Show me your papers, eh?

The following is an editorial by guest author Gerald Mueller, the Strom Thurmond Chair of Conservative Thought at the University of Cascadia.

Rule breaking!!

Last time I wrote about babies. They’re milking this country for all it’s worth and we all know it. But you probably haven’t heard about the second major threat facing our economy: Immigrants. Yes, immigrants. And I’m not talking about the kind that God sends to subdue a wild and fertile continent — those days are over. I’m talking about the kind of immigrant that sneaks across your border and steals your job without so much as asking.

Pretty much everything I said about babies goes for immigrants as well. They steal our jobs, feed at the public trough, and don’t pay taxes. And the worst of them even come over here and make more babies. So I’ll get right to the nub of the issue: What are we going to do about it?

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Justice Thomas reveals elaborate reductio of “money = speech”

[The quotations attributed below to Justice Thomas are genuine (though not the picture caption, obviously). Thanks to Alex Guerrero for the quip which inspired this post and became its title.]

“You thought I was serious, didn’t you?”

This week’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission confirms what many have suspected since 2010’s Citizens United: Justice Clarence Thomas is engaged in an elaborate reductio of the idea that money is speech.

In Citizens United Justice Thomas argued that if political expenditures by corporations and unions are speech (as claimed by the Court), then existing disclosure requirements are unconstitutional. Such requirements, Thomas wrote, would violate the right to anonymous speech.

But Thomas’s position on the matter was too extreme even for Justices Roberts, Scalia, and Alito, leading some to suggest that Thomas had unknowingly produced a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that corporate political expenditures are speech. Others responded that Thomas was well aware of the reductio he had crafted, and the proper interpretation of his intentions remained controversial.

Lawmakers blame philosophy for recent spate of trolley deaths

“This country doesn’t have a ‘trolley problem’. It has a philosophy problem.” Sen. Lamar Alexander

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill turned their attention to philosophy this week after Monday saw what appears to be the nation’s third trolley-related homicide since April. Members of both houses of Congress raised the prospect of legislation to regulate the violent content found in much contemporary moral philosophy, and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to study the effects of violent philosophy on children and adolescents.

The proposal comes in the wake of the death of Amtrak employee Charles Shubin, who was killed Monday when a runaway trolley was diverted onto the side-spur to which Shubin had been tied by unknown individuals. Two trolleys involved in similar incidents in April turned out to have had their brake lines cut.

Let’s face it: New arrivals are draining the economy

The following is an editorial by guest author Gerald Mueller, the Strom Thurmond Chair of Conservative Thought at the University of Cascadia.

With the fiscal cliff fresh on our minds, it seems appropriate to ask ourselves what policy resolutions we might adopt for the new year. While the prospects for true reform are bleak, it’s obvious that one of the most pressing problems facing America today is demographic in nature. There is an identifiable group of people who are demonstrably a drain on our economy and our finances. They’re unskilled, uneducated, and survive largely on handouts. Here’s a hint: They don’t speak English. You guessed it – babies. While the Left loves to coddle them, it’s time we took a good, hard look at these little fiscal sinkholes.

Four steps to strengthen our democracy (UPDATED)

The following is an editorial by guest author Gerald Mueller, the Strom Thurmond Chair of Conservative Thought at the University of Cascadia.

Responsible voters come in all shapes and sizes. Some are tall. Some are short. Some even have freckles!

The election season provides a prime opportunity to reflect on the state of our democracy. And, upon reflection, it is hard to deny that we face significant and growing threats to the integrity of our electoral system. Here are four of the most important (and least discussed) steps we should take to strengthen our democracy.

1. Keep out-of-state interests out of local politics

People like David and Charles Koch are often criticized for using their wealth to influence state politics around the country, but there is another threat to the integrity of local politics that has gone ignored. We need to protect small towns from the out-of-state interests who live in those small towns: college students. As New Hampshire Speaker of the House William O’Brien explained last year, college students are “taking away [small] towns’ ability to govern themselves” by outnumbering and outvoting long-term residents, and “that’s not fair.” Fairness demands that we expand restrictions on voting by out-of-state students. If you will not be around for the long haul, why should you have a say in the laws you will live under for the next four years? (Which is why we should also prevent voting by those who plan to move within the next four years, but that is another issue.)

Republicans attack ObamaContent as “socialized meaning”

One of these things is not like the others

In a rare break from party infighting, Monday’s Republican primary debate saw the candidates unite in their derision of “ObamaContent,” the president’s newly unveiled theory of linguistic meaning.  The theory, which relies upon the practice of a speaker’s linguistic community to fix the semantic content of many words, was attacked as “socialized meaning” by the debate participants.

“If you want content, you fix it yourself,” said Romney, kicking off a long series of comments on individual responsibility.  “I didn’t always use to be this erudite,” added Gingrich.  “You can either put in the work to learn new words, or you can leech off the knowledge of others.”