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This video clip takes a few minutes to watch, but in it the brilliant young Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin lays out the financial case against Obamacare as well as we have seen that done anywhere:

Here we have the President of the United States, in his State of the Union address, hectoring the Supreme Court over a decision with which he disagrees, and urging Congress to help him circumvent the effect of that decision. This may be unprecedented.

You can see Justice Samuel Alito shaking his head and mouthing the words, “Not true,” in response to the president.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, we have this from Georgetown law professor Professor Randy Barnett:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds [of] Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

Instapundit has a collection of additional comments on this latest episode.

One of the criticisms we hear about President Obama is that he is arrogant. This episode certainly seems to support that claim. And that attitude of arrogance may pervade his administration. In the video, you can see Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, at the Court members’ right. He is sitting right next to them. At least, he was, until he leapt to his feet and, with a grin, began applauding the president’s statement. If nothing else, this whole episode is appallingly impolite.

And to think the president is a lawyer.

Showing an abundance of caution, the United States Supreme Court has ruled to protect the proceedings of the Proposition 8 discrimination trial in San Francisco, blocking efforts by the trial judge, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn to allow cameras into a

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker

California federal courtroom for the first time.

Less than four weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that it was time to begin a pilot project exploring the benefits of broadcasting federal civil trials.   It is somewhat remarkable that the long-protected privacy of California federal courtrooms would become negotiable just weeks before the start of the Proposition 8 discrimination trial.   The Ninth Circuit’s “pilot project” immediately opened the door for Federal Judge Vaughn Walker to take extraordinary legal steps, on New Year’s Eve no less,  to extend the project to include the discrimination suit against Protect Marriage.  With every day, the prosecution of Protect Marriage seems to be led, not just by formidable constitutional attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson, but by Judge Walker as well.  An outraged National Review Online columnist, Ed Whelan, notes that by waiting until New Year’s Eve to make procedural moves to broadcast the Proposition 8 discrimination trial, Judge Walker essentially precluded the public from having any opportunity to oppose it.  In a letter written directly to the Judge, Whelan publicly challenges the motives behind the move:

The ever-incisive, often-devastating, and always bold Shelby Steele has a must-read op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Here’s a taste. 

After a reference to the story of the emporer’s new clothes, Steele states his thesis:

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Steele’s piece is so tightly written that it is really impossible to excerpt fairly.  But here is one of his central and typically well-developed points:  Barack Obama is essentially a content-free president: 

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

One has to raise such points with great care in order to avoid being painted as a racist – or, in more modern parlance, as a believer in  racialism, which is less odious but just as debilitating to public discourse.  Steele, who himself is African-American, is well-positioned to comment on all this, and probably because of his own racial background (and the resultant need to avoid the tired charge of being a traitor to his own race) is one of the most careful living writers on the subject. 

In other words, his ideas cannot be dismissed.  Give them a read.

On Christmas Eve we share the words from my very favorite Christmas carol, “What Sweeter Music,” by Robert Herrick (1591-1674). The most famous musical composition using these words is by John Rutter.

The lyric rewards effort and bears reading and re-reading, both silently and aloud:

 What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

We wish a blessed Christmas to all.

I am cross-posting much of this entry with Article VI Blog, where I also hang out.  As I said there, I am offering just a few quick hits:

Mike Huckabee, Convicts, and Religion

Anyone not living in a cave for the last 48 hours knows that Maurice Clemmons, the murderer of four police officers in Seattle, was once in state prison in Arkansas – until Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence. Huck has been running away from that decision and attempting to spread the blame to others involved in processing Clemmons through the legal system. It’s been suggested that Huckabee’s faith played a huge role in his clemency decisions as governor. The man himself has not yet addressed that question, probably because he doesn’t want to touch it.

That’s understandable.

Consider: While Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee issued 1,033 pardons, twice as many as the prior three Arkansas governors combined. Just as a point of comparision, Mitt Romney did not issue a single pardon while Governor of Massachusetts. I have a hunch that Huckabee, as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, is now . . . toast.

David Frum Thinks The Whole GOP Religion Situation Is Terrible

At least that’s what he seems to be saying here. Frum, who’s unhappy with religious conservatives generally, sees the Manhattan Declaration’s failure to include Mormons as yet another example of Evangelical bias against that faith. Well, the Declaration was authored not just by Evangelicals but also Catholics and Orthodox Christians, something Frum doesn’t seem to grasp. Also, as I noted here, the Declaration is a doctrinal trinitarian document. Mormons and other heterodox Christian faiths could not have signed it (to say nothing of Orthodox Jews), so the document’s drafters didn’t even invite them to sign. There are political reasons to quibble with the Declaration’s narrowness, but to this Latter-day Saint it doesn’t look like a slap at Romney or Mormonism.