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08 Feb ' 19:28
offers his own account. But crucial elements of it are at variance with the facts. Here is the key paragraph:
Butler writes that the Heritage proposal "focused on 'catastrophic' costs" and did not envision mandating as costly a package of benefits as ObamaCare does, and that the Heritage plan, unlike ObamaCare, would include "a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage." The latter statement is true, and to our mind is an advantage of the Heritage plan over ObamaCare. But it is irrelevant to the question of the individual mandate's provenance.
So far the 2012 GOP contest has been as unpredictable as the 2008 Democratic one, and if Gingrich manages to keep it a three-man race, it could go on for some time--especially with Ron Paul, while not a real contender for the nomination, taking away votes that might put someone else over the top. This may or may not be good news for Republicans in the long run, but it's very good for those of us who like political drama.
explanation for how the revolution in sexual mores--in this case, mores dealing with sex roles as opposed to sexual behavior--has led to reduced male wages. The supply of labor has increased enormously over the past 40 to 50 years as more women have entered the workforce. That wages would go down as a result is Economics 101.
- " 'Nothing Provincial' About the Huffington Post's [sic] New Quebec Website, Media Boss Says"--headline,
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Federal securities regulators plan to warn several major banks that they intend to sue them over mortgage-related actions linked to the financial crisis.
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Republican Party leaders hoped that antipathy toward President Obama and aggravation over the slow economic recovery would send a wave of Republican voters to the polls for presidential primaries. But turnout so far has been mixed.
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Government officials are on the verge of an agreement worth as much as $25 billion with five major banks, capping a yearlong push to settle federal and state probes of alleged foreclosure abuses by lenders.
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Ground Shifts Again for Republicans
Bruising defeats in three battleground states Tuesday have exposed lingering weaknesses in Mitt Romney's standing with conservatives.
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After Rick Santorum won in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri Tuesday night, the question remains: Can a senator voted out of office almost six years ago wage a national contest against better-known rivals with bigger donors?
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08 Feb ' 13:23
- FEBRUARY 8, 2012
Heritage Rewrites History
The think tank proposed the individual mandate years before Clinton took office.
In an October column, we recounted the origins of the ObamaCare individual mandate at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. In a USA Today op-ed earlier this week, Heritage's Stuart Butler offers his own account. But crucial elements of it at are variance with the facts. Here is the key paragraph:
The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through "adverse selection" (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
Even if you don't know the history, you can see that this is reminiscent of a John Kerry tale: "I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Richard Nixon was not yet president in 1968, and neither was Bill Clinton 20 years ago, in 1992.
To be sure, that's a quibble. Unlike Kerry, who cited a specific date, when Butler says "20 years ago" he is referring to a temporal order of magnitude. It would be close enough to say "20 years ago" if Heritage proposed the individual mandate in 1993 or 1994.
Twitter.comButler did it.
But it didn't. Butler's approximation runs in the other direction. He first proposed the individual mandate almost 23 years ago, in a 1989 "Critical Issues" monograph titled "A National Health System for America." (The Heritage website lists the publication date as Jan. 2, 1989, but it was actually June 1 of that year, according to a contemporaneous story.)
For most purposes, "20 years ago" is a close enough approximation for 23. In this case, however, it gives the lie to Butler's claim that Heritage first embraced the individual mandate as an "alternative" to President Clinton's "universal health care plan." Bill Clinton became president more than 3½ years after the monograph's publication.
Butler also writes: "My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate." He offers only one item of evidence for this assertion: "Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid 'with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.' "
That Friedman piece ran in the Journal Nov. 12, 1991--more than 20 years ago, but 29 months after Heritage published the monograph. Forbes's Avik Roy reports that he attempted without success to substantiate Butler's claim of unoriginality: "As far as I have been able to find, Stuart's 1989 brief is the first published proposal of an individual mandate in the context of private-sector-managed health systems."
Butler writes that the Heritage proposal "focused on 'catastrophic' costs" and did not envision mandating as costly a package of benefits as ObamaCare does, and that the Heritage plan, unlike ObamaCare, would included "a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage." The latter statement is true, and to our mind is an advantage of the Heritage plan over ObamaCare. But it is irrelevant to the question of the individual mandate's provenance.
As to the former assertion, it's unclear. The 1989 monograph, which listed the mandate as "Element #1" of 3, left the extent of the mandate unspecified but the basic idea unambiguous: "The degree of financial protection can be debated, but the principle of mandatory family protection is central to a universal health care system in America."
