Turn the Beat Around...

Apologies to Gloria, but that tune is what I hear playing out in the legal arena these days, and hopefully it's a song that will live long and prosper...

Turn it up, turn it up, turn it upside down
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it upside down
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it upside down
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it upside down

Turn the beat around
Love to hear percussion
Turn it upside down
Love to hear percussion
Love to hear it...

I admittedly am getting a kick out of the mainstream media playing legal expert on these Constitutional issues. Lil E apparently isn't the only one who'd just scrap the Constitution as irrelevant today, some musty old unvalued document written by old dead white men who didn't appreciate the power of diversity and had no idea the struggles the republic would face in the complex 2st century...

The common-sense case goes like this. Contrary to what Justice Kennedy said this week, no important principle is at stake in this decision. For all practical purposes, the economic power of the federal government is no longer constitutionally constrained. By using its tax power, the federal government already forces you to save for retirement (Social Security), insure against disability (ditto), provide for health care in retirement (Medicare), and pay for all manner of stuff you may neither need nor want. The government could perfectly well use its tax power to pay for universal health insurance. Obamacare is a milder dispensation in terms of personal liberty than tax-and-spend schemes that are already in place or any number of tax-and-spend alternatives to Obamacare that would immediately pass constitutional muster.

Am I forgetting the Broccoli Question? If the government can force you to buy health insurance, what can't it force you to buy? The common-sense answer to this, as we've just seen, is straightforward. Nothing. The government can make you pay for whatever it likes--that's where things already stand, and striking down the mandate won't change it. The Constitution as interpreted by the Court these past decades allows the federal government to put your taxes up and use the proceeds to send you a weekly box of broccoli. If Washington instructed you to choose your own basket of fruit and vegetables or else pay a penalty, that would be a smaller infringement of your freedom than the Constitution already allows.

As a practical matter, in other words, there's no "limiting principle". As a legal matter, of course, the Justices who see Obamacare as good policy will bend over backwards to devise one, and those who see it as bad policy will find grounds to be unpersuaded. Justice Kennedy has already told us what this lawyerly criterion could look like.

But I think it is true that if most questions in life are matters of degree, in the insurance and health care world, both markets -- stipulate two markets -- the young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries.

"Uniquely proximately very close." Well, something along those lines. But in worrying about whether a relatively liberal method of making you do something is constitutional, having previously determined that a less liberal method of making you do the same thing is perfectly fine, the Court is concerning itself not with an important principle but with a legal technicality. That's not to criticize--it's what courts do. The funniest part is that everybody understands this. If the mandate is struck down, Congress (voters permitting) could turn round and make the penalty a tax, and that would be that. Important principle my eye.

Key point: voters permitting.

Now of course you can ask whether the Court has been right over the years to use the Commerce Clause to turn the Constitution inside out and dissolve the limits on the economic power of the federal government.

Lol-- oh, that's rich. "Of course" we can ask.

That's not an easy question but on the whole I think it has in fact been right. The world has changed, and what we expect of the government has changed. The Constitution had to change as well, and that could be done either by amending it explicitly or having the Court draw on all its reserves of ingenuity and rewrite it judgement by judgement. In America, the Constitution is a quasi-religious document. Its constancy is an inviolable national myth. Changing it therefore falls to the Court and must be done by stealth, with a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the citizenry. The big disadvantage of amendment by jurisprudence is that it takes an unavoidably political task out of politics and gives it to unelected judges. Obviously, that's also its big advantage.

Whether we like the way the Constitution has been rewritten is beside the point. The thing is, it has been. The Court has all but erased the limits on the economic power of the federal government. So let's not pretend that striking down the mandate would be a victory of principle rather than just a huge embarrassment for the White House, or that upholding it would mark a big new advance of government power. Politically, it matters. Constitutionally, it's a tremendous fuss about not very much.

Spoken like a layman, a lame layman at that.

Listen, I'm not sure if now is the time to break it to these pundits. They're just starting to sober up, to see reality in a different light, and beginning to understand the stakes here...

You see,
it IS about change, but maybe not the change the libs envision. Plenty of voters are simply fed up with "accepting" the public policies thrust upon us, and as more and more of the bills come due, I think we'll see more of a curtailing of the entitlement mentality, rather than its expansion.

In short, we don't all accept the way the Constitution has been re-written, nor do we all agree that the public policy financing decisions of the past few decades have helped the country. These out-of-wedlock births? Why would any couple wait until they can afford their babymaking (and especially, the costs beyond), when if you just get pregnant when single and not working, the woman and her boyfriend can save the insurance expenses and put it toward a big wedding in a few years, with the very photogenic toddler taking part in the big wedding. (Financed by all the money saved by having the government pay for your family creation costs...)

See -- the government will pay for the mother and child needs -- from WIC support, to medical care, to all the freebies that come because nobody wants to see a struggling child and mother. Ditto with our senior care. If you're financially savvy, you have your elder become "indigent" by transferring their asset wealth into one home, one car (can be an expensive car) and trusts for the next generation's inheritance. Then, the family assets are secure, and the government will pay for the nursing home care, private nurses to come visit, and whatever else the indigent would qualify for. My family doesn't operate this way, but perhaps yours does? It's an upper-middle-class game, that's for sure.

Paying your own way in these no-stigma days? For your own children's births, health needs, or your own elderly family's care?
Suckers.

Did you know, for example,
undocumented, unseen, unprotected immigrants are not subject to the mandate? But, of course, they still would be treated for free at the emergency rooms. So there's still that cost shifting going on...

But this whole idea of everyone paying, regardless of financial need, to carry our ill, our disabled, our elders, our "needy"? I think we're wising up to the fact that these subtle financial incentives are costing more and more to those doing the providing.

That's gonna change. It has to.
Striking down the individual mandate which mandates the direct transfer of earned wealth from one group to another, aided by government social worker bureaucrats and well-meaning libs, is ending.

For real.
Look to the affirmative action case coming up to the Court. Want to speculate that the reason so many white men are rejecting college is because those raised in integrated schools see education as being "fixed"? Meaning, no matter how hard you work or how well you do on those tests, if your buddy sitting at the desk next to you wants to slough off, well, if he's being judged by the color of his skin, not the content of his character, he's in even with lesser stats? Who wants to play in a fixed game?

The liberal elite white writer here says, "Constitutionally, it's a tremendous fuss about not very much."

We who are paying the bills, the taxes, putting in to a social "security" retirement system that those under 55 have been warned will not provide for them in the end, don't accept the changes this writer assumes are permanent. He thinks the money is never ending. Like the Keynesians, they simply don't see an end in prosperity in sight.

