Ocare Depends on Stupid Young Voters

ObamaCare's Success Depends On The Young Being Stupid

Posted 07/02/2013 06:43 PM ET

Health Reform: ObamaCare's efforts to expand insurance coverage and bring down costs depend entirely on convincing young people to buy coverage, while the law gives these people every reason not to.

A marketing presentation put together for the administration admits that convincing the young and healthy — who make up 48% of the uninsured — to buy insurance will be difficult, since they "take health for granted" and have a "low motivation to enroll."

What it doesn't say is that ObamaCare will give them still more reasons not to buy insurance.

According to recent news reports, the cheapest policies so far proposed for ObamaCare exchanges will cost an average of about $2,400 a year. And these come with higher deductibles, bigger co-pays and stricter limits on doctors and hospitals than many individuals can buy today at lower prices. This isn't exactly a strong selling point for millions of young people who rarely need health care.

Census data show that just 30% of those between 25 and 44 saw a doctor three or more times in 2010, just 33% took a prescription drug and only 6% went to the hospital. On average this group spends about $850 on medical care — roughly half the cost of a daily cafe latte.

ObamaCare backers say premium subsidies will draw in the young, and tax penalties will take care of the rest. But many in this group won't be eligible for those subsidies. In Virginia, they end once incomes reach $33,000. And the tax penalty for not buying insurance starts at just $95 and will still cost less than insurance when fully phased in.

What's more, ObamaCare guarantees insurance coverage when one of these "young invincibles" does get sick, and at subsidized rates, since the law bans insurers from charging more based on health status.

How long will it take for the young to figure this out, and tell all their Twitter pals how to game the Obama-Care system?

The problem is that ObamaCare depends on getting the young and healthy to sign up so it can subsidize premiums for the sick.

Otherwise, the insurance pool will get sicker and more expensive, causing a premium "death spiral."

This might not be a problem for those who ultimately want a single-payer system. But it's a far cry from what the country was promised by the Orwellian-named "Affordable Care Act."

Barach vs Crude Oil

Crude Oil's Coming Clash With Obama's New Climate Policy

By MARK P. MILLS
Posted 07/02/2013 06:03 PM ET

President Obama's speech at Georgetown University last week provided clarity, if there was ever any doubt, as to why the administration equivocates on approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, heel-drags on permits for natural gas exports and restricts federal lands from hydrocarbon development.

The president is doubling-down on policies unfriendly (to put it politely) to hydrocarbons: coal, natural gas and oil.

There is no small irony in the fact that, despite the policy head winds, U.S. coal exports have doubled since Obama became president. And two years ago America became a net exporter of refined petroleum products — gasoline and diesel — for the first time since 1949.

Those exports, when combined with a huge decrease in crude imports occasioned by massive growth in domestic oil production, are now driving down the nation's economically debilitating trade deficit, nearly half of which came from oil imports.

But, given Obama's stated willingness to make policy by executive fiat, maybe we should take note of a little-known provision in the still-in-force 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act.

The EPCA gives any president authority to restrict exports of coal, petroleum products, natural gas or petrochemical feedstock "under such terms and conditions as he determines to be appropriate and necessary." No president, thus far, has ever invoked that authority.

We are likely to learn more about the EPCA, and how far Obama will go in his attempts to throttle back America's hydrocarbon machinery, as soon as some brave company, likely in Texas, applies for permission to export large quantities of American crude oil.

Such a remarkable possibility is practically guaranteed by virtue of the state of today's oil markets (massive global demand), juxtaposed against incredible U.S. productivity in hydrocarbons (where all the growth has been on private and state lands).

But while exporting gasoline is permitted (though it can in theory be constrained) under the EPCA the export of crude oil requires presidential permission; indeed, the act directs the president to restrict the export of crude.

The imminent completion of a network of pipelines from the American heartland (source of the new production) to the Texas Gulf
Coast will soon flood refineries there with more crude than can possibly be processed.

