How Far Can the Grey Lady Fall?

I mean, damn.

via @MikeRiggs

Quote of the Day

This is a quote of the day in the sense of the "Not Top 10 Plays" of gaffes and miscues ESPN runs on Fridays.

"...Dred Scott v. Sandford is widely regarded as wrongly decided."

--Judge Sonia Sotomayor, responding to written follow-up questions from Sen. John Cornyn.

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote for the Court:“[the negro] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and…might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

And as pointed out by WSJ SCOTUS correspondent Jess Bravin:

Abraham Lincoln, then running for Senate, said the decision effectively nullified the noble promises of the Declaration of Independence. In the Supreme Court’s hands, the charter “is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.”

Bravin's entire post here.

Now, I understand not wanting to antagonize Southern Republicans; but I'm pretty sure that, by now, even they will cop to the human equality of blacks so blatantly spit upon in that decision.

ADDENDUM: It's not that I'm implying anything nefarious/racist on her part. Just kinda floored by her inability to say anything resembling sensible about the case. Dred Scott v Sandford is perhaps only eclipsed by Korematsu (by the latter's placement on the historical timeline) as the most egregiously racist Supreme Court opinion ever written. (And that's saying something.)

It's more of a comment about the sorry state of our current confirmation system than it is any reflection on her. Though, I think she could have said a little bit more and, as it stands, the statement is fully in the running for understatement of the year.

Entertaining, and Yet, Takes No Effort

It's really easy to blog when you use other people's material. Courtesy of my friend Libby--who apparently got this joke from her brother:

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area
in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living -- or about cows, for that matter.

This is a herd of sheep, now give me back my dog!

Mood Music Monday

Malcolm X and Capitalism

Over at Hit & Run, Damon Root dropped a little hate on intimated some unpleasant things about Malcolm X, a personal hero of mine:

Rather than serving as the villains caricatured by Malcolm X, Manning Marable, and others on the left, classical liberals provided essential intellectual, political, moral, and financial firepower in the battles against slavery, Jim Crow, imperialism, and racial classifications.

Now, as I put in the comments there, this may be less Damon's fault than of the historian Marable that he quoted at the beginning of his piece:

In a 1992 speech at Colorado's Metro State College, Columbia University historian Manning Marable praised the black minister and activist Malcolm X for pushing an "uncompromising program which was both antiracist and anticapitalist." As Marable favorably quoted from the former Nation of Islam leader: "You can't have racism without capitalism. If you find antiracists, usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is that of socialism."

But one quote of Malcolm's does not sum up his political or economic philosophy. The fact that Malcolm wasn't familiar with free market theories and the protectionist anti-profit motive that supported segregation and other Jim Crow policies does not diminish his accomplishments as a proponent of civil and economic freedom for blacks.

As I noted in an earlier comment, what was touted as "capitalism" in Malcolm X's America was not a free market or an example of economic freedom. It was a nation governed, in part, by a racist minority in the Senate which simultaneously protected business interests and fought tooth and nail for the "Lost Cause." If that was capitalism*--I'd be vocally opposed to it as well.

Furthermore, it's hardly a secret that one of the major draws of blacks and other minorities into a socialist/communist fold was their (false) promise of racial equality. Socialists actively promoted their agenda by pointing out the racist, hypocritical policies of the U.S. and other "capitalist" countries--as if it were the capitalism itself that was racist. The unfortunate fact that Malcolm at least partially bought into this is, I believe, due to an ignorance of economic theory, not a preference for socialism. Indeed, in every speech I've read or heard of Malcolm's, he always referred to socialists in the third person. Free market theory means little to those who see business and government acting together to maintain a status quo which holds their people back by business practice, social custom, and law.

His pro-freedom message is very much borne out by the themes dominant in the majority of his speeches: personal responsibility, an inherent mistrust of the government, self-ownership and self-defense, the promises of (not actions under) the Constitution, and--most tellingly--black entrepreneurship. He couldn't have been clearer on the point that blacks should get into business: the "capitalism" of the day, however, shut many blacks out of starting private enterprises.

It is unfortunate and--I fully agree with Damon here--all too common for Malcolm to be hailed as a voice of the Left on college campuses. The facts, however, don't really bear out in this regard if you read and listen to what the man said and not rely on what is said about him.

*I think this is yet another case of conflating "business interests" and "market principles"--a businessman who benefits from/supports regulatory capture is hardly a free marketer; so too is it problematic to compare the "capitalists," as Malcolm understood them, with "classical liberals."

Quote of the Day

Mr Obama, so eloquent on a podium, speaks slowly and carefully in interviews, with frequent long pauses. This is obviously not because he is stupid or disfluent, but because he's hyper-aware of what a misstatement means in his job. Mr Biden, by contrast, is so keen to let you know that he knows all the provinces of Pakistan, that he is more likely than average to say something that will accidentally lead to nuclear war one day.

Economist "Democracy in America" blogger, New York

Mood Music Monday

I do apologize for the dearth of posts of late. I went on vacation, and since I've been back I've been playing a lot of catch-up, in addition to working on side-projects. I will try to get a few things up this week. In the meantime: