The Decade with No Name

I was born in the 50’s, survived the 60’s and the 70’s, became an adult in the 80’s and started a family in the 90’s. All of which got me and a lot of other folks used to having a name for each decade. I remember that, toward the end of the 90’s, there was a lot of hand-wringing about what to call that next decade, the one that started with 2000, the one we’re in now.

Yes, I know. The decade and the millenium really started in 2001. But 1970 was quite rightly the first year of the 70’s and not the last of the 60’s. That’s because you started saying the year with the word “seventy”.

Some predicted our current decade would be called the “Aughties”. Other, even lamer, ideas were proffered.

None stuck.

Here we are, about to turn the page to 2009, the last year of the Decade with No Name and people still refer back to the 80’s and 90’s but just don’t mention this block of years as a decade with any identity. I think that, to a certain extent, “21st century” has filled the void. But it looks like we’ll slouch all the way past it without having settled on a name for this decade.

Perhaps it’ll pick up a nickname during the Teens or Twenties.

The Constitution Says Hillary Cannot Be Appointed

A caller to Brian Sussman’s show tonight had an interesting point. Article I, Section 6 of the constitution says, in part:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time[.]

Since the Secretary of State was given a raise (the emolument having been encreased) during Hillary’s term in the Senate, and since she still is a Senator, that means she cannot be appointed to that position. The Founders specifically did not want the corruption that would come from voting to create or give a raise to a nice job and then taking it.

For an Obama administration, which doesn’t understand the role of judges and will no doubt be quite content to pretend that certain Amendments are devoid of meaning, this will surely be but a speed bump. But the language seems clear to me.

Update:

Apparently Volokh thinks the wording is “ambiguous”, but cites two law professors who agree with me. Mickey Kaus has the rim shot:

It’s Not the Cold War

You need to read Mark Steyn.

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.