Some of us, more realistic perhaps, do.
We vote, we save, we work, we're not accepting of the changes that have crippled our educational system, or healthcare delivery system, our worker protections. For heavens sake, we need to address the needs of the people already here -- citizens or not -- before we go making any more entitlement promises or presumptions.

I see that. The lib pundits don't.
They're in for a big surprise in the coming years, I suspect, when personal responsibility -- paring down your needs to meet what you can afford -- makes a comeback.

The Court has the Constitution, and despite the artificial diversity, the intelligence to make the hard decisions. The political/lobbyist/media class has failed us. Look around and see.

We the People? I wouldn't assume we're all ready to roll over, play dead, and give in to the demands of the growing "victim" class. Reality matters, voters still have a voice, and despite the best efforts to demonize the pragmatic, common sense is indeed making a comeback.

One of these days, we're going to tackle the root causes of a sick system, and not simply accept the band-aid quick-fix that some think will work for the time being.

Change is gonna come, all right.
Ready or not...
--------------------------------

From the comments:

Gerard Harbison
Paraphrase: we've already stretched the Constitution beyond all recognition. It's illogical not to let us stretch it a little more.

I do happen to think a federal constitution with a narrowly interpreted commerce clause is tenable in 2012. If the USSC decides along the way to overturn Wickard vs. Filburn, I'm OK with that. Unfortunately, they probably won't feel the need.

Barnett Schools Klein.

Special to me because of the Cal City connection,
Law Professor Randy Barnett has been on my radar since the summer of 2002, when I paid -- good money, by choice -- to hear him and other legal notables, like then Chicago Law Dean Saul Levmore, speak on basic first-year law school subjects, like Constitutional Law, Torts, Contracts and Crim Law at a pre-law school, private 3-day seminar.

It was expensive, but well worth understanding what I was getting into the next three years in attending law school mid-career. University of Wisconsin Law was good, don't get me wrong, but this panel included the national cream of the crop...

Yesterday Lil Ez -- finally dragging himself outside the echo chamber and admitting that perhaps his UC polysci undergrad degree isn't much of a "wonky" foundation to opine on serious legal and financial issues -- played at being an honest journalist: Instead of pretending to be an expert himself, he interviewed somebody in the know. Instead of preaching to the choir, he listened to constructive criticism from an honest intellectual.

Two years too late, you ask me, but this is what happens when ambitions outstrip accomplishments, intelligence or knowledge. Plus, living in the isolation chamber that is DC surely can't help your pramatic, "how will it play out in the real world?" skills.

EzK: Perhaps you can clarify a distinction that escapes me here. It’s understood to be constitutional for the government to tax me in order to pay for Medicare, which is a single-payer insurance program that I’ll get when I’m over 65. But it’s not okay for the government to say I have to self-insure on the private market before I’m 65.

RBarnett: There are several answers, but I’ll limit myself to two. First, there’s the text of the Constitution itself. The text of the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to levy taxes on people and on income. We can’t dispute that. It does not give Congress the power under its commerce power, at least not expressly, to make them do business with private companies.

The second point I would make is that the duty to pay taxes is part of your duty to support the government in return for the protections the government gives you. What the government is claiming here is this power — and this ought to disturb people on the left — to make people do business with private companies when Congress thinks it’s convenient.

EzK: And how does that fall on something like the Ryan plan, where the government says, look, we’ll lower your tax liability by $2,500 if you purchase insurance from private insurers? That seems like the same penalty, the same power, just one step removed.

RBarnett: Most of the justices did not seem all that sympathetic to that argument. Just because the government does have the power to do x, doesn’t mean they have the power to do y, even if y has the same effect as x. There’s no constitutional principle like that.

And by the way, if they have a commerce power to mandate you buy things, then under existing law and financial law, they could put you in jail. Every time you give up a tax subsidy, all you lose is the $5,000 benefit you didn’t get.

It can’t be enforced through imprisonment. And that’s a big difference.
...
EzK: I’m not an expert, so this may be a stupid question: Is “heavy burden” a technical term for a judge to use? Does it refer to something specific?

RBarnett: It’s not. The technical doctrine, which Justice Kennedy mentioned in passing, is that there’s presumed constitutionality for laws passed by Congress. What he said was, notwithstanding that doctrine, don’t you have a heavy burden of justification?

Whoop. Perhaps I spoke too soon on the "listening" part...
Dig this exchange:

EzK: One thread of the arguments that seemed interesting was that Justice Breyer basically said the commerce power is very broad. Congress could pass a Medicare insurance program that covered burial costs. It could push people into insuring themselves in that market. The conservatives are looking for a limiting principle here that doesn’t really exist for this bill because it hasn’t existed in the Court for years. And it often seemed to me that Verrilli’s problem was he had to come up with a limiting principle that he didn’t really believe and couldn’t clearly articulate in order to better target Kennedy. And it seemed at times that Breyer and the other liberals were trying to push Verrilli to just come out and say that.

RBarnett: Justice Breyer definitely argued that.
But I’m not sure the other liberal justices adopted that approach.

---------------------
From the comments:

MikeSoja3/27/2012 10:10 PM CDT

Klein: "I’m not an expert, so this may be a stupid question: Is “heavy burden” a technical term for a judge to use? Does it refer to something specific?"

Shorter Klein: Is there a way to weasel around this?

Heh.

Added: Then again, with liberal journolistic mentors like this... what's a soft-sciences boy to believe these days?

The Con-science of a Liberal,
by Paul Kruman
March 28, 2012, 9:39 am

Supreme Ignorance
I’ll have much more to say about the Scotus/ACA stuff later this week; right now, I have travel (and teaching tomorrow, so time will be tight until Friday).

But read Henry Aaron on yesterday’s not-good day. Astonishingly, many of the justices appear not to understand that health care isn’t like the market for cars, or broccoli; even more astonishingly, the administration’s lawyer seemed unprepared to explain the difference. (The Obama administration has been weirdly inarticulate on this stuff from day one; Mitt Romney has done a better job of explaining the mandate than the president has).

Again, more in a day or (more likely) two.

We won't hold our breath out here for any new revelations...

Plus, in his comments,
smell the condescension for ... "We, the People...":

VR, St. John's, Newfoundland

Indeed it is deeply disturbing when a justice on the Supreme court starts making such comparisons. Do they really think that, or was the statement a truly failed attempt at explaining the ACA to the unwashed masses?

Pushback:

ACW, New Jersey

Everything goes up except the pay of the worker who is stuck with fixed costs and is then asked to underwrite things that might happen to him when it's all he can do to pay for things that *are* happening to him. Prof Krugman, and the staff of the NYT who delude themselves they are among us common folk when they are actually like Marie Antoinette's court at Versailles playing at being shepherdesses, believe we should be forced to buy private insurance but no one should be forced to pay us enough to afford it.

