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As the Anglican Curmudgeon points out:

In the California case in Judge Walker’s court, the principal defendants were Governor Schwarzenegger and the Attorney General, Jerry Brown. Both chose not to defend the constitutionality of the amendment, which had passed by a significant majority at the polls. (In doing so, they placed their personal views above their duties to uphold California law. Apparently, only laws enacted by the Legislature are worthy of their support.) As a consequence, neither is expected to appeal the decision, as well.

The persons who had caused the proposition to appear on the ballot were allowed to intervene to defend its constitutionality. In the same way, Judge Walker allowed San Francisco County to intervene as well to oppose the measure, although in an unpublished decision the same day he ruled on Prop. 8’s unconstitutionality, Judge Walker denied a motion by Imperial County to intervene on behalf of the Proposition — go figure. (This is not a judge whose decisions bear the stamp of impartiality — the only words adequate to describe his judicial approach are “outcome-oriented.”)…

Thus, it hardly seems proper to deny the right of Imperial County to challenge Judge Walker’s ruling on the ground that it had no basis on which to assert a right of intervention. If Imperial County refuses to implement his decision, it clearly would face civil liability under 28 U.S.C. § 1983 for that failure, with the possibility of damages. Just as with the doctors who faced potential criminal liability in Diamond v. Charles (above), this potential liability under federal law should have given the County officials a sufficient stake in the outcome to make Judge Walker’s denial of their motion to intervene reversible error — and by the same token, that stake in the outcome should supply the County officials with standing to carry the principal appeal on the merits.

Judge Walker’s one-sided attempt to block the participation of the only real parties who had both a right to be involved and a concrete stake in the outcome should in and of itself serve as a beacon to any appellate court that his decision was wholly outcome-oriented. The Ninth Circuit, of course, is generally just as liberal as Judge Walker (and particularly with regard to its current motions panel), so there is no telling whether they will be able to resist an equally outcome-oriented approach in handling the appeal. The first gauge of what will happen in the Ninth Circuit is whether it will act to continue the stay of his injunction pending the outcome of the appeal. (And if it does not, the door will thereby be opened for an appeal to Justice Kennedy and the full Supreme Court to issue the stay, as described in this post.) So stay tuned — the case is by no means a done deal yet.]

Most people are unaware of the Imperial County action, and Judge Walker attempted to bury it in an unpublished opinion.  It will be interesting to see whether the SCOTUS will do anything about this (I think the Ninth Circuit’s idea is a foregone conclusion.)

I’ve always felt that the Proposition 8 effort was ill-advised, and that this would have been the perfect moment to pull the rug out from under civil marriage altogether.  Subsequent events have confirmed that judgement.

Having said that, I think Haley’s parting comment is still valid:

Nevertheless, the people who voted for Proposition 8 have every right to feel disenfranchised. The courts, the State’s elected officials, and its homosexual activists are colluding in broad daylight to prevent any ruling on the merits by anyone other than a single — and decidedly not impartial — judge.

If we live in a country where the judiciary routinely engages in outcome based decisions and the executive branch colludes with them, we no longer have a representative democracy.  All of these campaigns, polls and elections are nothing but a pile of rubbish, and the basic nature of this republic–to say nothing of its legitimacy–is altered dramatically.

When Michael Moore is doing the complaining:

But if they’re not laying people off yet, they’re also not hiring.

During the first half of 2010, GM made $2.2 billion in profit, yet according to The Wall Street Journal, they’ve only added 2,000 jobs in all of North America, taking their workforce from 113,000 to 115,000.

And what’s true for GM is true for the country. The government stepped in with trillions of dollars in cash and guarantees to keep Corporate America from collapsing due to its own stupidity, short-sightedness and greed. And it worked—for Corporate America. You may not have noticed as you were being foreclosed on, but the profitability of the Fortune 500 is almost back to normal. It jumped to $391 billion in 2009, up 335 percent from 2008. And the 500 biggest non-financial corporations are now sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, more than at any time in the past 50 years. (That’s what the business press always says—that they’re “sitting” on it—although as far as I know this is not literally true.)

