Today Politico Arena asks:

Do you feel safer from terrorism today than you did the day before? Assess Obama’s response.

My response:

The Washington Post feature “On Faith” today discusses Ireland’s new, profoundly misguided blasphemy law. Blasphemers there can now be fined up to $35,000. That’s a lot of money for a few little words.

Atheist Ireland is testing — and protesting — the law by publishing blasphemous quotations like the following:

“Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.”

“May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their prophets.”

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

They are, respectively, from Jesus, Jesus, Muhammad, and Benedict XVI.

Maybe it’s an American thing, but the Post apparently couldn’t find any panelists to defend the law. These folks are all professional wordsmiths, of course, and these tend to be most supportive of the freedoms that they depend on the most. As I noted in my recent Policy Analysis, those who are most easily offended, and who value free speech the least, tend to gravitate not to newspapers, but to governments (and university administrations). That’s where the power is.

Susan Jacoby, for whom I have the utmost respect, even calls the law Pythonesque, likening it to the Ministry of Silly Walks. Of course, there’s this as well:

Blasphemy laws are oddities, because they concede an awful lot of emotional power to the blasphemer. They tell the world: My feelings are so very fragile. Or perhaps they say: My god is so very weak — so weak that he needs state protection against other gods, or even against mere potty-mouthed humans. Either way, it’s an embarrassing admission, but hardly the business of government. If your god can’t take the heat, he’s hardly a god at all.

Jesus and Mo put it very well indeed:

When lawyers and other commentators say that a court did not properly explain its decision, it’s typically for hyperbolic effect. But, in a bizarre move, a court in the failed great state of Michigan has dismissed an economic liberty case brought by our friends at the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation for reasons the court quite literally did not explain. The court simply denied the plaintiffs’ complaint and that was that.

Home-based day care owners Sherry Loar, Michelle Berry, and Paulette Silverson have all been taxed by the Michigan Department of Human Services because, according to the state, they are somehow employees of the state and (further!) must pay union dues. because this baseless assertion comes directly from the state DHS, an executive department, among the significant constitutional objections to the case presents separation of power problems. (Ok, I haven’t studied the Michigan Constitution, but I assume they separate their powers there.) Enough ridiculous laws are passed by state legislatures — more than 40,000 last year alone — we don’t need state executive agencies getting into the act.

Yet, the Michigan Court of Appeals has nothing at all to say about the case.

Inexplicable — and unpardonable.

Today, Politico Arena asks:

How helpful is it to the GOP to have its chairman say the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?”

My response:

If GOP chairman Michael Steele means it, it’s very helpful for him to say that the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?” You first have to recognize a problem if you want to solve it.

For better or worse, we’ve had two major parties for most of our history, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. At least since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been the party of government, especially over economic affairs. By contrast, since the Goldwater revolution of 1964, the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of individual liberty and limited government, although that claim was often undermined by calls for restricting certain personal liberties, and the party was slow, as were parts of the Democratic Party, in supporting the civil rights movement. But broadly speaking, in our recent history the two parties have been distinguished, nominally, by their different conceptions of the proper role of government.

At no time was that contrast more sharply drawn than during the Reagan administration. Yet even then there were internal struggles between the Reagan people and the Bush people. Recall that when Bush ’41 became president, he called for a “kinder and gentler nation,” which was a slap at Reagan’s limited government principles. And eventually, of course, he broke his “no new taxes” pledge.

After Bush lost the presidency, the Gingrich “Contract with America,” leading to the Republican take-over of Congress for the first time in 40 years, was supposed to return the party to a principled, limited government path. It did so briefly, in those heady days of 1995, but by the end of the year the siren song of government power was calling and the party started its slow slide, at the end of which it was barely distinguishable from the Democratic Party.