There are only so many bucks in my pay packet and they're spoken for. Prof Krugman is waiting for an explanation? Me, I'm waiting for Mr Krugman, or anyone else who supports the individual mandate, to explain how you get manure from a wooden rocking horse.

Call Off the Dogs...

Speak up, speak out. This is wrong, people:

By Susan Jacobson , Orlando Sentinel.

A school-cafeteria lunch lady and her husband have received hate mail, unwanted visits from reporters and fearful inquiries from neighbors — all because their Sanford-area address is being disseminated on Twitter as belonging to Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman, her son said late Tuesday.

The woman, 70, who has a heart condition, and her husband, 72, have temporarily moved to a hotel to avoid the spotlight and possible danger, said son Chip Humble of Longwood.

The woman has another son named William George Zimmerman who lived with her in 1995 and still lives in Central Florida. He is no relation to George Zimmerman, 28, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Feb. 26, sparking national outrage and international interest.

William Zimmerman isn't sure how his mother and stepfather's address became public. He said he used it to register a car, get a drivers license and vote when he lived there briefly after college.

"This is really scary, and I'm concerned for my family," Zimmerman told the Orlando Sentinel Tuesday night. "It's scary because there are people who aren't mentally right and will take this information and run with it."

Zimmerman traced the tweets — which he said have been retweeted by actor-director Spike Lee — to a man in California. Zimmerman has implored the man to stop and said he received this response, "Black power all day. No justice, no peace" and an obscenity.

Lee's tweet has been removed, but it continues to be retweeted.

"To endanger people who are innocent because people are angry is not the answer," William Zimmerman said. "That's not how we're going to heal. It's not to help the Martin family for someone else to be hurt."

Added: More facts here.

Not to steal a line from McDonalds, but...

I'm loving it !
Jennifer Rubin in the WaPo:

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, as many commentators have remarked, had a terrible time of it today. He was, from a human standpoint, nervous at the onset. But it is wrong to personalize this. His argument was inadequate, as the Obama administration’s legal justification has been from the beginning. The government could have had a much more experienced solicitor general up there, and the result would have been exactly the same.

It’s not surprising that liberals, most of whom have not read or shown interest in the arguments of the challengers, were stunned to learn that there really is a constitutional difference between taxing and regulating and between inducing one into commerce and regulating commerce that already exists. It is this failure to understand, let alone imagine that constitutional text has meaning and there are actual limitations on federal power, that explains the stunned reaction of the liberal elite. Like puppies smacked on the nose by a rolled-up copy of the Constitution, they are flabbergasted.

Love that image -- puppy-dog smackdown.

Speaking of puppies,
Lil Ez, of Journolist echo chamber fame, demonstrates ... he still doesn't get it.

As Lyle Denniston writes, this still looks like Justice Anthony Kennedy’s case to decide. But however he decides it, it’s worth keeping in mind what an oddly narrow principle is actually being debated.

According to tax economists, there’s no economic difference between the individual mandate and the policies leading Republicans support to give large tax credits to Americans who purchase health-care insurance and deny them to those who don’t. But while the mandate might get overturned, everyone agrees that discriminatory tax credits are constitutional.

Principle, precedent ... it matters, kiddo. You don't get to skirt the rules just because you think you know better, you well-meaning "elite".

If you're not brave enough to call something a tax when you're advocating for it, if you're not brave enough to campaign for a mandate when you're running for the job, perhaps -- we'll wait and see how this thing shakes out, legally -- you're not bright enough to be crafting legislation. What a waste of time and money, all because somebody was afraid to advocate raising "taxes" and tried to jam this in through the backdoor (on the eve of Christmas Eve, nonetheless) with zero bipartisan support.

Rubin again:

In response to relatively ineffective questioning by the liberal justices, Clement patiently explained again and again that prior Commerce Clause cases didn’t force individuals into a web of regulation, and that if Congress could have approached the problem differently — well, then that would be another case for another day. The liberal justices seemed disadvantaged by a failure to understand that markets exist for all sort of goods and services.

(Clement, with unintentional hilarity, gravely explained to Justice Elena Kagan: “My unwillingness to buy an electric car is forcing up the price of an electric car. If only more people demanded an electric car, there would be economies of scale, and the price would go down.” Ouch.)

Hey now -- let's not give the "I can't live without this product, thus neither can you" libs any ideas. Mandated cell phones, mandated little cars, mandated arugula -- where would it end? Remember -- they only want the best for us in telling us what we must buy...

Only up to 2.5% of our incomes. (That appears to be the only limiting principle here.) After all, Ez knows what's best ... for all of us. Scary thoughts, indeed.

Fwiw.

Charles M. Blow asks:

Miami Herald: "Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin" < What does this have to do w/shooting?

One crucial point here is this: Zimmerman didn't know anything abt #Trayon's life when he got out w/a gun and started following him.

Another crucial point is that neither of #Trayvon's suspensions were for an act of violence. The crux of the case is who initiated fight.

The thinking goes,
if the child was in an "experimenting" phase, perhaps indeed he was out in the rain walking home from the convenience store, and looked like he was on drugs, as the neighborhood watch reported.

Perhaps he ditched any paraphernalia he had on him before he allegedly confronted the stranger following him. Perhaps, if indeed he had drugs in his system -- the test results are still out -- he got a bit of "false courage", especially if talking on the phone to his girlfriend, who allegedly urged him to just let it go.

Kids shouldn't do drugs, no matter what you might think of libertarian consensual adult use. They are growing, and often cannot handle their chemicals early on. Beer, liquor, pot, or the harder stuff ...

To most,
it doesn't seem credible in this day and age, that an otherwise rational Hispanic man, who had numerous times called police in a "broken windows" type of preventative community policing, would call police on a non-emergency number, stage injuries and a fight for a witness to observe him being bested, and then kill the teenager -- simply because he was a young black man.

If, instead,
the community watch noticed a young man acting strangely out in the rain, as though he were on drugs, and suspected something was up, thus the call to the police -- it makes more sense that the two might fight over ... "ego" ("who are you?" "what's it to you?" etc. ... ) and things might get out of hand.

Often, there's more "fight" in a little guy -- the fight doesn't always go to the heaviest, for obvious reasons -- especially a fit one, who thinks he's being challenged perhaps and gets his "pride" up...

If it turns out something other than race was the reason for the shooting -- and it legitimately could be argued self defense -- I think black and biracial parents should breathe a sigh of relief, from Florida on up.

