It’s Monday, July 3rd, 2012….and our apologies for going radio silent.  We’ve been dealing with the aftermath of Friday’s thundercanes, and had planned on publishing the following offering Sunday evening.  Unfortunately, our trusty generator decided to imitate Obama and take an extended vacation during a time of crisis.  As a result, our internet access and opportunity to compose our commentary is severely limited.  We’re coming to you now from a friend’s home where we’ve taken refuge for the foreseeable future, but our columns this week will be infrequent at best.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the first edition of July, it’s the Don McLean Memorial “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” segment, and a number of commentaries commemorating the day a peculiarly American music, the sound of freedom, died.  First up, the WSJ remarks on….

The Roberts Rules

The Chief Justice rewrites ObamaCare in order to save it.

 

Thursday was destined to be an historic day for American liberty, and it was, though the new precedent is grim. The remarkable decision upholding the Affordable Care Act is shot through with confusion—the mandate that’s really a tax, except when it isn’t, and the government whose powers are limited and enumerated, except when they aren’t. One thing is clear: This was a one-man show, and that man is John Roberts.

The Chief Justice ruled that ObamaCare’s mandate violated the Commerce Clause, joined by the Court’s conservative bloc, but he also said that the mandate fell within Congress’s power to tax, joined by the Court’s liberal bloc. In practice this is a restraint on federal power without real restraint—and, worse, the Chief Justice had to rewrite the statute Congress passed in order to salvage it. The ruling will stand as one of the great what-might-have-beens of American constitutional law.

The novel question raised by ObamaCare’s command to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty—the first-ever purchase mandate in U.S. history—was whether Congress could create commerce in order to regulate it. In his 1-4-4 opinion, Chief Justice Roberts writes that construing the Commerce Clause as the Obama Administration argued “would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. . . . The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, and for over 200 years both our decisions and Congress’s actions have reflected this understanding.”

Note that this rejection of federal compulsion, which the four conservatives supported albeit in dissent, is the same one that the liberal legal establishment spent years deriding as frivolous and beyond debate: Of course Washington has carte blanche to do whatever it wants to do. “That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned,” the Chief Justice writes, before going on to envision it himself by grounding the mandate in Congress’s power to “lay and collect Taxes.”

According to Chief Justice Roberts, the penalty is merely a tax on not owning health insurance, no different from “buying gasoline or earning income,” and it thus complies with the Constitution. This a large loophole. The result is that Washington has unlimited power to impose new purchase mandates and the courts will find them constitutional if Congress calls them taxes, or even if it calls them something else and judges call them taxes.

That was true with ObamaCare. The Pelosi Democrats explicitly structured the mandate as a regulatory “penalty.” Congress voted down a direct tax in 2009. Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1920s and 1930s define penalties and taxes as mutually exclusive and critically different.

Every lower court that heard the health-care cases rejected the taxing argument. Administration lawyers devoted only 21 lines of their reply brief to this argument and it barely came up at oral arguments. The Chief Justice in effect revised the statute in order to find it constitutional.

But if the mandate is really a tax, why doesn’t the law known as the Anti-Injunction Act apply, which says that taxes can’t be challenged legally until they’ve been collected? The Chief Justice actually rules that the mandate is a tax under the Constitution and a mandate for the purposes of tax law.

In their brutal (and, in a rarity, jointly signed) dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito write that the Chief Justice’s logic “is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. . . . One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression.” They score the Chief Justice for carrying “verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”

Justice Kennedy dissented angrily from the bench, and it is to his credit that he defended the federalist system of shared powers that is the hallmark of his years on the Court. The particular tragedy is that four Justices would have overturned not merely the purchase mandate but all of ObamaCare as unconstitutional. Only John Roberts prevented it.

One telling note is that the dissent refers repeatedly to “Justice Ginsburg’s dissent” and “the dissent” on the mandate, but of course they should be referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurrence. This wording and other sources suggest that there was originally a 5-4 majority striking down at least part of ObamaCare, but then the Chief Justice changed his mind.

