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The Audacity of a Conservative Court

Big Frick — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:01:41 +0000

Like it or not, you gotta love it.

If you read the papers today you would see that the Supreme Court ruled 9 – 0 in favor of 6,000 black applicants for firefighter suing the City of Chicago. At least that’s the way it’s being reported.

While to phrase it that way is not completely untrue, it was absolutely not the intent of the court, or to be more precise the conservatives on the court, to pass any judgment on the actual lawsuit.

What the Supreme Court ruled on today was not the merits of suit, which was filed after blacks claimed they were racially excluded from the civil service hiring process, but rather that the suit itself had all the legal elements necessary to be heard.

This suit has been battered back and forth in the courts for the last 15 years. It came to be filed after Chicago held open exams to fill a few hundred firefighter positions in 1995. 26,000 applicants took the test. Because the number of applicants so far outnumbered the available positions, the City of Chicago put in a “cut-off” score of 89 or better for applicants to be considered. This “cut-off” meant a large number of minority applicants did not qualify for employment. The suit claims that the “cut-off” was racially motivated. The city, of course, disagrees. After several court rulings the US 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals finally ruled the suit had no merit because the applicants had taken too long to file. It was that ruling and that ruling alone that the Supreme Court overturned today with their unanimous decision.

So why would Big Frick love the fact that the City of Chicago has to defend itself against a possible racial discrimination judgment that could reach $100 million? Most of you loyal readers know what I think of racial quotas in the workplace and in hiring. And for those that don’t let me explain; they suck. When Barack Obama waxed with his poetic flare and glycerin tears about the days when one of his daughters was very ill he did not mention that they took her to a black doctor, or had her cared for by a black nurse. No, the Obama’s sought out the most qualified medical personnel money could buy. Shouldn’t the rest of us have the same option? Shouldn’t the citizens of Chicago be given the best, most qualified applicants to protect their life and property? Not according to Congress. In the law passed in 1991 by Congress employers are not allowed to use an "employment practice" that had a "disparate impact on the basis of race." By those standards the Obama family should have been prevented, as employers, from seeking a doctor based on his superior knowledge of their daughter’s malady and forced to see a minority doctor who, for all intents and purposes, could have provided at least some level of medical care.

I love the court’s decision not because I agree with the lawsuit, but because the conservatives on the court did their job. They openly admitted that they disagree with the law as it is written. But they ruled on the law and not on their personal life experiences or their pie in the sky interpretation of how things should be.

Commenting on the decision Justice Antonin Scalia (one of my personal hero’s) said the law creates "practical problems for employers" and can "produce puzzling results." He concluded, however, "it is a problem for Congress, not one that federal courts can fix."

And that is exactly the point. The Supreme Court is not there to create law; it is there to uphold the constitution. If the law is flawed, as this law obviously is, it is a job for the “law makers” to fix, not the court.

This case may well end up back before the high court to rule on the law’s constitutionality, much like the case recently heard regarding the New Haven firefighters. But that was not the question before the court today. The question today was, is there currently a law that allows these applicants to file suit. Every single conservative on the court knows this is a bad law. But every single conservative on the court did his job and ruled yes.

The conservative justices did what they were entrusted to do. If you don’t like the law than take it up with the liberal nit wits that made it a law.

Your opportunity to be heard is coming in November.

Of Special Interest

Big Frick — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:57:33 +0000

I’m all for free speech as long as I can control what you’re saying.

That seems to be the message the Democrats are sending after the Supreme Court dismantled rules in place for a hundred years restricting corporate spending on political ads. The court’s edict officially reinstated the constitutional right to freedom of speech for America’s corporate voice which has been unjustly stifled for over a century.

The Democrats are crying foul and warning that this ruling will allow a huge influx of “special interest money” into the political process. I have a news flash for all the whining Dem’s who are once again attempting to mislead the American voters with deceptive and ominous sounding verbiage; all money spent on or donated to a political campaign is special interest money. Every single dollar and cent, and in the case of Barack Obama, riyal, halalah, euro and peso.

It seems unconscionable that a president who raised nearly $1 billion in campaign funds would now claim to be worried about special interest money. After making a solemn promise to fund his campaign the way every other presidential candidate has done by using matching public funds Barack Obama pulled out a little of that CHANGE he promised early and decided he could do much better without the restrictions that come with public funding. Acting as if the country has forgotten that little sleight of hand trick he now insists that expanding participation to privately owned American corporations is tantamount to vote fixing.