Parents of children potentially experimenting with drugs might want to keep them closer supervised though. Drugs aren't for kids, period. Like sex: Let them grow up first before taking on such adult choices and consequences...
--------------------
Added:
The Miami Herald reports:

In October, a school police investigator said he saw Trayvon on the school surveillance camera in an unauthorized area “hiding and being suspicious.” Then he said he saw Trayvon mark up a door with “W.T.F” — an acronym for “what the f---.” The officer said he found Trayvon the next day and went through his book bag in search of the graffiti marker.

Instead the officer reported he found women’s jewelry and a screwdriver that he described as a “burglary tool,” according to a Miami-Dade Schools Police report obtained by The Miami Herald.

Word of the incident came as the family’s lawyer acknowledged that the boy was suspended in February for getting caught with an empty bag with traces of marijuana, which he called “irrelevant” and an attempt to demonize a victim.

Trayvon’s backpack contained 12 pieces of jewelry, in addition to a watch and a large flathead screwdriver, according to the report, which described silver wedding bands and earrings with diamonds. Trayvon was asked if the jewelry belonged to his family or a girlfriend.

“Martin replied it’s not mine. A friend gave it to me,” he responded, according to the report. Trayvon declined to name the friend.

Trayvon was not disciplined because of the discovery, but was instead suspended for graffiti, according to the report. School police impounded the jewelry and sent photos of the items to detectives at Miami-Dade police for further investigation.
...
That suspension was followed four months later by another one in February, in which Trayvon was caught with an empty plastic bag with traces of marijuana in it. A schools police report obtained by The Miami Herald specifies two items: a bag with marijuana residue and a “marijuana pipe.”

Curiouser, and curiouser...

More details leaked in Trayvon Martin tragedy:

Zimmerman has gone into hiding. A fringe group, the New Black Panthers, have offered a $10,000 reward for his capture.

Police have been reluctant to provided details about all their evidence, but this is what they've disclosed to the Sentinel:

Zimmerman was on his way to the grocery store when he spotted Trayvon walking through his gated community.

Trayvon was visiting his father's fiancée, who lived there. He had been suspended from school in Miami after being found with an empty marijuana baggie. Miami schools have a zero-tolerance policy for drug possession.

Zimmerman called police and reported a suspicious person, describing Trayvon as black, acting strangely and perhaps on drugs.

Zimmerman got out of his SUV to follow Trayvon on foot. When a dispatch employee asked Zimmerman if he was following the 17-year-old, Zimmerman said yes. The dispatcher told Zimmerman he did not need to do that.

There is about a one-minute gap during which police say they're not sure what happened.

Zimmerman told them he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.

Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police.

Trayvon then said, "Well, you do now" or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose.

Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police.

Zimmerman began yelling for help.

Several witnesses heard those cries, and there's been a dispute about from whom they came: Zimmerman or Trayvon.

Lawyers for Trayvon's family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.

One witnesses, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help.

Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest from very close range, according to authorities.

When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.

Paramedics gave him first aid, but he said no to going to the hospital. He got medical care the next day.

ADDED:
Pretty weak sauce, particularly when the father cited the reason for suspension as being on unauthorized school grounds, and a teacher speaking anonymously had previously cited excessive tardiness for the 10-day suspension.

Still, you feel for the family. First for the death, second for the way they've been played by the race professionals.

Eh.

Define "most", prizewinner Krugman:

Supreme Thoughts

I haven’t been weighing in on the ACA hearing at the Supreme Court; I’m not a lawyer, and while most legal experts seem to think that the case for striking the law down is very weak, these days everything is political.

(I suspect the "most"/"it's all political" meme is a common pushpoint these days on the new, improved liberal Journolist listserv.)

Again, go straight to the legal sources for the quality stuff, readers.

The Volokh blog on the ACA.

Too many well-reasoned, legally analytical posts to link to, so just bookmark the whole blog...

Two liberal female Supreme Court reporters -- Lithwick and Greenhouse -- have recently made a pre-emptive strike: if the Court rules against the ACA's individual mandate, then the Court is acting politically.

If you stick solely to mainstream legal coverage, you're missing so much of the legal nuance that protects the rights of younger, less affluent American to choose their financial and health options in the coming years. Should this underrepresented group (in the MSM) be called upon to pay for the care of those with "pre-existing conditions", and those middle-class "children" being carried on their parents' plans until the ripe old age of 26?

Liberals can promise all they like, and they're free to take their own risks and hedge their bets. But when they lose -- when their promises cannot be upheld without confiscating unused dollars from lesser others to fulfill their grand insurance subsidization plans of bailing out the private insurance industry, which simply cannot function healthily in what they're paying out for care today from currently collected premiums without injection of fresh monies from uninvolved others -- then "we're all in this together".

Back to the drawing board, well-meaning liberals who can't afford to finance their big promises on their own dollars without picking the pockets of those downline.

Long, Hot Summer Ahead ?

or ... B(l)acklash.

If you live in an uneasily integrated area, it helps no one to stoke this story. Printing the little boy's picture in his Hollister gear, and pretending he was just a lil fella bouncing around on Skittles... It might help people think of their own middle-class children, but it hardly helps tell a truthful story.

Here's a current picture of the young man. He was allegedly on suspension from high school, for reasons yet to be disclosed. It's unclear whether he was supervised, at his father's girlfriend/fiance/baby mama? house, or if the Skittles and iced tea were the lanky lad's "dinner", or a snack.

For the life of me,
I can't understand why no one missed this kid until hours days later, identifying him at the morgue. Was he babysitting the father's girlfriends' son? Were any adults present at the home, or was the village indeed raising this child?

Had the boy spent much time in this community before his school suspension led him to be parked there? Did he have any ties that would make him call this community "home"? Or could George Zimmerman's story indeed be true?

That the young man -- color irrelevant -- looked suspicious, as he reported in one of his many neighborhood watch calls to police, because he was walking aimlessly between houses in the rain? With no place apparently to go.

I don't think policework is an easy job, and I'd love to see more black men step up to the plate, earn the grades honestly, pass the tests, and work in community policing themselves. Perhaps your son might serve his community in this way, one day?

"Walking while black" is convenient, if you've never lived in neighborhoods where things left outside not nailed down go missing, homes and garages routinely get broken into when no one's home, and "guests" -- particularly unsupervised "guests" sometimes don't respect neighborhood norms like those who live there and have a longer-term allegiance to the community.

If the independent witness who saw the alleged fight, and confirmed account that it was Zimmerman crying out for someone to help -- not the bigger (taller), younger, perhaps stronger Martin, who indeed looked cute and cuddly in that boyhood Hollister pic -- then perhaps the president will need to speak again on this topic.