A third Butler distinction is highly misleading: "In the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the 'mandate' was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement."
That may be true of a specific legislative proposal developed four or five years after the conception of the individual mandate. But here is Butler's original description of how the mandate would be enforced, from page 51 of the 1989 monograph:
The requirement to obtain basic insurance would have to be enforced. The easiest way to monitor compliance might be for households to furnish proof of insurance when they file their tax returns. If a family were to cancel its insurance, the insurer would be required to notify the government. If the family did not enroll in another plan before the first insurance coverage lapsed and did not provide evidence of financial problems, a fine might be imposed.
An April 2010 Congressional Research Service memo on "The PPACA Penalty Provision and the Internal Revenue Service" makes clear that ObamaCare incorporates every element of the original Heritage enforcement proposal, including the imposition of a "reporting requirement . . . on anyone who 'provides minimum essential coverage to an individual during a calendar year.' " That is, if you cancel your policy, your insurer must report you to Uncle Sam, just as Butler recommended.
We even noticed a foreshadowing of President Obama's rhetoric in Butler's 1989 proposal. In introducing the mandate, Butler stated: "This requirement would imply a compact between the U.S. government and its citizens: in return for the government's accepting an obligation to devise a market-based system guaranteeing access to care and protecting all families from financial distress due to the cost of an illness, each individual must agree to obtain a minimum level of protection." Obama likes to talk about "the social compact," too.
To judge by opinion polls, however, the government never bothered obtaining the consent of its citizens before imposing the ObamaCare compact. Heritage in 1989 and Obama in 2010 both underestimated the extent to which the idea of compelling individuals to purchase a product or service goes against the American grain.
Heritage has changed its mind, and Butler concludes his op-ed with a mea culpa of sorts: "I've altered my views on many things. The individual mandate in health care is one of them." Acknowledging error is a sign of integrity, but you have to be truthful about it.
Everything's Coming Up Santorum It's been a bad week for New England so far. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts who on alternate days is the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, lost three contests yesterday, two of which he won four years ago. Reuters reports:
Rick Santorum claimed a surge of momentum and fundraising on Wednesday, a day after his shocking sweep of nominating contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri that dealt a blow to front-runner Mitt Romney.
Even though Romney holds strong advantages in financing and organization, his campaign will have to refocus to fight the challenge from Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania known for his socially conservative views.
"We definitely are the campaign with the momentum, the enthusiasm on the ground," Santorum said on CNN.
For Romney, Tuesday's results included losses in two states--Colorado and Minnesota--that he won in his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. Minnesota also became the first state where Romney did not end up in first or second place.
In Missouri, where Newt Gingrich was not on the ballot, Santorum rolled over Romney in a beauty-contest primary. The other two states held caucuses, a form of voting in which organization is a tremendous advantage. In 2008, Barack Obama wrested the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton largely by performing very well in caucus states.
With his narrow victory in Iowa, Santorum has now won three out of the four caucuses so far; Romney's sole victory was in Nevada. Romney has had a big fund-raising edge over all his GOP rivals, but it now seems that isn't translating into an advantage in his favor in on-the-ground organizing.
So far the 2012 GOP contest has been as unpredictable as the 2008 Democratic one, and if Gingrich manages to keep it a three-man race, it could go on for some time--especially with Ron Paul, while not a real contender for the nomination, taking away votes that might put someone else over the top. This may or may not be good news for Republicans in the long run, for it's very good for those of us who like political drama.
A New Yorker's View of the World
- "Looking at the polling for the run of Midwestern primaries and caucuses to come, my colleague Nate Silver writes today that Rick Santorum is 'a more dangerous opponent for Mr. Romney than Mr. Gingrich at this point.' Indeed, there's been a spate of conservative commentary to that effect: From Bill Kristol, Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey, among others."--Ross Douthat, New York Times website, Feb. 6
- "Who saw that coming? Not I, and not anybody else—probably not even Rick Santorum."--John Cassidy, The New Yorker website, Feb. 8
Wages of Sin? Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman weighs in on the debate over the "drastic decline in marriage rates among less educated Americans" over the past half-century, which Charles Murray documents in his new book.
