Thought I’d post a little primer on what the phrase “Rule of Law” means. It gets bandied about quite a bit but doesn’t get explained very often. I’ll go with the first line of the Wikipedia entry:

The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure.

I’ll also go ahead and throw in my half-remembered recollection of Alvin Toffler’s description of law as “potential violence.” The government has asserted a monopoly on violence and it has been crystallized into a body of law which dictates when and how that force can be used. That we are a “government of laws, not men” means that we have attempted to create a bulwark against arbitrary and self-serving use of force by individuals.

When you think of laws as “potential violence,” it becomes much clearer why legal authority must only be used in accord with legal constraints. If the wielder of power exceeds those constraints, he or she stops acting as a representative of our government of laws and starts acting as an individual. An individual wielding the potential violence of the United States government, free of legal constraints, is a frightening prospect.

With that in mind, concepts like the Unitary Executive are a little frightening. That particular piece of hogwash posits that Article II of the Constitution puts strict limits on the ability of the Congress to regulate activities of executive branch agencies — the net result of the theory being to put a substantial amount of unregulated “potential violence” into the hands of the individual who happens to occupy the Office of the President at a given time.

From a reader:

As the reader said: Did anyone tell him about the pay cut?

John Cole has a post entitled The Reaction to Immigration which I enjoyed.

I really have not paid too much attention to the immigration bill, and anything with the handprints of Kennedy and Bush is probably something that is flawed in so many ways it is hard to count, but I have to admit, what I am really enjoying is the reaction from the 28%ers. Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett are going to explode any time now, and Michelle Malkin is equally volcanic (really, just go to the top and scroll). Their readers and echo chorus are in a predictable lather, as well.

Bush and the last few congresses have betrayed every principle conservatives ever stood for, and these folks were there with pom-poms the whole ride, degrading the debate and attacking anyone who dared to disagree with Bush. These are the folks who pushed Schiavo, these are the folks who said little to nothing over the hideous bankruptcy bill, these are the folks who told us all to STFU and let Bush lead us in the debacle in Iraq, these are the folks who insist that torture and invasive surveillance are first order conservative principles. I could list 100 more things, but why bother?

And now their ox has been gored, and they are freaking out.

Immigration doesn’t get me too excited, probably because I haven’t been personally been harmed to any great extent and because the immigrants I have met very often seem to be stand up people. If they have violated the law, it strikes me as being closer to the traffic violation end of the spectrum and further from the violent crime side of things. It’s malum prohibitum and not malum in se. It seems like a practical problem with practical, negotiable solutions. But, I suspect the core of the 28% of folks who still support Bush don’t see it this way. I think it’s an emotional issue for them and the fact that they’re being betrayed by their Commander in Chief stings them bitterly.

I had been blissfully unaware of Jerry Falwell’s view on race and civil rights until a friend flagged this article by Max Blumenthal. Falwell was more of a piece of work than I had realized.

Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church.

. . .

Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

His anti-abortion crusade came a little late in the game — in the early days, that was mainly the domain of Catholics. Anti-Vatican II Catholic, Paul Weyrich says that, initially, his attempt to enlist Falwell and other Southern evangelical leaders in a fight against “social ills” such as abortion, school prayer, and feminism fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
. . .
In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

Did Falwell remain a racist? I have no idea. For all I know, it’s altogether possible that some of his best friends were black.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article entitled Libertarians to gather for convention. The Indiana Libertarian Convention will host Libertarians from several states Saturday. Mitch Harper will be the keynote speaker.

[Christine] Smith, 40, of Golden, Colo., [a Libertarian presidential candidate] said she thinks many people would identify themselves as Libertarians if they knew the party’s stances.

I used to think that, but now I’m not so sure. I think I am more sympathetic to the Libertarian Party than the average citizen, but I don’t consider myself a Libertarian. More of a small “l” libertarian, and I’m not at all a purist. First, maybe it’s the ballot access and debate access — decidedly skewed against the Libertarians, holding them back. But, I think maybe there is a structural impediment to any third party that flows from the winner-takes-all electoral college system we have in place for electing the President. Parliamentary systems seem to have greater room for third parties. For whatever reason, our democracy never has. Even when we had third parties, they were usually just replacing one of the two main parties. Republicans replaced the Whigs, for example. Maybe it would be helpful just to think of our parties as Party “A” and Party “B”. One of the parties probably represents your views better than the other. The best you can do is to influence the closest party to reflect as many of your views as possible and, hopefully, have as much influence as possible on the government.