Thus, it was no accident that in 2000 the party selected as its standard-bearer George W. Bush, who had been utterly absent from the intellectual ferment of the Goldwater-Reagan years. Not unlike his father, Bush ’43 stood for “compassionate conservatism,” a slogan ripe with promise for government programs. And the Republican Congress, now rudderless, was anxious to supply them. If the party stood for anything, it was incumbency protection. What better example than the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” bill, which Bush signed while saying he thought it was unconstitutional. What’s the Constitution among friends?

But rudderless, unprincipled government could not go on forever, and so in time it came crashing down upon the Republican time-servers — and the real party of government took over. Immutable principles, however, such as you can’t get something for nothing, favor no party, and so Democrats too are facing, or will soon face, the harsh realities that flow from abandoning political and economic discipline. If the Republican Party can recover the fundamental principles that are captured in the nation’s founding documents, and take them to the people, it will then fall to us to decide what we want. And if we too believe in something for nothing, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for the consequences that follow. But at least we will have had a choice, which we have not had in recent years. So, yes, Mr. Steele’s call for a return to principle is helpful.

I probably should’ve predicted that a huge story implicating national security surveillance policy would break just as I was boarding a flight to Madrid for the holidays. Jim Harper & c. have by now covered most of the bases admirably, but there are one or two points I feel it can’t hurt to emphasize.

First, there’s been a lot of talk about millimeter wave body imaging scanners in the wake of the attempted Christmas bombing; the New York Times headlined a story about the machines “Technology that Might Have Helped.” Really, that should read “Might Have Helped Had It Been Installed in Lagos,” which might have underscored the weirdness of some of the ensuing discussion. Because the awesome next-gen spytech you’ve got at the most advanced 20% or 50% or 90% of airports matters a lot less than the situation in the bottom 1%, where a global adversary is going to focus their efforts. At a couple hundred thou each, we’re talking about a pretty pricey solution if they’ve got to be near-ubiquitous to work.

The press have set up a familiar security/​privacy debate over body imaging, but this strikes me largely as a sideshow. If no records of the scans are kept, and software is used to obscure body contour details while preserving resolution for objects concealed on the person, and the scans are reviewed by analysts in another room who don’t simultaneously see the subject, then it’s hard to see how they’re substantially more intrusive than x‑rays of carry-on baggage. (Though I would, of course, want to insist on those three privacy measures.) The real questions to raise about the tech are entirely on the security side.

First, experts have raised serious doubt about the assertion that millimeter wave scanners would have detected the device involved in the Christmas attempt. It’s hard to imagine a dumber way to blow a few hundred million bucks than on high-tech measures that wouldn’t even work against current terrorist methods, especially when alternative measures like chemical swabs—far cheaper, though without the gee-golly Total Recall factor—are on the menu. But you also have to assume that if it were effective against current methods, terrorists would switch methods—either by selecting different targets or looking for other means of hitting the same targets. Now, forcing that kind of shift can clearly be a benefit: As Jim has noted, the kind of device they had to use to circumvent metal detectors and baggage x‑rays was clearly less reliable than a bomb in a suitcase could’ve been, making it possible for passengers to foil the attempt. The question is whether the countermeasures they take in response to the body scanners require them to incur marginal liabilities that justify the cost. It seems awfully doubtful, frankly.

If you’ll forgive a bit of frank cynicism, I predict we’ll end up debating body imagers because they’re big, flashy, sexy tech with lots of cool scifi visuals for the weekly newsmags and cable news shows to use. The anchors get to say “naked” a lot, and air travelers get to feel like they’re being protected by cyborgs from the future. Meanwhile, measures that actually enhance security, like reinforced cockpit doors, tend to be rather more boring and invisible to the average person. So, for instance, probably Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have at least been pulled aside for additional screening. It’s not that it should have been enough, in isolation, that his father had contacted the American embassy with concerns about his son (intel agencies are drowning in vague tips, which is one reason there are half a million people on the terror watchlist, only a handful of whom are actually a threat; you can’t feasibly ground all of them) or that he bought a one-way ticket with cash or that he was traveling without baggage, or that there was chatter about a potential bombing attempt by a Nigerian. Rather, you’d think the combination of those things would have triggered a closer look at the airport. But that’s a question of abstruse and partly classified back-end data sharing procedures, which aren’t nearly as fun to talk about on Meet the Press.

