It’s Thursday, July 5th, 2012….and before we begin, a brief personal observation in honor of those who allow us to celebrate the 4th of July.

Though most if not all of you know this story, it’s worth recounting the fortunes of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence.  Five were captured and tortured by the British prior to their deaths.  Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Nine died defending their fledgling republic, two lost sons in the service while two more had their sons captured.

They were well-educated men of means; lawyers, jurists, merchants, planters and farmers.  And every one of them knew their signatures meant risking everything, knowing full well the penalty for their courage was death.

As the website dojgov.net recounts:

“Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags. Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton. At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr. noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire.  The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.”

These weren’t wild-eyed anarchists, or narcissistic Occupiers; they were prominent, well-to-do men of influence, pillars of their communities.  They simply valued liberty more than temporary security and personal possessions.  And their sacrifice on the altar of American freedom stands in stark contrast against the craven cowardice of John Roberts, who couldn’t bring himself to risk his personal popularity on the Capitol cocktail service in defense of the Constitution he’s sworn to protect.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Jonah Goldberg details in USA Today, despite what The Dear Misleader may claim to the contrary, the….

Supreme Court didn’t agree with Obama

 

Don’t make me angry, America; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry

Last Thursday, President Obama walked before the cameras and said, “Good afternoon. Earlier today, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act— the name of the health care reform we passed two years ago. In doing so, they’ve reaffirmed a fundamental principle that here in America — in the wealthiest nation on earth — no illness or accident should lead to any family’s financial ruin.”

A bit later, Obama added, “Today, the Supreme Court also upheld the principle that people who can afford health insurance should take the responsibility to buy health insurance.”

The casual listener might take Obama to be saying that the Supreme Court agrees with him and that the ruling was a ringing endorsement of what Obama takes to be the core “principles” of ObamaCare.

But that’s not the case, at all. The dissenting opinion written by four justices found the whole thing to be an affront to the Constitution. And the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the law is constitutional for reasons the president — a famous teacher of the Constitution — passionately rejected.

“You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos asked the president in a now legendary interview in 2009. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied Obama.

In Roberts’ words

 

Obama might respond that regardless of how they got there, the justices did affirm the principles of ObamaCare. Nope. “We do not consider whether the act embodies sound policies,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. “That judgment is entrusted to the nation’s elected leaders.” And again, Roberts writes of ObamaCare: “It is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”

This was Justice Roberts’ diplomatic way of paraphrasing Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous defense of judicial restraint: “If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It’s my job.” (Which is, as we note below, quite curious in light of polls which have demonstrated overwhelming public opposition to ACA since its inception.)

No doubt, Obama is delighted with the court’s decision. The court might have repudiated the president’s own opinions, but as a political matter there’s little doubt Obama welcomes such repudiation. Still, it’s telling that Obama’s fraudulent claim that the Supreme Court agrees with him is not so unusual. The president has a well-known habit of insisting that not only is he right, but also that all smart people agree with him.

For instance, in a 2009 discussion of the economic stimulus, Obama told The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, “Whatever arguments may be made by the critics at this point, there was no economist out there who thought we didn’t need to do (it).” Or, in a speech about energy last March: “What I just said about energy, by the way, is not disputed by any energy expert. Everybody agrees with this.”

Let the record show that there are, in fact, economists and energy experts who disagree with Barack Obama. Really.

Beyond what this tendency says about the president’s own character, it certainly reveals the arrogance of liberalism itself. There is something about the nature of liberalism that causes its adherents to argue as if it is the one true faith. But rather than speak the language of faith, they instead speak the vocabulary of expertise. They claim “sound science” and the support of “all experts” as if their opponents are devoid of facts and reason.

Contempt for democracy

 

There’s a troubling contempt for democracy in this approach to politics because it assumes that your opponents have nothing of substance to contribute to the discussion. Moreover, this assumption inexorably leads liberals to think that if we could just let the experts run things, then everything would be great.

This was the faith of the original progressives who pushed, in the words of legendary news commentator Walter Lippmann, the “mastery” of scientific governance over the “drift” of messy markets and disorganized democracy. The New Deal and the Great Society were grounded in the same vision of infinitely capable technocrats. Even John F. Kennedy argued that the problems facing the country “deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men” and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.

Just last year, Peter Orszag, former Obama Office of Management and Budget director, was making the same argument. “We need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions,” Orszag argued, “by making them a bit less democratic.” The answer to our problems, Orszag proclaimed: “Automatic policies and depoliticized commissions.”