The problem the Democrats are now facing is that they have spent years demonizing corporate America. They have pushed, poked, slapped and slugged companies and entire industries to the point of near nationalized government takeover. The last thing Democrats want at this point is for these corporations to have a strong vocal platform from which to fight back.

A perfect example is Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who once again made the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s (CREW) 2009 list of the 15 most corrupt members of congress. She was also prominent on the list in 2005 and 2006. It was Waters who told Shell Oil president John Hofmeister that she is “all about” instituting a complete government takeover of the oil industry. Do you think Congresswoman Waters wants Shell and other oil companies to have the right to speak out against her in her next campaign?

Congresswoman Waters and a host of other Democrat House and Senate members have made a career out of inflicting corporate pain for political gain. Their leader, Barack Obama, has just recently announced his plan to unconstitutionally single out financial institutions to hit with a special tax. Under the old rules financial institutions were powerless to get their message out to the voting public during the campaign season. Do you think perhaps Democrats may now be more than a little worried about the push back to come from these and other major American corporations?

Democrats have been successful at demonizing corporations as cold, uncaring entities when in fact they are nothing more than groups of people. Successful, profitable companies grow and employ more people. But Democrats want the government, not industry, to dictate who wins and loses in the game of business. Democrats have already announced plans to override the Supreme Court decision with new laws and restrictions. They will also come to depend heavily on their friends at the major networks to do their dirty work for them, as was done by NBC and ABC’s refusal to air commercials opposing the ObamaCare debacle. The networks are already decrying the ruling as being dangerous. ABC’s Diane Sawyer echoed most of the major networks when she warned that the ruling would open the “floodgates for companies and unions to spend all the money they want attacking political candidates." Their immediate reaction certainly gives one reason to assume the networks will do everything within their power to avoid compliance.

But the Supreme Court was fairly clear in their ruling and any attempt, either by politicians, political parties or the major networks, to stifle corporate America’s newfound right to free speech should be met with immediate and vigorous legal challenges. How much the networks are willing to spend to defend themselves remains to be seen.

If corporations, unions and industry groups are afforded the same rights to free speech as individuals Democrats will have a whole new populist movement to deal with.

What scares the hell out of them is that they see how well that worked for them in Massachusetts.

Change In More Ways Than One

Big Frick — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:23:00 +0000

Change.

With that one word an inexperienced community activist, schooled in the finer points of strong- arm Chicago politics, was placed in control of the most powerful nation on earth. The innocuous promise of something different was all it took. It mattered not to the country what that “something different” would be, having first been conditioned by the relentless drumbeat of an ever libelous and increasingly unrealistic Democrat controlled House and Senate that what we already had was not in fact what we wanted.

The country began to mindlessly accept the Democratic Party line that the security measures put in place that had kept us safe for 7 years were somehow more dangerous than the threat they protected us against.

That the war being fought on the home turf of the terrorists was an unwinnable quagmire and that even though the enemy had been in preparation for over 30 years it should have been decided in matter of months.

That the Guantanamo Bay detainees who were removed from the battlefield while trying to kill American and Allied forces were somehow being treated unfairly. Even though their treatment was far and away superior to that of about 80% of the world’s non-incarcerated population.

That diplomacy would keep us in the good graces of the rest of the world and win the hearts and minds of our enemies regardless of their overwhelming desire to kill us.

That the economic policy of lower taxes that had actually increased to record levels the revenues realized by the government was somehow unfair to those who were receiving the government aid those revenues paid for.

That the White House and the Executive branch of government was actually under the control of an evil Vice President and a group of shadowy political figures and corporate sponsors.

That the health care provided the elderly and infirmed in this country was subpar even though countless citizens from countries with nationalized health care programs were flocking to our clinics and hospitals to get it.

That temperature fluctuations in various parts of the globe were indicative of an ominous change in the entire earth’s suddenly fragile ecostructure and that the salvation of the human race and every plant and animal inhabiting this small blue planet could only be guaranteed by the creation of a new monopolistic currency shell game.

That the decline of American industry in the global marketplace was brought about by corporate greed and that the unrealistic wages and benefit packages demanded by organized labor was the solution rather than part of the problem.

That successful Americans who risked their own money and struggled countless hours to succeed in business were somehow unfair to those who chose not to invest their time and efforts to do the same.

That the basic laws of economics and the basic principles of mathematics were unfair and therefore needed to be disregarded. It was no longer necessary that 2 + 2 = 4 if we didn’t want it to.

What would these horrible inequities of the Bush administration change into and how would that change be effected? We didn’t know and more importantly we didn’t care. We only knew that without this magical verb being put into action immediately we, the country as a whole and likely the entire world would surely perish.