Bounties, witnesss intimidation, threats, a lack of respect for the honest truth in trying to "wee wee up" the emotional story of a poor little boy beaten up and shot over his little bag of Skittles* by an angry old white man...

If calmer, more rational heads don't prevail, perhaps we haven't seen an end yet to violence (simply put, who initiated the physical contact?) and defense. I hope we can agree to respect the legal process, work for better ways to settle neighborhood disputes in these coming days of have's and have-not's, and especially -- to involve our own sons in constructive activies that keep them from roaming the streets unsupervised, seeking nourishment from convenience-store sugar, as they try to find their way "home" in our shared world...

You're my Bread when I'm Hungry...

You're my Shelter from troubled winds.
You're my Anchor in life's ocean.
But most of all, you're my best Friend...

Sunday songs, with Don Williams.

Lord, I hope the stay (sic) is good.
I'm feelin' empty and misunderstood...
I should be thankful Lord, I know I should...
But Lord, I hope this day is good.

Lord, have you forgotten me?
I've been prayin' to you faithfully...
I'm not sayin' I'm a righteous man
But Lord, I hope you understand...

I don't need fortune and I don't need fame.
Send down the thunder, Lord. Send down the rain.
But when you're planning just how it will be,
Plan a good day for me...

You've been the King since the dawn of time.
All that I'm asking is a little less crying
It might be hard for the devil to do,
But it would easy for You...

Targeting the Young and Healthy...

to pay for the expensive medical needs of others...

By DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN AND VERNON L. SMITH ObamaCare will be argued next week in the Supreme Court. While the justices will consider the intricacies of constitutional law, at their heart the arguments in favor of the legislation have to do with the economics of health care.

Consider the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The Obama administration defends the mandate on the ground that a person's decision to not buy health insurance affects commerce by materially increasing the costs of others' health insurance. The government adds that health care is unique and therefore can be regulated constitutionally in ways other markets cannot.

In reality, the mandate has almost nothing to do with cost-shifting. The targeted population—the young, healthy and not poor who choose to forgo coverage—has a minimal role in the $43 billion of uncompensated health-care costs. In 2008, for example (the latest figures available), the Department of Health and Human Service's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey showed that the uncompensated care of the mandate's targeted population was no more than $12.8 billion—a tiny one-half of 1% of the nation's $2.4 trillion in overall health-care costs. The insurance mandate cannot reasonably be justified on the ground that it remedies costs imposed on the system by the voluntarily uninsured.

So much for respecting "pro choice" health decisions.
This is just the government picking favorites, and penalizing those who prefer to practice preventative maintenance while choosing less invasive medical testing and treatment. Choices that many simply would not choose for themselves, but which they are being asked to pay for as "needs", for well-heeled (not necessarily healed) betters.

That's the cost-shifting...

You simply can't "equalize" outcomes by taking from those who have (wealth, health, security, etc.) to pay the costs of those who can't afford their own needs. Nevermind thinking negatively of the successful non-users as free-riders and penalizing them in the premium racket, instead of holding them up as good examples to be emulated... with discounted premiums.

(and we wonder why -- collectively -- Americans of late have an incentive to become less and less healthy, and less financially responsible for their own choices and actions...)

Any Day Now ...

-------------------
In the camera, from early November:

Monday Bible Verse...

Proverbs 24-16:

For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again,
But the wicked stumble in time of calamity.

-----------
Think about...

Think about how many times I have fallen.
Spirits are using me larger voices calling...

Madness Not the Reason for this Massacre.

Robert Fisk:

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the "experts" when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the "deranged" bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn't know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have "disappeared" 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that's what it's about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that's too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

Unarmed Florida Teenager Shot in the Back...

No, not Trayvon Martin, Mark Drewes. The gunman got jumpy, and ended the life of a handsome young man, this one shot in the back, with no physical altercation even.

Didn't hear about it back then? The Catholic boy, shot by a Jewish accountant in Boca after the young man -- his parents' only child -- played a childish Halloween prank on the night of his 16th birthday, and then ran away...

"Justice" was slow in coming, and helped usher in the legislation that might just help clear George Zimmerman, the Hispanic triggerman in the Martin shooting.

I wonder*: even though the Drewes are not black, if the Martin family might find some solace -- at least in knowing they are not alone -- from the Drewes family. You see, it's not just black boys shot dead by guns in Florida neighborhoods, much as some might wish to spin it that way...

White victims hope for justice for their own too.

----------------------

* I also wonder about newsreports that say the teenager had simply slipped out at halftime for a soda and candy snack. If so, weren't people at home waiting on him? Didn't they hear sirens and the ambulance in their neighborhood, and wonder that the young man had not yet returned home?

If the reports are true, that only hours later did the family report Trayvon missing and the father identify his body at the morgue, then I wonder whether or not it would harm the story, or the presumption of innocence, if Trayvon indeed was out for a slow walk in the rain, perhaps cutting between houses to get to his eventual home destination...

It's not the same as playing ding-dong-ditch at midnight, but surely non-emotional justice demands that these youthful victims need not be angels or saints, simply unarmed and not initiating violence, to determine if the adults responding violently with guns overreacted.

Amen, Brother...

Tell It:

Self-Awareness and the Internet
By Brad Salisbury, Palm Beach Post.

The internet has shattered a number of things: the psyche of emotionally unstable youths, divisions between our personal lives, and barriers preventing the free flow of knowledge and information. It has mostly been a positive force for society, but I can’t help but lament the loss of innocence it has brought about. Namely that nearly everyone using it is too self-aware.

Irony has crept into every comment, video and meme dispersed among it pages and links.
The rampant infection that is self-awareness jumps from host to host at an alarming rate; devouring the the most naive before they realize their internet virginity has been taken.

Those uncontaminated internet maidens like Marilyn Hagerty, 85 year-old restaurant critic of the Grand Forks Herald whose review of the “eagerly anticipated” restaurant – the Olive Garden – went viral. Marilyn’s critique is straightforward as to be recommended reading only for uncontacted peoples and maybe - maybe – extraterrestrials.

But I couldn’t be more proud of her. This is a woman who has, by her estimation, reviewed 1,900 restaurants. Her writing style can best be described as earnest. Of course, someone this earnest is screaming to be trampled by the stampede that is internet culture. In their view, she is simply too on-the-nose to be allowed in the digital world. A review of the Olive Garden without irony is unacceptable. So the internet powers that be have sought to corrupt sweet Marilyn by virally forcing her throughout every corner of the web. Even her own paper has piled on the the self-aware smear campaign by devoting its entire staff to coverage of Marilyn Hagerty. They’ve been pumping out patronizing articles trying to explain her past; attempting to understand the forces that have allowed any person, especially a writer, this earnest to exist in 2012 AND cohabitate the same World Wide Web as the dark armies of the self-aware.

