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Monday, October 05, 2009

Hugh In Depth On C-Span - Video Link

Posted by: Jude at 2:24 AM

Cool - found the link and it works! In case you missed some or all of it, here is the three hours broadcast of Hugh on BookTV discussing GOP 5.0, new media, and his campaign contribution to Deval Patrick*, as well as taking some classic C-Span calls.

(* hopeychangey 1.0)

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Sunday, October 04, 2009

Honduras Edges Toward November; "Rivals Edge Toward Talks"

Posted by: Jude at 3:26 PM

That's what the AP reports today. We'll see. Last weekend, Honduras' (interim)President Roberto Micheletti and his government restricted rights of assembly and shuttered some pro-Zalaya media, in what seemed like a step too far for government leaders claiming total legitimacy because they, as opposed to the Zalaya/Chavez axis before them, have been honoring constitutional law. Micheletti must have seen Zalaya's stealth entrance back into Honduras from exhile and the prospect of his supporters gathering as highly dangerous, because he undermined his own position of legal integrity by taking the above measures. Civil war is not something to flirt with, and last Monday looked like a dangerous day in Tegucigalpa. One week later, he has said he will lift them any day now, but the P.R. damage has certainly been done, with watchers around the world now assigning a sort of moral equivalence between the former and current Presidents of Honduras, and no longer seeming to focus on what created the crisis in the first place.

I found myself across a dinner table last night from a lovely woman who works in several Latin American countries, coordinating outreach for an extremely liberal and controversial organization. As we discussed Honduras, we at least agreed that the only way from here to the future for the country is to have and recognize the November elections. Still, she went on about how Micheletti was no better than Zalaya, and that even before last week his government had been brutally cracking down on peaceful people, as reported to her by correspondents she described as "leftists" inside Honduras. What does one say to that kind of thing? The cracking down part may be true in part, but then, if you received you news about Los Angeles from the people hanging out at the bookstore on Alvarado in Echo Park, you might well believe that the top story this year was of a brutal police war against the citizens.

When another guest joined leaned in and asked to be caught up on what we were talking about, this highly educated woman, who is married to a Honduran and reads media from the region, went on an informative rant about how removing Zalaya from power had been illegal, that he had not actually sought to change the constitution, that the military had acted illegally, and other nuanced defenses we've all seen in the AP reports. She lamented the fact that Honduras had a history of illegitimate governments, and how Micheletti had only added to that legacy. It took me a few minutes, but I was finally able to ask her if she knew of article 239 of the Honduran constitution, which was written and ratified to prevent exactly the kind of thug-ocratic leaders she was decrying, and which had so precisely called for the termination of Zalaya's presidency. She did not. Not about the forfeiture of office or the ten year ban on serving. Like most Americans, myself included, she had not been familiar with Article 239, much less Article 4, or Article 5, or Articles 42, 272, 373 and 374 - all of which deal with what must be called the hugely important theme of Presidential term limits in the Constitution of Honduras. Article 374 specifically mentions that the ban on extending the President's term in office is one of several clauses (along with national boundaries and the entire form of government) that cannot be changed, even by the National Congress. The Constitution would have to be discarded, rewritten, and re-ratified. 'It was just a referendum', they say. Well, yeah, and it's just a Constitution.

All week, after Micheletti's suspension of certain civil liberties, we waited for the other shoe to drop... but in fact there was no shoe left to do anything but kick Honduras around some more. The OAS, the EU, and our own President, Barack I-Bama, had already joined the side of the would-be strongman Manuel Zalaya, punishing the new government, and the people by extension, with economic/humanitarian sanctions and the blunt threat of not recognizing the upcoming November 29 elections. (Free elections, by the way, between candidates selected before the crisis, but no matter, we're just not going to recognize them unless you restore Zalaya to power so he can, oh, let's see, grant himself amnesty for crimes and begin a purge of his enemies... sound good for you, Amigos?) Obama chose his side, and that was to be popular with the leftists in LAtin America. All that was left to lose outside Honduras was the sympathy of a few voices. Inside the country, a week of relative quiet may mean that the threat of an uprising has passed, and now, faced with wide criticism, Micheletti will restore all civil liberties, as he has promised. Let's hope we're there. He famously said that integrity has no price in his country, but Micheletti may be looking to buy or barter for some good press right now.