It used to be that nationalisation was considered “the deal” on the road to social justice.  Take the profit motive out of the picture, eliminate capitalists exploiting the surplus value of the workers, make the corporation work for the public good–these were the goals of nationalisation.  That was one of the appeals of the Soviet Union–they nationalised everything.  Their counterparts in Western Europe weren’t slackers at it either, if one considers the enterprises formed by the state or nationalised: British Leyland, British Steel, British Rail, Renault, ENI, and so on.

Although it’s against the grain in the US to do anything in a direct, straightforward way, GM (along with Chrysler) was basically nationalised.

Leaving out the simple observation that nationalisation frequently doesn’t work, the basic problem here is that the nationalisers are too much in the back pocket of their well-heeled elite donor base.  It’s a strange form of socialism, but that’s what we’ve got these days.  Even Michael Moore is agitated about it.

But he, along with many others on the left, should have thought about that before they backed change they thought they could believe in.

P.S. Moore’s griping about not creating jobs has some merit, but doesn’t take into consideration the fact that advances in automation and manufacturing always lead to the production of the same amount of goods with fewer workers.  Marx predicted that this, combined with the ability of capitalists to pocket the snowballing surplus value that resulted, would lead to revolution.  The problem people like Moore can’t figure out is why the revolutionaries these days are all flocking to the Tea Party and not to the Communist (or at least the Democrat) one.

But only President Obama’s left-wing critics:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

He and his boss should have thought about all this when these left wingers became his base.  Those of us who are products of the 1960’s and early 1970’s know that the modern (or more accurately post-modern) American left was birthed in that era, and has been working on making its tenets reality ever since.  Gibbs is either exceedingly dense or intellectually dishonest not to know this.

Let’s start with the drugs: any self-respecting 60’s style liberal would be proud to fail a drug test.  To be positive for controlled substances is a badge of honour, and these days legalisation of such substances is closer than ever.

Then there’s his statement that “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”  Isn’t eliminating the Pentagon what these people have been fighting for since the days of Berkeley and Kent State?  Why should they give up now?  Didn’t they vote for Obama believing that he would get us out of Iraq?  (Let’s throw in Afghanistan and do it right!)  As far as Canadian health care is concerned, that’s a compromise for a true leftist, because the real model is a Soviet style system, both single payer and single provider.

Yes, I know that not all of the “Netroots” base are superannuated hippies whose use of controlled substances has significantly reduced the number of working brain cells they started with.  But those who do fit that category have done a reasonable job of their own version of Proverbs 22:6.  It’s really the same cause, just some new standard bearers with new weapons of warfare.

But some things the left does these days defy their own principles.  Would someone tell me why we’re still fighting over civil marriage when it should have gone the way of fault divorce?

There’s been a great deal of press about the campaign by certain Republican leaders to either amend or redefine the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude the children of illegal immigrants from American citizenship.  I don’t think it’s a winning issue politically, but on a more profound level it’s based on the a priori assumption that American citizenship is an unalloyed benefit.

As was the case with Roman citizenship, whose value deteriorated from the time when the apostle Paul invoked it for his own legal protection until the Late Roman taxes and politics inspired the Britons to cut loose from the Empire, our isn’t getting better either.  An example of this come from Rubin on Tax:

While ostensibly limited to “reporting” requirements to address offshore tax evasion by U.S. persons, at some point U.S. investors will balk at the level of reporting and forego profitable investments in the world at large, and foreign investors will simply move on to greener pastures and avoid the U.S. in making capital available…

For example, U.S. persons that purchase stock of a U.S. corporation from a foreign entity are required to obtain certification regarding “substantial” U.S. ownership (or nonownership) of the foreign entity. If the U.S. person does not obtain the required certification, the U.S. buyer is obligated to withhold 30% of the purchase price from the foreign seller (at least that is how I read the new statute). If the U.S. buyer is not aware of these rules, the IRS can come after it for the 30% withholding even if the buyer has already fully paid the foreign seller.