It’s no wonder that this mindset led to the creation of ObamaCare. Indeed, this is the real principle at the core of the act: the idea that if we can just give the experts, the commissions, the panels and boards enough power to do “what all experts” believe, then everything will be great, particularly if we can force citizens and businesses alike to heel.

In fairness, the court didn’t affirm that principle either, but it did say that if the voters want to go to that corner of hell, we can.

Which is more than passing strange as, given overwhelming opposition to Obamascare since its inception, it’s clearly a corner of hell the vast majority of Americans never voted to visit.  As has been documented repeatedly, the passage of Obamascare no more resembled the legislative process envisioned by the Founding Fathers than The Obamao does a constitutional scholar.

This bill grew like Topsy, and it’s enactment required every form of bribery, cajoling, arm-twisting and procedural sleight-of-hand known to the Dimocratic political machine….which is saying something.

Roberts’ and O.W. Holmes’ self-serving mea culpas notwithstanding, and regardless of whether the ACA is a tax or a penalty, the fact remains rather than a cure-all for what ails America’s healthcare system, Obamascare is akin to euthanizing the patient to alleviate the symptoms of a common cold.

In a related item, the WSJ asks….

Why are Republicans so awful at picking Supreme Court justices?

 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decision to side with the court’s liberal bloc and uphold Obamacare raises an important question for conservatives:  Why are Republicans so awful at picking Supreme Court justices?  Democrats have been virtually flawless in appointing reliable liberals to the court. Yet Republicans, more often than not, appoint justices who vote with the other side on critical decisions.

Just compare the records over the last three decades. Democrats have appointed four justices — Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. All have been consistent liberals on the bench. Republicans, by contrast, have picked seven justices. Of Ronald Reagan’s three appointees (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy) only Scalia has been a consistent conservative. George H.W. Bush appointed one solid conservative (Clarence Thomas) and one disastrous liberal (David Souter). With George W. Bush’s appointments of Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Roberts, conservatives thought finally they had broken the mold and put two rock-ribbed conservatives on the bench — until last week, that is, when Roberts broke with the conservatives and cast the deciding vote to uphold the largest expansion of federal power in decades.

So Democrats are four-for-four — a perfect record. Republicans are not even batting .500.

Why is the Democratic record so consistent while the Republican record is so mixed? For one thing, the whole legal and political culture pushes the court to the left.  Conservatives are pariahs if they vote against the left on certain issues. But if they crossover vote with the left, they are hailed as statesmen. Just look the pre-emptive attacks on the Roberts Court when everyone thought it was about to strike down Obamacare — and contrast that with all the accolades Roberts is now receiving from his erstwhile critics.  Before the decision he was threatening to plunge the nation into a political crisis. Today he is praised for his “humility,” “restraint,” being “brave” and “judicial modesty.” Meanwhile, many conservatives are twisting themselves in knots to defend or explain his vote. Not a chance the left would do the same if one of the court’s liberals had voted to overturn Obamacare. There is no penalty for voting left, but there is for voting right.

Another factor is that liberal Supreme Court nominees can tell you precisely how they stand on key issues and still get confirmed. In her 1993 confirmation hearings, Ginsburg declared the right to abortion “central to a woman’s life, to her dignity” and was confirmed 96 to 3. Breyer declared abortion a “basic right” and was confirmed 87-9. Imagine if a conservative nominee said the opposite? Their confirmation battle would be a nuclear war.

Liberal nominees can simply affirm liberal positions, while conservatives must speak cryptically in terms of their judicial philosophy. And as we saw last week, those philosophical statements do not necessarily indicate how they will vote on the bench. During his confirmation hearings, Roberts famously compared the role of a judge to that of a baseball umpire whose job “is to call balls and strikes.” This was taken as a promise that, as President Bush put it, “he’s not going to legislate from the bench.”

But legislate from the bench is exactly what Roberts did last week. The law’s proponents consistently rejected the notion that the individual mandate was a tax. But Roberts effectively redrafted the statute, making the mandate a tax in order to declare it constitutional. As Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito wrote in their dissent, “to say that the Individual mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it.” This, they added, “carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”

That is the kind of sophistry we expect from liberals. The left sees the law as a tool of social justice — so they start with the desired outcome and then come up with legal reasoning to justify it. That is what Roberts did last week. He decided he wanted to uphold Obamacare and rewrote the statute to fit that outcome.