A couple final thoughts. Currently it's rumored that restoring Zalaya to a titular presidency of one day - either election day or the last day of his term - will be the solution agreed to by all parties. That doesn't sound like a mess waiting to happen at all... Also, from within Honduras is the rumor that Sec. State Clinton has been siding with Micheletti and quietly supporting him the whole time Obama has been backing Zalaya's return, supposedly to undermine the Obama. This strikes me as the wonderful, fantasy version of politics as opera which the Clintons seem to inspire. Otherwise, it might be that Obama's America is working both sides of the street at the same time in Honduras, which perhaps we'll come to call "diplomacy, Chicago-style."

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Sunday, October 04, 2009

"Who Are These People And Where Did They Come From?"

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 7:21 AM

My latest Townhall.com column is here.

I'll be the guest for an extended interview on CSPAN's Book TV today, from noon until 3 PM, EST.

And don't miss the Washington Examiner's latest editorial on ACORN and Congress.

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

The Unemployment Costs Of Our Tort Law System

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:58 AM

In today's speech to the Americans for Prosperity gathering in D.C., just as with last Thursday's talk to the Distributors' Council and next Tuesday's speech to the California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse meeting in San Diego, I will focus a lot of my remarks on the growing burden on American employers of the costs of litigation.

Full disclosure: My law firm's two offices in Orlando, Florida and Newport Beach, California defend American manufacturers and businesses against injury claims as our primary specialty. We defend the makers of cars, motorcycles, vans, sporting goods, roller coasters etc. My partners have a combined two centuries of trial experience squared up against the plaintiffs' bar. Their reputation is as lawyers who aren't afraid to try cases even when the plaintiff is badly injured. They are very, very good at what they do.

I tell you this because even though I am not a products liability/catastrophic injury lawyer, six of my partners are, and I live the practice with them, know its challenges, and know especially that we have turned America into a tort happy culture, as one would expect if you watch as much cable news as I do and see as many adds for personal injury lawyers as air every day on Fox and CNN. We are awash in lawsuits, and it is killing not only American manufacturing, but also various service industries where customers come to be entertained or fed or both. We have been hearing about the high cost of defensive medicine and the burden it places on health care system, and that is indeed a staggering cost, but the same suffocating burden is carried by every industry making things in America or providing food or entertainment, and it drains profits and productivity away from production and growth and thus away from jobs.

As national unemployment creeps towards 10%, remind everyone who points to it as an urgent issue that sustained job growth requires rising productivity, and that is going to require (1)an overhaul of our tort laws in every state and (2)the willingness of corporate America to push back and try cases, not settle them with quick payouts to phoney plaintiffs. You simply cannot be serious about job growth without seriousness on the issue of repairing our busted tort system.

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Friday, October 02, 2009

"Defending the American Dream Summit" and David Brooks

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 7:45 AM

I am off to D.C. to participate in the Defending the American Dream Summit, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, and then for an extended interview on Sunday's Book TV. As I head to the airport, e-mails are flowing in about David Brooks' column in the New York Times which slams talk radio. I'll talk about it when I broadcast tonight, as will most other hosts throughout the day, but here are some quick points.

First, Brooks gets a lot right. Talk radio, like every other form of media, has lots of influence and very little actual power. We can and do make the phones ring, and we can and do sometimes help stop legislation like the ill-fated and poorly drafted immigration bill of 2007, but moments like that are very rare. We certainly cannot nominate GOP presidential candidates, as almost none of us supported Seantor McCain, but that may reflect only that we lack decisive influence in the course of a fractured long campaign, or that we were ourselves fractured or uncommitted in our choices. Rush, for example, clearly didn't like John McCain, but neither did he push for any particular candidate. He never does in such settings. Part of the problem with Brooks' column is that it fails to accurately render the ambitions of talk radio, and thus he cannot accurately assess its successes or failures.

