Holman Jenkins: Obamacare saved, still doomed

This was always the fatal problem of ObamaCare. Reality could not have instructed President Obama more plainly: The last thing we needed, in a country staggering under deficits and debt, a sluggish economy and an unaffordable entitlement structure, was a new Rube Goldberg entitlement. The last thing we needed was ObamaCare. The nation and the times were asking Mr. Obama to reform health care, not to double-down on everything wrong with the current system.

Even with this week's Court success, he failed—and it's not as if there wasn't a deep well of policy understanding in Washington that he could have drawn on to take the country in a better direction. Regardless of any Supreme Court ruling, reality will pass its own judgment on the Affordable Care Act and it won't be favorable.

Dave Burge (a.k.a. Iowahawk) says...

"The last time Democrats gloated this hard after a health care victory, they lost 60 House seats.

Spencerblog's prediction on Obamacare comes true. I mean, does this describe Obamacare or what?


[Boy:] On a hot summer night,
would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?
[Girl:] Will he offer me his mouth?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Girl:] Will he offer me his teeth?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Girl:] Will he offer me his jaws?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Girl:] Will he offer me his hunger?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Girl:] Again, will he offer me his hunger?
[Boy:] Yes!
[Girl:]And will he starve without me?
[Boy:] Yes!
[Girl:] And does he love me?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Girl:] Yes.
[Boy:] On a hot summer night,
would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?
[Girl:] Yes.
[Boy:] I bet you say that to all the boys!


For you dim bulbs...
Wolf = Government 
Red Roses = Obamacare 
Boy = Obama
Girl = The Public


Dig it!

Chief Justice John Roberts saves Obamacare by indirectly saying President Obama is liar. My print column is up.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, George Will believes Roberts ruling will provoke a backlash that will serve the cause of conservatism in the long run.

The health-care legislation’s expansion of the federal government’s purview has improved our civic health by rekindling interest in what this expansion threatens — the Framers’ design for limited government. Conservatives distraught about the survival of the individual mandate are missing the considerable consolation prize they won when the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional rationale for the mandate — Congress’s rationale — that was pregnant with rampant statism.

The case challenged the court to fashion a judicially administrable principle that limits Congress’s power to act on the mere pretense of regulating interstate commerce. At least Roberts got the court to embrace emphatic language rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale for penalizing the inactivity of not buying insurance:

UPDATE II:

UPDATE III: More interesting analysis from the Washington Times here...

Chucky the K attempts to explain yesterday's Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. In a nut shell, Chief Justice Roberts has a split personality.

Supreme Court upholds ACA, calls individual mandate a "tax" despite the fact that the Obama administration said it wasn't.

The mandate, though, has been declared unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. WOW! Weird.

UPDATE: Very busy collecting reactions from every corner of the economy from CEOs and constitutional professors to nurses, PAs and deck builders.

UPDATE II: A sampling...

From my Constitutional Scholar: "This is actually fascinating. It's a much more fragmented decision that I thought it would be. It's more of a plurality decision... The administration's assertion that this is a penalty and not a tax is semantics. Political speak. We don't want to say there is a tax in this. People don't call things what they are. Yes it is a tax, Although, the solicitor general didn't really argue it. And by the way (according to the court) Congress has the taxing authority to do just this."


From the CEO of a local insurance company: "I am surprised (at the decision) based on what you've been reading in the health related and political journal. From our standpoint, as a company, we haven't had a rooting interest. We'll just keep our head down and continue to do the things we're doing to meet the requirements of the law and better serve our customers.


From the CEO of a for-profit hospice company: "That's it. We're just closing up shop. We're out of business." (He was kidding.) "Yes, found it surprising (but) I don't have any negative reaction. As for the law in general, he said, "I'm wary. Who knows what the consequences that the this law. Are companies going to have a lot of employees with healthcare plans? Probably not. It (the law) is going to change healthcare delivery (in this country) pretty significantly."
But, he added, "I think rich people will be OK."