"What could be causing that?' asks Krugman. "Well, it could be some kind of cultural contagion from liberalism, or something," he answers, sarcastically. Then, seriously, he observes "it could also be this" and shows a chart showing a decline of about 22% in average male wages, after adjusting for inflation, since 1973:
Should we really be surprised that young men, confronting the reality that they won't earn anything near as much in real terms as their fathers did--and that they will be even further from having what society sees as an adequate income, because even Adam Smith acknowledged the importance of social norms in defining prosperity--don't marry and raise families the way the previous generation did?
Krugman has a point here. It seems reasonable to think the decline in male wages is one factor behind the decline in marriage among "working class" Americans. But to pooh-pooh the loosening of sexual norms as a major factor seems preposterous--a function of both Krugman's political bias as a left-liberal and his professional bias as an economist.
But Krugman's political bias wins out over his professional bias. It does not even seem to occur to him that there is an economic explanation for how the revolution in sexual mores--in this case, mores dealing with sex roles as opposed to sexual behavior--has led to reduced male wages. The supply of labor has increased enormously over the past 40 to 50 years as more women have entered the workforce. That wages would go down in a result is Economics 101.
"[President Obama] is also telling the country that simply getting re-elected is bigger than standing on principle."--editorial, New York Times, Feb. 8
We Blame Global Warming "Legendary Mormon Curse Blamed for Washoe Disasters"--headline, Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal, Feb. 6
With DNC in Mind, City Bans Carrying Urine, Feces "Romney Sees No. 1 or No. 2 Finish in Colorado"--headline, WSJ.com, Feb. 8
He Can Get It Free at Planned Parenthood "Obama Seeks Deal on Birth Control"--headline, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8
Questions to Ask to Annoy Objectivists "When Is an 'A' Not Really an 'A'?"--headline, KRQE-TV website (Albuquerque, N.M.), Feb. 7
He Wrote the Cambodia Chapter "Kerry Well Represented in New Tourism Guide"--headline, Kerryman (Tralee, Ireland), Feb. 8
Read My Lips. No New Taxis. "NASA Calls for New Taxis to Fly to Space Station"--headline, Reuters, Feb. 7
Leaving 3 Empty Seats "4 Yahoo Board Member [sic] Including Chair Leaving"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 7
'The Defendant Is Ordered to Take My Wife. Please.' "Judge Orders Florida Man To Take His Wife on a Date"--headline, WTVJ-TV website (Miami), Feb. 8
These Guys Are Really Lost "The Russian team hit the lake Sunday at the depth of 12,366 feet (3,769 meters) about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) southeast of the South Pole in the central part of the continent."--Associated Press, Feb. 8
- "A Florida Millionaire Adopted His 42-Year-Old Girlfriend. Isn't That Incest?"--headline, Slate.com
- "What if Hugh Hefner Were Mitt Romney's Great-Grandfather?"--headline, Forbes.com, Feb. 8
"Ralph Nader's Advice to Gingrich on a Third Party Run: 'Go for It!' "--headline, Yahoo! News, Feb. 8
It's Always in the Last Place You Look "Randy Travis Found Drunk in Church Parking Lot"--headline, Slate.com, Feb. 7
- "Rick Santorum, Beyond the Sweater"--headline, Washington Post website, Feb. 8
- "Ron Paul Gets Excited During Speech After Second Place Finish In Minnesota Caucus"--headline, , Feb. 8
- "Members Make 'Em Laugh"--headline, Roll Call, Feb. 8
Breaking News From 1941 "US, Japan Pave Way to Send Okinawa Marines to Guam"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 8
- "Dolphin Strandings Offer Few Clues"--headline, Boston Herald
- " 'Nothing Provincial' About the Huffington Post's New Quebec Website, Media Boss Says"--headline, Montreal Gazette, Feb. 8
The Opposite of Progress
"The House Ethics Committee could be probing a second allegation that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) broke House rules, according to the Chicago lawmaker," the Hill reports:"[It was] not a personal benefit to me, I don't believe, under the House rules. A benefit to the person for whom he bought the ticket. He didn't buy tickets for me. Did I direct him? I did," said Jackson, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Oh well, at least he's contrite.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Eric Jensen, Kyle Kyllan, Daniel Mullen, Doug Helferich, Dave Ceely, Aaron Booth, Robert Walsh, Tony Francois, Jacob Roebuck, Chris Papouras, Ray Hull, David Hallstrom, Ed Grinberg, Tim Magee, MIguel Rakiewicz, Ravi Baskaran, Mark Kellner, Leonard Peirce, John Hutsebaut, Mark Swanson, John Bobek, John Luetjen, David Gerstman, John Williamson, William DeVinney, Jim McIntosh and T. Young. If you have a tip, write us at
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08 Feb ' 03:04
's annual poll last May, for example, found that a majority of women, 51%, thought abortion was "morally wrong," the same percentage as for men, and only 37% thought abortion should be legal in "any" or "most" circumstances, whereas a large majority, 60%, thought it should be legal only in "a few" cases or "none."
