(if I were the) King of the Forest

I am fairly certain that if I owned a fleet of vans that I made a business of renting to the public and I donated them gratis to, say, the McCain campaign to drive their volunteers around that would constitute an in-kind campaign contribution and would be subject to the limits imposed by various campaign finance laws and regulations. If Bill Gates decided to outfit some politician’s campaign offices with Microsoft Word without charging them for it I am sure the same thing would apply. If a sign-maker contributed campaign signs, or the owner of a television station contributed air-time for campaign ads I am sure those would both count as contributions as well.

So why can Springsteen or Streisand contribute what amounts to some tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of concert without tripping over those same regulations?

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.

Here we are in the thick of the election season and, as always happens during such times, we hear endless declarations from the candidates about the various problems that they will fix for us if we will only vote for them, and endless discussion from activists and advocates and self-declared victims and would-be policy-makers about […]

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.

THAT debate format would actually tell us what the candidates believe in depth, give us a sense of how they analyze problems and what kinds of advisors they listen to, give us a real knowledge about their plans on a particular topic (and about what topcis they think are important), and give us a fighting chance at assessing the source material they rely on in forming their opinions and plans.

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?

Now that this site has moved into its own domain I suppose I ought to provide a link back to its original home, which is still relevant. Here it is:
I Want A Choice
It provides a brief commentary — and some recommendations — on our electoral process.
-apl
Update: The domain “IWantAChoice.com” has now been turned […]

In March 2007 The Boston Globe published an opinion piece by Peter H. Schuck of the Yale Law School and Richard J. Zeckhauser of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard which described the adverse effects of so-called “bad apples” and “bad bets” on the effectiveness of government assistance programs. By “bad apples” they […]

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.