From a local Emergency Room Physicians Assistant: "I'm happy that it passed and has been  legitimized. In my practice see a lot of patients who don't have insurance. (The law will provide) more option in terms of getting coverage and make my job easier in terms of getting follow up medical care for my patients. Instead of coming in the ER that can go to their own provider. It's good for business. Insurance companies are going to be happy. Drug companies are going to be happy because there are going to be more customers.


From a local Emergency Room Nurse: "Disgusting. It's unconstitutional and the Supreme court is wrong... The whole goal of obamacome to eventually come up with a single payer system for the county. The goal is to enlarge government, to bankrupt the insurance industry. Roberts is Benedict Arnold and Obama should be impeached.

From a self-employed construction worker: "I'm flipping out, man. They (the Democrats and Obama) were first saying (the mandate is) not a tax... And frickin' Roberts goes in there and switches the whole thing." For the last several years he said his coverage is getting "worse and worse" while the cost is getting higher and higher.

"It's a bunch of bullcrap, a bunch of lies to make me buy something. And if I don't they're going to fine me."

While you're waiting for the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare check this out... It's scarrrrrrry... Almost as scary as government-mandated nanny insurance...



h/t Secret Squirrel's Nut House

The Supreme Court is scheduled to release it's ruling the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act tomorrow. Legal scholars from across the country have offered their predictions on how the court will rule.

Prof. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy offers his prediction here. I humbly disagree.

My own prediction can be found here.

Natalie Munroe, the Bucks County teacher who referred to her students as "ratlike," "dunderheads" and "utterly loathsome" on her personal blog last year has been fired.

"I've been set up," said Munro, sounding an awful lot like Marion Barry, the former crack-smoking mayor of Washington D.C.

Of course, her union has filed a grievance against the district on her behalf.

Why isn't my heart aching for her?

Walter Russell Mead explains the collusion between politicians, public sector union and Wall Street...

The biggest scam going in American financial life may be the collusive effort by Wall Street, the political class, and public sector unions to use union retirement money to prop up Wall Street speculation.

And nowhere is the problem bigger than right here...

Looking for examples? Head to Pennsylvania:

The Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System, for example, has more than 46 percent of its $26.3 billion in assets invested in riskier alternatives, including private equity funds and real estate. Over the last five years, the system paid roughly $1.35 billion in management fees – over 5 percent of the total value of the fund over a five-year period – while realizing an annualized return of just 3.6 percent, well below the 8 percent it needs to meet its financing requirements and also lagging behind the 4.9 percent median return for all public pension systems.

There’s bad news for Pennsylvania’s teachers, too:

The $51.4 billion Pennsylvania public schools pension system…which has 46 percent of its assets in alternatives, pays more than $500 million a year in fees. It has earned 3.9 percent annually since 2007.

Ugh. Read it all 

President Obama congratulated the NBA Champion Miami "Heats," during a trip to Florida.

Last week, Mitt Romney was in Pennsylvania and referred to a Wawa store as "Wawas." I would call it a draw but Mitt isn't from Pennsylvania and the Heat have been in the national news quite a bit lately.

Kinda' reminds of when our current Commander in Chief referred to a U.S. Marine as a "corpse" man. Those damn Ss! Let's blame the teleprompter and move on.

Heather Hess, 23, is accused of killing two-year-old David Miller at her home in Upper Chi last December.

Monday, the mother of three was not the distraught, tear-stained suspect that she was right after her arrest. She was cool and even a bit angry when she asserted that she has been "wrongly accused" and that police did an "inadequate" job investigating the boy's death. Is has a posse of supporters made up of friends and family who attend every court hearing wearing "Free Heather Hess" T-shirts. It's quite a sight.

My print column is up.

UPDATE: Mrs. Spencerblog sez that no responsible adult caring for a toddler would let that child sleep for 17.5 hours without thinking something was medically wrong with him. She's got a point.