It's not just that there are too few refineries. Many Gulf Coast facilities were built to process heavy crudes from Venezuelan and Canadian oil sands; they can no more switch to the prolific light crude of U.S. shale fields than a diesel truck can switch to gasoline.

Some argue we should build new refineries before we begin exporting crude. But that takes time. And why not do both?

Benefits from exporting crude immediately accrue because it is easier and cheaper to transport than LNG, since the latter requires massive gas-liquefaction facilities costing tens of billions and expensive specialized ships. And there's currently a glut of tankers on the high seas offering low transport costs to a world hungry for oil.

It's a good bet there will be opposition to crude exports, and it will be based on the same two claims used against selling natural gas and coal overseas: a) exports will contribute to increased carbon dioxide emissions, and b) America's resources should stay in America since "using them up" won't lower, and could even contribute to, higher energy prices.

To argue the former is to subscribe to the patently silly notion that America can set an example that will lead to lower global energy use by billions of people seeking prosperity, and that other nations (often not our friends) won't supply those hydrocarbons if we don't.

As for the second trope, it continues the myth that both technology progress and hydrocarbon reserves have peaked. But the reality is U.S. oil production is growing fast because of technology and America's unique infrastructure, which together have unleashed our vast resources.

The U.S. is the world's fastest-growing oil and natural gas producer, and the most efficient extractor of coal. This hydrocarbon abundance is stimulating a manufacturing renaissance in industries chasing low-cost energy rather than low-cost labor, and attracting a rush of foreign investment, $150 billion in the past four years alone.

Adam Smith, in the "Wealth of Nations," said nations should produce and sell what they're particularly good at. No nation is as good at producing hydrocarbons as America.

Trade has been an engine of economic growth for centuries, and free trade championed, if not pioneered by Adam Smith was arguably the accelerant of global prosperity over the past two centuries. At the beginning of this high-tech 21st century, hydrocarbons comprise the biggest class of products traded in the world, at $2 trillion annually.

In terms of job and business creation, America's hydrocarbon industry has been the brightest light in the dark economic times since the
Great Recession began. Now is the time to encourage, not throttle it back.

But Obama's newly articulated climate policies will, if successful, prevent the United States from becoming the rising star of global trade in hydrocarbons.

• Mills, a physicist, is senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and author of "The Case for Exports" and "The Bottomless Well."

Battle of Gettysburg 150yrs Ago (George Will)

After 150 years, the choices made at Gettysburg still reverberate


By George F. Will, Published: June 30 E-mail the writer

In the 1780s, the son of a farmer in south-central Pennsylvania purchased from his father 116 acres where two roads intersected. He laid out 210 lots for a town he named for himself. He was James Gettys.

What happened when two armies collided there 150 years ago was, some might argue, not the most important battle in American history or even the Civil War. The 1777 defeat of the British at Saratoga won French support for the American Revolution. The Battle of Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862) enabled Abraham Lincoln to redefine the war by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of
Midway sealed Japan’s fate.

But the Revolution would have succeeded without French assistance: No distant island could govern this continent. Japan’s defeat was assured when its attack on Pearl Harbor enraged a continental superpower. And in spite of Antietam, which repulsed the first invasion of the North, secession could still have succeeded if Robert E. Lee’s second invasion had shattered Northern support for the war by smashing the Union army at Gettysburg.

Antietam would have shortened the war, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, if Gen. George McClellan, among the most disagreeable figures in U.S. history, had pursued the retreating Lee. But Antietam was most important for what it enabled Lincoln to proclaim 106 days later. Gettysburg was most important for what it achieved, not for giving the president an occasion to deliver an address there 139 days later.

Studying history serves democracy by highlighting contingencies: Things did not need to turn out the way they did; choices matter. Since Hegel, Marx and other 19th-century philosophers decided that history is History — a proper noun, an autonomous force unfolding an inner logic — humanity has been told that vast, impersonal forces dictate events, nullifying human agency.

