The Supreme Court’s impending Obamacare overrule seems to have liberal legal types anxious lately.

In their recent lecture-disguised-as-an-op-ed “Health Care Economics 101 And The Supreme Court,” University of Michigan professors Jill Horwitz and Helen Levy argue that by intervening in the health insurance market, government has the power to make healthcare uniquely efficient and affordable.

Assuming that that’s correct—and it’s not—so what?

Horwitz and Levy contest that upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate could lead to forcing people to buy broccoli or cars, as several Supreme Court Justices suggested during oral arguments in April.  They write, “[T]here are significant economic differences between health care and the list of goods the amicus brief and some of the Justices cited…  [T]he market for health care is characterized by multiple and substantial departures from the assumptions of perfect competition…  [A]ppropriately structured government intervention—which in this case means guaranteed issue, community rating, and an individual mandate—can actually promote efficiency, solving the problem of market failure and making the pie bigger for everyone.”  read more »

Liberals conspired for two years to plant a web of technologically sophisticated, hard-to-defuse bombs across the country’s urban and suburban centers, explosives that sparked up here and there frightening people and were programmed to detonate four years later.

Conservative SWAT teams screamed and pleaded and begged the public not to let them do it, and tried to stop the impending carnage via arguments, campaigns, and ultimately elections.  Liberals just laughed at the chaos like the Joker.

Twenty-six states sought intervention from the Supreme Court, which may be on the verge of defusing the bombs, and if the Court doesn’t do it the next Republican Congress will.  The right inevitably will spread collateral damage as they storm into downtown areas cordoning off districts, deactivating trigger devices, resetting timers, and safely dismantling and clearing out every last bomb.

Naturally, the media are blaming conservatives for the mess they’re going to make clearing out the explosives liberals planted.

The bombs in question are, of course, the various provisions of Obamacare.  The disorder left by conservatives’ clearing them out constitutes “messy ripple effects” the mainstream media are warning about if conservatives get their way.  read more »

On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released disheartening statistics showing that the nation’s employers added many fewer than expected jobs to their payrolls in May.  The unemployment rate ticked up for the first time in almost a year from 8.1% to 8.2%.  The stock market suffered its worst day all year, and the dip in Friday’s Dow Jones Industrial average completely erased 2012’s gains.

Democrats’ constructive response to these dismal numbers was to accuse Republicans of being happy the economy was tanking.

Hey Democrats: Republicans don’t want the economy to fail, we want you to fail.  Hoping for the economy to sink is Democrats’ métier: Democrats do better when there’s more poverty and misery, because that gives them more of an opening to step in and “help,” and more of an impetus to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”  read more »

In the waning days of the Obama Dynasty, liberals have been rolling out graph after graph purporting to offer voters ironclad proof of one crackpot Keynesian notion after another.

Last year Nancy Pelosi’s office posted a risible graph showing that President Obama had increased the debt far less than George W. Bush and all other Republican presidents over the last thirty years.  It was later revealed that Pelosi’s office had mistakenly counted spending in Obama’s first year as Bush’s, and that based on debt as a percentage of GDP—the more relevant measure—Obama was the most profligate spender of the lot.  Fact-checking website PolitiFact awarded the graph a “Pants on Fire” rating, and for a while we didn’t hear any more crowing about Republicans outspending Democrats.  read more »

Far-right conservatives don’t protest far-left institutions the way leftists protest even center-left institutions.

Witness liberals’ uproar over the NATO summit held in Chicago earlier this week, at which protester turnout was augmented by Occupy Chicago sympathizers seeking to recapture the rancid magic of last fall’s anti-Wall Street movement.

What’s puzzling about the left’s agitation over the summit is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not exactly the John Birch Society.  The topics on the agenda this year included: removing international troops from Afghanistan by 2013, not intervening militarily in Syria, and rolling back austerity measures in France—all stances you’d think the protestors would be in love with.  Yet leftists marched and rioted and looted all weekend as though Mitt Romney had established Mormonism as the state religion of Illinois.

