This Will Be Interesting

Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court's holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order....

I agree with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, and with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, that the majority opinion in Obergefell has no basis in the law, history, or tradition of this country. Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

So rules Alabama's Supreme Court. (H/t D29.)

It's the right moment for a push like this: the usual answer, the deployment of Federal Marshals or even Federal troops to force compliance with Federal orders, is risky in the middle of an election season dominated by rebellion in both parties against their establishments. The states do have an interest in defending their own Constitutional powers under the 10th amendment: that powers not granted to the Federal government nor forbidden to the states are reserved to the states or to the People. No power to arbitrate fundamental moral questions for all states was ever granted to the Federal government, not even by the 14th Amendment, which only gives the Federal courts the power to ensure that existing rights and privileges are respected equally for all citizens. That power has been stretched out of shape, and now is thought to give the Nine power to force their views on every American and every state.

Did He Really Say That?

President Obama, on Putin:

“He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.”

Oh, really? Had any G20 meetings about Syria lately? The agenda on Syria was set by the Russians the day they parked an air force and a highly capable naval gunnery command there, providing fire support to their allies Assad and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Their deployment of S-400 missiles cemented that agenda, as has their sale of S-300 missiles to Iran -- banned by the UN Security Council's resolution governing Iran's nuclear "deal." Russia signed off on that piece of paper, too, didn't they? Wonder why it didn't stop them from selling these missiles to Iran?

That they are not playing your stupid games does not mean that they aren't a player. They're going to own the northern Middle East thanks to your failure to grasp this, just like they own Crimea. Have any G20 meetings about the lawful disposition of Crimea or Ukrainian territories, by the way? Who set the agenda for those?

What Could Go Wrong?

NSA data becomes widely available:

What does this rule change mean for you? In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages. FBI agents don’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They can simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations.

In addition to the civil rights abuses pondered at the link, let me raise a National Security concern: you'll be giving a vast number of people access to this information, which means its parameters and limits will become widely known very quickly. The tool will rapidly become useless for what it was originally intended to do.

Richard Fernandez on Challenging Opinions

The Belmont Club author, and one of the bloggers I've always respected most, gives a remarkable podcast interview.

He begins by contrasting historical imperalist treatments of the Middle East with the current post-Bush chaos unleashed by the Obama administration. The price of chaos, he says, will be much higher.

Somebody Looks Very Uncomfortable

NPR & Harvard: Boy, Obamacare is a Disaster

PowerLine notes an NPR report that can't sugarcoat the medicine.

You can list me in the group whose benefits have stayed about the same -- it's a grandfathered plan -- but whose co-pays have increased and whose premiums have skyrocketed. I'm paying I think twice now what I was paying before this lovely adventure began, for exactly the same plan (since I am now forbidden by law to change it without losing it forever).

Please Let That Be True

I don't know enough about Federal prosecutions to know if this statement is accurate. The source is the right kind of person to know, but if there's a loophole, I'd expect it to be in play in a Clinton-related case.

DiGenova said it was clear to him if a federal grand jury had been impaneled after Justice Department officials acknowledged they had issued statutory immunity to Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s former IT chief.

Druid Temple in Scotland

Underground, and possibly. Interesting pictures, and worth entertaining as a theory.

The Expected Violence

Multiple camera angles caught a Trump supporter sucker-punching a black activist who was being removed from a rally following an attempt to disrupt that rally by protesting. The use of several cameras at different angles to capture his removal -- and the subsequent violence -- makes it difficult to claim the offense was faked or is being misunderstood.

Will Trump try to talk his people into not taking the bait? Does he actually have that much control over the passions he's riding toward the nomination? I am doubtful on both questions.

Trump on the Oprah Winfrey Show

Decades ago, talking about foreign policy and foreign trade.



He sounds pretty much the same, right down to praising Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis for doing "one hell of a job." The America-first, tired-of-seeing-our-country-lose tone is the same, too.

Also, President Obama just said the same thing about allied free riders that Donald Trump apparently took out a full-page ad to say 24 years ago.

The Democratic Debate, Abridged

A pro-Clinton writer despairs.

UPDATE: A former Clinton administration counsel writing at Salon magazine thinks it should really be over for her.

