemings’ children received special treatment from Jefferson, evidence some have used to suggest that the third president had a special relationship with Hemings. Neither Hemings nor her children received unusual privileges at Monticello, the scholars argue in the book. In fact, all of Hemings’ relations were not, in fact, given freedom at age 21, as is commonly believed.

Everything I've ever read about the DNA testing always mentions that Jefferson was never directly linked to Hemings's children, and that a number of Jefferson's male relatives could have done the deed. Nonetheless, the fact that a Founding Father had children with one of his slaves is one of those things that Everybody Knows, even though it is, at best, highly debatable and ultimately unknowable.

It's really too bad that the Hemings-Jefferson story has been reduced to a vehicle for neurotic 21st century obsessions with sex and race, because what we know for sure about their relationship illuminates much about slaves and their masters that has been lost to history. We may not know if Jefferson was Hemings's paramour, but we do know that her father was Jefferson's father-in-law. (and Hemings's mother also had a white father). In other words, Hemings was a half-sister to Jefferson's wife, and was half-white and half-black. And yet, under the rigid class structure of the South, Sally Hemings was born and died a slave, while Martha Wayles lived the privileged life of a planter's daughter and then wife. Really makes you realize why slavery was called the "peculiar institution."

(Even worse, regardless of who fathered Hemings's children, those kids were, by my count, 7/8ths white...yet the same rigid rules said they were slaves, while Jefferson's daughters were free).

In many ways, history remains a nightmare from which we are still awakening.

In Our Hands: Why Crime Hasn't Gone Up As the Economy Has Gone Down

James Q Wilson looks at a phenomenon that has surprised many people: crime rates have not gone up appreciably during the Little Depression. In fact, they continue to fall. Wilson sorts through a number of factors, (including a reduction in lead poisoning. give me a break), but concludes that a "change in culture" is what really lies behind this trend.

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society's cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

I'll agree that American society and popular culture is much improved from the loose and tacky Sixties and Seventies when the Great Crime Wave swept the nation. Just as an example, try to find some old World Series footage from Yankee Stadium. People were storming the field, scrambling around wildly, and looking generally like an out-of-control mob. Or look at the infamous "Disco Demolition" at Comisky Park. People laugh about it now, but what you are seeing is a thuggish, depressing riot.

By contrast, when a city-wide blackout hit NYC in 2003 (I think that was to year), nobody rioted, or smashed windows, or looted stores. Everybody quietly and calmly walked across the bridges to get home, or stayed put, but otherwise behaved themselves. The contrast with the Murder City of two decades earlier was stark, albeit in a good way.

Wilson identifies a Sixties-era social dynamic of self-expression uber alles as being part of the crime wave. And, yeah, people were expressing themselves, but more important, society's guardians failed to lay down a fundamental rule: stay off my lawn. This found expression in a myriad of ways. The most obvious were the Warren Court's criminal procedure reforms, which were widely seen at the time by liberals as being part of the civil rights movement, and widely panned by "right wingers" and other normal people as giving the criminal class too many undeserved rights. Well the wingnuts were right about that one. Reading a Miranda warning to low-lifes had very little to with Rosa Parks. It only placed her and her neighbors in greater jeopardy (since most crimes, then and now, were committed in poor neighborhoods). Nixon was running as a tough on crime candidate as early as 1972. As late as 1988, Republicans could tag a Democrat as "soft on crime" and torpedo his slim chances for winning the presidency.

As important, there was an explosion of drug use at all levels of society. While narcotics have never been legal, there was a de facto decriminalization back in those days. The quintessential event of the era was Woodstock, where celebrations of LSD and marijuana were as important as the music. Much of the crime of the era was related to drug use, from selling and distributing to collateral crimes like stealing TV's to score some dope. Setting the crime part aside, drug use contributed to a breakdown in society because the drugs themselves caused their users to break down in one way over another.

