Bookworm Room

Tweet In an earlier post, I asked several questions about economic issues that confuse me.  Robert Arvanitis wrote a comprehensive reply, but then couldn’t get the Word Press comment system to accept it.  Because it is so comprehensive and informative, I’m putting it up here as an independent post.  All that I ask of the [...]

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Tweet Fellow Weasel Watcher Greg, at Rhymes with Right, came up with a good poster likening every woman’s right to have a gun to a black woman’s right to sit anywhere she wants in the bus.  That poster, combined with a discussion I had with some young ‘uns about the Bill of Rights got me [...]

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Tweet I’ve had the same ten tabs open in Firefox this entire day.  I feel like a madman, trying to create order out of the chaos in my mind.  I’m convinced that there’s a thread tying together these articles, but I can’t figure out precisely what that thread is.  Maybe it’s just that each is [...]

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Tweet One of the things I find most distasteful about ObamaCare is its requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for their employees’ children through their 26th year.  I don’t find this just economically wrong, I find it cosmically, morally wrong that our federal government has officially extended childhood until citizens are 26.  I cannot [...]

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Tweet After a lovely long weekend with family, we’re getting in the car today and heading home. If things go well, the drive should take about seven hours. If we get stuck in holiday traffic (as happened when we drove down), we’re looking at nine hours on the road. I might be able to blog [...]

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Tweet On Monday, I noted that ObamaCare regulations requiring employers to provide full (really full) insurance coverage to all employees may make running restaurants, which have a famously low profit margin, so prohibitively expensive that many will go out of business. It turns out that we needn’t fear this eventuality, because we’re about to see [...]

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Tweet I hate cooking.  That’s not hyperbole.  Restaurants are a constant temptation, but I resist because, during my young lawyer days, I spent way too much of my money on restaurants.  With college and old age to plan for, I can’t eat out whenever I like — which is every night.  So here’s one good [...]

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Tweet Bruce Kesler highlights the largest ever survey of doctors on the subject of Obamacare — and they don’t like it. I can already hear the pro-Obamacare people saying, “Well, they don’t like it because it’s going to be more efficient and therefore cuts into their profits.” Think about that for a minute.  You can [...]

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Tweet With the election nearing, the Facebook frenzy is accelerating.  I got this from a Facebook acquaintance: Lots of food for thought, there: Ryan voted to end funding for Planned Parenthood.  Ryan’s vote is completely in line with Romney’s insistence that a broke U.S. government should repeatedly ask itself “Is this program worth going into [...]

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Tweet (The title is supposed to be sarcastic. I’m not sure that’s coming through.) Gosh, the administration started with such high hopes.  Elect him, Obama promised, and we would get the following: I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the [...]

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Tweet Here’s another great video to share with your friends, from Dr. Barbara Bellar, candidate for Illinois State Senate, District 18: If you’d like to help Dr. Bellar win the election, go here.  We need to support every candidate out there who has learned the judo technique of turning Alinsky tactics back against the Dems/Progressives.  Dr. [...]

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Tweet Within seconds of Romney’s announcement that Ryan would be his running mate, the chatter started.  Democrats expressed delight, because they see Ryan’s stance on Medicare as one they can use to portray Romney and Ryan as Satan incarnate.  A couple of years ago, they showed Ryan pushing grandma’s wheelchair off the cliff.  This year, [...]

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Tweet Gay Patriot posted the other day about yet another anti-Walmart protest.  His point was that the protesters, rather than being excited about real paying jobs coming to L.A., insisted that they would be better off with some hypothetical Mom and Pop jobs that might arise if they protested Walmart with sufficient vigor: Last week, [...]

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Tweet When lawyers were arguing ObamaCare before the Supreme Court, Obama’s attorney’s claimed ObamaCare was a tax, while everyone else’s attorneys claimed that it was an unconstitutional penalty.  Justice Roberts, for reasons unknown but still deeply suspect, agreed with both arguments.  Things got exciting after that. In the days since the opinion came down, both [...]

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Tweet If you’d like to see in one place a broad range of opinions about the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision (or, more accurately, opinions John Roberts’ intellectual spasm), check out this week’s Watcher’s Council forum.  This is a special one, because we not only have a sampling of Council members participating (including me), but we [...]

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Tweet You probably know that Glenn Reynolds pointed out that, if the administration is going to go around arguing that ObamaCare isn’t a tax, they’re conceding that it’s unconstitutional.  That’s a clever line, but Rhymes With Right explains that the administrations’ strenuous denials also open a pathway to a Supreme Court rehearing.

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Tweet I’m going back and forth whether Roberts was a typical judge (i.e., stupid and unworthy of respect), a brilliant thinker, a chess player, a pawn, etc.  Each of you who has commented here has made an excellent point.  I agree with all of you, even when you disagree with each other.  In other words, [...]

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Tweet Many people are asserting that, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the end is near.  I see that in op-eds, in blog posts, and in my email box.  America’s constitutional experiment is over, they say.  They might be right.  Or not. But here’s the deal:  if we give in to despair now, [...]

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Tweet [UPDATE:  Since I wrote this post, there is now reason to believe that Roberts issue his opinion for the wrong reasons, not the right ones.  If I were to rewrite this post today, I would be less charitable to the man.  Nevertheless, putting aside Roberts' motives, I stand by the substance of my post, [...]

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Tweet I was driving along in the car and, suddenly, the phrase “Roe v. Wade” popped into my head.  In 1973, the Supreme Court waded into what should have been a state-by-state legislative matter, and created the most vicious 39 year fight in America since the Civil War.  One side found the decision completely invalid, [...]

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Tweet I’ve now had the chance to digest myriad analyses of the Roberts decision on ObamaCare.  I think I can sum up the various conclusions that liberal and conservative pundits have reached.  Here goes: The decision is a victory for Obama and the Democrats because it keeps ObamaCare on the books.  However, it’s a victory [...]

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Tweet The Supreme Court opinion on ObamaCare runs to 193 pages.  It is the size of a book, only more boring than any book anyone would ever want to read — and that is true despite the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the worst writer on the court, didn’t write it.  I’ve been making a [...]

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Tweet Don Quixote and I were talking today about the Commerce Clause.  We weren’t saying anything original.  We were simply wondering whether the Supreme Court, in ruling on ObamaCare, will address the vast reach of the Commerce Clause and whether it will (a) reaffirm that reach; (b) reverse that reach entirely (which requires reversing the [...]

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Tweet Karl Rove has written a WSJ op-ed, the title of which is “Obama’s Campaign Will Take the Low Road.”  I haven’t even read Rove’s piece — which I’m sure is good — but I already know he’s right.  Obama’s campaign will take the low road because there is no high road.  After almost three [...]

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Tweet There’s a lot of buzz lately about an article David R. Dow, who is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the Rorschach Visiting Professor of History at Rice, about the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare hearings.  In it, he insists that, if the Supreme Court justices overturn ObamaCare because it’s unconstitutional, [...]

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