But they don’t. Choices matter. They certainly did during the first three days of July 1863 at the town of 2,390 people seven miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. In “Intruder in the Dust,” William Faulkner famously invoked the tantalizing power of possibility:

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence. . . . That moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself.”

But before what is remembered as Pickett’s Charge — mostly a brisk 19-minute walk — headed toward Cemetery Ridge, choices made by Lee and some of his generals had put victory beyond the reach of valor. They were, however, choices.

Books about battles, historian Allen C. Guelzo says tartly, have “acquired among my academic peers a reputation close to pornography,” war being, in their eyes, chiefly a manifestation of American savagery. But, he says dryly, one cannot discuss the 19th century without discussing the Civil War era, whose “singular event was a war.” And one conducted, not least at Gettysburg, with an “amateurism” — a “bewildered, small-town incompetence” — that magnified its bloodiness.

The theory that it was the first “modern” or “total” war is, Guelzo acutely says, refuted by “the silent witness of places like Gettysburg, where almost all of the buildings that sat in the path of the battle are still [there]” because the technology of war was too limited to destroy them. A stray bullet killed just one civilian — Mary Virginia Wade, who picked a bad time to bake bread.

For those whom Guelzo calls the war’s “cultured despisers,” the Union cause was mere dull democracy, whereas “emancipation makes a better story for our times.” But as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, the war’s ultimate purpose was to preserve the Union in order to prove democracy’s viability. “Unless the Union was restored,” Guelzo says, “there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best anti-slavery intentions.”

Lee was, a colleague said, “audacity personified.” His temperament and intellect were mutually reinforcing, his aggressiveness serving his strategic understanding: The South would lose a protracted defensive war. After Antietam, Lee said: “If I could do so, I would again cross the Potomac and invade Pennsylvania.” Hence a small crossroads town became the hinge of American, and hence world, history.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Barach's "Arab Spring - Egypt": A Mess

Obama’s ‘New Beginning’ in Cairo Now a Knee-Deep Mess

                         Posted By Bridget Johnson On July 1, 2013  

The White House reaction to the historic outpouring of Egyptians calling for the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi can be summed up as thus: Don’t turn attention away from President Obama’s heavily touted African tour.

As Obama flew to his last stop on the three-nation swing, Tanzania, Tamarod (Arabic for “rebel”) once again stole his thunder: The protesters won as the powerful Egyptian military announced a 48-hour ultimatum for an agreement to be reached on their demands.

Otherwise, they’ll provide a “road map” for a post-Morsi country.

Still, the White House inundated reporters with fact sheets on Obama’s trade initiatives, health and power investments and efforts to combat wildlife trafficking in Africa, along with his new Young African Leaders Initiative.

But the Obama administration is facing uncomfortable truths that dwarf the opposition protesters’ inconvenient timing.
First, the protesters, who ranged from niqab-clad women decrying the Muslim Brotherhood’s lack of religious tolerance to Coptic Christian nuns, were openly expressing their disgust with Obama and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson for propping up and backing Morsi. “Obama and Patterson support terrorism in Egypt,” read one large banner bearing pictures of the two. Another sign showed Patterson happily shaking hands with Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie.

“Anne Paterson will likely go down in history as the most unpopular US ambassador ever for the people in her host country,” tweeted Cairo writer Bassem Sabry.

Not exactly the impression Obama hoped to impart upon Cairo with his 2009 “new beginning” speech to the Muslim world from here.

Second, the protesters are right. Obama welcomed Morsi into office as a democratically elected leader — Morsi won slightly over 50 percent of the vote with around 43 percent turnout in 2012 — while knowing full well the undemocratic aims of the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi’s anti-Semitic remarks about “apes and pigs” were condemned yet ultimately forgiven. Today, even after the months of Muslim Brotherhood repression, after attacks on Coptic churches, after the conviction of 16 Americans by an Egyptian court for promoting democracy, Obama was practicing a policy of go along to get along.

