Yesterday morning, I was scheduled for a 40-minute-ish appearance on Sirius/XM’s The Mike Church Show.  Once the conversation began and the calls started to roll in, however, Mike asked me to stay through an hour, and then through two.  You can find the transcript of much of our discussion here, here, and here.

Even as Mike Church, his callers, and I conversed, I received an e-mail from Fox News TV’s The Glenn Beck Program.  Judge Andrew Napolitano was to be the guest host, and he would like for me to join him in a conversation about the ways that the Federal Government trashes the Constitution.  In the event, we also talked about the idea of a constitutional convention.  You can find our exchange, in which we were joined by my Who Killed the Constitution? co-author Tom Woods, here (transcript).  (There’s also video of that TV segment on YouTube.)

Judge Andrew Napolitano will guest host Fox News’s Glenn Beck Program tonight.  I’ll be on right at the top of the show.  The topic will be the Federal Government’s trashing of the US Constitution.  I understand that Tom Woods will be on the show tonight as well, but I’m not sure when or about what.

Today on Sirius/XM’s The Mike Church Show, I was a guest for two hours.  The topic was the idea, floating around among state legislators in several states, of having a federal constitutional convention.  I favor it, strongly, and Mike gave me plenty of time to develop my reasoning.  My appearance was originally to be for one hour, but he asked me to stay for a second hour, and I happily obliged.  Callers asked all of the most common questions, which I flatter myself that I answered persuasively.  At least, I am persuaded.

... are also incommensurate with those of decades past because what in the ‘60s was a 12-game season is now a 16-game season.  If all of the season marks have been set in the past 20 years, then, who can be surprised?  Even if the rules hadn’t all been changed to facilitate scoring, this would be completely unsurprising.  It certainly doesn’t prove that Favre, Manning, Roethlisberger, and Brady are all better than Stabler, Staubach, Bradshaw, and Tarkenton.

Steve Sailer leaps straight from the fact that most of the top NFL quarterback statistics have been compiled by players of the last generation and this one to the conclusion that today’s quarterbacks are better than those of days gone by.  In doing so, he has bought the hype.

When I was in the eighth grade, in 1976-77, my football coaches showed us a training film on offensive fundamentals.  Made by Vince Lombardi and his Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, this black-and-white spectacular featured several Hall of Fame offensive linemen demonstrating the techniques I needed to use.

So, if memory serves, there were Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer pass blocking with their elbows bent so that their hands would not leave the general vicinity of their chests.  For them to have pass blocked otherwise would likely have earned them a 15-yard penalty for holding.

Today, however, the penalty for offensive holding is not 15, but 10 yards.  Besides that, on every snap, every offensive lineman in the NFL blocks in a way that would have been holding for Lombardi’s men.

When I was a boy, my heroes, like Carl Eller of the Minnesota Vikings, treated quarterbacks very roughly.  They drove them into the ground or stood them up so someone else could take a shot.  In the late 1970s, however, the NFL changed its rules so that quarterbacks were, as the Steelers’ Jack Lambert spat, effectively put in tutus.  Mustn’t hurt the little darlings by hitting them the way you’d hit any other player who had the ball.

Oh, yes, and when Johnny Unitas scanned the field for wideout Raymond Barry, he was apt to see him being shoved around the field by a DB playing bump-and-run.  Now, a DB mustn’t touch a WR more than five yards down the field.  That wouldn’t be nice.

So, yes, the QBs today rack up lots of statistics.  Can anyone say “grade inflation?”  Nevermore will there be Super Bowls like # VII (14-7 final, with basically no offense the whole day) or #IX (2-0 at halftime, despite the presence of multiple Hall of Fame performers on both offenses, including both quarterbacks).  To my mind, making it easy for any team to score did not improve the game—and Drew Bledsoe was no Terry Bradshaw, despite his gaudier numbers.

The Supreme Court is going to take up the question whether the 2nd Amendment is enforceable against the states.  Any guesses?  My own rule is “Always assume that the Supreme Court will get it wrong,” and so I’m betting that once again, they’ll say that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause means that a Bill of Rights provision—in this case, the one regarding gun rights—has the opposite meaning from the one it originally had.  In other words, I’m guessing that the Supreme Court will declare that the Due Process Clause makes all gun-related state (including local) laws subject to federal judicial supervision.  We’ll soon see.

David Gregory:  “He was the Lion of the Senate.”

Doris Goodwin:  He was the greatest senator ever.

Note that the historian does not dash that judgment off in the same manner as one dubs one’s latest hamburger “the best hamburger I’ve ever had” or the latest actress one has espied “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”  Rather, she offers it after first comparing him to Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Arthur Vandenberg (really?), and other senators who earned the plaudits of John Kennedy and his colleagues decades ago.  She means it seriously:  Ted Kennedy was the greatest senator ever.

Make your senator account for this, Justice Sotomayor’s very first Supreme Court vote.  Her balderdash persuaded him that the past had not been prologue and that she would enforce the law, not her own preferences, on the Supreme Court.  Sure it did.  (Thanks to Mike Church for the link.)

Over at “The Other McCain,” my article on the Republicans and the Constitution is said to mark me as a “snarky leftist.”  One couldn’t possibly be an originalist (that is, constitutionalist) and criticize the Republicans for not adhering to originalism, natch.  Any criticism of the Republicans must come from the left.

It was this way of thinking that led countless Republicans to walk the plank with George Bush.  Can’t criticize the witless “I’ll leave it to my successor” non-policy on ending the Iraq War, because that would be “snarky leftist.”  Mustn’t vote “no” on the Medicare prescription drug benefit, because to criticize Bush makes one a snarky leftist.  Next thing you know, you’ve voted so often with an actual snarky leftist (Bush) that the country can’t distinguish you from a snarky leftist.

As Paul Gottfried (notorious snarky leftist) has noted, the chief problem in political science for conservatives and libertarians these days is to oppose the massive centralization of government that has occurred since World War II and is occurring even as I type. To deny that, I think, marks one as a flagrant bonehead.  My column’s point was precisely that Republicans are failing to oppose that centralization in every sense in which they are not adhering to originalism.

“Conservative” Blue Dog Democrats, having begun this Congress by voting for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker of the House, have now agreed to a health care reform acceptable to Nancy Pelosi.  Whoof.

According to CNN.com, “Instead of raising taxes, states are putting taxes and fees on specific items and services as they try to decrease their budget gaps.”

No wonder people buy the argument that socializing medicine will reduce expenditures on medical care in America:  they get their economics from journalists!

Now if someone could just explain to me the difference between “raising” taxes and “putting” taxes ....