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Santorum jolted the Republican presidential race by winning nominating contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, puncturing Romney's claim to be the unstoppable front-runner.
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07 Feb ' 17:28
- FEBRUARY 7, 2012
The Ball Heads for His Court
Same-sex marriage looks like a sure thing, at least in California.
Same-sex marriage will resume in California over the will of the state's voters if a new federal court ruling stands up on appeal. In Perry v. Brown, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a trial judge's ruling that struck down Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to restore the traditional definition of marriage. The Golden State's Supreme Court had earlier held that the unamended California Constitution mandated same-sex marriage, but then upheld the amendment that effectively struck down that ruling.
"In the grand scheme of things, there is nothing enduringly significant about today's ruling," writes National Review's Edward Whelan. A perceptive reader will recognize the ponderous qualifiers "grand" and "enduring" as signals that Whelan's assertion is a trivial truth. As he explains in his next sentence, "The Ninth Circuit was just a way-station on the path to the Supreme Court." It's possible that the Ninth Circuit will rehear the case en banc--i.e., before an 11-judge panel--though Whelan doubts it. In any case, an appeal to the high court is a certainty, and the justices' agreeing to hear the case is a strong possibility, if not an overwhelming likelihood.
The Ninth Circuit has a poor batting average in Supreme Court appeals, and this decision was written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who is notoriously liberal. Those facts are likely to inspire optimism among conservative commentators who oppose same-sex marriage. They shouldn't. Reinhardt's decision was expertly crafted to appeal to his former Ninth Circuit peer Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose view of the matter is all but certain to prove decisive.
Justice Kennedy: The tea leaves aren't hard to read.
In August 2010, this column ventured a prediction: "When the Supreme Court takes up Perry v. Schwarzenegger--perhaps under the name Brown v. Perry or Whitman v. Perry [it will be Perry v. Brown if today's opinion is appealed]--the justices will rule 5-4, in a decision written by Justice Kennedy, that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage."
Although we still think that is Justice Kennedy's inclination, we hereby walk back our prediction a bit. The court will not find a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in this case, but it will strike down Proposition 8 and thereby reimpose same-sex marriage in California. Reinhard's decision lays out a way in which Justice Kennedy can do so--and indeed makes it very difficult for Kennedy to uphold Proposition 8.
The trial judge in the Perry case held that same-sex marriage was itself protected by the U.S. Constitution. But the Ninth Circuit judges set aside this holding and decided the case on "narrow grounds." They found that Proposition 8 was analogous to Amendment 2, a Colorado ballot measure that the Supreme Court struck down in Romer v. Evans (1996).
Amendment 2 barred state and local government in the Centennial State from official actions "designed to protect the status of persons based on their 'homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.' " In a 6-3 ruling, the high court held that the amendment violated equal protection by "imposing a broad and undifferentiated disability on a single named group." The author of that decision was Anthony Kennedy.
Today's Ninth Circuit decision relies almost entirely on Romer (quoting with citations omitted):
Proposition 8 is remarkably similar to Amendment 2. Like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 "single[s] out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status. . . ." Like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 has the "peculiar property" of "withdraw[ing] from homosexuals, but not others," an existing legal right--here, access to the official designation of "marriage"--that had been broadly available, notwithstanding the fact that the [U.S.] Constitution did not compel the state to confer it in the first place.
Like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 denies "equal protection of laws in the most literal sense," because it "carves out" an "exception" to California's equal protection clause, by removing equal access to marriage, which gays and lesbians had previously enjoyed, from the scope of that constitutional guarantee. Like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 "by state decree . . . put[s] [homosexuals] in a solitary class with respect to" an important aspect of human relations, and accordingly "imposes a special disability upon [homosexuals] alone." And like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 constitutionalizes that disability, meaning that gays and lesbians may overcome it "only by enlisting the citizenry of [the state] to amend the State Constitution" for a second time.