The Justices may never confirm this informed speculation. But if it is true, this is far more damaging to the Court’s institutional integrity that the Chief Justice is known to revere than any ruling against ObamaCare. The political class and legal left conducted an extraordinary campaign to define such a decision as partisan and illegitimate. If the Chief Justice capitulated to this pressure, it shows the Court can be intimidated and swayed from its constitutional duties. (And John Roberts a contemptible coward.) If this was a play to compete with John Marshall’s legacy, the result is closer to William Brennan’s.

The Court did rule 7-2 against ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid, the supposedly voluntary federal-state program that once covered only the poor. The majority included liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, who held this expansion to be unconstitutional because the feds commandeered state resources.

The problem is that this also involved rewriting the law. The majority merely created an opt-out that Governors and states could elect to preserve some measure of independent control, instead of telling Congress to start over. Still, this is the first time the Court has found a law enacted under Congress’s spending power to be unconstitutionally coercive.

But this and even the five votes limiting Congress under the Commerce Clause pale against the Chief Justice’s infinitely elastic and dangerous interpretation of the taxing power. Nancy Pelosi famously said we need to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. It turns out we also needed John Roberts to write his appendix.

Here’s the juice: whatever John Roberts’ opinion….or perhaps more accurately, opinions, as this video clip from Shannon Wood details, The Obamao’s got his story and he’s stickin’ to it:

 Next, the title of Jonah Goldberg’s offering belies the contempt it contains for a man deserving of little else:

Roberts’ ruling took guts

The chief haruspex reads the entrails expediently.

 

Why not just cut open a goat and be done with it?

In ancient Rome, a special kind of priest called a haruspex would “read” the entrails of sheep to divine the will of the gods, the health of the growing season, or whatever else was weighing on the minds of men. Because animal guts don’t, in fact, impart that much information about, say, next year’s wheat harvest, the haruspices could pretty much make it up as they went along. The same went for the auspices, priests who studied the flight of birds and derived signs or omens called auguria (from which we get “auguries”). Ultimately, the haruspices and auspices made their decisions based upon the whims, vicissitudes, and demands of politics in one form or another. If the rulers were happy with the result, they didn’t much care what the guts actually said.

Fast-forward to chief haruspex John Roberts. In the majority opinion written by Roberts, the Supreme Court held that the mandate to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. But Roberts also found that it’s constitutional under Congress’s power to tax. It is on these grounds that Roberts upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare, siding with the four liberal justices of the bench.

The upshot is that Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause to force you to eat broccoli, but it can tax you into doing so. Huzzah for liberty!

To reach this decision, Roberts had to embrace a position denied by the White House, Congress, and vast swaths of the legal punditocracy: that the mandate is a tax for the purposes of constitutional consideration but not a tax according to the Anti-Injunction Act (which bars lawsuits against taxes until after they’re levied). Roberts’s effort, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent, “carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”

Let the record show that the sophists were valued defenders of entrail-reading.

Of course, there are substantive arguments in favor of Roberts’s reasoning. But as far as I can tell, no one is confident, never mind certain, that Roberts actually believes his own position. And among supporters of Obamacare, from the White House on down, no one cares whether he does.

President Obama — self-praised constitutional scholar — mocked those who called the fees and penalties under Obamacare a tax. Now he celebrates a decision that mocks him back. Democratic National Committee executive director (and former White House aide) Patrick Gaspard seemed to summarize the depth of concern on his side of the aisle when he responded to the ruling on Twitter: “it’s constitutional. B—-es.”

More sober-eyed liberal legal experts took similar positions. Roberts’s opinion was “statesmanlike,” they claimed, and, more bizarrely, “apolitical.” Some, such as constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, speaking on National Public Radio, even celebrated Roberts’s brilliance at finding a way to save the reputation of the court by deploying what Thomas Jefferson called “twistifications.”

