Born in the USA
Kudos to National Review for its “birther” smackdown. (link)
Also, Mark Steyn is making sense at The Corner:
Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.
As usual, Mark Steyn sounds much better at 28,000 feet than he does on the ground. He needs to deal with reality. Illinois legislators routinely vote on bills they haven’t read. I’d bet that’s true in most state legislatures.
I think the problem inheres rather in the multicameral system. The supposed check on governmental action actually obscures responsibility, giving vast power to those who can claim to speak for large factions of each house. It requires backroom deals to achieve bills that can move through both houses, and the elite legislators who make these deals have an incentive to release them too late to be read and processed, so that they can’t be torn down. They are then presented as the only alternative to the sheep who couldn’t be present in the backroom.
Government will be simpler and more accountable if the structure is simpler and more accountable.
— ryan · Jul 28, 06:19 PM · #
Pick one:
1) In the early nineteenth century, you could frequently read through a statute and understand it as a self-contained document. The problem came afterward when you were trying to figure out what law addressed particular subject matter, and you’d see several statutes from several different years that addressed the same subject in different ways with no clue how they were intended to fit together. That was extremely problematic. Over the course of the nineteeth century states, and eventually Congress, moved toward a code model: the statutes were combined into a single code and then subsequent statutes took the form of amendments to the code. Statutes in that form are difficult or impossible to read as stand-alone documents, which is why there are reports prepared by committee counsel that typically walk the reader through each section of the bill and describe its function. Americans have been writing statutes in substantially this fashion for well over a hundred years. The style manual of the U.S. House’s Office of Legislative Counsel informatively discusses many of the challenges faced in the drafting of legislation.
2) America was full of freedom and stuff until FDR ruined everything. Him and LBJ.
— alkali · Jul 28, 06:37 PM · #
Yeah, Alkali is right. A 2000 word healthcare bill would’ve landed on the US Code with a giant thud. Nobody would’ve known how it was meant to be used.
The problem is the meal, not how long it takes to prepare it.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 28, 07:14 PM · #
Justifiably, you have low expectations of NR. It wasn’t a certainty they would take this position. Andy McCarthy has been strangely absent the last few days.
— Steven Donegal · Jul 28, 10:13 PM · #
lol
I for one can’t wait for summer recess.
The “conservative” congresscritters will be hoping to hold town halls to scaremonger the low information base into polling against healthcare reform (which would actually benefit them)…..but instead they are going to get schiavo’d by the birfers.
sweet!
revenge is a kind of wild justice.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 12:05 AM · #
I gather alkali is if the view that amendments to the United States Code or the Consolidated Laws of New York are of necessity 1,000 pages long.
— Art Deco · Jul 29, 01:09 AM · #
Oh Conor…….it isn’t worrrking.
hehe, check out teh hotair comments …..at least halfbirfer.
you guyz SO deserve this.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 01:31 AM · #
Its really not working.
the birfers are carrying that thread. 1250 comments and counting.
Now they are fantazing about seccession and riots.
SOUTHERN STRATEGY FTW!!!!!
I’m referring to people dying. Dude, they rioted in the streets and killed people over Rodney King and OJ. I really fear that people will go apesh!t crazy if Obama is somehow removed from office.
mrsmwp on July 28, 2009 at 11:44 PM
Bring it on.
Oiling up my AR-15…
guntotinglibertarian on July 29, 2009 at 12:01 AM
Conor, you sowed the dragon teeth.
Now there is an unkillable zombie army of birfer memes.
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving party.
hahahahaha!
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 05:01 AM · #
Re: It wasn’t a certainty they would take this position
They took the same position late last year when the birthers were bringing their lawsuits still. NR is being consistent at least.
— JonF · Jul 29, 10:42 AM · #
How do you kill a meme, Conor?
If you believe Dawkins, you must come up with a competitive meme that is more……. attractive.
That is why debunking conspiracy theory is so tuff. It can take 10,000 reps to unlearn something.
Lawyers in jury trials rely on this. It is called catalepsis, to be seized. They will introduce something outrageous only to have it stricken from the record. But it doesn’t getstricken from the jurors brains.
Humanbrains are more sticky for outrageous or “scandalous” memes.
