drsmooth wrote:David Brooks with a get-well card to (or pre-eulogy for) Christopher Hitchins, which semi-self-consciously makes a case for David Brooks as the bizarro Hitchins

pacino wrote:is glenn beck really holding a rally at the same place on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr's most famous speech? Pathetic. I'm stunned.

who was it that said that al franken was a joke? i disagree I had to watch this twice to understand it, but it appears that franken pretty rightly discusses how Marshall wasn't some crazy activist judge.

cshort wrote:
I don't think people ever thought he was dumb, just that he was a douche

cshort wrote:

pacino wrote:is glenn beck really holding a rally at the same place on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr's most famous speech? Pathetic. I'm stunned.

who was it that said that al franken was a joke? i disagree I had to watch this twice to understand it, but it appears that franken pretty rightly discusses how Marshall wasn't some crazy activist judge.

I don't think people ever thought he was dumb, just that he was a douche

Go back and read Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise speech,” which liberals have lately been rehabilitating. With its warnings about retrenchment, rationing and a permanent energy crisis, it feels like a contemporary document. But it isn’t, and Carter’s prophecies were wrong: the grimmest speech any modern president has given was delivered just a few years before America kicked off a long era of impressive economic growth.

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.

We ourselves are the same Americans who just ten years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.

We can regain our unity.

The liberal constitutional vision in the years before World War II was an inseparable part of the liberal ideal of the right relationship between the government and business, especially the financial markets. Liberals argued that the capitalist system could not survive its internal or external threats unless it was tempered and constrained by government regulation. The point of that regulation was not to subvert the market but to save it. One job of the Constitution, on this view, was to allow the government to protect its citizens and itself from the market’s tendency to dominate everything that came into its path. F. D. R.’s supporters did not see the court as the primary government institution for regulating the market, but they did say that the court must implement the regulatory objectives chosen by the president, Congress and the administrative agencies. In contrast, constitutional conservatives at the time argued that the job of the court was to act as a check on government in its efforts to regulate the markets — to protect private property against its erosion and to preserve capitalism against the threat of socialism.

The fundamental difference, then, between constitutional liberals and constitutional conservatives was on the question of whom they feared most. Liberals feared that, unregulated, business and markets might destroy both themselves and republican government. Conservatives shared the liberals’ fear about the fate of republican government, worrying that, unfettered, regulation might destroy private property, the market and capitalism itself. Both sides contended that the Constitution ought to be interpreted in the light of their substantive views about the dangers to a system of democratic capitalism that both sides equally embraced.

Today, we are moving toward a contemporary version of this debate between liberals and conservatives about what we need to fear most — an overreaching state or unconstrained market forces. The positions in this debate today are not identical to what they were three-quarters of a century ago, but there are important similarities. Progressives today view regulation as the necessary response to the market failures that led to the present economic crisis. Many conservatives fear that taking regulation too far will cripple the possibilities of economic recovery and long-term growth. These differences are not only shaping the leading political debates of our day, but framed in terms of constitutional rights like free speech and due process, will also determine the outcomes of important constitutional challenges to legislative and regulatory reforms. And progressive constitutional thought, in its current form, may not always be adequate to produce the desired progressive outcomes.

z ipper wrote:that bitch tells it like it is. me and my friends started this collapse in '89 by giving away outrageous amounts of kool-aid at well below cost.

TenuredVulture wrote:GOP senate candidate uses copyright in attempt to censor reprinting her previous campaign positions