It was our unwillingness to ask what “CHANGE” meant prior to electing it that has led us to where we find ourselves today. It is the realization that the expression “From the frying pan into the fire” is the very definition of “CHANGE”. And that realization has caused a marker decline in the popularity of the ultimate “CHANGE MAKER”.

The approval rating for Barack Hussein Obama has plummeted from its lofty highs in the 70% area after the election to less than 50% only six month later. This approval rating under 50% is important because, as he carried 52% of the vote, it means that after only six months even those that voted for Obama are now disapproving.

It is also the reason that so many landmark legislative moves are now being rushed for a vote. The Democrat leadership knows that if they delay even a little there will likely be no chance to get bills such as the trillion dollar ObamaCare plan passed. Especially after Treasury Secretary Tim 1040 Geithner came out with is request to increase the national debt limit currently set at $12 trillion to who knows what stratospheric level. But Democrat House and Senate Members are also aware that if they vote for these fast-tracked tax and spend behemoths they will likely be looking for new work soon.

We’ll spend the next few days talking about some of these recent developments and how the Obama administration is falling back to good old fashioned Chicago-style politics to fight back.

Change is indeed upon us. But not the kind Obama and his supporters had planned on.

Can Barack Obama change from Messiah to Pariah in less than a year?

Apparently, Yes He Can.

Speculating On Stupidity

Big Frick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:49:00 +0000

Here we go again!

Political leaders on both sides of the big pond have once again begun to look for scapegoats in the lack of sufficient or immediate economic recovery. And once again their focus has turned to oil. Well, not so much oil, as those who make money speculating on oil.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote an opinion in The Wall Street Journal that mirrors the sentiments of the clueless in the United States who believe oil speculators are the leading cause for the dramatic and volatile swings in oil prices.

To be sure, a massive influx or outflow of cash into or out of a commodity can play a part in the volatility of that commodity. But that holds true for all commodities not just oil. Some commodities are more susceptible to a higher volatility than others. Oil, for instance, has a higher volatility than copper, but both are driven by market conditions and demand. Watch the new home building forecasts and see what happens to copper futures.

I have no dog in this fight. While I do invest in oil stocks and ETF’s I am by no means a speculator. Commodity speculators are a rare breed and pretty smart cookies to boot. It doesn’t take much in the way of gray matter to figure out that since gasoline prices have dropped more folks are driving more miles. But speculators don’t look at the line in their local Amoco to figure out if oil is going up in demand. Their decisions are based on global forecasts and worldwide market trends. Commodities are global and so speculators must focus globally.

The massive run up in oil prices made a lot of people a lot of money. Conversely, the drop from over $140 per barrel to the low of $35 per barrel lost some folks more than their shirt. If speculators truly had the ability to control the commodities market you would probably see far less volatility and far fewer of them on the wrong side of the trade. Oil has since run back up to $73 per barrel and is now trading at around $63.

In every one of these cases, from the very high to the very low, each of these moves can be traced to the economic news coming out at the time.

The concern stated by the UK and French leaders and others is that oil plays a key role in the economic recovery. In what has become all too typical political rhetoric, Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan called for “curbing oil speculators looking to make a quick buck at the expense of American consumers.” The blatantly uninformed Senator Dorgan may know how to make a good sound bite but is completely sans common sense when it comes to commodity trading. Speculators are looking to make a buck by risking their own money, not the American publics. Risking the American public’s money is Congresses job.

It is estimated that a sustained 10% increase in oil prices can knock 0.4% out of any global economic recovery over a 12 month period. That is the last thing a commodity speculator wants to do. When it comes to oil and the economy one must first look at which is driving which. I am firmly in the IDS camp – It’s Demand Stupid.

As the economic indicators continue to improve, oil will continue to increase in value. Also, let us not forget that oil is trade in American dollars. As the US dollar slumps in value oil will conversely increase. The outrageous deficit spending undertaken by the US Congress, devaluing the US dollar has probably had far more to do with oil price volatility than speculators could ever dream of.

China is continuing with their unprecedented growth in both industrial and civilian areas. Millions upon millions of rural farmers have moved from their rice paddy to the big city and are now driving cars instead of ox carts. Iran, in the center of the oil producing Middle East is building nuclear weapons threatening stability in the entire region. Manufacturing forecasts for Asia, Europe and the US are all improving. And the oil related news goes on and on.

I am not looking for political leaders to be as savvy as oil speculators when it comes to what makes the price move. But for crying out loud, could you at least pick up a newspaper.