It’s Monday, April 2nd, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the first edition of April, the reality of the individual insurance mandate, courtesy of Chris Conover writing in The Enterprise Blog….

Alito’s correct: The individual mandate was never about saving money 

 

According to Justice Ginsburg, the central justification for the individual mandate is to prevent “free riding” by the uninsured, who allegedly impose a cost of more than $1,000 apiece on other health insurance market participants. But the dirty little secret of American healthcare is that the mandate wouldn’t save taxpayers a dime. Why? Because the tax subsidies for people with health insurance are bigger than the unpaid medical bills left behind by the uninsured.

I reported earlier that, on average, uninsured Americans in 2011 generated $1,078 apiece in uncompensated care losses. With 49.9 million uninsured (A bogus figure to begin with; the actual number is less than 14 million), this amounted to $53.8 billion last year. Leave aside the fact that the mandate will not apply to everyone (e.g., those qualifying for Medicaid) and that careful analysis has shown that the actual amount of uncompensated care that would be averted through a mandate is more likely to be 30% of the total amount of uncompensated care attributable to the uninsured. As the following analysis shows, even if we generously assume that the mandate will eliminate all uncompensated care losses for the uninsured, it will not save taxpayers a single penny!

It turns out that three quarters of the uncompensated care generated by those without coverage is financed by taxpayers, or about $728 per uninsured in 2011. However, for the 169 million Americans with employer-based health plans, federal and state taxpayers finance an average of $1,890 apiece for their health insurance coverage. That is, Uncle Sam (and states) encourages people to buy employer-provided health insurance by not taxing it, a subsidy that amounts to about 36% of premiums for employer-provided family coverage. The $1,890 represents the tax savings provided to those who purchase health insurance rather than receive the same dollar amount in cash wages. In short, most privately insured Americans cost the U.S. taxpayer at least $1,100 more apiece than their uninsured counterparts! So who is doing the free riding here? Admittedly, only three quarters of the uninsured are workers or their dependents, so not all of the uninsured would qualify for the subsidies for employer-sponsored coverage if they obtained insurance. But even taking this into account, this simple analysis demonstrates that it would cost taxpayers about $700 more per uninsured if this “free riding” ended than if it continued.* Note that I am only referring to existing tax subsidies for employer-provided health insurance under current law. If we took into account the much more lavish subsidies that will be provided to newly covered individuals under the Affordable Care Act, the figure would be much higher than $700 per previously uninsured individual.

But what about the one quarter of uncompensated care costs not paid by taxpayers? This amounts to $250 per uninsured and purportedly is borne by those with private health insurance. Subtracting this amount from $700 doesn’t change the conclusion that the typical insured individual costs society/taxpayers more in subsidies than the typical uninsured individual. Nevertheless, it does seem unfair that those with private insurance should bear this burden. But how big is this burden in actuality? As I demonstrated yesterday, cost-shifting by all the uninsured adds about 20 cents a day to the premiums of the average person with private health insurance coverage. But when we exclude all the uninsured individuals who will not be affected by the mandate, the maximum increase in premiums that might be averted by the mandate is only 6 cents a day, or $23 a year! Thus, the actual burden on the average privately insured family that the mandate will avert is less than $100 annually—far, far below the mythical $1,000 figure repeatedly cited this week by Justice Ginsburg.

But using the same logic, the $700 in added taxpayer spending per uninsured would, as a very rough approximation, translate into an added cost of $175 in the taxes paid per privately insured individual—or about $700 per privately insured family of four (this isn’t quite fair, since it does not account for taxpayers with Medicare and Medicaid, but in the grand scheme of things, the amount of taxes paid by such individuals is not that large). Thus, even the privately insured (the group supposedly “burdened” by the free riding of uninsured patients) would pay more if “free riding” were eliminated through an individual mandate than if it continued!

So if the mandate was not about saving money, what was it about? It was about forcing predominantly young people, whose annual healthcare costs are about $850 a year, to purchase coverage costing many thousands of dollars. The mandate was about forcing these individuals to pay for the care of other people (older and sicker) rather than their own care, a point that Justice Alito seems to have grasped quite astutely. But if that’s true, then the individual mandate had nothing to do with a legitimate exercise of the Commerce Clause, but instead was an end-around Congress’s taxing powers. The mandate is a hidden tax cloaked in the guise of making people responsible for their own health bills.