Mostly, though, there was a failure of leadership, especially in urban areas. Liberals were in charge of the most crime ridden areas of the country, whether NYC, Detroit, DC, or what have you. No matter how many innocent people were victimized, they never seemed comfortable with the idea of sending the police into a crime zone to knock heads, make some arrests, and send people to prison. Instead, they preferred to lecture us about poverty and "root causes" and how legitimate fears about crime were a figment of suburbanites' racist imaginations (that's the Bowling For Columbine theory).

And, liberals still don't get it. Just this week, the liberal wing of the Supreme Court ordered California to release tens of thousands of prisoners from its "overcrowded" prisons, a back door way of eviscerating California's effective and popular 3-Strikes initiative, which is based on the crazy theory that if you lock up criminals, you will have less crime.

The liberal approach to crime prevention, then and now, has been twofold: first, give us a ton of money so we can attack the "root causes" of crime by redistributing wealth downward. Second, restrain the police so they can no longer unfairly "target" minority communities. Unsurprisingly, this did not result in any reduction in crime, but rather to a disastrous increase. It took decades to dig ourselves out, but liberals seem hellbent to throw us back down.

The Lost City: Finding Atlantis

This got lost in the shuffle over the weekend, but someone out there claims to have found, not only the fabled lost city of Atlantis, but also a series of smaller cities built in imitation after its destruction.

NORTHAMPTON, Mass (Reuters) – A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the "twist" of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast.

"We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense," Freund said.

The flake factor on Atlantis discoveries is usually pretty high, but Freund and his team claim to have found, not just the city, but also a series of smaller cities that echo Atlantis' multi-ringed design. If true, that's incredible enough even without the Atlantis angle.

We know so little of the ancient world, but there is plenty of tantalizing evidence that there really was a city of Atlantis that was destroyed by flood. The biggest Atlantis booster was Plato who wrote extensively about the city and clearly believed that it existed. Less well known is that Solon spent years working on a history of Atlantis, at least according to Plutarch. And you may recall a story from last year about a new theory that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by a catastrophic flood from the Atlantic Ocean pouring into a previously dry valley.

Read enough ancient sources, and you realize that the ancients were aware of an world more ancient than theirs. We now know that Minos and Troy existed, and that the legends described as happening there actually occurred, at least to some degree. Atlantis may well give up its secrets, yet.

Happy President's Day

If you can read this, hug a President

We've had 44 of 'em and no matter how great or how low each one might have been, they either left on schedule and without protest, or were carried out on their shields. That's how we roll, constitutionally speaking.

The Year of the Constitution

Great essay from Kyle-Ann Shriver - 2010: The Year They Came For the Constitution

As 2010 fades into history, no living, sentient American will remember the year as anything other than the year when progressives came for the Constitution. And the same year in which the same Constitution provided for elections in the 50 states. The people exercised their constitutional right to vote many of the would-be tyrants out on their disgusting derrieres.

I have a shocking confession to make. While I have been voting Republican since I was 22 years old (don't ask me about my misbegotten votes for Dukakis and Ted Kennedy back when I lived in Boston in 1988, please), up until this year, I had been registered as a Democrat. The reason was so I could vote in the City's primaries, the only way I could have my voice heard in local politics. I've always been a little embarrassed by this, but took heart from the fact that the Prince of Darkness himself, Bob Novak, registered as a Dem for the same reason when he moved to DC after his kids had left home.

Anyway, after Obamacare passed, I re-registered as a Republican the next day. So disgusted was I, not only by the lying and cheating of Obamacare's proponent, but also by the near-coordination by the White House, the Congress, the media, and the academy in arguing for its passage, that I decided even voting in a local primary for state assemblyman was too much; that the corrupt Big Government stink would rub off even then.

The fact is, after this year, there is no way I would vote for or support a Democrat for office at any level, in any capacity, at any time, under any circumstance. Henceforth, I will vote for dead people, felons, and Oliver North before I will ever think of voting for a Democrat. Call it epistemic closure, if you want. I don't care. Democrats have definitively shown themselves to be more concerned with centralized government more so than with the Constitution or the free market, not to mention the consequences of their own legislative actions. I'll have nothing to do with them.