Also, like I said, I’m not a purist as far as libertarian idealogy. I think that would put me on the fringes of Libertarian thinking. I tend to think there is a much greater need to act as a community than the typical Libertarian probably does. We’re social animals. Networked activity is a strategy that has given humans a leg up over other animals and has helped us achieve a pretty remarkable standard of living. I tend to agree with Hobbes that pure individualism amounts to a state of war: “every man against every man.”

It is a state where:

men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I don’t go so far as Hobbes as to think we need a “Leviathan” with absolute power to preserve a state of peace. There are checks on government power that are necessary and proper to preserve liberties. But, those checks aren’t absolute or unlimited. I’m sort of building a strawman here because, I expect that most Libertarians would agree that individual liberties aren’t absolute or unlimited. And, while I suspect that my view of individual liberties are more absolute and less limited than the view of the average citizen, I also suspect that I don’t go so far as most Libertarians.

An article in Science Daily entitled US Continues To Lag On Health Care, According To New International Comparison:

The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K.] on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes, in the third edition of a Commonwealth Fund report analyzing international health policy surveys. While the U.S. did well on some preventive care measures, the nation ranked at the bottom on measures of safe care and coordinated care.

Another new Commonwealth Fund report comparing health spending data in industrialized nations published today reveals that despite spending more than twice as much per capita on health care as other nations ($6,102 vs. $2,571 for the median of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries in 2004) the U.S. spends far less on health information technology–just 43 cents per capita, compared with about $192 per capita in the U.K.
. . .

* On measures of quality, the U.S. overall ranked 5th out of 6 countries. The U.S. ranked fifth in coordinated care, and last in patients reporting that they have a regular doctor (84% vs. 92%-97% in other countries).
* On access measures the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on timeliness of care: 61% of U.S. patients said it was somewhat or very difficult to get care on nights or weekends, compared with 25%-59% in other countries.
* On efficiency, the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on percent of patients who have visited the emergency room for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor if one had been available (26% vs. 6%-21% in other countries). The U.S. ranked fifth of six countries on primary care practices having “high clinical information functions,” defined as practices having at least 7 of 14 office practice information functions, including electronic records, electronic prescribing, computerized safety alerts, and patient reminders systems and registries (19% compared with 8%-87% in other countries).

Like I’ve said before, we’re already paying for universal health care, we’re just not getting it.

Today there is a story in the Journal and Courier reporting that “Cities Ranked & Rated” by Bert Sperling and Peter Sander has put Lafayette as #25 on the list of best places to live. They ranked “more than 400 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.” Gainesville, FL is #1, Bellingham, WA is #2. Bloomington is down from #29 in 2004 to #86 this year. Carmel is #19 up from #79.

I don’t know about these rankings, necessarily, but I’ll just add my two cents that Lafayette is a very nice town.

The Hoosier Pundit has a post entitled Mitch Daniels: “A Long Step Toward a Dream of a Healthier Indiana”. He notes that Gov. Daniels signed the cigarette tax hike (linked to the health care plan for low income Hoosiers) and that smokers and business owners who will lose cigarette sales to Kentucky are not pleased. But then he goes on to say:

That anger has to be placed and weighed against the 140,000 Hoosiers that will be helped by the plan, and any Hoosier that quits smoking or doesn’t start because of it, particularly teenagers and youth.

Growing up, my parents were smokers. My wife’s parents were smokers. I’ve seen how tough it is to quit once the habit has been established. While a tax on addicts is, perhaps, problematic; I’ll go along with the Hoosier Pundit’s hope that it serves to deter smoking. And, if it doesn’t, perhaps their addiction can at least do some good in the form of providing health care to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it. (There may be a fair amount of overlap, of course.)