Mostly we aim to influence the life of the country by influencing the ideas that prevail within it, and Brooks greatly underestimates the extent of that influence. There's a reason why Sam Tanenhaus, editor of Brooks' paper's book review, wanted to spend two hours with me on air talking about his new book The Death of Conservatism, and it wasn't because he was trying to sell his book to dead people. In fact, if you'd like to get a glimpse of one reason why Brooks' column is at best incomplete, and perhaps even anti-intellectual in that it avoids dealing with persuasive evidence that runs counter to his thesis, run down the transcripts page at HughHewitt.com. In just the past few weeks you'll find Mark Steyn and Michelle Malkin from yesterday's program of course, but also Norman Podhoretz, Max Book, Bill Kristol, Walter Russell Mead, Frank Gaffney, Meg Whitman, Jon Kyl, and, oh yes, the New York Times' London Bureau chief John Burns in an hour long conversation on Afghanistan and Iraq. Day in and day out I and many of my colleagues are in the news business, presenting important voices and stories with the hope of moving the country's collective opinion on key issues of the day.

As with all media, talk radio has great moments and bad stretches. On the spectrum of talkers there are quite a few very distinct colors, and some of the folks with shows I wouldn't let borrow my car for a trip to the store. But for the most part, and especially if by talk radio we mean Rush, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and my colleagues at Salem Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Janet Parshall, Albert Mohler and Michael Medved, we deal with the ideas and debates that matter. Talk radio helped raise the GOP in 1994 after its wipe-out in 1992, and it is doing so again today. It is also providing good information and excellent suggestions about effective action by the tens of millions of Americans who are waking up from their Obamazone torpor and wondering what happened to the centerpoint in the American political debate.

David Brooks is one of the most talented columnists at work today, but like David Frum, Brooks too often gives in to the temptation to prove himself different from the economic, cultural and religious conservatives he finds so interesting but also so very odd. Every so often Brooks has to demonstrate to his friends in the Manhattan-Beltway media elite that he is one of them, not one of us. Talk radio's strength is that most of us don't think in terms of "them" and "us," but of ideas and their appeal to people regardless of class, race, and geography.

Talk radio has entered into one of its cycles of extraordinary growth, powered by the deep felt need of Americans to balance the super-majoritarian power of the Democrats and the deep bias of the legacy media with sources of information they can trust not to be courting favor with those in office.

That would be us. The GOP is poised for a strong return to the prominence. That will not be because of talk radio but because of the ideas and ideals the renewed GOP holds. Talk radio's job is to help identify those ideas, persuade our audiences they are the correct ones, and point to those political figures who hold them.

The first test of influence between legacy media and new media in the era of Obama Incumbent comes next month in New Jersey and Virginia. If David Brooks is right, Jon Corzine should be re-elected and the Democrats should hold on to the statehouse in Richmond. We'll see.

In the meantime, a hat tip to Mr. Brooks. He borrowed one of the best tricks from those in talk radio who are not confident in the appeal of their ideas or good humor --a slashing personal attack that focuses attention on what might otherwise pass unnoticed. That is ratings crack cocaine and many hosts have fallen for it in the past. I hope that it doesn't become a habit for the estimable Mr. Brooks.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

Harmer for Congress

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 7:33 PM

You can contribute to David Harmer's campaign in the special election on November 3 in the Bay Area via an online contribution.

Harmer's full website is here. It is a clearly a Democratic seat, but even a close showing will chill Democratic enthusiasm for Obamacare, and an upset would stun the Congress.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

"China Celebrates 60 Years of Communist Rule"

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 5:40 PM

Any guesses on whether the New York Times article under this headline estimates the number killed by Mao during his long reign of terror?

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

Ardi v. Lucy

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 5:34 PM

What's 1,200,000 years between primates?

The attempt to pit Lucy enthusiasts against the Ardi ardent is just the latest example of the new era of incivility.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

Has A New Era Arrived For Pro-Life Legislation At The State Level?

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 4:49 PM

With enormous majorities in the House and Senate and the most radical pro-abortion rights president in history in the White House, some in the pro-life movement despair of any progress for many years to come. But as Jill Hamers, writing in the June 2009 Boston University Law Review this past spring pointed out, there is reason to believe the Roberts Court will be much slower than in the past to block state statutes protecting the unborn. Her conclusion:

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, organizations such as Planned Parenthood played a major role in sustaining facial challenges to state abortion regulations before states even had a chance to implement them. Courts reliedheavily on the discretion of abortion doctors to determine what procedures were safest for women. Now, courts will entertain challenges to abortion regulations only in discrete cases. A doctor will have to show not just that a faction of the medical community believes one procedure is generally safer than another, but that in specific instances the existence a particular medical condition requires that the doctor perform a partial-birth abortion for a well defined class of women whose health is otherwise in danger. Without this showing, and in the face of scientific and medical uncertainty, state legislature will have discretion to regulate abortion procedures occurring at these late stages of pregnancy.