Indeed, before and after the ruling, much of the journalistic and legal establishment argued that a 5–4 ruling to overturn Obamacare would be “political” because the majority would be comprised entirely of Republican appointees. But a 5–4 ruling to uphold Obamacare would be apolitical because, well, it just would be.

In other words, if five conservative justices rule according to their well-known convictions, it’s illegitimate. But if Roberts twists himself like an illustration in the Kama Sutra to find a way to uphold the law, then that amounts to “leadership.”

Now, I don’t know what’s in Roberts’s heart, but no court watcher I’ve heard from puts much weight on the idea that Roberts did anything other than reason backward from the result he wanted in order to buy respect from the court’s critics at the expense of his own beliefs.

At least that’s one thing both fans and critics of this ruling can largely agree on.

Some of Roberts’s defenders claim he’s outmaneuvered everyone. (See entry #4 below by Bert Atkinson) By upholding Obamacare, he’s made future conservative decisions unassailable. He’s poisoned the well of the Commerce Clause for liberals. He’s removed the court from being an election-year issue. He’s gift-wrapped for Mitt Romney the attack that Obama has raised taxes massively, violating a host of promises and assurances. And, again, he’s saved the legitimacy of the court.

That’s all very interesting, but it leaves aside the real issue: None of those concerns are what was asked of the court. That so few people seem to care augurs poorly for the rule of law and the auspices of our republic.

Then there’s this from John Yoo writing for the WSJ:

Chief Justice Roberts and His Apologists

Some conservatives see a silver lining in the ObamaCare ruling. But it’s exactly the big-government disaster it appears to be.

 

White House judge-pickers sometimes ask prospective nominees about their favorite Supreme Court justice. The answers can reveal a potential judge’s ideological leanings without resorting to litmus tests. Republican presidential candidates similarly promise to appoint more judges like so-and-so to reassure the conservative base.

Since his appointment to the high court in 2005, the most popular answer was Chief Justice John Roberts. But that won’t remain true after his ruling on Thursday in NFIB v. Sebelius, which upheld President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.

Justice Roberts served in the Reagan Justice Department and as a White House lawyer before his appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush. Yet he joined with the court’s liberal wing to bless the greatest expansion of federal power in decades.

Conservatives are scrambling to salvage something from the decision of their once-great judicial hero. Some hope Sebelius covertly represents a “substantial victory,” in the words of conservative columnist George Will.

After all, the reasoning goes, Justice Roberts’s opinion declared that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause does not authorize Congress to regulate inactivity, which would have given the federal government a blank check to regulate any and all private conduct. The court also decided that Congress unconstitutionally coerced the states by threatening to cut off all Medicaid funds if they did not expand this program as far as President Obama wants.

All this is a hollow hope. The outer limit on the Commerce Clause in Sebelius does not put any other federal law in jeopardy and is undermined by its ruling on the tax power (discussed below). The limits on congressional coercion in the case of Medicaid may apply only because the amount of federal funds at risk in that program’s expansion—more than 20% of most state budgets—was so great. If Congress threatens to cut off 5%-10% to force states to obey future federal mandates, will the court strike that down too? Doubtful.

Worse still, Justice Roberts’s opinion provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts’s tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

Some conservatives hope that Justice Roberts is pursuing a deeper political game. Charles Krauthammer, for one, calls his opinion “one of the great constitutional finesses of all time” by upholding the law on the narrowest grounds possible—thus doing the least damage to the Constitution—while turning aside the Democratic Party’s partisan attacks on the court.

The comparison here is to Marbury v. Madison (1803), where Chief Justice John Marshall deflected President Thomas Jefferson’s similar assault on judicial independence. Of the Federalist Party, which he had defeated in 1800, Jefferson declared: “They have retired into the judiciary as a stronghold. There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the treasury, and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.” Jeffersonians in Congress responded by eliminating federal judgeships, and also by impeaching a lower court judge and a Supreme Court judge.