Locked Down: San Francisco's Growing Historic Districts

I've written before about San Francisco's (and California's) tendency towards overrating and over-celebrating their "history." The fact is that modern California history began in 1849, which is not that long ago. By contrast, Englishmen were building permanent settlements on the East Coast during Shakespeare's lifetime. If, like me, you grew up in Virginia, you go on field trips to Civil War battlefields and Founding Father plantations. If you're a kid in SF, your field trips are visits to Spanish Missions (most of them are modern buildings built on the sites of old missions) and Indian burial grounds. Big whoop. The latest effort at preserving useless history is in San Francisco's South of Market area, or what my Dad used to call "Bumtown"

The buildings lining the lone block of Sumner Street in San Francisco's South of Market district will never be mistaken for the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square.

The entrance off Howard Street is flanked by two-story warehouses from the 1920s, one concrete and one brick. The alley itself displays small buildings of various styles, including a one-story wooden home from 1906 with columns framing the door and a huge bay window.

Yet 11 buildings on the block, and 467 more on the blocks around it, are deemed "contributors" to what could become the city's largest historic district - a collection with few obvious landmarks that instead offers clues to the blue-collar city of the past.

This and similar landscapes deserve such attention; for too long they were taken for granted. The double-edged sword is that new layers of protections could undermine the varied architectural character that makes such areas distinct.

In the case of the proposed Western SoMa Light Industrial and Residential Historic District, that character is easy to miss.

The rational is that SOMA's buildings are part of the City's "blue collar" history. Maybe. But, we're talking about an area filled with warehouses, flophouses, and dive bars. There are some stray urban hipsters living there, but mostly it's bums and low-income housing types. And if SF cares about its "blue collar" history, why does the City otherwise pursue policies - high tax, high, environmental regs, rent control - that are practically designed to drive blue collar jobs out? Mostly, though, I don't think any of the proponents for this "historic" district can identify what historically important events or persons are linked to the site. At the bare minimum, the standard for preserving any building should be: is there a PhD thesis attached to this site?

Of course, the point of declaring this useless area "historic" is not so the City can fill it up with historic re-enactors playacting as Wobblies and longshoremen. It's to stop the dreaded "development," and SOMA is a place that is perpetually ripe for development, but which always seems to miss the development bus, mostly because busybody progressives declare SOMA to be off-limits for one reason or another. During the Internet Bubble era, for example, there was a big local stink over the construction of a few condo-lofts in the area, some of the few nice areas in SOMA and thus thoroughly objectionable.

Historic or not, the place is an eyesore. If SOMA was truly historic, locals would have "preserved" it on their own. You don't need some mayoral proclamation declaring the place to be "historic."

Standing Athwart Progress Yelling "STOP!": The Palo Alto Tree v High Speed Rail

Despite the parlous state of California's finances, it's full speed ahead on the high speed rail project. We already know it's going to cost tens of billions of dollars. We also know that it will end up costing more than anyone will admit. And if this headline is repeated down the length of the state, we all know that our grandchildren will be in their dotage before the final spike is nailed: Historic Tree Stands In The Way of High Speed Rail.

Towering 10 stories above the banks of San Francisquito Creek, the El Palo Alto redwood predates the U.S. Constitution by more than 800 years. It is widely believed to have been a campsite for explorer Gaspar de Portola when he discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769.

It has endured everything from ecological changes to economic shifts, all of which left marks on the ecology of this venerable tree. Now it’s entangled in the debate over high-speed rail.

The tree stands within 10 feet of existing Caltrain tracks between the Menlo Park and Palo Alto stations, with commuter trains passing by 90 times every weekday. Initial plans by the California High-Speed Rail Authority called for widening the tracks to accommodate the new rail line, which would put the tree in jeopardy. Proposed alternatives included a trench or raised track.

To be sure, critics cite many reasons for their opposition, including the costs. But in Palo Alto and neighboring communities, the tree has become a budding symbol for why high-speed rail — approved by a majority of the state’s voters in 2008 — needs to be evaluated carefully. Dave Dockter, Palo Alto city arborist and current steward of the tree, said, “I think all of the alternatives have a potentially significant and catastrophic potential to impact the El Palo Alto redwood.”