There is informed speculation in conservative legal circles that a close reading of the dissent shows Roberts had intended to strike down Obamacare, but flipped his position at the last minute. We don’t know if he was suddenly convinced by his liberal colleagues, or simply had a failure of nerve. But the challenge for conservatives is clear: We need jurists who not only have a philosophy of judicial restraint, but the intestinal fortitude not to be swayed by pressure from The New York Times, the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the legal academy.

Roberts’ defenders point to his many other conservative decisions and argue that he is not another David Souter or even another Anthony Kennedy. That may be true. But is that really the standard we want for a Supreme Court justice — they are not another Souter or Kennedy? Shouldn’t conservatives expect Republican presidents to do better and appoint another Scalia, Thomas or Alito? That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

And since we’re on the subject, in the “Houston, We Have A Problem” segment, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight confirms our worst fears they couldn’t hit the broad side of barn with a bazooka:

Romney’s Tax Confusion

The candidate’s response on the ObamaCare mandate reveals larger campaign problems.

 

Hmmm, maybe I should visit some of the hundreds of thousands in the Mid-Atlantic still without power….?

NAAAAHHHHH!!!

If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts’s ObamaCare salvage operation—that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax—into a second political defeat.

Appearing on MSNBC, close Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked by host Chuck Todd if Mr. Romney “agrees with the president” and “believes that you shouldn’t call the tax penalty a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?” “That’s correct,” Mr. Fehrnstrom replied, before attempting some hapless spin suggesting that Mr. Obama must be “held accountable” for his own “contradictory” statements on whether it is a penalty or tax. Predictably, the Obama campaign and the media blew past Mr. Fehrnstrom’s point, jumped on the tax-policy concession, and declared the health-care tax debate closed.

For conservative optimists who think Mr. Fehrnstrom misspoke or is merely dense, his tax absolution gift to Mr. Obama was confirmed by campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, who tried the same lame jujitsu spin. In any event, Mr. Fehrnstrom is part of the Boston coterie who are closest to Mr. Romney, and he wouldn’t say such a thing without the candidate’s approval.

In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country who had used the Chief Justice’s opinion to declare accurately that Mr. Obama had raised taxes on the middle class. Three-quarters of those who will pay the mandate tax will make less than $120,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Romney high command has muddied the tax issue in a way that will help Mr. Obama’s claims that he is merely taxing rich folks like Mr. Romney. And it has made it that much harder for Republicans to again turn ObamaCare into the winning issue it was in 2010.

Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney’s fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we’ve said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.

Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama’s spending ambitions are so vast that they can’t be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.

Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare. The tragedy is that for the sake of not abandoning his faulty health-care legacy in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney is jeopardizing his chance at becoming President.

Perhaps Mr. Romney is slowly figuring this out, because in a July 4 interview he stated himself that the penalty now is a “tax” after all. But he offered no elaboration, and so the campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb. This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign’s insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn’t been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.

The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that “Obama isn’t working.” Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lake-side home with a jet-ski cameo. Team Obama is pounding him for Bain Capital, and until a recent ad in Ohio the Romney campaign has been slow to respond. Team Obama is now opening up a new assault on Mr. Romney as a job outsourcer with foreign bank accounts, and if the Boston boys let that one go unanswered, they ought to be fired for malpractice.

All of these attacks were predictable, in particular because they go to the heart of Mr. Romney’s main campaign theme—that he can create jobs as President because he is a successful businessman and manager. But candidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.

The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.

Mr. Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat. So far Mr. Romney is letting them down.

Not to mention lending truth to Team Tick-Tock’s claims of being “out of touch”.  Regardless of how the results unfold, surely there’s plenty of time after November for jet-skiing or any other form of….”horseplay”!?!

This despite, as Dan Henninger observes, The Obamao doing everything but conceding the election to Romney outright:

ObamaCare’s Lost Tribe: Doctors

The practice of medicine is the Obama health-care law’s biggest loser.

 

Meet the future of single-payer healthcare; go on….tell them where it hurts!

Back at the at the dawn of ObamaCare in June 2009, speaking to the American Medical Association’s annual meeting, President Obama said: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.” But will your doctor be able to keep you? Or will your doctor even want to keep you, rather than quit medicine?