Sadr City

Corb Lund has a new album out. One of the things I like about his work is that he focuses on telling other folks' stories.

Is Hillary Clinton a Regional Candidate?

So asks an author at The Week. Pointing out that Clinton has only done well in the South, which the Democrats will doubtless lose in November anyway, he notices a pro-Sanders argument that she is even weaker against whomever the Republicans field than Sanders would be: the bulk of her voters will be overwhelmed in what are, overall, easy Red states.

It must be strange to be a "regional" candidate in the region that supports you least.

Fiorina Backs Cruz

I grew to like Fiorina more and more the longer she was in the race, although she lacked the necessary experience to be an ideal candidate for President. This was back when we were thinking about ideal candidates for President, instead of wondering if we were going to get the felon or the guy who really wants you to know about the size of his genitalia.

She's throwing her support to Cruz.

American Veteran Killed in Israel

Taylor Force was killed in Jaffa by a Palestinian terrorist. He was a Redleg and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, being a tourist, he was unarmed at the time.

UPDATE: Donations for his family can be given here. Condolences can be left on the West Point Association of Graduate's page for him once they have finished putting together the tribute page, as he was an alumnus of the Academy.

Life Exists Not Despite But Because of Entropy

A young man at the Institute has come up with a novel theory for explaining the origins of life: in fact, he has developed a mathematical formula for it.

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

This leads him to make a small, humble claim.

“I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

OK, but if you are right, the Fermi paradox becomes even more urgent.

They Know If You Feel Bad Or Good, So You'd Better Feel Good for Goodness Sake...

Neuroscientists report that they can tell whether your motives are altruistic or selfish using fMRI scans, regardless of whether your actions are altruistic or selfish.

Increasingly we hear that it is not enough to do the right thing for the right reasons: you've got to feel the right way, too. Now we can look forward to a future in which that is enforced and transgressors punished.

Landlines

Twelve years ago, pollsters began to notice that millions of people were abandoning traditional land phone lines for cell phones. Even then, we were wondering about the effect on polling. In Michigan last night, we may have seen it:

Bernie Sanders made folks like me eat a stack of humble pie on Tuesday night. He won the Michigan primary over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 48 percent, when not a single poll taken over the last month had Clinton leading by less than 5 percentage points. In fact, many had her lead at 20 percentage points or higher. Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.

Both the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus and polls-only forecast gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. That’s because polling averages for primaries, while inexact, are usually not 25 percentage points off. Indeed, my colleague Nate Silver went back and found that only one primary, the 1984 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, was even on the same scale as this upset

Sanders is the perfect candidate for an error of this type, as his support is demographically concentrated among the young. Many of the youngest voting generation have never had a landline. Telephone polls that aren't adequately capturing cell phones just don't know how to reach and count these folks.

Nevertheless, thanks to the rigged nature of the "Democratic" primary, Clinton came out ahead in delegates.

Of course, superdelegates can change their votes. Put that way, the race is a lot closer:

True and accurate numbers are the following: after “Super Saturday,” Clinton has 663 pledged delegates. Sanders has 459 pledged delegates. Clinton needs 1,720 delegates to win. Sanders needs 1,924 delegates to win.

Sanders is a few hundred delegates behind Clinton, and Clinton has over a thousand delegates to go before she clinches the nomination.

Sanders still has a chance to pull this thing off. At the least, he's going to drain Clinton of money and energy all the way to the convention if he keeps winning at this pace. At most, he'll pull off a historic upset.

Israeli Successfully Defends Country's Reputation

I really liked Israel.

An Israeli man attacked by a Palestinian Tuesday allegedly pulled his assailant’s knife from his own neck and then proceeded to kill the attacker.

The 40-year-old Israeli was apparently collecting money for charity at a store in the suburb of Petah Tikva at the time he was assaulted.

White Privilege

In Flint, Michigan -- home of Michael Moore, who made a couple of his early documentaries on the hardship of the factory workers and other urban and rural poor in the area -- Bernie Sanders declared that poverty is an ethnic issue. "When you are white, you don’t know what its like to be living in a ghetto,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

Go tell it in Appalachia, Bernie.