President Obama is appalled and claiming he will be outspent by Mitt Romney in the upcoming campaign. What an outrage! A sitting president outspent by a mere challenger.

When he was outspending John McCain in 2008 by hundreds of millions of dollars, candidate Obama didn't seem so concerned. In that election, he broke his promise to take public financing and limit his own spending. Hope and Change was too important to risk by keeping mere political promises.

It's doubtful most voters will be too sympathetic about his current predicament.

The Smoking Gun reports that George Zimmerman passed a lie detector test during the original police investigation into Trayvon Martin's death.

Can't wait to see what MSNBC and Lawrence O'Donnell have to say about that. If cast of MSNBC were put on a lie detector it would explode.

Daniel Flynn explains the gay activists who expressed their contempt for Ronald Reagan and why they're wrong to hate him.  

Not all presidents are big fans. Hey, where's Nixon?

UPDATE: Is that you, Dick?

Charles Lane on the liberal hysteria on the soon to be released Supreme Court Obamacare ruling.

He does a nice job of putting the matter into historical context. During the 1930s and the New Deal, it was conservatives who got all hysterical about what the court allowed President Roosevelt and the federal government to do. Such an expansion of the government was unheard of and constitutionally suspect. But the court acquiesced.

Times change. Writes Lane:

In the 1930s, expanding federal power was innovative, promising. By blessing it, the court aligned itself with the wave of the future, in this country and globally. Ditto for the 1960s. Much of the legislation that resulted — from Social Security to the Voting Rights Act — was indeed progressive.

Today, however, there is nothing new about federal intervention — and much evidence from the past 70 years that big programs produce inefficiencies and unintended consequences.

The post-New Deal consensus about the scope of federal power has broken down amid national, and global, concern over the welfare state’s cost and intrusiveness — a sea change of which the tea party is but one manifestation. Obamacare itself, which has consistently polled badly, fueled that movement.

There is still a good chance that the court won't overturn Obamacare. But whether it does or not, concern about the size and scope of government won't disappear. It will continue to grow due to the building consensus that government is too big, too intrusive and too ineffective.

I was in Ohio over the weekend where, if you walk into a convenience store, you will see this...

Wine too!

UPDATE: You would think with such availability that hundreds of teenagers would be getting killed drinking and driving. At least, that is what we are told by defenders of the state Liquor Control Board.
In reality, that is not the case.

In 2010, Ohio had 43 underage drinking and driving fatalities. Pennsylvania, 53 - for a 1.5 per 100,000 rate, to Ohio's 1.3. So the next time some apparachik of the LCB tries to tell you that having well-compensated union workers in charge of dispensing alcohol to the public is important for safety reasons, you can tell them to save it for more gullible voters.

Incidentally and oddly, Ohio's underage drinkers seem to prefer Keystone Light over Buckeye state brews like Stroh's. My sources on this are impeccable.

From left to right gay rights activist Matty Hart, Philly publisher Mark Segal and philly shutterbug Zoe Strauss pose for photos after being invited to the White House for a LGT pride celebration.

After the photos on the internet were published the White House reacted.

"While the White House does not control the conduct of guests at receptions, we certainly expect that all attendees conduct themselves in a respectful manner. Most all do," Shin Inouye, a White House spokesman, said. "These individuals clearly did not. Behavior like this doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in the White House." 

Said Matty "The Honey Badger" Hart don't care:

“Yeah, f– Reagan, Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands. The man was in the White House as AIDS exploded, and he was happy to see plenty of gay men and queer people die. He was a murderous fool, and I have no problem saying so. Don’t invite me back. I don’t care."

According to Fox News, Segal is giving the portrait of George W. Bush a "thumbs up."

A third guest, Philadelphia publisher Mark Segal, was also photographed next to George W. Bush's portrait, but used a more tasteful thumbs-up in his picture. He told Philadelphia Magazine he has friends in the White House and "I'm not going to do something that could embarrass them."