For the longest time now, since the day one of the Affordable Care Act, we have been having arguments over the mandate to purchase health-care insurance, requirements that insurance companies accept policyholders regardless of health, and price discrimination in insurance policies.

And of course this past week, the Supreme Court—or something resembling the Supreme Court—outputted a decision on the tax status of the insurance-purchase mandate, the states’ obligation to pay for Medicaid and as a bonus, the Commerce Clause.

Have you noticed what got lost in this historic rumble? Doctors. Remember them?

ObamaCare has been a war over the processing of insurance claims. It has been fought by institutional interests representing insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical firms. The doctor-patient relationship, or what used to be called “the practice of medicine,” has sunk beneath these waves.

Barack Obama, a savvy pol, understood from the start that rationalizing payments claims through the maw of these private and public bureaucracies was not what the average person thinks of as “health care.” To any normal person, health care means that when you or yours get really sick, the doctors and nurses who attend to you will push all else aside to give you medical help.

Thus, the constant Obama chorus that you can “keep your own doctor.” No one knows better than Barack Obama that his law sends the nation’s doctors on a voyage into an uncharted health-care world in which they are just along for the ride with their patients.

A Wall Street Journal story the day after the Supreme Court ruling examined in detail its impact across the “health sector.” The words “doctor,” “physician” and “nurse” appeared nowhere in this report. The piece, however, did cite the view of one CEO who runs a chain of hospitals, explaining how they’d deal with the law’s expected $155 billion in compensation cuts. “We will make it up in volume,” he said.

Volume? Would that be another word for human beings? It is now. At Obama Memorial, docs won’t be treating patients. They’ll be processing “volume.” And then, with what time and energy remains in the day, they’ll be inputting medical data to comply with the law’s new Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

Here’s the Centers’ own description of what PQRS does: “The program provides an incentive payment to practices with eligible professionals (identified on claims by their individual National Provider Identifier [NPI] and Tax Identification Number [TIN]) who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services furnished to Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service (FFS).”

We’re all pressed for thinking time these days, but the one group we should make sure has time to focus on what’s in front of them is doctors treating patients. Instead, they’ll also be doing mandated data dumps for far-off panels of experts.

Doubts, even among believers, have begun to emerge about what ObamaCare could do to the practice of medicine. A remarkable and important piece by Drs. Christine K. Cassel and Sachin H. Jain in the June 17 Journal of the American Medical Association directly asks: “Does Measurement Suppress Motivation?”

The question raised by the article is whether imposing pay-for-performance measurements on individual physicians does more harm than good: “[C]lose attention must be given to whether and how these initiatives motivate physicians and not turn physicians into pawns working only toward specific measurable outcomes, losing the complex problem-solving and diagnostic capabilities essential to their role in quality of patient care, and diminish their sense of professional responsibility by making it a market commodity.”

This is an important piece, because Dr. Cassel is part of the intellectual foundation for the measured-directives movement. The saying that comes to mind reading these misgivings is that it’s better late than never to notice that the core relationship between doctor and patient is being eroded. Except that in the wake of Chief Justice Roberts’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act, it’s too late and we’re beyond never.

Mitt Romney needs a way to talk about health care in America. This isn’t just a fight over insurance companies. It’s about the people at the center of health care—doctors. The Affordable Care Act will damage that most crucial of all life relationships, that between an ill person and his physician. Barack Obama’s assertion that we all can keep our doctors is false. You could line up practicing physicians from here to Boston to explain to Mr. Romney why that is so.

At least for now, Romney evokes the image of an offensive lineman in the closing seconds of a big game who’s just had a deflected pass drop in his hands; though aware he’s been presented once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he’s uncertain what to do or even which direction to head….and not only is the opposing team breathing down his neck but the clock’s ticking.

Next up, it’s the Environmental Moment, as James Taranto poses the question….

Hot Enough for You?

Apparently it is, if you’re a global warmist.

 

When the weather is cold, we think it’s cool to make fun of global warmism. Invariably when we do so, global warmists get hot under the collar. “You fool!”, they thunder, “Climate isn’t the same thing as weather!” Of course we understand that. Cool down, it’s a joke.

It’s a joke designed to make a point–a point worth revisiting now that it’s hot out. And it is hot: As we write, Google informs us that the temperature in New York, outside our lovely air-conditioned apartment, is 88 degrees. Over the weekend we were in Tennessee, and at one point our rental-car thermometer informed us the outside temperature was 111, albeit on blacktop.

