You don’t say.

That’s really the only word to describe it when the gender politics grievance-mongers who were part of the president’s coalition turn on him for being insufficiently inclusive.

<montyburns>Excellent.</montyburns>

Having been raised Catholic (though largely lapsed to agnosticism, at this point), I am keenly aware of the difference between regret and repentance.  Regret is easy (“I’m sorry I threw up on your sofa.”).  Repentance, on the other hand, requires both penance and a commitment to sin no more (“I’m sorry I threw up on your sofa; I’ll pay to get it cleaned, and that’s the last time I spend a night out doing Jagermeister shots.”).

It is because of my understanding of this distinction that I am so very, very weary of expressions of regret from the business interests I interact with.  While the apology, however platitudinous, is appreciated, it neither fixes the problem nor indicates that you are serious about preventing it from recurring.

My landlord inspired this rant.  UPS and Fedex deliver packages to the rental office rather than leaving them unattended at the front door of our apartment.  This is appreciated, even though the rental office’s 9:30am – 6:30pm weekday business hours make it a bit of a pain to pick up said packages during the week.  Typically it involves going in to work a little late, leaving a little early, or skipping out for an hour or so during the middle of the day.

But when I get to the rental office this morning, shortly after it was scheduled to open, I was greeted with a sign taped on the inside of the door indicating that they’ll be closed until noon, and they apologize for any inconvenience.

Your apology is not accepted, you wankers, especially given that this is at least the third time this has happened.  You have needlessly wasted my time and raised my blood pressure.  Keep regular business hours or at least announce when you’re going to be closed in advance of the closure.

That’s the question that looks to be percolating in the mind of U.S. District Court judge Vaughn R. Walker in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative.  Though the linked news report is principally about the judge’s denial of a motion to dismiss by the initiative’s sponsors, it also contains this nugget:

Walker made clear that he wants to examine other issues that are part of the political rhetoric surrounding same-sex marriage but rarely surface in courtrooms. Among the questions he plans to entertain at the trial are whether sexual orientation is a fixed or immutable characteristic, whether gays are a politically powerful group, and if same-sex marriage bans such as Proposition 8 were motivated by anti-gay bias.

As written, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from denying citizens the equal protection of the law — that is, treating citizens differently based on their membership in some class.  However, we live in a time when the Constitution does not mean what it says, and so we enter the strange world of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence where some classes are entitled to greater constitutional protection than others.

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of the Reconstruction Amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, and so courts have had no trouble concluding that race-based classifications are, for the most part, verboten.  Courts call race a “suspect” classification, and analyze laws that make such classifications under the strict scrutiny standard.  This is quite a high bar: the burden is on the government (and not the plaintiff challenging the law) to show that the law is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest through the least intrusive means.  About the only race-based policies that have survived are bona fide affirmative action programs directed at remedying past discrimination by the sovereign, and even those are of increasingly dubious constitutionality as time goes on.

As for other classifications, courts look to four factors when determining whether they are “suspect,” like race-based classifications:

1. The class is a discrete and insular minority.
2. The classification is based on an immutable trait.
3. Members of the class have historically been discriminated against.
4. The class lacks the political power to redress injustice through the political process.

Based on these factors, courts have found classifications based on national origin and religion to likewise be “suspect.”  Classes based on gender and legitimacy, on the other hand, are merely ”quasi-suspect,” and are given intermediate scrutiny (the law will be upheld if the government can show that the law is substantially related to achieving an important governmental interest).  All other classifications — heretofore including sexual orientation — get rational basis review (the law will be upheld unless the plaintiff demonstrates that the law is not rationally related to a legitimate government interest).

To my mind there’s a decent argument that sexual orientation ought to be a suspect, or at least a quasi-suspect, classification.  While GLBT folk don’t seem to comprise a “discrete and insular minority” the way blacks once did, the classification certainly seems to be based on an immutable trait, and members of the class have historically been targets of appalling discrimination.  It’s that fourth factor that’s, I think, the toughie: the fact that Proposition 8 was opposed by almost 48% of the electorate is, though the measure nonetheless passed, a pretty plain demonstration of the political juice possessed by the class.  Politically-powerless minorities can’t move near-majorities of voters, and so one can envision the judiciary suggesting, in so many words, that the plaintiffs spend less time litigating and more time persuading their fellow citizens.

It’s interesting to see that Judge Walker looks to want to wrestle with this question, and it’ll be even more interesting to see what he decides, and why.