“Our commitment to Egypt has never been around any particular individual or party. Our commitment has been to a process,” Obama said at a joint press conference with President Jakaya Kikwete in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. “…They went through an election process that, by all accounts, were legitimate. And Mr. Morsi was elected. And the U.S. government’s attitude has been we would deal with a democratically elected government.”

Obama said his administration has “encouraged” the Muslim Brotherhood government “to reach out to the opposition and work through these issues in a political process.”

“It’s not the U.S.’s job to determine what that process is. But what we have said is, go through processes that are legitimate and observe rule of law,” he continued. “…I do think that if the situation is going to resolve itself for the benefit of Egypt over the long term, then all the parties there have to step back from maximalist positions. Democracies don’t work when everybody says it’s the other person’s fault and I want 100 percent of what I want.”

Obama boasted that the U.S. was used to compromise in its democracy because “we’ve had 200-plus years of practice at it.”

“But our position has always been it’s not our job to choose who Egypt’s leaders are,” he added. ”We do want to make sure that all the voices are heard and it’s done in a peaceful way.”

A third truth weighing on the administration is that a government which was quietly slipped $1.3 billion in military aid by Secretary of State John Kerry a matter of weeks ago is on the verge of going under. Will Muslim Brotherhood loyalists be armed with more than just sticks if the ultimatum is ignored and the Islamist “National Alliance” becomes Morsi’s ragtag army? AlHayat TV reported this evening that the Muslim Brotherhood rejected the deadline, saying the rulers don’t need to take commands from the army.

It’s ammunition for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has been urging the White House and State Department from the advent of Morsi’s rule to stop sending fighter jets and tanks to the Islamist government. It also brings into question how Obama might similarly support a secular government not viewed in Washington’s eyes as legitimately elected but in need of support to fend off Islamist challenges.

And even though scattering from the Beltway for the July Fourth recess, lawmakers fired off concerns to Obama that his lack of foreign policy prowess could continue to mangle the U.S. reaction in another hotspot.

Every member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), signed on to a letter to Obama on Friday cautioning the president to turn a highly skeptical eye toward new Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani.

Far from a free and fair election, they noted, “more than 600 potential candidates were disqualified by an unelected body of Islamic jurists, leaving only those approved by government-appointed clerics.”

“Iran’s election unfortunately has done nothing to suggest a reversal of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capacity,” the lawmakers wrote. “…Decisions about Iran’s nuclear program and foreign policy rest mainly in the hands of Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamene’i. Khamene’i has recently reiterated his view that Iran has no reason to normalize relations with the United States.”

The letter expresses the omnipresent congressional anxiety that Obama doesn’t have a grasp on the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program or the wherewithal to accept no less than a totally dismantled nuclear program — theirs, not ours.

“For this outcome to be realized, Iran must face intensifying pressure. This means the full implementation of current sanctions available to your administration, and further legislative steps to close loopholes and broaden our sanction’s reach,” the committee wrote. “…An added positive action would be extending sector-based sanctions to the mining, engineering, and construction-based sectors of Iran.”

“It is important that you leave no doubt in the minds of the Iranian government that the United States will do all it can to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.”

Perhaps Congress’ fear is stirred by indications, only highlighted by the past couple of days, that yet another tyrannical force will enjoy, in Washington’s eyes, the status of a legitimate government.

“We respect the vote of the Iranian people and congratulate them for their participation in the political process, and their courage in making their voices heard,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement after the mid-June vote. “…It is our hope that the Iranian government will heed the will of the Iranian people and make responsible choices that create a better future for all Iranians. The United States remains ready to engage the Iranian government directly in order to reach a diplomatic solution that will fully address the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.”

Mindset of the Left

The Mindset of the Left

7/2/2013 12:01:00 AM - Thomas Sowell

When teenage thugs are called "troubled youth" by people on the political left, that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these young hoodlums.

Seldom is there a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called "troubled youth" and mass murderers are just assumed to be "insane"?

At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil -- that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil.

All the people who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including kings, conquerors and slaveowners.