In Marbury, Justice Marshall struck down section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, thus depriving his own court of the power to hear a case against Secretary of State James Madison. Marbury effectively declared that the court would not stand in the way of the new president or his congressional majorities. So Jefferson won a short-term political battle—but Justice Marshall won the war by securing for the Supreme Court the power to declare federal laws unconstitutional.

While some conservatives may think Justice Roberts was following in Justice Marshall’s giant footsteps, the more apt comparison is to the Republican Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes’s court struck down the centerpieces of President Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal because they extended the Commerce Clause power beyond interstate trade to intrastate manufacturing and production. Other decisions blocked Congress’s attempt to delegate its legislative powers to federal agencies.

FDR reacted furiously. He publicly declared: “We have been relegated to a horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” After winning a resounding landslide in the 1936 elections, he responded in February 1937 with the greatest attack on the courts in American history. His notorious court-packing plan proposed to add six new justices to the Supreme Court’s nine members, with the obvious aim of overturning the court’s opposition to the New Deal.

After the president’s plan was announced, Hughes and Justice Owen J. Roberts began to switch their positions. They would vote to uphold the National Labor Relations Act, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, and the rest of the New Deal. But Hughes sacrificed fidelity to the Constitution’s original meaning in order to repel an attack on the court. Like Justice Roberts, Hughes blessed the modern welfare state’s expansive powers and unaccountable bureaucracies—the very foundations for ObamaCare.

Hughes’s great constitutional mistake was made for nothing. While many historians and constitutional scholars have referred to his abrupt and unprincipled about-face as “the switch in time that saved nine,” the court-packing plan was wildly unpopular right from the start. It went nowhere in the heavily Democratic Congress. Moreover, further New Deal initiatives stalled in Congress after the congressional elections in 1938.

Justice Roberts too may have sacrificed the Constitution’s last remaining limits on federal power for very little—a little peace and quiet from attacks during a presidential election year.

Given the advancing age of several of the justices, an Obama second term may see the appointment of up to three new Supreme Court members. A new, solidified liberal majority will easily discard Sebelius’s limits on the Commerce Clause and expand the taxing power even further. After the Hughes court switch, FDR replaced retiring Justices with a pro-New Deal majority, and the court upheld any and all expansions of federal power over the economy and society. The court did not overturn a piece of legislation under the Commerce Clause for 60 years.

If a Republican is elected president, he will have to be more careful than the last. When he asks nominees the usual question about justices they agree with, the better answer should once again be Scalia or Thomas or Alito, not Roberts.

For more on those who think Roberts total abdication of his principles augers well for America, here’s the thoughts of Bert Atkinson in the Independent Journal Review, courtesy of Balls; we’re not going to take time highlighting any portion of Atkinson’s missive, as it is, in our opinion, hopelessly and naively optimistic:

Why Chief Justice Roberts Made the Right Long-Term Decision With ObamaCare

 

Before you look to do harm to Chief Justice Roberts or his family, it’s important that you think carefully about the meaning – the true nature — of his ruling on Obama-care. The Left will shout that they won, that Obama-care was upheld and all the rest. Let them.

It will be a short-lived celebration. Here’s what really occurred — payback. Yes, payback for Obama’s numerous, ill-advised and childish insults directed toward SCOTUS.

Chief Justice Roberts actually ruled the mandate, relative to the commerce clause, was unconstitutional. That’s how the Democrats got Obama-care going in the first place. This is critical. His ruling means Congress can’t compel American citizens to purchase anything. Ever. The notion is now officially and forever, unconstitutional. As it should be.