What is it about leftists and protesting?

Conservatives certainly protest a thing or two, now and then; witness the vigorous and effective Tea Party movement of the past three years.  But note the differences in how conservatives and leftists make their views known:  read more »

The media have been gasping in horror over claims that Mitt Romney engaged in gay bashing 50 years ago in high school, including one iconic incident in which he brutally hacked off a gay student’s bleached blond locks.

Except that said student, John Lauber, wasn’t openly gay.  When interviewed by the non-partisan Auto Weekly before the haircut story surfaced in the mainstream media, key witness Phillip Maxwell never even mentioned the supposedly traumatizing incident.

Maxwell, a Democrat, did offer that Romney was disciplined, focused, and smart, and would probably make a great president—points that somehow didn’t make it into the trim 5,500-word Post piece, no doubt due to space restrictions.  One tipoff that the Post may have been proffering a biased report was its admission that most of the five witnesses it interviewed were Democrats.  read more »

As the Republican Party settles on its 2012 presidential nominee, the Obama campaign is gearing up to implement a coherent twenty-seven-prong strategy to secure every conceivable voting bloc in the country.

The Obama 2012 website includes separate pages targeting:  read more »

In honor of National Nurses Week, I thought I’d pose the question: What are American nurses’ actual responsibilities these days?

Last week while researching a column on Obama’s pandering to various interest groups, I noticed that his campaign website featured a page, grouped with pages for various demographic categories, devoted to Nurses.  What was that about, I wondered?  Was Obama shoring up support for Obamacare with a key segment of the medical profession?

I’d like to suggest another reason: nurses are the new Teachers, the apocryphally underpaid, overburdened sirens of the service industry who make heroic sacrifices to nurture their tender underlings.

Not at the hospital I spent last week at, they didn’t.

After suffering a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung), I entered the emergency room of a midtown Manhattan hospital for surgery that involved suctioning excess air out of the space between my left lung and chest and allowing the lung to reinflate.  When it collapsed again two days later, doctors performed a more advanced surgery.  Two days with tubes in my chest, a day of observation, and I was home.  read more »

Up till now, the most accurate reporting the mainstream media have done on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case has been relaying the fact that Martin had Skittles and iced tea on him when he was shot.  At the rate they’re going, I won’t be surprised if it emerges that he was actually carrying Pop Rocks and Four Loko.

Here is a partial list of the wild, reckless, irresponsible claims the left-leaning media have made in the Martin-Zimmerman case, every one of which has been rendered highly suspect or outright false:

Zimmerman is a white racist who killed Martin because he was black.

Multiple acquaintances of Zimmerman’s, including black friends, testified to reporters that Zimmerman—who is half-Hispanic—isn’t racist.  Zimmerman comes from a multiracial family and, during the period when the shooting took place, was tutoring a black neighbor’s two young children and helping raise money for her all-black church.

Maybe Zimmerman wasn’t racist, but he racially profiled Martin and told a 911 dispatcher Martin looked suspicious because he was black.  Zimmerman also uttered a racial slur.  read more »

The Secret Service paid Vice President Joe Biden over $20,000 in rent last year for the privilege of residing on his property while protecting him.  Apparently one of its agents couldn’t cough up $50 to pay a Cartagenero hooker last week.  Coincidence?

Eleven Secret Service staff members were sent home from tony beach resort city Cartagena and put on administrative leave, ahead of President Obama’s arrival Saturday for the 6^th Summit of the Americas, for the indiscretion of having invited a squadron of prostitutes to their hotel rooms.  One of the hookers brought to the posh Hotel Caribe was upset over a lousy $47 an agent had failed to pay her.  She went to complain to the police, who forwarded her case to the State Department.

Several hotel waiters reported that the week before the scandal, agents had been drinking heavily and carousing at the Caribe.  The prostitution scandal broke the day before Obama was scheduled to arrive in South America, and took place just a few blocks from his hotel.  read more »