The only difference Reinhardt acknowledges between the two ballot measures is that whereas Amendment 2 imposed "a broad and undifferentiated disability" on homosexuals, Proposition 8 "excises with surgical precision one specific right."
Best of the Web columnist James Taranto on President Obama's embrace of Super PACs and the primary races today.
Those who hope for a reversal of today's decision can perhaps take comfort that Justice Kennedy emphasized Amendment 2's breadth in his decision striking it down. But if Romer was correctly decided, as Kennedy obviously thinks it was, then Reinhardt's logic is compelling. It would take a lot more work to overturn today's ruling than to uphold it.
For Justice Kennedy, then, the path of least resistance is to follow what probably is his inclination to begin with--and he can do it without (yet) taking the momentous step of finding a new constitutional right to same-sex marriage. It seems perverse to suggest that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a state from amending its constitution to reverse a dubious ruling by the state's judiciary. But that would seem to be the inexorable consequence of Romer.
PAC Man Fever "President Obama is signaling to wealthy Democratic donors that he wants them to start contributing to an outside group supporting his re-election, reversing a long-held position as he confronts a deep financial disadvantage on a vital front in the campaign," the New York Times reports:
Aides said the president had signed off on a plan to dispatch cabinet officials, senior advisers at the White House and top campaign staff members to deliver speeches on behalf of Mr. Obama at fund-raising events for Priorities USA Action, the leading Democratic "super PAC," whose fund-raising has been dwarfed by Republican groups.
In an email to supporters, campaign manager Jim Messina laughably presented the decision as standing up for the little people: "We decided to do this because we can't afford for the work you're doing in your communities, and the grassroots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads."
The subject line of that email was "We will not play by two sets of rules," and if one takes this decision in isolation, one could acquit the Obama campaign of hypocrisy. That they favor stricter controls on political speech does not oblige them to apply such controls only to themselves. But the Obama campaign is willing to play by two sets of rules when it is to its advantage, as the Times notes deep in the story;
The decision comes four years after Mr. Obama became the first presidential candidate since the Watergate era to turn down public financing and the accompanying spending limits, allowing him to raise $750 million for his 2008 campaign.
John McCain accepted public financing and the concomitant limits. The co-author of McCain-Feingold actually believed in "campaign finance reform" (as does the other one, Russ Feingold, who tells the Puffington Host he deplores Obama's decision). Republicans can at least be grateful their nominee this year will be someone who puts a higher priority on winning.
'On the Side of Women's Rights' A report from McClatchy-Tribune Information Services illustrates the political pitfalls of a totalitarian ideology in a democratic system:
Even as angry Catholic leaders vow to fight a new federal requirement that most employers include contraceptives in their health insurance coverage, the Obama administration believes any political damage will be limited because it's on the side of women's rights.
Democratic strategists think voters who oppose President Barack Obama because of the birth-control rule wouldn't have voted for him anyway. The strategists think most Catholic women--like most other American women--believe that birth control should be affordable and available.
Of course, "Birth control should be affordable and available" is a very different proposition from "Religious institutions should be denied the liberty of declining to pay for abortifacient drugs and sterilization, which violate their teachings."
But more to the point, if this report is accurate, the Obama people have made the error of buying into totalitarian feminism--that is, the fusing of sexual identity with feminist ideology. Not all women support the extreme feminist conception of "women's rights." Gallup's annual poll last May, for example, found that a majority of women, 51%, thought abortion was "morally wrong," the same percentage as for men, and only 37% thought abortion should be legal in "any" or "most" circumstances, whereas a large majority, 60%, though it should be legal only in "a few" cases or "none."
And while 50% of women identified with the pro-abortion euphemism "pro-choice," a significant minority, 44%, chose the antiabortion euphemism "pro-life." That's a very small difference from men's answers, 49% "pro-choice" and 46% "pro-life."
The Daily Caller, meanwhile, reports that White House spokesman Jay Carney is making vague noises about a compromise: "We will continue to have discussions about ways that the implementation can be done that might address some of these [constitutional and religious] concerns." If the Obama administration does backtrack, it will be a case of politics winning out over ideology.