Next, he stated that, because Congress doesn’t have the ability to mandate, it must, to fund Obama-care, rely on its power to tax. Therefore, the mechanism that funds Obama-care is a tax. This is also critical. Recall back during the initial Obama-care battles, the Democrats called it a penalty, Republicans called it a tax. Democrats consistently soft sold it as a penalty. It went to vote as a penalty. Obama declared endlessly, that it was not a tax, it was a penalty. But when the Democrats argued in front of the Supreme Court, they said ‘hey, a penalty or a tax, either way’. So, Roberts gave them a tax. It is now the official law of the land — beyond word-play and silly shenanigans. Obama-care is funded by tax dollars. Democrats now must defend a tax increase to justify the Obama-care law.

Finally, he struck down as unconstitutional, the Obama-care idea that the federal government can bully states into complying by yanking their existing medicaid funding. Liberals, through Obama-care, basically said to the states — ‘comply with Obama-care or we will stop existing funding.’ Roberts ruled that is a no-no. If a state takes the money, fine, the Feds can tell the state how to run a program, but if the state refuses money, the federal government can’t penalize the state by yanking other funding. Therefore, a state can decline to participate in Obama-care without penalty. This is obviously a serious problem. Are we going to have 10, 12, 25 states not participating in “national” health-care? Suddenly, it’s not national, is it?

Ultimately, Roberts supported states rights by limiting the federal government’s coercive abilities. He ruled that the government can not force the people to purchase products or services under the commerce clause and he forced liberals to have to come clean and admit that Obama-care is funded by tax increases.

Although he didn’t guarantee Romney a win, he certainly did more than his part and should be applauded. And he did this without creating a civil war or having bricks thrown threw his windshield. Oh, and he’ll be home in time for dinner. Brilliant.

Yeah….brilliant; just as brilliant as Neville Chamberlain’s storied coup in Munich.

And as our final entry on the Roberts Retreat indicates, we’re hardly alone; John Pohoretz, writing at CommentaryMagazine.com, assesses….

The Damage John Roberts Has Done

 

There are several fascinating and provocative pieces today—among them one by Sean Trende, one by Jay Cost, and one by COMMENTARY contributor Adam J. White—that argue John Roberts’s peculiar opinion in the Obamacare case yesterday is a Machiavellian masterstroke. It is, they say, comparable to the ju-jitsu practiced by the first chief justice, John Marshall, in ruling for Thomas Jefferson’s administration even as he single-handedly raised the Supreme Court to a co-equal check-and-balance on the executive branch, something Jefferson detested, in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision.

Roberts himself probably had Marshall and Marbury in mind as he crafted an opinion that seeks to limit federal power even as it allows its expansion in this single case. Which does not change the fact that Roberts’s reasoning is intellectually, ideologically, and legally perverse—willfully so, in fact. And no matter how you slice it, such perversity is not good argument, good intellection, or good leadership by the nation’s most powerful thinker.

It is not just the contradiction I point out in the New York Post today—saying the mandate is not a tax on page 15 and saying it is on page 35. That illogic runs in parallel with the simultaneous acceptance of an enormous increase in federal power while simultaneously evoking the need to limit it. It is all well and good to assert both conclusions, but they cannot be reconciled by ignoring the need to reconcile them! Roberts is far too intelligent not to know this. And yet, in the most important opinion of his career thus far, he signed his name to something that, were he a professor grading a paper in which such an argument was advanced, he would be compelled to circle three times in red with arrows pointing back and forth.

This is why my friend David Brooks’s description of the Roberts decision as “Burkean” does an injustice to Burke, perhaps the greatest polemicist in the English language, who would never have engaged in such slipshod reasoning.

A writer’s first responsibility, pace the Straussians, is unity—clarity in prose that reveals the clarity of argument. I know that a court decision is not an article but a negotiated document; even so, these decisions are intended to govern the thoughts of others, and when they indulge in casuistry, they legitimate casuistry in other courts. Roberts may want to limit federal power, but in rewriting a law’s language for his own purposes, he is effectively expanding court power in a profoundly damaging way.

If it is indeed the case that Roberts switched sides because he was worried about the political legitimacy of the Supreme Court, he made a devil’s bargain. It is meretricious decisions like these that damage its legitimacy far more than any immediate political controversy.