We’ll give you three guesses what Associated Press blames for the heat:

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change . . .

They are also the kind of extremes anyone who lives in the Northern Hemisphere can predict will come with July. News flash: Summer is hot. And actually, the AP dispatch switches midsentence from global-warmist alarmism to an acknowledgment that weather isn’t climate:

. . . although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

Tell that to the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, whose column today begins pretty much the same way the AP story does: “Still don’t believe in climate change? Then you’re either deep in denial or delirious from the heat. As I write this, the nation’s capital and its suburbs are in post-apocalypse mode. About one-fourth of all households have no electricity, the legacy of an unprecedented assault by violent thunderstorms Friday night. Things are improving: At the height of the power outage, nearly half the region was dark.”

It’s even scarier than that. Last night the sun fell into the ocean, leaving the Earth both hot and dark. (Flat, too, according to Thomas Friedman.) Fortunately, by morning there was a new sun. But if the obstructionist Republican Congress doesn’t act quickly to solve this problem, it’s only a matter of time before we run out of suns.

Seriously, though, when we point out cold weather to mock global warmists, we’re satirizing the sort of cherry-picking arguments that global warmists routinely put forth. When it’s hot in July, it’s global warming. When it’s cold in January, climate isn’t weather. You science-hating idiot.

The Washington Post reports that a new survey finds public concern about global warming cooling: “Just under four in 10 polled say global warming is extremely or very important to them, the lowest percentage since 2006 and down from 52 percent in 2007. Just 10 percent say it is extremely important to them personally, down from 15 percent in 2011 and 18 percent in 2007.”

The average man, it would seem, knows enough to be skeptical of overheated rhetoric and fallacious arguments. Why are so many journalists by contrast so credulous?

Because they’re….educated idiots totally in the tank for a Marxist Missiah?!?

Speaking of educated idiots, despite a budget tighter than the seat of the First Marxette’s pants, as Special Report details, the powers that be in the Pentagon continue to play their own version of….

Anchor$ Aweigh

 

The Navy is going full steam ahead with an initiative to power ships with biofuel despite criticism that that the so-called “green Navy” will be hitting taxpayers in the wallet hard. The 50/50 blend of alternative and conventional fuel costs about $26 a gallon compared to typical fuel costing about $3.60 a gallon.

Republican lawmakers say that’s just too much money considering the average non-nuclear aircraft carrier burns 100,000 gallons of fuel on a normal day. The Navy wants to have half its fleet on alternative fuels by 20/20 and insists costs will go down as fuel production goes up.

Nothing like impressing the ChiComs, NoKos and Mad Mullahs with our commitment to meaningless environmental measures at the expense of military preparedness and national defense.

On the Lighter Side….

Carl Polizzi….

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the Homer Simpson Memorial “D-oh!!!” segment, courtesy today of the Tar Heel State and a small switchology snafu:

N.C. lawmaker hits wrong button, approves fracking

 

D’oh!!!

A veteran state lawmaker in North Carolina says she pushed the wrong button late Monday night  in a marathon legislative session and accidentally opened up the state to fracking. Rep. Becky Carney, a five-term Democrat from Charlotte, burst into tears after mistakenly voting with Republicans to override Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of the contentious legislation. The measure lifts the ban on hydraulic fracturing as a means for mining for natural gas, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Carney and other Democrats asked for a do-over, as is common when a member pushes the wrong button. But in this instance, Republicans said no. A change in Carney’s vote would have changed the outcome, which is against the House rules. But Ms. Carney asked for the rules to be suspended so she could change her vote, but got nowhere. Ms. Carney had lobbied against the fracking initiative and had voted against it previously. “It feels rotten,” Carney said, in an interview.  “It’s a very heavy responsibility because I just feel like the state is not ready.”

Majority Leader Paul Stam said fracking could be important to North Carolina’s economy and Republicans needed every vote they had to allow it, including Carney’s. The Senate had already overridden the veto and it became law the moment voting closed, Stam said. “There was nothing she could do about it,” he said, in an interview. “There was nothing that can be done.

It should be noted Dimocrat Bev Perdue is so popular she’s not seeking reelection as governor, and Republicans hold significant majorities in both houses of the North Carolina legislature.  Thus, regardless of Carney’s Homer Simpson moment, fracking is clearly the will of the people.

Which of course doesn’t even register on the Dimocratic….

Magoo