There's a good example of why California is bankrupt. This tree has its own steward, while I don't even have a manservant. Talk about a misallocation of resources!

More important, it's a good example of how California's inflated sense of self leads to absurd results such as a "historic" tree - did it run for president, or something? - standing in the way of a rail project that the state can't afford; would replace an already cheap, speedy form of transport (it's called an airplane); and would be going through some of the least developed, sparsely populated land in the country (the idea that CA is a densely populated, over-developed place is a myth. Most of the state is rural, if not wilderness). Bonus gag: there's already a rail line going by the tree.

The fact is that California has some of the least historically significant territory in the country. Maybe it's my East Coast bias, but I lived in Northern Virginia for many years. Half the Civil War was fought within a two hour drive of my house. And some scolds in Palo Alto are worried about a tree? Get a grip.

History & Style: The Secrets of the Cadillac

In the midst of a cheeky deprecation of the Cadillac Catera, Car Lust explains the origins of the Cadillac logo. It's obviously some bit of imported heraldry, but the meaning behind the logo has its own fascination, and gives you an idea of the vast mental gulf that separate the founders of GM and the MP's who are running the company now:

The shield in Cadillac's traditional shield-in-a-wreath emblem uses the actual coat of arms of the man the car was named after, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, the French nobleman who founded the city of Detroit. In the upper left and lower right quadrants of the shield, there's a trio of black, duck-like birds. The official term for them in heraldry is "merlettes." Merlettes are a symbol of the Holy Trinity, and their presence in the coat of arms indicates that someone in old Antoine's family tree did something brave in one of the Crusades.

Ducks on the Cadillac logo?? I didn't believe it until I took a walk around the neighborhood to find a 15 year old Caddy. Whaddaya know! There really were ducks on the logo! (the "modern" logo, of course, has substituted some Mondrian-style black bars for the little guys).

Albert Sloan and co. may have been rapacious industrialists who helped pave America and destroy the planet. But, they also had a sense of history and style that allowed them to grab and hold the public's imagination. They were "car guys" in the best sense of the word, and it is clear that they would have had no place in the modern GM. Too bad because they could do the one thing that is in short supply right now: sell a lot of cars.

Good Points

A lot of good points being made across the Blogosphere today:

Republicans ecstatic over the anti-Obamacare results in Missouri should temper their enthusiasm, since the status quo was and remains unsustainable. Repeal will not be enough. If Americans want to "keep" their current health care, they need to accept that they will have to actually pay for it. (Cafe Hayek)

Just because someone is a left-wing historian with an axe to grind, doesn't mean their research lacks merit. US involvement in the Korean Peninsula during the Cold War has actually inspired some useful historical writing from progressive types, as the "official" record has been hopelessly white washed. (Marginal Revolution)

The Obama Administration's approach to the "Birther" issue - mockery, combined with deliberate opaqueness that only encourages further "questions" - has had the opposite of its intended effect. The number of people who aren't sure whether Obama was born in the US is at 58%, at least in one poll. (Legal Insurrection)

In the wake of the Crash of '08, the US needs to do more than pass regulatory "reform," or build up balance sheets. Its regulators, finance pros, and ratings agencies need to rebuild their tattered reputations, or see themselves replaced by foreign competitors more willing to make bearish (i.e. rational) calls on US financials. (Ampontan)

American media outlets may be more numerous than ever, but they keep failing to report the same stories; namely that New Age/Leftist ideas and philosophies can be just as destructive and anti-human as anything you could point to on the Right. (The Macho Response)

Liberals like Paul Krugman claim to hate deflation because it creates a "downward spiral" that is hard to get out of. The truth is they hate the benefits of deflation: debt becomes more expensive, savings increase, and private capital formation encourages self-determination. So much easier if liberals could just artificially goose the economy with "stimulus" and zero per cent interest rates, and then inflate away all of the debt that their schemes generate. (Market Ticker)

If you are in New York City and want to talk to beautiful women, you need a Vespa and some blue shoes. At least that's what you need this summer. (The Sartorialist)