While future advances in scientific and medical technology will eventually shed more light on prenatal life and the effects of abortion on women, for now the Court must grapple with these issues in the dark. Under these circumstances, it “would indeed be undesirable for [the] Court to consider every conceivable situation which might possibly arise in the application of complex and comprehensive litigation.” The Gonzales Court is right to retreat from premature decisions of constitutional questions and instead exercise its limited jurisdictional power to “adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies.” Such are the demands of as-applied challenges:“the basic building blocks of constitutional adjudication."

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

Help Defend The Second Amendment

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 2:58 PM

On yesterday's show I interviewed Dean John Eastman of Chapman University School of Law and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California School of Law --the weekly "Smart Guys" segment.

In the course of the discussion, Dean Eastman told the audience that the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence which he leads at Chapman Law School hopes to file an amicus brief in favor of the vigorous protection of an individual's Second Amendment rights.

Those sorts of briefs cost money, so if you'd like to help defend the Second Amendment, make a donation online to Chapman law School and note in the comments that the gift is to support the CCJ.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

HughHewitt.com 3.0 and Mark Steyn, James Lileks and Michelle Malkin

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:38 AM

Today marks the roll-out of the third version of this site. It is also the day that podcasts of the radio show become available only with a subscription to the Hughniverse. As always, your comments are welcome via hugh@hughhewitt.com.

Today's program will also feature an hour with Michelle Malkin, whose Culture of Corruption has spent eight weeks already on the New York Times' best seller list.

Also on today's show: Mark Steyn and James Lileks.

James' new column is also available at his Hughniverse blog, The Lileks Zone.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

What Will Obamacare Cost?

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:25 AM

Well, seniors stand to lose about $500 billion --that much we know for certain. Medicare benefits will be slashed and Medicare Advantage costs will skyrocket under all the versions of Obamacare. That's why seniors have turned decisively against the plan and against its Democratic sponsors. An army of replacement knees and walkers is forming up now for the elections of 2010, and Congressional Democrats who don't know that are truly lost in the Obamazone.

Other groups will turn even more decisively in the direction of the seniors and their opposition after the text of the final Senate bill is in. Senator Jon Kyl on yesterday's program predicted it will take at least a couple of weeks more to get the whatever is the final version of the Senate Finance Committee's Obamacare bill done and merged with the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee's bill, and then the merged version has to be evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office. Only then will we know the extent of the brand new gaping fiscal hole being proposed by the Democrats.

At that point the Democrats will have to find 60 votes for cloture. Between then and now all Americans who want to preserve the American medical system as well as some form of Medicare as we know it have got to contact Senators and Congressmen again and again to demand this recklessness stop. Here's the list of Senate Democrats up for re-election in 13 months as well as the list of Blue Dog Democrats in the House. Call all of them early and often, and tell them you will contribute to their opponents if they vote for Obamacare:

Key Democratic Senators:

Arkansas

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (18.70% Lifetime ACU rating)

DC Phone: (202) 224-4843

Local Phone: Dumas (870) 382-1023, Fayetteville (479) 251-1224, Little Rock (501) 375-2993, Jonesboro (870) 910-6896, Texarkana (870) 774-3106

Link to E-mail
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Thursday, October 01, 2009

The Deepening Concern OVer President Obama's Appeasement Policies

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:04 AM

Two interviews on yesterday's program deserve to be read and circulated widely.

Max Boot and Bill Kristol have their share of detractors on the left, but mainstream liberals know that both are serious students of national security and both are widely respected for their analysis of world events.

The transcript of my conversation with Boot for yesterday is here, and the transcript of the conversation with Kristol is here. Two excerpts.

From the Boot interview:

HH: Now some of my Democratic friends really bristle when I use the term appeasement. And I point out to them that appeasement has a genealogy, it has a specific approach to world affairs, it has a specific way of dealing with aggressive regimes. Is it fair for me to use the term appeasement, Max Boot, in relation to the world’s response to Iran?

MB: Well, it’s an incendiary term, but I think in the current case, it more or less applies, because here you have Iran doing outrageous things in violation of international accords, and the reaction from the world is basically to meet with Iran, and to talk about serious consequences, but not really deliver those serious consequences. So yeah, I mean, if that’s not appeasement, I’m not sure what is.