This is the knotty question now facing the Supreme Court. The mandate was a way of avoiding Congress having to impose additional taxes of $360 billion on Americans. The designers of Obamacare were well aware that if the true costs of the bill were accurately identified and taxes transparently increased to cover them, the public never would have supported health reform. (Was there ever a time they did?) This is why they resorted to all manner of smoke and mirrors to hide the true costs and to reliance on hidden taxes such as the individual mandate to further hide from view the burden this plan would impose on Americans. To their credit, the American public appears not to have been fooled. Since the law was passed nearly two year ago, RealClearPolitics.com has tracked more than 100 different polls on the issue. With the exception of one lone CBS/New York Times poll conducted in January 2011, every single poll has shown that those favoring repeal of the health law outnumber those who oppose repeal by margins that in some polls have reached as high as 31 percent. In all but 8 polls, an absolute majority of those surveyed favored repeal. In light of the reality that the individual mandate would actually increase rather than reduce the burden posed by today’s uninsured, it will be interesting to see what the Court ultimately decides about this contentious mandate.

But frankly, polling data on ObamaScare should have no place in the SCOTUS decision; neither should the facts belying the lies promulgated regarding its mythical economic benefits.  A requirement for individuals to purchase health insurance from private companies is unconstitutional, end of argument.

The President and the Dimocratic leadership could, could, mind you, have constructed a health care reform bill which fell within the limits of the powers granted Congress and the President by the Constitution; but it would have required (a) massive new tax increases to pay for it, and (b) a complete and obvious takeover of the entire healthcare system by the federal government.

But they lacked the political courage, intestinal fortitude, veracity and, most importantly, public support for the honest approach, so they went with Plan “A”, hoping a combination of outright lies, oral obfuscation and overwhelming MSM support would carry the day.

And frankly, they’re probably more surprised its come to this than anyone.

In a related item, Jonah Goldberg’s thoughts on the subject courtesy of National Review Online:

Conservative interpretations

It’s not the Supreme Court’s job to design our health-care system

 

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and other ingredients of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” Why, she asked toward the end of three days of hearings, shouldn’t the court keep the good stuff in Obamacare and just dump the unconstitutional bits?

The court, she explained, is presented with “a choice between a wrecking operation . . .  or a salvage job. And the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything.”

“Conservative” is a funny word. It can mean lots of different things. It reminds me of that line from G. K. Chesterton about the word “good.” “The word ‘good’ has many meanings,” he observed. “For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

Conservative can mean cautious in temperament — a man who wears belts and suspenders. Similarly, it sometimes suggests someone who’s averse to change. It can also refer to the political ideology or philosophy founded by Edmund Burke and popularized and Americanized by people like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and George Will. Things can get complicated because these different meanings can overlap. Many strident liberals can have conservative temperaments, and many philosophical conservatives can have private lives that make a brothel during Fleet Week seem like a retirement-home chess club. Conservatives in America love the free market, which is the greatest source of change in human history. Liberals, alleged lovers of change and “progress,” often champion an agenda dedicated to preserving the past. Just consider how much of the Democratic party’s rhetoric is dedicated to preserving a policy regime implemented by Franklin Roosevelt nearly 80 years ago.

You can also be conservative with respect to a given institution while being un-conservative in every other respect. The most ardent Communists in the Chinese or Cuban politburos are often described as “conservatives.” The same holds true for every left-wing institution in America: Someone has to be the “conservative” at PETA or Planned Parenthood — i.e., the person who is risk-averse when it comes to scarce resources or the group’s reputation.

Anyway, sometimes people like to play games with the indeterminacy of the word “conservative” in order to sell a liberal agenda (and in fairness, conservatives often do the same thing with “progressive”).

Which brings us back to Justice Ginsburg. She would have people believe that if the Court rules the individual mandate unconstitutional, the conservative thing to do would be to preserve the rest of Obamacare. She suggests that “wrecking” the whole thing would be an act of judicial activism, while “salvaging” it would be an act of conservation.