Why has evil been such a hard concept for many on the left to accept? The basic agenda of the left is to change external conditions. But what if the problem is internal? What if the real problem is the cussedness of human beings?

Rousseau denied this in the 18th century and the left has been denying it ever since. Why? Self preservation.

If the things that the left wants to control -- institutions and government policy -- are not the most important factors in the world's problems, then what role is there for the left?

What if it is things like the family, the culture and the traditions that make a more positive difference than the bright new government "solutions" that the left is constantly coming up with? What if seeking "the root causes of crime" is not nearly as effective as locking up criminals? The hard facts show that the murder rate was going down for decades under the old traditional practices so disdained by the left intelligentsia, before the bright new ideas of the left went into effect in the 1960s -- after which crime and violence skyrocketed.

What happened when old-fashioned ideas about sex were replaced in the 1960s by the bright new ideas of the left that were introduced into the schools as "sex education" that was supposed to reduce teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases?

Both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases had been going down for years. But that trend suddenly reversed in the 1960s and hit new highs.

One of the oldest and most dogmatic of the crusades of the left has been disarmament, both of individuals and of nations. Again, the focus of the left has been on the externals -- the weapons in this case.

If weapons were the problem, then gun control laws at home and international disarmament agreements abroad might be the answer.

But if evil people who care no more for laws or treaties than they do for other people's lives are the problem, then disarmament means making decent, law-abiding people more vulnerable to evil people.

Since belief in disarmament has been a major feature of the left since the 18th century, in countries around the world, you might think that by now there would be lots of evidence to substantiate their beliefs.

But evidence on whether gun control laws actually reduce crime rates in general, or murder rates in particular, is seldom mentioned by gun control advocates. It is just assumed in passing that of course tighter gun control laws will reduce murders.

But the hard facts do not back up that assumption. That is why it is the critics of gun control who rely heavily on empirical evidence, as in books like "More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott and "Guns and Violence" by Joyce Lee Malcolm.

National disarmament has an even worse record. Both Britain and America neglected their military forces between the two World Wars, while Germany and Japan armed to the teeth. Many British and American soldiers paid with their lives for their countries' initially inadequate military equipment in World War II.

But what are mere facts compared to the heady vision of the left?

Decadent Lawmaking in America

Washington's Decadent Lawmaking Lives In The Shadows

By MARK STEYN
Posted 06/28/201


Wednesday, June 26, 2013 — just another day in a constitutional republic of limited government by citizen representatives:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, deputy director of acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half-a-billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal "set-aside" program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans.

For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a "disabled veteran" because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie.

Later in the day, Sen. John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and alleged author of the Corker-Hoeven Amendment to the immigration bill, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and, in a remarkable interview, revealed to the world that he had absolutely no idea what was in the legislation he "wrote."

Rachel Jeantel, the endearingly disastrous star witness at the George Zimmerman trial, excused her inability to comprehend the letter she'd supposedly written to Trayvon Martin's parents on the grounds that "I don't read cursive." Sen. Hoeven doesn't read legislative.

For example, Section 5(b)(1):

"Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish a strategy, to be known as the 'Southern Border Fencing Strategy' ... ."

On the other hand, Section 5(b)(5):

"Notwithstanding paragraph (1), nothing in this subsection shall require the Secretary to install fencing ... ."

Asked to reconcile these two paragraphs, Hoeven explained that, "when I read through that with my lawyer," the guy said relax, don't worry about it. (I paraphrase, but barely.)

So Hoeven and 67 other senators went ahead the following day and approved the usual bazillion-page we-have-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what's-in-it omnibus bill, cooked up in the backrooms, released late on a Friday afternoon and passed in nothing flat after Sen. Harry

Reid decreed there's no need for further debate — not that anything recognizable to any genuine legislature as "debate" ever occurs in "the world's greatest deliberative body."

Say what you like about George III, but the Tea Act was about tea. The so-called "comprehensive immigration reform" is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish processing industry as a "cultural exchange" program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait.