- "Al-Assad Missed Chance to Reform Syria"--headline, CNN.com, Feb. 6
- "Bill O'Reilly: MSNBC Doesn't Deal in Facts"--headline, Politico.com, Feb. 6
If Obama has lost Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger, He's Lost Middle America "Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger Says She's Not Sure How She'll Vote"--headline, Politico.com, Feb. 6
Shortest Books Ever Written "What David Brooks Gets Right About the Left"--headline, Salon.com, Feb. 6
Iran-Iraq War "Kaptur, Kucinich Face Off in Ohio"--headline, Washington Times, Feb. 7
'A Is A . . . Facts Are Facts . . . Things Are What They Are'--Ayn Rand "How Ron Paul Became Ron Paul"--headline, Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Fla.), Feb. 6
Look! It's Helen Thomas! " 'Oldest Living Thing on Earth' Discovered"--headline, Daily Telegraph (London), Feb. 7
So Much for the War on Drugs "Brent Hits 6-Month High Over $116 on Iran, Cold"--headline, Reuters, Feb. 7
"Online Dating Services Don't Work, Scientists Say"--headline, CBSNews.com, Feb. 7
You Better Be Good for Goodness' Sake "North Pole Man Accused of Attempted Extortion"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 6
The Tao of Poo "Taoiseach Defends Septic Tank Plan"--headline, irish Times, Feb. 7
- "Rush Limbaugh at the Super Bowl: Did He Pick His Nose?"--headline, Puffington Host, Feb. 6
- "Where Is Canada's Most Romantic City?"--headline, Canadian Press, Feb. 7
- "What if All the Cats in the World Suddenly Died?"--headline, LiveScience.com, Feb. 7
"Why the Right May Be Right to Be Offended by Chrysler's Clint Eastwood Super Bowl Ad"--headline, Puffington Host, Feb. 7
Too Much Information "Barney Frank Shows a Little Love for Liz Warren"--headline, Boston Herald, Feb. 7
- "RNC Reminds Reporters: No Delegates to Be Awarded Tomorrow"--headline, Washington Post
- "Bill to Override Local Fertilizer Rules Dies in Committee"--headline, Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Fla.), Feb. 6
- "Pats Fans Disappointed by Loss Reminiscent of 2008"--headline, Associated Press
Why the Onion Is A-Peeling "Rep. John Fleming has deleted his Facebook post linking to an article in The Onion about a fictional Planned Parenthood 'Abortionplex,' " Politico reports:
In a Facebook status on Friday, the Louisiana Republican alerted his followers to The Onion's May 18, 2011 article, "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex" and wrote "More on Planned Parenthood, abortion by the wholesale." Fleming's spokesman Doug Sachtleben confirmed to POLITICO the post has since been removed from the congressman's Facebook page and said the office had no further comment.
Meanwhile, Christian Toto of Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, demonstrates that it's possible to take the Onion too seriously even while recognizing it as satire:
Rather than trying to spoof, mock or even gently tease President Barack Obama–the man who actually holds the highest office in the land–the paper is targeting the administration's out-of-power critics.
The Onion's latest Obama humor article taunts those who note how a leader who rails against the rich routinely enjoys the perks that come with his wealth, power and status:
Obama Criticized For Living In Lavish Mansion While Most Americans Struggle To Make Ends Meet . . .
You see, those silly Obama critics will attack poor Barack on just about any charge. So we should simply ignore them, right?
It's a classic case of misdirection, a comedic attempt to distract voters from Obama's lifestyle.
The Onion's critics and its critics' critics alike should keep this in mind: It's funny because it's true.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Rod Pennington, Ed Lasky, Stuart Sullivan, Eric Jensen, John Bobek, Ed Grinberg, Jonathan Mairs, Jeryl Bier, Lynn Bateman, Ray Hull, T. Young, Monty Krieger, John Williamson, Hillel Markowitz, Lewis Chilton, Miguel Rakiewicz, Paul Martin, Terry Holmes, Frank Free, David Hallstrom, Peter Huntsman, Mark Kellner, Phil Mullane, Mark Finkelstein, Myreon Hodur, Dan Ciarrocki, Jim Schnabel, Robert Walsh, Leonard Peirce, John Nehmer, Zack Russ, Merv Benson and Jim McIntosh. If you have a tip, write us at
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Article Excerpt
The Ball Heads for His Court
BY JAMES TARANTO
Same-sex marriage will resume in California over the will of the state's voters if a new federal court ruling stands up on appeal. In Perry v. Brown, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a trial judge's ruling that struck down Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to restore the traditional definition of marriage. The Golden State's Supreme Court had earlier held that the unamended California Constitution mandated same-sex marriage, but then upheld the amendment that effectively struck down that ruling.
"In the grand scheme of things, there is nothing ...
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