In other words, she’s playing games with the word. The Supreme Court is supposed to be a conservative institution in that it serves as a backstop for the excesses of the other branches. Political conservatives, by extension, argue that the court should defer to Congress, the most democratic branch, when constitutional issues are not at stake. Hence, liberals contend, a “conservative” court should take a scalpel to Obamacare, not an axe.

It sounds reasonable, but it isn’t. As Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Roberts noted, if the court simply removes the requirement that everyone buy health insurance, they are left with the task of essentially rewriting the act. That prospect caused Justice Scalia to exclaim, “What happened to the Eighth Amendment [barring cruel and unusual punishment]? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? . . . Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?”

The conservative thing to do — and I don’t mean politically conservative — is to send the whole thing back to Congress and have it done right. Leaving aside the fact that Obamacare largely falls apart if you remove the mandate, it’s not the Supreme Court’s job to design our health-care system from the scraps Congress dumps in its lap. What Ginsburg proposes is akin to a student handing in a sloppy, error-filled term paper, and the professor rewriting it so as to give the student an A.

Some liberals note that one option Congress could pursue would be to pass a far more left-wing piece of legislation that mandates a single-payer system, i.e., socialized medicine. That would — or at least could — be constitutional. And that’s true: Congress could do that, and I’m sure Justice Ginsburg would be pleased if it did. And if that happened, the right and conservative thing for the court to do would be to let it happen.

But Congressional Dimocrats didn’t….and now they can’t.  Seriously, does anyone doubt were such a plan possible Pelosi and Reid would have passed it in a New York minute when Dimocrats enjoyed unassailable majorities in both the House and Senate?  Of course they would have; but they couldn’t….because they didn’t have the support then, even within their own party.  And now, the party’s over.

Speaking of the Overreach of the Century is giving Progressives across the country pause to ponder, as this next item by Molly Ball in The Atlantic details:

If Obamacare Is Overturned, Can Democrats Recover?

A Supreme Court rejection of the president’s signature domestic accomplishment would deal a severe, long-lasting blow to the progressive ideal.

 

There’s a reason liberals are freaking out about the Supreme Court this week.

If part or all of the health-care reform law is thrown out, a central goal of the progressive project will have been dealt a possibly fatal setback. The dream of universal health care — pursued for decades, frustrated again and again — that seemed finally to have come to fruition in 2009 will have been derailed before it could even be fully implemented. For liberals and their allies, it will be a crushing blow from which there is no easily foreseeable recovery.

“It would be a particularly bitter pill to swallow to get [health-care reform] all the way through the legislative process and, because of the partisan leanings of five people who happen to be justices of the Supreme Court, not get universal health care,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former Obama administration adviser who helped see the bill through Congress. (Note in Tanden’s warped world, a SCOTUS finding that  ObamaScare is unconstitutional will have had nothing to do with the bill’s contents and everything to do with the “partisan leanings of five people who happen to be justices of the Supreme Court”.

Tanden does not believe the whole bill will be thrown out, but based on the questioning and debate in this week’s oral arguments, she sees parts of the law, such as the insurance mandate, in unexpected peril from the court’s conservative wing.

If the entire law gets thrown out, she said, “I think my head would explode.” (To borrow a phrase from Dickens, Tanden should do it quickly and decrease the surplus population!) But even if only the mandate is rejected, the fundamental achievement of the legislation would change, she said: “Without the mandate, I don’t believe it is a universal health-care bill.”

For Republicans, a court decision invalidating part or all of Obamacare would be a powerful talking point, cited as a stinging rejection of the president’s agenda and proof that Obama — a former constitutional law professor — doesn’t understand or respect the Constitution, a cherished belief of the Tea Party. (Res ipsa loquitur, baby!) In policy terms, too, the president’s central domestic accomplishment would suddenly cease to exist or else limp forward in badly maimed form.

“If the whole thing goes down, I think it’s pretty tough for the president,” said Howard Dean, the physician and former Democratic National Committee chairman. “I think he’s probably going to win reelection anyway, but does he want to start all over again?” On the heels of a court rejection, he said, “I don’t think [health-care reform] could come back. Not the whole thing.” (Dean, however, believes the mandate isn’t necessary and could be removed from the law without consequence.) (Yeah….Howard Dean….