We also have the spectacle of foreign banks turning away American citizens/persons because of the onerous requirements our government places on banks which do business with our citizens/persons.  And, of course, one must never forget the double taxation that we impose on those who work abroad, frequently for American companies.

That’s why we’re seeing an increase in people renouncing their American citizenship.  For someone who comes to this country with the idea of achieving economic success, the possibility of their American citizenship trapping them in an economic bubble (and I mean that in several senses) should give pause.

It’s unlikely that most of those who come to this soil to have their children are thinking that far ahead, but if our government continues to punish people for success and ties economic activities in kilometres of red tape, they need to start.  And the Republicans need to stick to making American citizenship worthwhile for everyone rather than obsessing with denying it for a few.

When the Telegraph’s Nile Gardiner says that “the British press…has a far less deferential approach towards the White House,” he’s not just kidding:

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

In addition to the usual “let ’em eat cake” analogies, there are two aspects of these United States these days where the similarity to Louis XVI’s France is exact.

The first is the financial crisis.  The monarchy was in the throes of a long-term financial crisis which both Louis XVI and his predecessors had created.   Attempts by the likes of Necker had gotten nowhere due to the opposition of both the monarchy and the nobility.  Things had deteriorated to the point where Louis XVI was forced to call the Estates-General into session (the first time in more than a century and a half) in an attempt to enact new taxes, and that began the series of events that ended with Louis XVI losing his head and Napoleon I putting the crown on his own.

The second is the lack of uniformity and rationality in government administration.  Taxes were wildly different from one part of France to another; there were all kinds of special privileges entrenched by custom and law and, of course, there were those venal offices.  In this country two centuries of federalism plus the maze of overlapping bureaucracies at the top make a legal environment of daunting complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability.  Obama’s major initiatives only make matters worse; both the health care and financial reforms create bureaucratic mazes and carve out exceptions for special interests that add to the difficulty.

It’s ironic that the revolt against this constantly refers to the Constitution, that “Age of Reason” document whose principles (along with the Declaration of Independence) strongly influenced France’s own revolution.  But these days, how you view a revolution doesn’t depend on principle but on which side your interests lie.

Like many other things in public education, the New York state Regents’ exams for its high school students aren’t working as planned:

The big story in New York education circles is the further confirmation of what longtime critics have alleged: that the feel-good story of rising student test scores over the last several years is largely an illusion produced by dumbed-down tests. David Steiner, appointed State Education Commissioner last year, believes that the system has led to “systemic grade inflation.” Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch agreed and enlisted Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz to evaluate the state exams. On July 19, a preliminary report, based on Koretz’s findings, revealed that the jump in state test-score results over the past four years was indeed too good to be true: improved test results, it turned out, didn’t mean that more students were adequately prepared for high school or college.

Unfortunately, the story of New York’s testing mess doesn’t end at the elementary-school level. The state’s once-vaunted Regents exams, given to high school students, have long since become a shell of their former selves. Success on them signifies little—certainly not the ability to excel in college. Teachers have been complaining about this problem for years.

Good students of American history (of which there are fewer, thanks to our inadequate teaching of the subject) will remember that it was the New York Regents’ Prayer that was was the issue in the 1962 Supreme Court case Engle v. Vitale, which ejected open prayer from public schools.

Unfortunately that case and its progeny have engendered the illusion that, if we pursue religous cleansing in our public schools, they will be better.  We have and they are not.  Until we focus on what’s really important in public education, the results we have will continue.

Oh, yes, it is:

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made “state registration and church consecration” a dual requirement of matrimony.

We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn’t it about time we freed marriage from the state?

Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives.

It isn’t the only mistake we need to get over coming out of Geneva, but it’s a biggie.  It’s time.