There's no scandal quite like a Republican bikini scandal. Apparently, the Left thinks this will kick off some sort of hypocrisy buzz. What they don't realize is that Republican bikini scandals remind people that the hot women are all on the right side of the aisle. (The Other McCain)

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" is one of Dylan's best songs from his post-accident semi-retirement period. It's also one that isn't well understood. (Brendan Bernhard)

While we can all put on an appropriately glum face on the anniversary on Hiroshima, it's worthy of comment that civilian battlefield deaths among our allies, including one battle that took place on American soil, have been forgotten despite their exceeding the toll from the atomic bomb. (The Belmont Club)

Life Is Not Fair. (The Leader of the GOP)

Happy Fourth of July

Have a great holiday! (image via Pat Dollard)

The Battle of Gettysburg

Today is the 147th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Gettysburg. History has tended to linger over the tragedy of Pickett's Charge, the "late" JEB Stuart, the defeat of Robert E Lee (D), and of course the high water mark of the Lost Cause. Comparatively little is known of the men in Blue (R), yet a visit to the Pennsylvania Monument tells the tale. These were great men, who fought just as hard, and as well, as their Southern counterparts. The only difference: they won.

The Monument, btw, includes a charming plaque stating that the soldiers were presenting the monument to the ladies of Pennsylvania who sacrificed so much during the war. Gettysburg, like few sites in the US, brought out the best in America - from the Gettysburg Address down to the tip-of-the-hat gentility towards the Home Front - even as it saw some of America's worst days.

And, dare I point out the vast gulf that separates the men of the 19th century who died to make men free; and the men (and women) of the 21st century who seem intent on grasping every scrap of "stimulus," "bailout" and "social justice" available? All in the name of (language abuse alert) "equality?" I've never been one to say that our best days are behind us, but certainly some of our better days are.

I Don't Need Your Civil War

I occasionally joke that Ron Paul is OK, except he's always one sentence away from declaring Abraham Lincoln to be a blood thirsty war monger. Today, and not for the first time, he reached that sentence: Correcting Ron Paul: Buying the Slaves Was Not An Option

Ron Paul insisted in a recent interview that Abe Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War by buying the southern slaves from the southerners. Paul argues that Lincoln (a warmonger) was “determined to fight this civil war” that he could have avoided “for 1/100 the cost.”
Right Wing News reported, via HotAir:

QUESTION: Getting down to the last two questions here…. Most people consider Abe Lincoln to be one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest president we’ve ever had. Would you agree with that sentiment and why or why not?

RON PAUL: No, I don’t think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have been available to buy up all the slaves and free them. So, I don’t see that is a good part of our history. Besides, the Civil War was to prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government and that’s what it did. It rejected the notion that states were a sovereign nation.

Whatta doof. As Gateway Pundit notes, proposals for such schemes were common in the years leading up to the Civil War - the American desire to solve every problem with a quick payout was ratified along with The Constitution - but were rejected as prohibitively expensive. So, no, you couldn't just "buy all the slaves" and avoid a collision between North and South. By the time Lincoln was elected, the two political "sides" in American politics - slavery/Democrats and freedom/Republicans (sound familiar?) - had gotten to the point where war was the only way to resolve their political disputes.

And you can't blame this on Paul's age or that he was "tired." This is actually a common belief, both on the Rothbardian wing of the libertarians and even among some progressives, who have developed the theory that the framers of the 14th Amendment were "redistributionists" because they "took" the Confederates' slaves (via conquest and constitutional amendment) without just compensation (as God is my witness, I am not making this up).

Paul is one of the most potent spokesmen for limited government and the moral dimensions of the national debt. But he is a problematic spokesman because he is a contrarian who feels compelled to be contrary on virtually everything. Also, if you read his last couple books, it is clear that his ant-Fed crusade is as much an anti-war crusade as it is an anti-Big Government one. Not saying we should stop listening to him entirely, but just know that you might want to watch your head when Paul is operating heavy machinery.

Do You Know How I Know You Are A Bubble?