….Mr. Credibility.)

Opponents of the law agree: This is universal health care’s Waterloo. “This was their one big shot. They certainly thought so. They pulled out all the stops,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and president of the American Action Forum, which has filed court briefs in opposition to the health-care law.

Already, he said, the law was on shaky ground. “The vast public rejection of the law, its broad unpopularity, the fact that so many Republicans were elected on it in 2010, the fact that so many states are rejecting it — really, it wasn’t looking strong,” he said.

Through all that, liberals took solace in the fact that at least the legislation was on the books, moving inexorably toward implementation; eventually, they were convinced, Americans would grow used to the new system, come to depend on it, and become unable to imagine life without it. (That’s “depend”, spelled e-n-s-l-a-v-e-d.)

“But it’s not done yet,” Holtz-Eakin said. “And if they overturn it, it will not be done. In my lifetime, it doesn’t get done. Nothing like this.”

Liberals were shocked by the justices’ willingness to call into question the legal basis for not only the insurance mandate included in the reform law, but less controversial concepts such as the federal government’s ability to dictate the terms of Medicaid grants to the states.

“I was baffled the court would even hear that argument, let alone take it seriously,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of the pro-reform Families USA and a health-care activist for three decades. If that goes, federal programs to improve education, the environment, transportation. and more could suddenly be under fire, he said — creating the potential for the wholesale gutting of the New Deal and the welfare state. (NOW we’re talkin’!)

In political terms, a rejection of all or part of the Affordable Care Act would dramatically reshape the playing field for the 2012 general election. With the law in place, the health-care debate is a referendum on an existing (if not fully implemented) piece of legislation that remains marginally unpopular and poorly understood. (“Marginally”….you know, as in 2-1 against….like the Wizards are a marginally poor basketball team!) Mitt Romney, Obama’s likely Republican opponent, has vowed to repeal the law, although his argument against it is muddied by his past support of insurance mandates. Nonetheless, by keeping the focus on Obamacare’s perceived shortcomings, he would be making primarily a negative argument.

With Obamacare partly or wholly out of the picture, however, the terrain would shift back to a battle of rival ideas, starting more or less from scratch. Romney has proposed a rather boilerplate array of standard GOP fixes to health care, including tax incentives, pushing responsibility to the states, and tort reform. Critics say such proposals would fall far short of covering all Americans, but Obama would have to come up with an argument for some kind of fix that wasn’t the one he’d already tried to enact and seen shot down by the court.

How Obama would react to the court’s rejection of his signature legislation is an open question. The official line from the White House is that there is no Plan B. (Hell bells!  The political coward punted on formulating Plan A!) “There is no contingency plan that’s in place,” Josh Earnest, the deputy White House press secretary, said during Wednesday’s press briefing. “We’re focused on implementing the law, and we are confident that the law is constitutional.”

He did, however, offer something of a foreshadowing of the political debate that might lie ahead. “There will be a robust debate between the president’s record on health-care reform and the critics who think that we should go back to a system in which insurance companies wield outsized power and can put lifetime caps on your benefits or can kick you off your health insurance coverage if you get sick, or can discriminate against you if you have a preexisting condition,” Earnest said. “The president doesn’t believe that we should go back to the status quo.” (He’s simply lacks the political courage to suggest an alternative course of action.)

Karl Rove, the Republican strategist and commentator, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column Thursday that there would be two approaches available to Obama post-court rejection. “Mr. Obama could announce he respects the court’s decision and pledge to fashion a bipartisan solution to provide access to affordable health-care insurance for all Americans,” Rove wrote. “This would help his re-election by repositioning him back in the political center …. But he could instead lash out against the court’s majority — as he did in the Citizens United case upholding free speech for corporations — and insist on an even larger role in health care for Washington.”

Liberals generally hope for the latter. Many are convinced that if Obamacare is thrown out, Democrats will be thrown into a fury and energized, while the electorate as a whole won’t be angry at Obama — they’ll be angry at the court and Republicans.