From the Kristol interview:

HH: Yeah, it is a four front policy of appeasement, and I used that word advisedly, not just Iran and Iraq, but the Pole and Czech decision, and then this decision that you reference, the Afghanistan pullback. And I want to go there now. I sense, especially in this Washington Post article today, the preparation of the political battlefield for basically a retreat from Afghanistan. Do you share that assessment?

BK: Yes, I think that was a very significant piece in the Post where the forces who want to go to a so-called counterterrorism strategy, which is really a way of just staying offshore and killing a few terrorists, I suppose, and hoping it all doesn’t blow up in our face, that…I had assumed that Obama would reject those counsels. But I don’t see how you can explain his behavior over the last month except to say that he is trying in various ways to lay the groundwork for not accepting General McChrystal’s recommendation, the commander he put in there six or seven months ago. They’re going to pretend that the election changed everything, the Afghan election, was a mess and that changed everything, and somehow now we’re going to go to, I don’t think he’ll go to any kind of immediate withdrawal, but I really think we’re now…he is, I believe now, he had thought things through in this way. He thinks that he wants to go to the country in 2012, to this country for reelection as president, and say I have gotten our troops out of these messy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are having diplomacy all around the world, and he will hope that these places don’t blow up in his face. And they may not immediately. I mean, even if we have 30-40,000 troops in Afghanistan, they can probably do a lot of, prevent some bad things from happening for quite a while, cross his fingers, and hope Pakistan doesn’t just blow up, cross his fingers and hope that the Middle East doesn’t blow up, I guess. But you know, I really, as I say in the past, I’ve kind of assumed that look, he’s president of the United States, he’s going to…although there’ll be a lot of things I’ll disagree with, and things we’ll pay a price for, but that on some big decisions, he’ll be responsible. But I now really fear that on these really decisive decisions, he’s not going to make the right decision.

Read both interviews in their entirety and you will be --or should be-- alarmed.

These conversations reflect the growing concern among center-right, and perhaps even some honest center-left foreign policy elites that the president is in full retreat mode across the globe and that he views American power as always the problem and never the solution. Clearly the left wing of his party has always believed as much, but he did not run as its representative on any issue except Iraq, and the president in fact ran as a proponent of greater force in Afghanistan, up to and including an invasion of Pakistan.

What is being unveiled right now is not just troubling but deeply dangerous. Center-right elites have held their fire in the months since President Obama's election and then his inauguration, and have hoped that the combination of Secretary Gates-General Jones-Admiral Mullen-General Petraeus would keep the president on a mainstream course, one which recognizes that American power must be deployed in the world to check its worst actors.

If the decision on the Afghanistan recommendations by General McChyrstal goes the wrong way and President Obama refuses the reinforcements requested for a strategy of victory there, the course of the Obama Administration's foreign policy will be set and it will be unmistakable. It will also not be what the vast majority of Americans voted for, or what they believe in.

And it will be an incredibly dangerous decision to trust that our enemies will leave us and our allies alone.

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Thursday, October 01, 2009

A Young Conservative Laments

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 7:57 AM

Will Munsil writes for the Arizona State University newspaper, and he's dismayed that some big conservative voices have hurt the reputation of the party. I think young Munsil paints with far too broad a brush --Rush, for example, is a enormously influential voice in the country because he is in fact a powerful proponent of genuine conservative values and is funny and timely-- but Munsil is right to warn about marginal voices destroying mainstream messages.

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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Congressman Alan Grayson: The Official Biography

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 7:18 PM

The Orlando, Florida Democratic Congressman who has been making the outrageous statements on the House floor the past two days has an "official biography" on his House web site that is definitely worth reading. Count the number of Harvard references:

“Justice, justice, ye shall seek.”

- Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20.

      There is right, and there is wrong. We in Central Florida have sent someone to Washington who fights for what’s right.

      Our Congressman, Alan Grayson, grew up in the tenements in the Bronx. It was a hard life. He had to be a fighter to survive.

      His parents were teachers. They made great sacrifices, to make sure that Alan received the best education.

      Alan was a sick child. His mother took him to the hospital four times a week, for treatment. Without health coverage, he would not be alive today. He remembers that.
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