To me, Marilyn Hagerty, from this point forward shall be known as Saint Marilyn; in honor of her contributions to battling the hordes that seek to turn every denizen of the internet into an ironic, self-aware coward. The best and worst aspects of the internet are caused by the anonymity it provides. It is a place where cowards can anonymously spew hatred on their fellow man with no consequences, and a place where people can write earnest reviews about the Olive Garden.

Here’s to you, St. Marilyn, for your unashamed earnestness in an environment that is dumbfounded and too often attempts to capitalize on anti-self-aware heroes. They are only jealous of the innocence they lost – somewhere between the Dancing Baby and a review of the Olive Garden.

--------------------
From the embedded link:

"She writes five columns a week, and they are all this sort of this very direct, no-nonsense approach to what's going on," said Mike Jacobs, publisher of the newspaper. "She has her detractors, but she's very popular. She's a real asset to the Herald."

It's not the first thrill created by an Olive Garden opening in North Dakota. Back in 2008, when construction began on a location in Bismarck, it was front-page news in the Bismarck Tribune.

Hagerty said she was surprised by the reaction. She called her son, Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Hagerty, to ask what it meant to "go viral."

She acknowledged that some bloggers were making fun of her, but said she has received dozens of emails from people defending her, too.

Hagerty, whose late husband, Jack, was the longtime editor of the Herald, has been writing for the paper for six decades. She estimates she's done more than 1,500 restaurant reviews. And when she's found the cuisine to be terrible, she skips the review.

That's the way her bosses want it, she said.

"It's just sort of a way of life for me, to go out and eat," she said, adding that she pays for all her meals.

Tom Sietsema, food critic for The Washington Post and a Minnesota native, said Hagerty need not apologize for her choice of restaurants.

"Here's what I think. People poke fun of the Olive Garden. But, hey, if that's what the people there are talking about, that's theirs. She is covering news," Sietsema said.

He did have one complaint about the review, and it came with a chuckle. Marilyn didn't try any other entrees.

"She based this whole review on one dish, and she didn't even bother to have a lemonade. She did not do a thorough job," Sietsema said.

The restaurant could not have paid for such intense publicity, he added, calling this "Olive Garden's lucky day."

The same could be said for the Grand Forks Herald, Jacobs said.

"I'm delighted," Jacobs said. "We got a quarter of million hits on our website. Every modern newspaper editor dreams of such of thing. But you can never make it happen. It sort of happens on its own."

Heidi Schauer, spokeswoman for Olive Garden, said she read the review and a "lot of the other articles" that have followed.

"We're appreciative of the attention the restaurant is getting," she said. "Business is going well, and we're just excited for the Grand Forks community."

Why The Polling Shift?

Maybe... there hasn't been a shift in the polls so much in recent days, as the earlier polls (and pundits) overrated the president's popularity in the first place...

Performance counts, and no matter how you spin it: homes are still underwater, gas prices still up, and still some look ahead and have growing concerns of how exactly the country is going to finance the growing demographics eligible for benefits with an increasingly uncompetitive workforce...

Then there's the fact that if we look outward, better days do not appear to be on the horizon elsewhere in the world, in either the financial or military realms.

In short,
maybe people are simply getting more realistic about their immediate expectations -- as we've been encouraged to do, no? Artificially manufactured happiness and partisan spin only go so far in shielding people's eyes from the truth of what they see outside their doors this spring, in their immediate neighborhoods.

Some of us hate losing, despise mediocrity and "fixed" games.

Maybe things are picking up on Wall Street and in DC, but for the rest of us out here? Not so much... Perhaps the recent polls simply reflect that reality, minus any optimistic holiday uptick or winter burrowing isolation.

Get... Out... Now...

Where is the leadership, and "hope and change" when you really need it?

Please -- don't tell me this is the work of one renegade soldier. Like it or not, this is the work of America now. Nevermind the promises, and purple finger assurances to the women and men on how much better their lives can be with our Western ways...

We've simply "helped" enough.
We've shown the world how to kill our way to success, wealth and prosperity; peace for all. Or not.

Perhaps it's time we concentrated a bit more on our Christian origins in this country, and nevermind all the "we've got your back" promises.

Success ... it's really working out so well for America, in terms of money, reputation and character-building abroad.

Just remember, folks:
No tears, no complaints, no calls for mercy, when we Americans start experiencing -- here -- what we've done unto others over there...

It's not a game, people.
Try as we might, it's getting harder and harder to look away, and pretend that the (non) leadership and political gamesmanship has our country's -- and our soldiers' -- best interests at heart.

Dead children, unarmed elderly, and then desecration of the bodies...
Don't look away.
Think of 9-11: remember the children left orphaned that day, the officeworkers who jumped to their deaths ... and then ask yourself: "Haven't we had our fill of vengeance yet?" , "Is this really the new American way?" and especially, "Is continued military involvement over there really so essential to our safety here?"


It's costing us big these wars, and in the future, your children will pay for it. If you don't care about human life outside your own kind, calculate the monetary cost...

The only wise calculation is to get out. Yesterday.


ADDED: The president likes to insert his two little girls into political frays when it suits him, as in the recent attempts to pretend contraceptives are at risk of being banned.

I wonder: how will he respond if only he was able to envision his own daughters' brown faces on the corpses of those little Afghan girls stacked like cordwood and lit on fire after they were killed?

Bin Laden is dead.
We have no further business there.
This is why wise people counsel against never-ending wars, and rather a "get-in-get-out-get-the-job-done-and-go" style of fighting.

We're not Israel. We're America.
It's not our neighborhood, and we haven't land-grabbed nor pissed off our neighbors, nor cheated in obtaining nuclear weapons while promising to deny them to others who fear our continually destructive, ideological ways.

This isn't our fight anymore.

Nutrition for the Brain.

Two intelligent articles worth spending your time with...

Dahlia Lithwick reviews Univ. of Minn. Law Prof. Dale Carpenter's book on the Lawrence case background:

Whereas only a decade ago public-opinion polls showed Americans opposing gay marriage by a two-to-one margin, new polls show that slightly more than half of Americans are in favor of it. What explains the shift? The most commonly accepted account is what could be called the “Will & Grace” theory. A mainstream television comedy featuring openly gay characters demonstrated what social scientists have long known: the single most important indicator of one’s support for gay rights is whether one knows someone who is gay. In a pinch, it seems, a fellow on TV will do.

Of course, “Will & Grace” was never real. It replaced America’s unspoken nightmares about homosexual deviancy and dangers with a gorgeously lacquered world of lovable narcissists with enviable kitchenware. Yet the cultural logic was hard to resist. In order to counter centuries of vague horror, the real Lawrence and Garner had to be concealed behind a tasteful scrim.


