• The Journal on how to fix California’s budget mess Rein in runaway government spending and reform taxes to stop penalizing success.
• What happens when you release a terrorist? “An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.”
• Obama Would Centralize All Aspects of Health Care
• Fix It Fast: Rapid IE6 CSS Debugging “The following is my cycle of preventing, catching, and fixing bugs in IE6.”

• Why trains run slower now than they did in the 1920s.
  Lower demand, more freight and more government regulation conspire to reduce train speeds.
• An interview with the old RNC webmaster
  “What I discovered is technological development cycles will always overlap with campaign cycles, and that’s not conducive to having efficient technology, because when you’re in campaign mode you’re not going to want to deal with alpha or beta products or sit through the development of something that hasn’t been tested.”
• Redskins win new legal fight with Indian group
  Is “the appropriateness of Native American imagery for team names” really a legal question? Perhaps the name and logo are insensitive, but there’s certainly no “right not to be offended.”
• Obama administration plans a new regulator for consumer finance.
  This is certainly ripe for all kinds of overreach, and could easily backfire.

• MyLifeIsAverage
  An amusing response to FML.
• The auto industry, now run by the people who brought you the DMV
  “President Barack Obama took aim at climate-warming greenhouse gases on Tuesday and ordered the struggling auto industry to make more fuel-efficient cars under tough new national standards to cut emissions and increase gas mileage.”
• Menu labeling bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers — Los Angeles Times
  “Two federal lawmakers have introduced legislation to require fast-food and other chain restaurants to post calories on menu boards and food display tags. The chains also would have to put information about calories, fats, carbohydrates and salt on printed menus.”
• David Freddoso on the Club for Growth’s political impact
  “The Wall Street Journal tackles the the Club for Growth, some conservatives’ financial answer to the problem of overwhelming incumbent retention in Congress. The piece, in which some moderates fault the Club for shrinking the GOP caucus, misses two important points.”

Writing in the New York Times, NBC’s Tom Brokaw suggests we rethink local government in the name of efficiency. But he goes beyond common-sense suggestions for consolidation of state services and instead advocates administrative centralization.

Yet Iowa proudly maintains its grid of 99 counties, each with its own distinctive courthouse, many on the National Register of Historic Places — and some as little as 40miles away from one another. Each one houses a full complement of clerks, auditors, sheriff’s deputies, jailers and commissioners. Is there any reason beyond local pride to maintain such duplication given the economic and population pressures of our time?

Every state and every region in the country is stuck with some form of anachronistic and expensive local government structure that dates to horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience.

There is a very good reason to maintain this “duplication”: to uphold the principle of self-government and preserve liberty, such that individuals manage their own affairs as directly as possible. This is hardly a new reason. The very existence of self-governing municipalities—even if they’re inefficient or duplicate services provided elsewhere—serves to protect liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville maintained. “The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular determination. If an oppressive law were passed, liberty would still be protected by the mode of executing that law; the majority cannot descend to the details and what may be called the puerilities of administrative tyranny.” He added that “township institutions … limit the despotism of the majority and at the same time impart to the people a taste for freedom and the art of being free.” This principle guided the Framers as they wrote the Constitution: they deliberately limited the powers of the federal government, leaving most authority at the state or local level, so the people could govern themselves as directly as possible.

Brokaw seems to hold a fundamentally different conception of government. His analysis considers government only as a provider of services, not as a guarantor of individual liberties, and he argues, in effect, that towns, cities and counties exist merely as administrative districts of the state or federal governments.  Furthermore, he advances a common folly of the Progressives: the notion that an idea is worthless simply because it is old. He forgets, however, that while our nation has seen sweeping technological, economic and social changes, one thing remains constant: human nature. And since human nature has remained unchanged since the days of “horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience,” the principles of government remain unchanged as well.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to misunderstand the proper role of the Supreme Court:

She added that the failure to engage foreign decisions had resulted in diminished influence for the United States Supreme Court.

The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

The Supreme Court does not exist, however, so that its rulings might be influential in foreign courts or cited favorably abroad. Instead, the Constitution empowers the federal courts to judge cases, not to curry favor; Publius elaborates on these “proper objects” of the “federal judicature” in The Federalist. Furthermore, each Supreme Court justice takes an oath “that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [title] under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

In “faithfully and impartially discharg[ing] and perform[ing]” these duties, the court can serve as a model to the world. But this is a happy consequence of sound judicial decision-making, and ought not to be the justices’ aim, as Ginsburg suggests. The justices’ duty is first and foremost to uphold “the Constitution and laws of the United States,” even if this means their peers overseas disapprove of their reasoning or the results.

Justices who seek citation by foreign courts might consider a career in academia instead of on the bench. There they can focus their energies on analyzing court cases from anywhere in the world without any fear of abrogating their responsibilities to America’s Constitution and laws.