Segal's expression looks to me more not like he is giving a "thumbs up" to Bush but simply gesturing  with his thumb with an expression of "Can you believe this guy was president?" He's entitled to his opinion, whatever it is, but it seems to me Fox gave him more credit for being "tasteful" than he probably deserves.

Some gay activists and others are criticizing their peers for acting so disrespectfully, understanding that it reflects negatively on their cause and maybe even the president's reelection chances.

"With friends like these," wrote law professor Jonathan Turley. He may be right. And I don't think this sort of stuff helps the cause either...

(Posted by Dannytheman)


H/T to Jerry Holbert. RIP Brian Terry!

Americans are losing faith in public schools. Nobody tell Larry Feinberg.

Mark Steyn goes off... on Obama's fake memoir, other fake memoir writers, and the silly people who celebrate them.

Courtesy of David Maraniss' new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama's identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram'pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack's "memoir" who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama's autobiography as "a symbol of young blackness" was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people's valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he "fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes."

It goes on and it's a pip.

Woman sues 11-year-old Little League catcher

She wants $150,000. Someone sign the kid quick. He must've a hell of an arm to do that much damage to this poor woman.

My Friday print column is up.

Spencerblog is not shocked.

Niall Ferguson explains how America's financial liabilities will burden our children and grandchildren.

As our economic difficulties have worsened, we voters have struggled to find the appropriate scapegoat. We blame the politicians whose hard lot it is to bring public finances under control. But we also like to blame bankers and financial markets, as if their reckless lending was to blame for our reckless borrowing. We bay for tougher regulation, though not of ourselves.

The president and CEO of Independence Blue Cross has one of the biggest jobs in the Delaware Valley and more than a passing interest in what the Supreme Court decides about Obamacare.

My Wednesday print column is up. More tomorrow.

On Fast and Furious, the Justice Department has been Slow and Infuriating when it comes to cooperating with a congressional investigation.

This gun walking operation to Mexico directly led to the death of U.S. Border Patrol agents and dozens of others.

Eric Holder has been threatened with a Contempt of Congress citation for withholding documents that will show what his office knew about the operation and when it knew it. 

Now, DOJ has put forth a very questionable claim of "executive privilege."

John Hinderaker says it's worse than that. 

Wait! I don't see a parachute.

Shocker! The beer distributors monopoly is against opening up the market.

Larry Kennedy, a longtime employee at Goff’s Suds & Soda in the Primos section of Upper Darby, said this legislation would “absolutely” put beer distributors out of business because it would be more convenient for customers to buy beer at supermarkets.

More convenience for customers? Can't have that.

The New Republic reports that when it comes to the presidential race Pennsylvania is in play.

Robert Samuelson says if anything is clear its that President Obama overreached in his healthcare overhaul and delayed the recovery.

WASHINGTON -- We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care "reform" a centerpiece of his first term. Ahead of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- and regardless of how the court decides -- it's clear that Obama overreached. His attempt to achieve universal health insurance coverage is a massive feat of social engineering that, by its sweeping nature, weakens the economic recovery and antagonizes millions of Americans.

UPDATE: Even Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economic advisor until recently, says the president should admit his mistake and apologize to the American people.

WOW!

UPDATE II: A former supporter of the individual mandate changes his mind.

Not your average happy Father's Day column.

With his de facto amnesty edict for almost one million undocumented immigrants, President Obama adds to a list of laws he chooses to ignore because "it's the right thing to do."

Victor Davis Hanson calls him on it.

Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon.

Read it all.

Bum in Texas finds $77,000 in cash and he may get to keep it. He says his first purchase would be a car. After spending a night in jail for being drunk, that's what he told a local TV station.

"I've been walking for so long; the first thing I want is a vehicle," he said.