While we're bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans "out of the shadows," why don't we try bringing Washington's decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Just when you thought the day couldn't get any more momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less-advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people's elected representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law.

That's how they did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, etc.

But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the legislative class to attempt "comprehensive marriage reform," complete with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen's au pairs and the hiring of 20,000 new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from disparate-impact groups.

So instead it fell to five out of nine judges, which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he's the guy who swings both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide the issue for 300 million people.

As Spider-Man's Uncle Ben so famously says in every remake, with great power comes great responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal institution that predates the U.S. by thousands of years, Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the semblance of a legal argument.

Instead, he struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated by an "improper animus" against a "politically unpopular group" they wished to "disparage," "demean" and "humiliate" as "unworthy."

What stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to "harm" gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton.

It's good to have President Clinton's animus against gays finally exposed by Kennedy. There's a famous photograph of him taken round the time he signed DOMA, at a big fundraiser wearing that black tie and wing-collar combo that always made him look like the maître d' at a 19th-century bordello.

He's receiving greetings from celebrity couple Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, who'd come out as gay the week before and, in the first flush of romance, can't keep their hands off each other even with President Happy Pants trying to get a piece of the action. For a man motivated only by a hateful need to harm gays, he's doing a grand job of covering it up, looking like the guy who decided to splash out for the two-girl special on the last night of the sales convention.

Nevertheless, reacting to the Supreme Court's decision, Clinton professed himself delighted to have been struck down as a homophobe.

In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean or humiliate other constitutions." Indeed.

With this judgment, America's constitutional court demeans and humiliates only its own. Of all the local variations through which same-sex marriage has been legalized in the last decade, mostly legislative (France, Iceland) but occasionally judicial (Canada, South Africa), the U.S. is unique in its inability to jump on the western world's bandwagon du jour without first declaring its current vice president, president pro tem of the Senate, majority leader, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and prospective first First Gentleman raging gay-bashers. As the Paula Deens of orientation, maybe they should all be canceled.

There is something deeply weird, not to say grubby and dishonest, about this. In its imputation of motive to those who disagree with it, this opinion is more disreputable than Roe v. Wade — and with potentially unbounded application.

To return to the immigration bill, and all its assurances that those amnestied will "go to the end of the line" and have to wait longer for full-blown green cards and longer still for citizenship, do you seriously think any of that hooey will survive its first encounter with a federal judge?

In much of the Southwest, you'd have jurisdictions with a majority of Hispanic residents living under an elderly, disproportionately white voting roll. You can cut-and-paste Kennedy's guff about "improper animus" toward "a group of people" straight into the first immigration appeal, and a thousand more. And that's supposing the administrative agencies pay any attention to the "safeguards" in the first place.

As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people's representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty.

Whether or not, per Scalia, we should "condemn" the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

© Mark Steyn, 2013

Obama to Press: BEHAVE

President Barack Obama told American reporters to "behave" during a joint press conference with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa on Saturday. 

Obama was warning U.S. journalists not to ask too many questions in one, complaining that "my press" tried too squeeze "three or four or five questions in there," complimenting Zuma on his more compliant media.

(The Associated Press noted that "both U.S. and South African reporters asked multi-part questions," though seconded Obama's description of U.S. journalists as "his press corps.")

Press freedom is being challenged in South Africa, where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) chafes at criticism of its difficulties and resents exposure of its numerous corruption scandals. Television networks are dominated by the government-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which favors a pro-ANC line, and Internet media growth has been stunted by the state telecommunications monopoly, Telkom.

Yet Zuma, though frequently at loggerheads with local media, would hardly dare tell them to "behave."
Obama's admonition of American journalists is not the first time he has rebuked them in the presence of a foreign leader, on foreign soil.

In March, during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he scolded NBC reporter Chuck Todd for asking several questions, saying an Israeli reporter who asked only one question had "behaved" better.
Despite enjoying the support of mainstream media, Obama has often remained aloof from the press, and the recent AP/Rosen scandals have deepened the mistrust.