Sebastian talks CA-AB962, which we have discussed here previously.  And he’s correct: the Brady Campaign and other assorted anti-gun lobbying groups, for all that they sell themselves as merely being anti-gun violence, have never met a gun control law that they didn’t describe as reasonable and common sense regardless of how burdensome the law was on honest gun owners.  Sebastian:

Try finding odd calibers or match grade ammunition at your local corner gun shop. For a lot of competitive shooters, especially cowboy shooters, mail order is really your only option, and now Governor Arnold just told those people they don’t matter.

I can tell you, without my regular mail order houses, there’s no way I could find everything I need easily. The local gun shops are often poorly stocked with reloading supplies, and the nearest Cabela’s is 100 miles away. Even if you think it makes sense to regulate loaded ammunition, it makes zero sense to regulate components, because criminals are not going to hand load their ammunition. That was purely a fuck you to law abiding gun owners from the Brady Campaign and Governor Schwarzenegger.

Yeah, you read that correctly: even reloading components are subject to this law.  And Sebastian is saying this from the perspective of somebody who lives in Pennsylvania, a significantly smaller state than California.  There are far more areas of California that are unserved by a well-stocked Friendly Neighborhood Gun Store; even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to a few million people all told, there are only about half a dozen shops, and none of them are “specialty” stores that cater to, for instance, the CAS crowd.

Sebastian’s exit question is worth quoting:  “And [good-faith proponents of gun control] still want to insist there’s no hidden agenda here? Hell, it’s not even really that hidden!”

Let’s begin, as before, with some context:

The semi-automatic weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Those words were written by Josh Sugarmann, the executive director and founder of the anti-gun Violence Policy Center, in 1988.  Sugarmann is, in fact, frequently credited with inventing the term “assault weapon.”  His and other anti-gun activists’ express intention has been to advance their policy goals not by informing the public, but by preying on public ignorance and fear.

So what is an “assault weapon,” really?

Read More

John Stossel deserves some sort of medal for voluntarily subjecting himself to Michael Moore’s latest pile of tripe.  I will observe, however, that remarking on Moore’s intellectual incoherence is a bit like noting that the sun rose in the east.

It’s for a worthy cause and everything, and it definitely makes Dianne Feinstein cry, but even if it was legal in California I simply couldn’t bring myself to bid on this… thing.

Shudder.

Thanks to FB friend Corrina for pointing me to this article in the WSJ, in which Bret Stephens argues that President Obama was actually the perfect pick for the Nobel Peace Prize… at least, according to the values that have underlain the award for most of its history.  Stephens:

[M]ost of the prize winners draw from the obscure ranks of the sorts of people the late Oriana Fallaci liked to call “the Goodists.”

Who are the Goodists? They are the people who believe all conflict stems from avoidable misunderstanding. Who think that the world’s evils spring from technologies, systems, complexes (as in “military-industrial”) and everything else except from the hearts of men, where love abides. Who mistake wishes for possibilities. Who put a higher premium on their own moral intentions than on the efficacy of their actions. Who champion education as the solution, whatever the problem. Above all, the Goodists are the people who like to be seen to be good.

For example:

Characteristically, the Nobel Committee awarded no Peace Prizes for most of the Second World War: not to Franklin Roosevelt for turning America into an arsenal for democracy; not to Winston Churchill for rallying Britain against the Nazi onslaught; not to Charles de Gaulle for keeping the flame of a free France alive; not to the U.S. Army Rangers for scaling the heights of Pointe du Hoc on a June morning in 1944; not to Douglas MacArthur for turning Japan into a country at peace with itself and its neighbors.

These were the soldiers and statesmen who did more than anyone else to assure the survival of freedom in the 20th century. Being Goodists, however, the Nobel Committee chose instead to lavish its honors on people like the wan New England pacifist Emily Greene Balch (in 1946), the tedious British disarmament obsessive Philip Noel-Baker (1959) and the Irish antinuclear campaigner and Lenin Prize Winner Seán MacBride (1974).

These names don’t exactly spring to mind as having made a lasting and genuine contribution to world peace. Nor, one suspects, will history lavish its highest honors on Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Wangari Maathai, Mohamed ElBaradei, Al Gore or Martti Ahtisaari, to name some of this decade’s winners. They are merely the Frank Kelloggs and Seán MacBrides of the future.

In other words, the Peace Prize is generally awarded to dangerously naive fools rather than to individuals of actual accomplishment — and in that light, Mr. Obama is perhaps an ideal Nobel Laureate.

For sufficiently generous definitions of “bipartisan”, i.e., “party-line Democrat plus one liberal Republican”.