Now wouldn't that make a nice drivers license photo? Spencerblog is rooting for him.

... How Obama Became Black

I think it had something to do with his parents, plus the rise of affirmative action, racial chic and his own ambitions. Pretty much the same way, Elizabeth Warren became Native American.

Heh.

Hat tip: Moonbattery and IMAO

In today's editorial the Daily Times avers that the Ku Klux Klan is unfit to pick up highway trash.

Spencerblog disagrees. Sort of.

We think the KKK is fit to pick up trash. Just as we think the members of Al Qaeda, the New Black Panther Party, prison chain gangs and employees of the EEOC are fit to pick up litter along our highways.

But we applaud the state of Georgia and its Adopt a Highway program in denying the KKK a sign boasting of its commitment to highway cleanliness. Government agencies should avoid being used by hate groups for their self promotion.

As for the EEOC, it may not be a hate group, but it is an awful government agency that has a record of being sued for discrimination more than any other federal agency.

Go figure.

Mike McQueary is as clueless as ever.

UPDATE: McQueary testified that he withheld some of the more explicit details of what he supposedly saw in the locker room shower that night from Joe Paterno and others afterward "out of embarrassment."

Question: Didn't he think for one minute that by being vague he was making it more difficult for more responsible people to investigate the matter?

It is, after all, one thing to say "I saw something that very much appeared to be sexual nature going on" and quite another to say, "I saw Jerry Sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower."

In any case, as he described the incident, McQueary faced a moment of truth. He needed to act to rescue that kid. But he didn't. He chickened out. He ran away.

Now he has sued Penn State for removing him from his coaching job, and claiming he didn't do anything wrong. He's either in serious denial or an complete imbecile. Maybe both.





 

Heh.



They must work for Eric Holder.

The Golden State being screwed by a Soviet-like political culture that refuses to face economic realities. Joel Klotkin explains...

California’s “progressive” approach has been enshrined in what is essentially a one-party state that is almost Soviet in its rigidity and inability to adapt to changing conditions. With conservatives, most businesses and taxpayer advocates marginalized, California politics has become the plaything of three powerful interest groups: public-sector unions, the Bay Area/Silicon Valley elite and the greens. Their agendas, largely unrestrained by serious opposition, have brought this great state to its knees.

California’s ruling troika has been melded by a combination of self-interest and a common ideology. Their ruling tenets center on support for an ever more intrusive, and expensive, state apparatus; the need to turn California into an Ecotopian green state; and a shared belief that the “genius” of Silicon Valley can pay for all of this.

It can't!

In the Sandusky case, Mike McQueary testifies. He sticks to his story. And I'm sticking to mine.

Ridley cops seeking robbery suspect.

Police, including a K-9 officer, searched unsuccessfully for the suspect. The cash register money tray was placed into evidence. Fresh fingerprints were also lifted from the door.
The suspect is between 25 and 30-years-old, with a shaved head, a beard and sideburns. He was wearing a white long-sleeve T-shirt, dark or gray pants, a baseball hat that was white on the front and a dark color on the back. He was carrying a white towel or rag on his left shoulder.

That oughta' do it.

Does Obama need a friend like Bill Clinton? asks the Daily Beast.

As Vito Corelone told Michael, "Keep your friends close, keep your frenemies closer." Or something like that.

The Pa. House bill on LCB privatization is on. Spencerblog puts the odds at any meaningful reform at 10 to 1 against. More tomorrow.

Ross Douthat on the new eugenics.

This progressive fascination with eugenics largely ended with World War II and the horrors wrought by National Socialism. But while the West has discarded the theory of the eugenics era, the practice urged by Fisher and others — the elimination or pre-emption, through careful reproductive planning, of the weaker members of the human species — has become a more realistic possibility than it ever was in the 1920s and ’30s.

Read it all.

UPDATE: Listen to Douthat talk about the issue on NPR here:

But will it actually sell that sugary dreck?