The Left tends to dismiss property rights as being for the rich and powerful. But the rich and powerful usually can take care of themselves whether their rights are formally recognized or not. It is the poor and middle class who most need legally enforceable property rights.

No where is that more clear than in cases of eminent domain. The government rarely moves against the rich and powerful, seizing their lands to redistribute to the poor. Most often the government takes the property of the poor and middle class to redistribute to the rich and influential.

So it is in New York City. George Will describes one case now working its way through the courts:

On Aug. 27, 1776, British forces routed George Washington’s novice army in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought in fields and woods where today the battle of Prospect Heights is being fought. Americans’ liberty is again under assault, but this time by overbearing American governments.

The fight involves an especially egregious example of today’s eminent domain racket. The issue is a form of government theft that the Supreme Court encouraged with its worst decision of the past decade — one that probably will be radically revised in this one.

The Atlantic Yards site, where 10 subway lines and one railway line converge, is the center of the bustling Prospect Heights neighborhood of mostly small businesses and middle-class residences. Its energy and gentrification are reasons why 22 acres of this area — the World Trade Center site is only 16 acres — are coveted by Bruce Ratner, a politically connected developer collaborating with the avaricious city and state governments.

To seize the acres for Ratner’s use, government must claim that the area — which is desirable because it is vibrant — is “blighted.” The cognitive dissonance would embarrass Ratner and his collaborating politicians, had their cupidity not extinguished their sense of the absurd.

If the courts took the Constitution seriously the outcome of this case would not be in doubt. But today the Constitution only occasionally affects the operations of modern American government. Let’s hope that principle trumps politics when the case reaches New York’s top court.

Today Politico Arena asks:

What’s in a name? Does it matter whether or not it’s called “war on terror? Is Obama’s approach any better or worse than Bush’s?

My response:

It matters whether or not it’s called “war on terror,” because war, whether declared or not, changes the legal regime — from law enforcement, aimed primarily at investigating and prosecuting domestic crimes after the fact, to protecting a people from acts of war before they happen by means unavailable outside of war. In discharging his duty to protect the nation, President Obama has moved slowly, inconsistently, and often begrudgingly from the law-enforcement to the war paradigm. Al-Qaeda has shown no such confusion or irresolution. Just this morning, for example, the Washington Post reports that at its web site yesterday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “called for ‘every Muslim’ to kill ‘every cross-worshiper who works at the [British and American] embassies.’ ”

So how did Obama treat the Christmas Day bomber al-Qaeda sent us? The way his mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, treated the German saboteurs who landed on our shores? No — Abdulmutallab was “lawyered up,” read his Miranda rights, and encouraged to talk through his lawyer, like any common criminal. Some say that approach — like calling him “the underwear bomber” — reduces a terrorist’s stature. That’s fine for the playground (as if the terrorists were seeking simply to join the community of nations). This is the real world.

And in the real world you don’t make excuses for why the dots weren’t connected, as Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, did yesterday on the talk shows. You find out why they weren’t. And a good place to start this morning is with Gordon Crovitz’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. Rarely, he writes, does intelligence come to us “on such a silver platter.” Abdulmutallab’s father, a respected banker, reported his concerns to the American Embassy not once but three times, twice in person. And the son had a U.S. visa, which could easily have been discovered. He paid for his ticket in cash, and had no luggage. But the criteria U.S. intelligence agencies use for determining when to put a suspected terrorist on a watch list or a no-fly list, Crovitz shows, are adapted from a landmark law-enforcement case, Terry v. Ohio, concerning local traffic stops: “Mere guesses or inarticulate ‘hunches,’ ” the standard concludes, “are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.” Is it any wonder that the dots were not connected. They won’t be until we start taking this war seriously.