Lawrence and Garner may have been reluctant to talk to civil-rights lawyers from the outset, and reluctant to become the face of gay sodomy in Texas, and yet this imperfect test case could be made over into something more than serviceable. Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights advocacy group, agreed to represent them as a means both of directly challenging Bowers v. Hardwick and of highlighting the consequences of criminalizing consensual gay sex. Sodomy laws were almost never enforced, but their very existence legitimatized a culture of homophobia, and as long as Bowers was still on the books gay-rights arguments would be stymied in the courts.

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.
...

Carpenter’s painstaking interviews establish that Garner and Lawrence not only weren’t having sex but were clothed (Lawrence was in his underwear, preparing for bed) and in separate rooms. This makes sense if you consider the timeline that night (Eubanks was ostensibly just slipping out to buy a soda) and the fact that there was yet another man still in the apartment. But the defendants’ accounts were never disclosed to the media. Nor was the existence of Lawrence’s longtime boyfriend, Jose Garcia. Requests by lawyers that the privacy of the two plaintiffs be respected meant that little attention was ever paid to their personal lives. Lawrence and Garner, for their part, were given strict instructions by the lawyers to shun the press. (Carpenter is careful throughout to show that none of the civil-rights lawyers lied or misrepresented the facts.) The litigation strategy, as the case made its way up through the trial courts and appeals courts, was deliberately framed to highlight the need to decriminalize homosexual conduct as a means of recognizing and legitimatizing same-sex “relationships” and “families.” In short, the legal issue was not that free societies must let drunken gay Texans have sex; it was that gay families around the country, in the words of one of the lawyers in the case, “are essentially just like everybody else.”
...

National gay-rights advocates certainly got a boost of confidence when, on the day of oral argument at the Supreme Court, someone in the audience whispered to Smith that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—one of two potentially “gettable” swing voters on the Court—had recently sent a baby gift to a former clerk and her same-sex partner. That’s how much sentiment at the Court had shifted. Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., the swing vote in the 1986 Bowers decision, was seventy-eight when the case reached the high court. Baffled, he told his clerk, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” That clerk, as it turns out, was gay. But by the time that Lawrence arrived to challenge Bowers the Justices had openly gay clerks, and prominent lawyers who were gay were arguing major business cases at the Court. Insofar as this case could be packaged as a fight for the dignity and respect of a class of successful clerks, advocates, and lawyers now well known to the Justices, it was much easier for Kennedy to conclude, as he did, that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
...

Does it matter that, in Justice Kennedy’s stirring meditation on privacy and dignity and the “manifold possibilities” of liberty, the truth of the non-relationship between the non-lovers John Lawrence and Tyron Garner was lost? Does it matter that our collective memory locks the two men together in a mythic embrace? The plaintiffs who seek redress at the Supreme Court are rarely as polished as the movie versions that the Court can bring itself to love. But it’s rare that they disappear altogether, the way Lawrence and Garner did.

At a press conference after the decision was announced, Lawrence read a brief prepared statement and Garner said nothing. Some advocates hoped that Garner might have a career as a gay-rights spokesman. After he gave a drunken speech at a black-tie dinner in the plaintiffs’ honor, that idea was scratched. The case is called Lawrence v. Texas. John Lawrence died last November. Almost no one took note. Garner died five years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine. When Lambda Legal proved unable to raise funds for a proper memorial or burial, Harris County cremated him and sent his ashes home to his family in a plastic bag. There was no funeral. ♦

and, (now that we're past the namecalling, hurt feelings, and personal presidential "support" of young activists), anybody up for a serious numerical analysis of what Ms. Fluke believes she and her friends are entitled to? If so, check this out. Well written, well argued, and ... honest.

Avik S. A. Roy:

There have been, of course, a lot of pixels spilt in the Great Contraception Debate of 2012. But I want to talk about an underappreciated aspect of the story: how the new federal rule forcing all insurers to cover birth control will dramatically inflate the price of contraceptives.

To review, in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that, under Obamacare, HHS was issuing a "final rule on preventive health services" that would "require most health insurance plans to cover preventive services for women including recommended contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible." (Emphasis added.)

Thus far, the big controversy has been about the fact that the HHS rule applies to some entities owned by religious institutions. And justly so. But another big problem with the rule is that it will enrich drug companies at the expense of people who want access to basic contraception.

Today, oral contraceptives are really cheap. At Wal-Mart, a one-month supply of Sprintec or Tri-Sprintec, manufactured by Barr Laboratories (a unit of Israeli drug giant Teva Pharmaceuticals) costs a grand total of $9. It profits the Obama Administration nothing to infringe on religious liberty for ideological reasons...but for $9?
...
The reason why birth control is so cheap is because there are no longer any patents covering the use of a combination of estrogen and progesterone for the purpose of oral contraception. The first Pill, Enovid, was made available in the U.S. in 1957. These hormones are very inexpensive to synthesize and manufacture.

Under the current system, drug companies have an incentive to compete on price. If you have health insurance that covers birth control today, your insurer is likely to charge you a higher co-pay for expensive, "branded" versions of birth control over cheaper, generic ones. If you don't have health insurance, and you're buying the Pill directly from the pharmacy at Wal-Mart, you have even more incentive to shop on price.

Under the new mandate, this price incentive disappears. Insurers will be required to pay for any and all oral contraceptives, without charging a co-pay, co-insurance, or a deductible. This "first dollar coverage" of oral contraception kills the incentive to shop based on price.
...
If you were surprised that PhRMA, the pharmaceutical trade group, backed Obamacare, now you can see why: the HHS contraception mandate alone will be a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for the pharma industry. If your health insurance plan allowed you to buy a television, of any price, without any cost-sharing on your part, would you buy a 13-inch CRT or a 60-inch flat screen?

This gets us to a broader question: how the definition of insurance has lost any meaning in the context of American health care. Insurance, traditionally defined, is meant to protect us from the risk of unexpectedly incurring catastrophic costs. Car insurance, for example, protects us against collisions, but doesn't cover our purchase of wiper fluid or gasoline. Homeowner's insurance doesn't cover the cost of air conditioning. And yet, now, we have a federal law that forces health insurance to cover something that is even cheaper than gasoline or air conditioning.

It's this perversion of the term "insurance" that helps highlight the weirdness of Democrats accusing Republicans of wanting to "ban" contraception. If a politician were to oppose a mandate forcing insurers to pay for gasoline or air conditioning, would he then be supporting a "ban" of these products?