... soon. Wise up, people!

Upper Darby education activists take note: This is how they got more money to school programs in Wisconsin.

Places like the New Berlin school district, with its 4,700 students, have already reduced health-care costs by $2.3 million, retirement costs by $1.25 million, and other liabilities by $15 million. The district hired new staff, reduced class sizes, and added programs. The Shorewood district saved $537,000 simply by bidding out its health contract (previously run by a union outfit), and also reduced insurance premiums for its teachers.

Somehow, I don't expect the PSEA to support the sort of reforms the helped the Badger state get more money into the classroom.

Read all about it...  and be moved to tears.

UPDATE: Here too.

From James Taranto:

Theoretically, Obama was on the side of the government employee unions that were behind the unsuccessful attempt to oust Gov. Scott Walker, who last year signed legislation abolishing most of their corrupt "collective bargaining" arrangements. "Understand this," the future president declared in 2007: "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I'll will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."

In practice, Obama tweeted "present": "It's Election Day in Wisconsin tomorrow, and I'm standing by Tom Barrett. He'd make an outstanding governor." But he was only theoretically present. Not only was he standing, not walking; he was standing someplace far from Wisconsin. In fact, for all we know he was sitting at the time. We can't be sure he was even wearing shoes.

Heh. Read it all.

And now come the death threats...

UPDATE: Courage Rewarded.

Tim Logue does a nice job with his profile Sandusky prosecutor, Middletown's own Joe McGettigan.

My own sense of it is prosecuting Sandusky will be like dynamiting a fish in a barrel. Not a particularly tough case. Prosecuting Penn state officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz for perjury, now that's a tough case...

Is it that the Obama administration doesn't understand the constitution or is it that it just doesn't care? Because it's losses in court are starting to mount up.

Miss Pennsylvania has resigned her post alleging the Miss USA pageant is fixed and noting her disagreement with the inclusion of transgender contestants.

The pageant has vehemently denied the fix was in, but for the sake of all our Little Miss Sunshines, there  ought to be a serious and exhaustive investigation like during the Quiz Show scandal.

And is it too much to ask that contestants meet the DNA standards of being female? Surgery, massive hormone injections, and the removal and construction of new sex organs? Please!

Talk about "the fix" being in.

UPDATE: Here's one of those transgendered contestants.

OK, she's cute. Real cute. Hot, even. But still...

Ross Douthat does a nice balanced job explaining the recall failure in Wisconsin and the Push-me Pull-you of American politics.

Elsewhere there is some gloating and much whining.

Get a load of this guy:



Democracy didn't die. And neither did progressivism. Public employee unions went all-in in an hysterical fit of pique. They picked the wrong battle at the wrong time and lost big time. They'll continue to battle private-sector taxpayers in other states for years to come. But the writing is on the wall. The lavish benefits and early retirements are becoming a thing of the past.

UPDATE: from the WSJ:

And it's worth recalling how brutally they (the public-sector unions) fought. They occupied the state capital for weeks. They harassed GOP lawmakers and their families, tried to recall state Senators and defeat a conservative Supreme Court judge, while Democratic lawmakers abdicated their legislative duty by fleeing the state. They lost in the end because Mr. Walker and Republicans rode out the storm, passed their reforms, and are now able to show Wisconsin voters the beneficial results.

The pro-big spending education lobby is losing - not just in Upper Darby but - across the country. My print column is up.

Gov. Scott Walker defeats the Public Sector Unions and their recall attempt.

Public sector unions have reached their high water mark. Let the cleanup begin as the red ink recedes.

David Brooks: Our tolerance for debt is becoming intolerable. And its completely unsustainable.

Today we are living in an era of indebtedness. Over the past several years, society has oscillated ever more wildly though three debt-fueled bubbles. First, there was the dot-com bubble. Then, in 2008, the mortgage-finance bubble. Now, we are living in the fiscal bubble.