“I fear for the court if a 5-4 decision [rejecting health care] comes in the wake of Citizens United and still reeling from Bush v. Gore,” Tanden said. “People already believe the court is a political actor, and when you add to that a decision where they strike at the heart of the president’s single biggest domestic-policy accomplishment a few short months before the election in what seems to be a very partisan decision, the court is undermining its own standing.” (Tanden lies: it was the Administration itself that determined the timing of the SCOTUS hearing and decision when, instead of seeking a prolonged legal fight, Team Tick-Tock in September 2011 asked SCOTUS to review the case, saying it was “pleased” with the court agreeing to do so.)

Millions of Americans are already benefiting from the law, including an estimated 2.5 million young adults who get to stay on their parents’ health insurance longer and senior citizens who get subsidies to fill the “doughnut hole” Medicare coverage gap, noted Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the pro-reform Protect Your Care. “The times that Republicans have gotten into trouble with health care are when they try to take stuff away from people. We saw it most recently with contraception,” Vale said. (Yeah….all those Roman Catholics are sure as hell energized against the GOP!) “It will be an interesting campaign situation from June to November where instead of running a campaign to educate people about the benefits they get from the law, you’re campaigning for six months on what Republicans are trying to take away from you.”

Democratic strategist Karen Finney agreed: “I would run ads every day highlighting another individual, another family, another small business that’s going to lose their health care,” she said. “Keep the focus where it should be. This was originally about solving a problem that’s a real problem in this country.”

Nonetheless, for all their attempts to look on the bright side of a court rejection, proponents of reform are not eager for that outcome. “Are there upsides, things we can do, ways we can campaign on it? Sure. But obviously, it’s a huge setback to have five judges overturning years and years of health-care policy work that people put into this,” Vale said. (So what if the end-result was completely unconstitutional; a lot of people put a lot of time and effort in this thing!)

“I’ve always thought this was a long fight,” said Dean. “Look, this has been going on for 40 years. It’s a tough issue, and the Republicans clearly outmaneuvered the Democrats in this instance. We’ll see what happens.” In the battle for universal health care, Dean added, “We’ve had defeats before, we’ll have defeats again. This may be another one.”

No Howie, through a combination of political miscalculation, deliberate misrepresentation and unmitigated hubris Dimocrats outmaneuvered themselves.  Res ipsa loquitur: the fact The Obamao’s signature legislation ended up in the court system to begin with speaks for itself.

Next up, Charles Hurt, courtesy of Speed Mach and The Washington Times, describes what can only be termed a….

Brutal week for Obama, the worst of his presidency

 

The past seven brutal days will go down as one of the worst weeks in history for a sitting president. It certainly has been, without any doubt, the worst week yet for President Obama.

Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himself abroad, humiliate himself here at home, see his credentials for being elected so severely undermined that it raises startling questions about whether he should have been elected in the first place — let alone be re-elected later this year.

Consider:

• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.

Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.

• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.

• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he was.

By most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.

• Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to hide behind.

So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.

It was as if you lumped Hurricane Katrina and the Abu Ghraib abuses into one week for George W. Bush. And added on top of that the time he oddly groped German Chancellor Angela Merkel and got caught cursing on a hot mic. Even then, it wouldn’t be as bad as Mr. Obama’s week. You would probably also have to toss in the time Mr. Bush’s father threw up into the lap of Japan’s prime minister. Only then might we be approaching how bad a week it was for Mr. Obama.

Not that you will see any trace of embarrassment in the face of Mr. Obama. He has mastered the high political art of shamelessness, wearing it smugly and cockily. Kind of like a hoodie.

You know….sorta like B. Hussein and the….

….terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week….except the rest of America gets to live it with him.

And since we’re on the subject of America living with the consequences of Team Tick-Tock’s ineptitude, SecDef is trying to pin the ass’s tail on the elephant:

Defense secretary Panetta blasts defense budget cuts in visit to ship off California coast

 

We don’t know what’s worse; the Administration’s efforts to emasculate the American Military….or the complicity of senior leadership in the crime.

Moving on, here’s the “Pot Calling the Kettle Black” segment, brought to us today by James Taranto and the predictably hypocritical histrionics of the sheltered class:

Good Fences Make Bad People

 

If you live in a gated community, Rich Benjamin doesn’t think much of you. A fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank, Benjamin spent two years living in various gated communities for research on his new book, “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.” Here’s what he found:

No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls. A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.

Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.

Except for the firearms, what Benjamin describes sounds a lot like the way your humble columnist lives–in a community of about 300 homes with 24-hour-a-day security that prevents outsiders from entering without permission. It is located in New York City and is usually referred to not as a gated community but as a doorman apartment building.

We don’t know where or how Benjamin usually lives, but we’ll bet a lot of the editors who worked on his Times op-ed–not to mention his New York-based publisher, Hyperion–also live in doorman apartment buildings. And we’ll bet a Benjamin that they’re parochial enough that it never occurred to them to question their own assumption that they’re better than people who live in gated communities in Middle America.

Meanwhile, back in sunny Florida, it’s business as usual:

14 shot, 2 dead in shooting outside funeral home near North Miami

 

Gunmen fired a barrage of bullets at a crowd of mourners who were gathered Friday night at a North Miami-area funeral home, injuring 12 people and killing two, according to Miami-Dade police.

….The funeral was for Morvin Andre, 21, of North Miami, killed in a March 18 shooting, according to witnesses. He was buried at nearby Southern Memorial Park Saturday morning….Three of Friday’s victims were taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, according to reports, and several more went to other areas hospitals. One victim reportedly was a child, shot in the leg.

….Police are looking for six men, who were in a white 2006 or 2009 Pontiac or Impala, according to WSVN-TV.

“Six men”….that’s the best description authorities can offer?!?  We should probably be thankful the police were willing to accurately report the color of the vehicle involved!  At least the Reverends and the rest of the professionally-sensitive can take comfort in the fact racism wasn’t the motivating factor in the shootings, Blacks apparently requiring no added incentive to slaughter their “own”.

Next up, today’s Money Quotes, courtesy of three of the nation’s keenest legal and financial minds; first, Joe Biden offers a frank assessment of his life at a Chicago fundraiser after praising former Mayor Richard M. Daley:

“I never had an interest in being a mayor ’cause that’s a real job.  You have to produce.  That’s why I was able to be a senator for 36 years.“

Then there’s Elena Kagan, who, according to Slate, “can’t seem to understand why” the ObamaScare case is even before her:

“Why is a big gift from the federal government a matter of coercion?” Is there really something unconstitutional happening when the federal government offers the states what she refers to as a “boatload of federal money“?

And last but certainly not least, the Washington Wizard’s Chris Singleton explaining to a Twitter follower why he spent $10,000 on tickets for Friday’s Mega Millions drawing:

“Well if I get more than 10000 back then it was a smart investment. Whatever happens I’m dedicated to making more money….Its an investment guys.“

So who’s Singleton’s investment counselor; Mike Tyson, M.C. Hammer, Toni Braxton or Nick Cage?!?

And in the Environmental Moment, forwarded today by Carl Polizzi,

Climate Change Skepticism a Sickness That Must be “Treated,” Says Professor

Global warming alarmist equates climate denial with racism

 

Kari Norgaard, assistant professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at prestigious Whitman College

Comparing skepticism of man-made global warming to racist beliefs, an Oregon-based professor of sociology and environmental studies has labeled doubts about anthropogenic climate change a “sickness” for which individuals need to be “treated”.

Professor Kari Norgaard, who is currently appearing at the ‘Planet Under Pressure’ conference in London, has presented a paper in which she argues that “cultural resistance” to accepting the premise that humans are responsible for climate change “must be recognized and treated” as an aberrant sociological behavior.

Norgaard equates skepticism of climate change alarmists – whose data is continually proven to be politicized, agenda driven and downright inaccurate – with racism, noting that overcoming such viewpoints poses a similar challenge “to racism or slavery in the U.S. South.”

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to the Lighter Side….

Finally, we end the day with News of the Bizarre, and this just in from the Land of Fruits, Nuts and supersized

California woman blames McDonald’s for forcing her into prostitution

 

Artist’s rendering of the plaintiff

The Hamburglar; like Clemenza told Sonny about Paulie in The Godfather….

….you won’t be seein’ HIM ’round here no more….at least not for the next 15 to 20 years!

Magoo