The contraception contretemps is a case study in how thoughtless laws and policies drive up the cost of health care, making it less accessible to those who are most in need. The path to truly affordable health care involves moving in exactly the opposite direction: restoring the notion that health insurance is meant as protection for catastrophic costs, and letting people buy birth-control pills for themselves.

This is what's created when big government gets into bed with big business. Don't say you weren't warned...

Happy 80th Birthday...

to the best Man I know:

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland
Then maybe at the closing of your day
You will sit and watch the moon rise over Claddagh
Or see the sun go down on Galway Bay.

Just to hear again the ripple of a trout stream...
The women in the meadows making hay
Ah, to sit beside a turf fire in a cabin
And watch the barefoot gossoons at their play.

For the breezes blowing o’er the seas from Ireland
Are perfumed by the heather as they blow
And the women in the uplands diggin’ praties
Speak a language that the strangers do not know.

For the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways
They scorned us just for being what we are.
But they might as well go chasing after moonbeams...
Or light a penny candle from a star.

And if there is going to be a life hereafter
And somehow ... I am sure there’s going to be.
Then I pray my God will let me make my heaven...
In that dear land across the Irish Sea.

A Superior Sense of Snowe?

Nevermind the mixed metaphors and social niceties* that accompany a leave taking. Truth be told, that kind of political analysis takes away from the ... truth.

Jonathan Chait:
The retirement of Olympia Snowe, at the young (by senatorial standards) age of 65, has again dramatized the perilous condition of the Senate moderates. They have been scorned, marginalized, and hunted close to extinction. Yet the striking fact about Snowe’s career is that, far from being shunted to the sidelines, she has wielded, or been given the opportunity to wield, enormous power. She has used it, on the whole, quite badly.

When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.

This may sound sensible, even admirable, if you subscribe to the notion that securing bipartisan support for major bills is inherently valuable. But it’s worth noting that moderates like Snowe and their fans worship bipartisanship for reasons that have nothing to do with good government. A Republican representing a blue state, or a Democrat representing a red state, faces an inherently precarious situation. Often she will find the demands of her party’s national base pitted against those of her home state electorate. Olympia Snowe’s worst nightmare is to have to choose between infuriating Republicans in Washington and moderate voters in Maine. Creating legislation that passes by wide margins is not done out of a desire to bring bills closer into alignment with any abstract standard of good government, but to ensure her vote sits comfortably in the middle of a wide swath of support from both sides. In a farewell op-ed in the Washington Post, Snowe complains that centrism offers no electoral rewards. For her, though, such careful positioning was a matter of political self-preservation.

The New York Times report on her departure cast the central tension of her career as pitting “her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.” This is a common way people think about it – there are two poles, one representing the moderate’s principled convictions, and the other representing party loyalty. The negation of one implies the presence of the other. Snowe’s career proved that it’s entirely possible to steer clear of the party line without upholding any particular notion of the public good.

[Hattip: ~Unknown]

* Lotsa ... sugar, but little in way of substance.

Kinda Kinky.

"But please, keep trying to convince us that judgment of someone else's sex life is NOT the issue."

Take away the $$$ concerns, and see who cares to peer into Ms. Fluke's bedroom, or condemn her personal practices.

Women who pretend it's a bedroom issue, and not a pocketbook issue, are damaging the power of Choice. No good will come of this. Take care not to sell out the rights of all women, Ms. Fluke, for a handful of "free" magic pills...

Surely a Georgetown woman can figure out how to finance her monthly healthcare needs that truly aren't that expensive if you shop generic. What's next? Mandating insurance plans pay for basic monthly medical needs like sanitary napkins and tampons? So that young women mandated to pay "insurance" premiums get ... something back for their dollars?

It's silly, and the more we mandate, the more power we give to others to criticize our private healthcare choices. Keep out of others' pocketbooks, and they'll continue to keep out of your bedrooms. But make them pay for your choices, with no effective opt out, and you'll hear criticisms...

What's hard to figure out about that? Like Mitt said, contraception is still on the shelves, still accessible to all, men and women. Not threatened.

Just the entitlement mentality that well-off young women like Ms. Fluke are advocating for. Expect pushback from those who pay out-of-pocket for their own choices and medical needs, who expect Ms. Fluke to pay her own way too...

EQUAL, and all that...

Surely I'm not the only one who sees newfound media celebrity Sandra Fluke's face and thinks ... Meg Tilly. Or Jennifer Tilly. Or the empty-headed blankface character once played in a movie, was it that Boomer one -- The Big Chill?

Regardless, let me weigh in on the latest media "controversy" that has taken our attention away from the crumbling world economy, and the rush to war in Iran.

Should mandatory insurance plans cover basic medical needs? Is there any opt out -- for women, or men, who are celibate/ gay/ infertile/ or generally welcoming of children, so that they don't need this monthly "benefit" covered?

What ever happened to Choice?

Don't these women, and men, see that once you start asking other people to pay for your Choices, particularly if they conflict religiously -- mandate basic costs in the insurance pool, with mandated services covered by everybody's premium dollars -- then of course people will be peering into your bedroom, and criticizing how your preferences on their mandatorily-collected-and-redistributed dimes?

Selling out true Choice,
for a handful of magical pills?

Maybe the white, educated, soon-to-be wealthy women like Ms. Fluke feel entitled, and maybe the media once again will pander to fear, and choose to cover "lifestyle" issues over the meat-and-potatoes reasons people will vote:

It's about the entitlements, stupid.
The pocketbook issues, not the bedroom issues.

If you want Choice, and surely all women do, men too, even those who would not choose to purchase what you do, women must learn to accept responsibility and step up and pay for those Choices.

Birth control pills are not bank breakers. Their monthly cost is about that of a cable bill, I'm told. If you can't afford that, perhaps you can't afford to deal with the costs if the birth control fails either.

But society currently bails out those Choices as well.

Simply put, whether Limbaugh is being listened to, in his ongoing nastiness, isn't the point. Really, contraceptive freedom is no more endangered today than before the mandate was surreptitiously passed, and promises that conflict with other people's personal Choices were promised.

If Catholics like Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Sotomayor are listening, perhaps they too see the easy way out of the inevitable personal criticisms that will come, once too many Americans decide they liked it the old way: no mandate, but Choice to choose which insurance policies, if any, best suits their own private and personal medical needs.

By then,
I suspect Ms. Fluke will be in a financial position to better budget her monthly needs from her private paycheck, and she too will be able to afford the same sexual freedoms of women, and men, in past days have been able to Choose, or not to choose.

In fact, some say Freedom, true freedom that you're choosing and financing yourself, is the ultimate orgasm. We should all be free to find out for ourselves, no?

Please take care that your "choices" don't endanger mine is all.