In this country, the federal government has borrowed more than $6 trillion in the last four years alone, trying to counteract the effects of the last two bubbles. States struggle with pension promises that should never have been made. Europe is on the verge of collapse because governments there can’t figure out how to deal with their debts. Nations around the globe have debt-to-G.D.P. ratios at or approaching 90 percent — the point at which growth slows and prosperity stalls.

It all goes back to the increase in the tolerance for debt. 

From the How Rich is This? file - a Wharton professor named Peter Cappelli knows why the unemployment rate is so high. It's because business owners are stupid and they don't know how to hire  people.

No mention of the high cost of a bad hire. No mention of litigious labor lawyers, the EEOC,  economic uncertainty, high taxes, over regulation, etc. It's just that business owners are "whiny" and too dumb to act in the interests of their own enterprise.

Yes, that must be it.

Maybe they should take a course from Professor Cappelli. Better yet, maybe he should start a business and show them how it's done.

Time for Professor Cappelli to go Back to School...

... in which I recall the youthful exuberance, passionate belief and silly thinking of my salad days. My print column is up.

I've got to see this...

Rob Long reviews Jonah Goldberg's "The Tyranny of Cliches." Writes Long:

Decades ago, during the 2012 Republican presidential primaries — it was decades ago, right? or does it just seem that way? — Newt Gingrich made his bones with a simple strategy.
He dissented from the premise of the question.
Some smug television news personality would ooze out a question — cradled, inevitably, in left-wing assumptions — and Newt would blast away at the foundation of the question itself, the superficiality of the process, and often the right of the questioner to be there in the first place.
It was “dials up,” as campaign strategists say, referring to the focus group reactions. People eat that stuff up — I know I did — and a lot of us were halfway to the post office with our checks made out to “Gingrich 2012” before we slowed down and asked ourselves, “Dude, c’mon. Newt?”

And it gets even better. If Goldberg's book is as clever as this review in exploding liberal shibboleths, it will be a best seller. Cheers!

Big deal!

The Save Upper Darby Arts campaign goes from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. Today's  print column was not well received by SUDA founder Colleen Kennedy, who is demanding an apology and a retraction.

Ms. Kennedy accuses me of making fun of a little girl because of her disability. She is wrong about this as, I think, any fair reading of my column will make clear.

In an email to my editor, Ms. Kennedy writes:

A lot of people claim Mr. Spencer's work to be satirical in nature, a jab to help boost awareness about our cause, but let me ask you this. Would Tina Fey, one of the best satirists of our generation, ever use a little girl's disabilities to get her point across? No, she wouldn't. What would Brad Schoener, a hero and mentor to both of us, say to such cheap ploys for attention? I know for a fact that he'd be pretty darn upset. I'm really at a loss for words for the level of classlessness that Mr. Spencer committed to tonight.

There was no satire meant in today's column and only a fool would think so. My criticisms of SUDA are sincere and not meant to "boost awareness" of their "cause."

As for just who is using "cheap ploys" for attention, what could be more clear? It is SUDA that is using Katie for this purpose. It was Ms. Kennedy who challenged me to watch the video featuring Katie as the symbol for heartless cuts being made in the Upper Darby School District.

Katie is obviously a neat kid with a winning personality but she is just as obviously being used by Ms. Kennedy and her zealous band to promote their cause. Sanctimoniously claiming that their demands are "for the kids" is standard operating procedure in the education funding wars.

In this case, given the budget constraints in Upper Darby, administrators came up with rather a modest plan that has been characterized by its critics as "dangerous" and putting kids "at risk." The charge is ludicrous and deserves to be pointed out as such. SUDA activists seek a public opinion advantage over these heartless administrators by tugging at the heartstrings of district residents (and our readers) with an assortment of videos meant to rally public opinion to their point of view.