Our impressions of Roberts politically-inspired perfidy are perhaps best summed up by today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Wally Gator and First Trust‘s Economic Impact Report:

“Instead, the Chief Justice “threaded the needle,” or “cut the baby in half” and said that while the Commerce Clause would not allow Obamacare, the power of Congress to tax and spend does allow it.  In other words, you can be taxed if you don’t buy health insurance.  As far as we know, this is the only tax in American history that can be levied for not doing something.  In other words, you can live in the back of your brother’s property, grow your own food, build your own house out of lumber you cut down, but still be forced to pay a tax just because you’re a breathing citizen of the United States.

The tax is 2.5% of income with a ceiling linked to the average cost of insurance and a floor of $695 no matter what your income.  The ACA described this as a “penalty,” which Roberts said was not constitutional under the Commerce Clause.  Nonetheless, he argued that “It is not our [the Supreme Court’s] job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

As a result, he found a way to make Obamacare constitutional, by using the argument that it is a “tax” not a “penalty.”  And since Congress has the power to tax, the law will stand.  We do not agree with this argument and find it interesting given that Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearing that “Judges are like umpires.  Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.  Nobody ever went to a game to see the umpire.”  It certainly seems he found a way to be at the center of the game.“

The bottom line?  It’s as this cartoon forwarded by Paul Croisetiere suggests:

And a cowardly, craven Chief Justice just shoved it up America’s collective backside.  Now it’s up to Romney and the Republicans to drive home the incalculable impact this tax will have on an already-foundering national economy.

In a related item, James Taranto notes….

Heaven Called, They’ve Never Heard of the Guy

“House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday credited the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) with driving the success of the Democrats’ healthcare law–even from his grave,” the Hill reports:

“I knew that when he left us he would go to heaven and help pass the bill,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “And now he can rest in peace. His dream for America’s families has become a reality.”

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment. But while she may be in heaven, we’re quite sure Ted Kennedy is in another place.

Our thoughts exactly!

Moving on, Thomas Sowell offers….

A Political Glossary: Part II

 

Editor’s Note: This is part II in a series. Part I can be found here.

Politicians seem to have a special fondness for words that have two very different meanings, so we are likely to hear a lot of these kinds of words this election year. “Access” is one of those words. Politicians seem to be forever coming to the rescue of people who have been denied “access” to credit, college or whatever.

But what does that mean, concretely? It could mean that some external force is blocking you from whatever your goal might be. Or it could mean that you just don’t have whatever it takes to reach that goal. To take a personal example, Michael Jordan became a basketball star — and a very rich man. I did neither. Was that because I was denied “access” to professional basketball?

Anyone who saw me as a teenager trying to play basketball could tell you that I was lucky to hit the back board, much less the basket. By the first definition, I had as much “access” to the NBA as Michael Jordan had. Nobody was blocking me. They didn’t have to block, because I was not going to make the basket — or the NBA — anyway.

Making a distinction between external and internal reasons for failing to reach one’s goal would clarify the meaning of the word “access.” But clarification would destroy the political usefulness of the word, along with the government programs that this word is used to justify.

For years, politicians and the media went ballistic over the fact that different groups had different approval rates for mortgage loans. This was supposed to show that some racial groups were denied “access” to mortgage loans, and especially access to the most desired loans with the lowest interest rates. No one even asked the question: Denied access by which definition of “access”?

Political crusaders don’t pause to define words. Their shrill rhetoric suggested that external barriers were the problem. And that meant government intervention was the solution, to smite the wicked and deliver “social justice” (another undefined term).

When statistics showed that blacks were turned down for conventional mortgage loans at twice the rate of whites, that was the clincher for those saying that “access” was the problem and that racial discrimination was the reason. Since this fit the existing preconceptions in many quarters, what more could you want? Other statistics, however, showed that whites were turned down for conventional mortgage loans at nearly double the rate for Asian Americans. By the very same reasoning, that would suggest that whites were being racially discriminated against by banks that were mostly run by whites.