For a meme to command the attention of the human brain, it must do so at the expense of other memes.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 12:58 PM · #
@Art Deco: I gather alkali is of the view that amendments to the United States Code or the Consolidated Laws of New York are of necessity 1,000 pages long.
Bills are usually printed in large type with large margins and extra space between lines to facilitate markup by hand. Even so, bills that run to 1,000 pages or more are exceedingly rare (IIRC, some budget resolutions may be that long).
By way of example, the version of health reform passed by the Senate Health (HELP) Committee — Sen. Kennedy’s committee — runs to about 600 pages, and the other health reform bills are of comparable length. You can get a pretty good sense of what’s in that particular bill by reading the table of contents, which takes up about the first 6 pages.
Of course, to get a really good understanding of the thing you would need to sit down with it for several hours, and consult some references. However, it’s not like this bill came into existence a few moments ago: Congress has been working on various forms of this legislation all year. Congressmen and their staff know what’s in it.
(To be sure, if a Congressman says that he doesn’t know what’s in the bill and can’t understand it, I might well believe him, but the logical inference would be that the Congressman in question is stupid and lazy, not that the bill is so complex as to surpass human understanding.)
— alkali · Jul 29, 01:59 PM · #
Also, the ability to reject conspiracy theories on confrontation with empirial data is positively correlated with IQ and education.
IOW, the “low information” base-segment of the GOP is easily colonized by conspiracy theories, which are then extremely difficult to eradicate. This happens on both sides of the aisle.
But the composition of the GOP has changed, and the low information portion of the base has become proportionately much larger than it was.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 02:00 PM · #
Matoko, please stop using vernacular to spell “birthers.” I am not sure, since I don’t know you, but I am concerned it might be racist, classist, or anti-Appalachian.
— J Mann · Jul 29, 02:02 PM · #
And the problem with the Buckley Option is that based on my random samples of Free Republic and Hot Air comments the GOP would lose half its base.
Not cost-viable.
J Mann, i guess we could call them nirthers like Charles Johnson. ;)
How could birfers be racist?
I’m a cauc too.
You could say it is IQist i suppose. Is that what you mean by classist?
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 02:11 PM · #
I think it is instructive to look back on the Schiavo situation.
Again, here was a case where the weight of empirical evidence (CAT scan, EKG flatline, physician testimony) disproved the conspiracy theory. But there was no value to the GOP leadership in doing anything but pandering to the ……terribots we will call them. So Bill Frist made a diagnosis (on tv no less!) based on 1/10,000th of the video record (the infamous balloon video) ….although as a physician he was surely cognizant of his calumny.
But the GOP never made a full court press to educate their base, because there were terribots on both sides of the aisle. There was no penalty for pandering.
And even after the autopsy, many americans believe that Ms. Schiavo just needed pudding and speech therapy to emerge from her PVS.
The difference is, that the GOP leadership realizes thay are in danger of having their agenda coopted by the low information segment of their base, which has become proportionally overrepresented due to party shrinkage, which has also moved the center farther right.
And the birfer meme is not shared between parties, like the schiavo meme was.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 02:28 PM · #
An amendment to my earlier comment: at least one of the House bills does weigh in at just over 1000 pages.
— alkali · Jul 29, 02:35 PM · #
Like too many conservatives, Steyn never bothers to actually examine how reality matches up to his theories. Pretty much every problem that exists in the federal government also exists in state and local government, often in an even worse and more destructive form. Of course, recognizing that would put a damper on the apparent enthusiasm of righties like Styen to go back to the Article of Confederation or something.
Mike
— MBunge · Jul 29, 03:39 PM · #
Do you know what I adore about O?
The whole playful subversiveness of him.
He just said in his townhall that alla the “conservatives” that are having problems with the bill(s) will have plenty of time to read the ENTIRE healthcare bill(s) while they are on recess.
lol, praps he planned this all along.
pwned again.
He’s advancing the ball, and you guyz can’t even get on the field.
Simply full of win.
hahahaha
Matt said I was a concern troll…..that isn’t true.
I actually think I’m a gloat troll. You guyz shouldn’t have lied to meh when I was a young impressionable republican.
My thirst for vengence is vast and unslakable. ;)
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 05:32 PM · #