Ms. Kennedy is wrong about something else. Such tactics have, in fact, been satirized by Ms. Fey and other SNL cast members for decades. In so doing the satirists are NOT making fun of the kids, they are making fun of the grown-ups who attempt to exploit children for their own ideological or political purposes.

But then Ms. Kennedy wouldn't know satire from Sartre.

You will find her ridiculous e-mail below in it's entirety (except of the phone number she left for Phil to call her back). Read it (and my column) and make up your own minds about who is pathetically (and bathetically) exploiting whom.

Mr. Heron,

I got a Google Alert for a new article about our movement about an hour ago. I read the article, and then I sat, completely enraged, for about 40 minutes...not because of the nasty things that were said about me, but because of your colleague's use of a child with disabilities as a ploy for his childish games to gain readership. 

I'm writing to you because you are a reasonable gentleman, and I know that not only through your coverage of our movement, but through years of reading your pieces and through what I hear from older community members. What Mr. Spencer did by writing the article was a proverbial kick in the stomach to a girl with only one leg. Katie is absolutely one of the most inspirational and strong kids I have ever met. I've spent years around some amazing kids, from my work as a co-founder of the Brad Schoener Music Marathon, to many other opportunities I've had over my years in Upper Darby Township. Katie's strength and humility brings tears to my eyes, and she talked openly with my colleagues on camera about the ways that other kids tease and bully her for having one leg. She takes it all in stride every day, because of what her teacher, Mr. Dunne, has shown her. He not only has helped her to learn how to walk up steps, but to take pride in herself and become a leading athlete in her elementary school. I think you understand what these programs mean to these kids, and I'm trying to do the very best that I can (as an inexperienced young adult) to be an advocate. I shouldn't be ridiculed for that, but more important, Katie's innocence should not be taken away by an adult, all for the sake of entertainment to some readers.

Among all my other duties with Save Upper Darby Arts, I have to call Katie's parents now, first thing tomorrow morning, to notify them that their child was made fun of by a news reporter. We can go back and forth, but her disability was trivialized, and that is something that deeply upsets me, and will absolutely upset the parents and readers tomorrow, when they read it. 

I demand not only a retraction from Mr. Spencer for his comments, but an apology on the phone from him to Katie's parents, and a genuine promise from him to at the very least, treat the children of this community with dignity and respect. I could care less about Mr. Spencer's insults of me, because they're ridiculous and completely unfounded at best, but he will not use the children of this township as sources for attack. If these three things do not occur, our organization is going have to sit down and think seriously about whether or not this paper's editorial standards are worthy enough for the serious nature of our cause. (And that hurts me to say, because everyone else on your staff has absolutely treated us and their work with absolute dignity, but a line has been crossed, and something needs to be done.)

A lot of people claim Mr. Spencer's work to be satirical in nature, a jab to help boost awareness about our cause, but let me ask you this. Would Tina Fey, one of the best satirists of our generation, ever use a little girl's disabilities to get her point across? No, she wouldn't. What would Brad Schoener, a hero and mentor to both of us, say to such cheap ploys for attention? I know for a fact that he'd be pretty darn upset. I'm really at a loss for words for the level of classlessness that Mr. Spencer committed to tonight.

Please feel free to drop me a call tomorrow, so we can discuss matters. As you can imagine, I am very distraught over this recent development, and I want things to be rectified as soon as possible, so we can get back to the job at hand: telling the news. I think above all else, we need to be concerned about the safety and emotional welfare of the kids at the heart of it all, because what really matters more than that?...

Colleen KennedyFounder of Save Upper Darby Arts

Concerning that recall vote in Wisconsin, it looks like the Democrats and their public employee union supporters are in big trouble.

James Taranto nails it:

Public-sector collective bargaining is an inherently corrupt process. Unions spend their members' dues to help elect the politicians who sit on the other side of the bargaining table. Thus, the very officeholders who are supposed to be representing the interests of the taxpayer are often beholden to their putative adversaries, whom they assist in looting the public treasury.