We often hear that speculative bubbles are impossible to forecast until after they have popped. Naked Capitalism points to Edward Chancellor's "10 Sign Posts of Manias and financial Crises" to make the argument that (1) you can identify bubbles and (2) if you want to see a live bubble in action, look to China (you should really click through to see the supporting links): Top 10 Reasons You Know China Has A Financial Bubble On Its Hands

1. "Great investment debacles generally start out with a compelling growth story."
2. "Blind faith in the competence of the authorities."
3. "A general increase in investment is another leading indicator of financial distress. Capital is generally misspent during periods of euphoria. Only during the bust does the extent of the misallocation become clear."
4. "Great booms are invariably accompanied by a surge in corruption."
5. "Strong growth in the money supply is another robust leading indicator of financial fragility. Easy money lies behind all great episodes of speculation from the Tulip Mania of the 1630s – which was funded with IOUs – onward."
6. "Fixed currency regimes often produce inappropriately low interest rates, which are liable to feed booms and end in busts."
7. "Crises generally follow a period of rampant credit growth."
8. "Moral hazard is another common feature of great speculative manias. Credit booms are often taken to extremes due to a prevailing belief that the authorities won’t let bad things happen to the financial system. Irresponsibility is condoned."
9. "A rising stock of debt is not the only cause for concern. The economist Hyman Minsky observed that during periods of prosperity, financial structures become precarious."
10. "Dodgy loans are generally secured against collateral, most commonly real estate."

Now some of these ("a surge in corruption") are simply part of the human condition, bubble or not. I would also add an 11th item to the Top 10: growing opacity in budgeting and accounting. The acceptance of Enron-style accounting methods in America's public and private financing should have been a warning that no one had any idea as to the solvency of the overall system. That should go double for China, which doesn't even bother to follow generally accepted accounting principles, but simply tosses out numbers that China bulls/acolytes accept without question (a level of blind faith they would never grant to their own countries, btw).

It's always dangerous to make any predictions about China because the only constant there has been the persistence of poverty and roiling social change. Right now, China looks like the wave the future. But, 20 years ago, it was a pariah because it was shooting student protesters. 20 years before that, it was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, and was as isolated as North Korea is today. And 20 years before that it emerging from 20 years worth of civil war and foreign invasion. The popping of a speculative bubble may be the least of China's problems.

Fables of the Reconstruction

Sean Wilentz takes to the pages of the NY Times to rehabilitate the historical image of US Grant. It's about 100 years late, but whatever: Who's Buried In the History Books?

In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, “on the altar of Radicalism.” That he accomplished as much for freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

After Grant left the presidency in 1877, he was widely hailed as the most famous and admired living American, his alleged transgressions overcome by a fabulously successful two-year world tour. He was still beloved at his death in 1885 — a reverence embodied by his monumental tomb in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson.

But Grant came in for decades of disgraceful posthumous attacks that tore his reputation into tatters. Around 1900, pro-Confederate Southern historians began rewriting the history of the Civil War and cast Grant as a “butcher” during the conflict and a corrupt and vindictive tyrant during his presidency. And the conventional wisdom from the left has relied on the bitter comments of snobs like Henry Adams, who slandered Grant as the avatar of the crass, benighted Gilded Age.

I always think it's important to point out that it was DEMOCRATS - the self-proclaimed truth telling tribunes of the people - who aided and abetted this sort of historical slander. Also, it's notable that many of these DEMOCRATS were segregationists on the one hand and statist progressives on the other. A charming bunch, and it's a wonder how they obtained the privilege of having the last word in these sorts of things.

Grant, of course, was a remarkable man. In 1858, he was working behind the counter of his father's store after having been drummed out of the army for drunkenness (fun fact: his drinking became terminal right here in Northern California!). 10 years later he was president of the United States. In the intervening years, he had led the armies of the North to victory in an all consuming civil war. But, all I ever heard about in school was that Grant was "corrupt," although the exact details of that corruption were never quite spelled out.

As Wilentz notes, the "trend" is for historians to look more favorably upon Grant. Thanks, fellas! A good place to start is Jean Edwards Smiths' biography, which he wrote with the explicit aim at presenting a more balanced portrait of the general and his times. I