There’s all this stuff that got in there about creating commerce in order to regulate it. … But quite apart from that, what is the commerce? The commerce is not the health insurance market. The commerce is the health-care market, as [current solicitor general Donald] Verrilli said a million times. And it’s very hard to deny that.
There is a market for health care. It’s a coordinated market. A heavily regulated market. Is Congress creating the market in order to regulate it? It’s not creating it! The market is there! Is it forcing people into it in order to regulate them? In every five-year period, 95 percent of the population is in the health-care market. Now, it’s not 100 percent, but I’d say that’s close enough for government work. And in any one year, it’s close to 85 percent. Congress isn’t forcing people into that market to regulate them. The whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party and Randy Barnetts of the world, and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.
Charles Fried, law professor at Harvard University and Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general
go read all of this. i wish he had argued the government’s case.
And that, Sen. Santorum, is why you don’t call it a war on radical Islam: because choosing your words carefully is part of winning the war.
" After all, achievement in higher education correlates powerfully with performance in the workplace. Recent numbers indicate that only 4% of those with university degrees are unemployed, while the rate rises to 16% for those with no high school diploma. Ironically, this field of Republican contenders amounts to the best-educated crop of major candidates in the history of American politics. Each of the final four holds at least one prestigious post-graduate degree. Dr. Ron Paul earned his medical degree from Duke and Newt Gingrich won a doctorate from Tulane; Mitt Romney holds both law and MBA degrees from Harvard, while Rick Santorum got the same two degrees from Dickinson School of Law and the University of Pittsburgh, respectively. What's more, Mr. Santorum's family background shows the profound value of education in lifting the disadvantaged into the middle class and beyond. The campaign likes to leave the impression that he grew up in the coal fields of Pennsylvania, but young Rick actually came of age in a home where the father earned a doctorate and worked as a clinical psychologist while the mother toiled outside the house as a well-credentialed administrative nurse; it was his immigrant grandfather who worked the coal mines. It makes no sense for the former senator to hide his own family's success story, because his parents' progress exemplifies the sort of achievement that all mothers and fathers seek for their children. Sure, it's important to talk about protecting and increasing manufacturing jobs, because so many hard-pressed people depend on them. But those same workers dream that the next generation may choose educational options that extend their horizons beyond industrial employment."
it’s not often I agree with the content of the WSJ’s editorial page, but this is right on. democrats should be all over those education/unemployment stats.
"The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office."
“With all respect, the person who is sitting in the classroom, the person who’s giving back to this economy is me, not my parents.”
(Source: campusprogress.org)
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishment of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
David Foster Wallace, “Up, Simba”
(this piece is just brilliant and so well written it hurts me a little.)