But this unlikely conclusion never surfaced, because the second set of statistics seldom saw the light of day in the mainstream media, even though both sets of statistics were available from the same sources. To publish the second set of statistics would undermine the whole moral melodrama in the media, and the political crusade based on it.

Statistics on the average credit ratings of people in different racial groups likewise seldom saw the light of day. The average credit ratings of whites were higher than the average credit ratings of blacks, and the average credit ratings of Asian Americans were higher than the average credit ratings of whites. But to lay all these facts before the public and say, “We report, you decide” might well result in the public’s deciding that banks and other financial institutions prefer lending to individuals who were more likely to pay them back. Also lost in media stories was the fact that many, if not most, of the financial officials who actually made loan approval decisions never laid eyes on the people who applied, but based their decisions on the paperwork sent by those who dealt directly with the applicants.

Equal “access” does not automatically lead to equal outcomes, either in lending institutions or in basketball, or anywhere else. But words like “access” have led to much political success and much economic disaster, the housing market being just one example.

Just one….unfortunately among many.

And in the Culture Section, as the next item from the Washington Times, courtesy of Bill Meisen confirms, it’s as we’ve said all along: rescinding DA/DT was just the tip of the iceberg:

Pentagon holds first gay pride event 

 

The Pentagon on Tuesday saluted open gays in the ranks, with a civilian lawyer calling on fellow homosexuals to “stretch a little” and become more visible inside the military in the drive for benefits for same-sex couples. “We need to be as visible as we can be,” Gordon Tanner, principal deputy general counsel of the Air Force, said at the Defense Department’s first gay pride event. “Let us be a bridge to our straight allies.”

The Pentagon is not providing benefits to spouses of gay service members because federal law defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Pentagon chose Mr. Tanner and two other gays — a Marine officer and a West Point graduate — to talk about the military during the ban on open gays, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and about the months since its official repeal on Sept. 20.

“I happen to be gay, but more importantly, I’m a Marine,” said Capt. Matthew Phelps. Capt. Phelps told of serving in Iraq with heterosexual officers who would gather Saturday nights to smoke cigars and talk about family back home. He said he had to remain quiet in the back of the room. “By virtue of the fact that I wasn’t allowed to say anything, I was actually growing more distant from my unit,” he said. “We hear people talk about unit cohesion and how is the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ going to affect unit cohesion. I would argue it got better.”

Since enlisting in 2002, he risked being fired. But on June 15, he was at the White House “having champagne with the commander in chief,” he said. Capt. Phelps‘ journey from being secretly gay to openly gay included taking his boyfriend to a Marine Corps ball in San Diego in November to celebrate the Corps’ 236th birthday.

Wow….what a comparison; our POWs in Vietnam endure years of torture at the hands of The Dear Misleader’s ideological soulmates versus Capt. Phelps’ inability to share with his fellow Marines the details about his nocturnal activities with his boyfriend.

Chesty Puller and Presley O’Bannon must be rolling over in their graves.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Follow-Up Segment, and this update on an earlier sign the Apocalypse is upon us:

Students suspended for a year in New York bus monitor bullying

 

Four seventh-grade boys from upstate New York who were caught on video mercilessly taunting a 68-year-old bus monitor have received their punishment. The school system in the Rochester suburb of Greece says it will suspend the middle school students from school and from using regular bus transportation for a year for bullying Karen Klein.

The students will be transferred to a special alternative education program because the district is legally required to give the students an education. Each student will also be required to complete 50 hours of community service with senior citizens. They will be able to reapply to middle school after their complete the discipline.

In a statement, the school system said each of the students involved admitted to wrongdoing, accepted the consequences and agreed to let the district publicly release the terms of their disciplinary action.

There may be hope for the world yet!

Magoo