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Next Week's Supreme Court Arguments on Health Care Law

The Supreme Court is set to hear three days of arguments next week over challenges to the health reform law President Obama signed two years ago. Here's a viewer's guide from The PBS Hews Hour as well at a summary by Jeffery Toobin of The New Yorker.

Watch A Viewer's Guide to Supreme Court Arguments on Health Care on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Toobin:

The legal challenges to ACA, which the Supreme Court will hear next week, center on its key provision, the individual mandate. The mandate essentially requires all adults to obtain health insurance, either through their employers or by buying it themselves. (There will be subsidies for those who cannot afford it.) The idea of a health-insurance mandate first came to wide public notice in 1989, in the form of a proposal from the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s venerable right-wing think tanks.... For decades, no one suggested that an individual mandate was unconstitutional.
.....
The main argument that opponents of the health-care law have come up with is that the mandate regulates economic inactivity—i.e., not buying insurance—and the Commerce Clause allows only the regulation of economic activity. In the first appellate review of the law, last summer, the Sixth Circuit demolished that argument. The court pointed out that there are two unique characteristics of the market for health care: “(1) virtually everyone requires health care services at some unpredictable point; and (2) individuals receive health care services regardless of ability to pay.” Thus, there was no such thing as “inactivity” in the health-care market; everyone participates, even if he or she chooses not to buy insurance. Indeed, the choice to forgo insurance imposes a direct cost on the taxpayers, who wind up footing the bill. Those choices by consumers, especially in the aggregate, represent an economic matter that Congress may decide to regulate.

Union pensions in New York

From Crain's New York Business, January 30, 2012:

A recent report on city pensions noted that it would take an IRA of $825,000 to generate the same income a city teacher retiring at 62 would receive from his or her pension. A police officer retiring at 51 would need a $1.1 million IRA to generate the income equal to his or her pension.

Last week, the [New York City] comptroller issued a report stating that the median retirement assets of the state's urban residents who have IRAs or similar plans and are nearing retirement are $67,000.
.....
State and local governments' and school districts' pension costs are expected to grow to $2 billion in 2014....

Read more (subscription required).

 

 

On the ground...but not on the yard

I've recently returned from my annual holiday trip home to central Iowa. While there, a state legislator told me Rick Santorum would carry the local county on Jan. 3rd or come in a close second-place behind Ron Paul.

I was incredulous relative to Santorum doing so well. About 48 hours later, the first polls were released showing that a surge in the former US Senator's popularity had been occurring. I then recalled a pundit on ABC's This Week having said earlier in December to not underestimate the potential dividends of Santorum's months-long hard work in Iowa. It reminded me of the value journalists find in informed, honest, and sufficiently forthright sources near to the action, and in their own experience. We'll see if the legislator’s prediction and the pundit's observation hold true. Based on my own inexpert observations while in Iowa, I think Santorum may in fact win or come in a close second-place in the county that I was in, but I think Romney will win the state.

The only frontline observation of my own that I make with any confidence is that yard signs are thin on the ground! I saw only five signs in four days in and around a town of 15,500 people fairly near Des Moines. Also, I saw not one bumper sticker! When I was growing up in Iowa, forests of candidate yard signs cropped up in neighborhoods. Farmers put them in fields and ditches, and sometimes even painted the sides of barns with their favorite candidate's name. Even in December 2007, while driving along I-80, I recall seeing Clinton, Obama, and Edwards signs galore--at least one barnside proclaiming HILLARY in red, white, and blue, and plenty of signs for Huckabee, McCain and others.

Does the disappearance of the yard sign reflect a lack of voter enthusiasm, or perhaps indecision—an unusually long wait-and-see stance by Hawkeye Republicans? Or maybe smaller campaign budgets? Maybe lesser focus on Iowa by the campaigns? Has the rise of social media or the dominance this cycle of televised debates displaced the need for the valiant foot soldiers of Iowa caucus campaign advertising, those brave little signs that endure wind, snow, the rare defacement attempt, and the more common assault from dog urine? Here's to the return of the humble yard sign.

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UPDATE: Nate Silver's Iowa 2012 GOP caucus analysis - Updated Jan. 2, 2012 at 12:11 PM ET

	Vote Projection	Chance of Win
Mitt Romney	21.8%	42%
Ron Paul	21.0	34
Rick Santorum	19.3	20

UPDATE: Unofficial caucus results from my parents' precinct in Jasper County, Iowa - Updated Jan. 3, 2012

161 votes:
Santorum 48
Gingrich 39
Romney 31
Paul 29
Bachmann 8
Perry 4
Huntsman 2

Dec. 18, 1865 - Ratification of the Constitutional Amendment Abolishing Slavery

Proclamation of the Secretary of State announcing the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, December 18, 1865

Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States and provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Secretary of State William H. Seward issued this Proclamation announcing the ratification on December 18, 1865.

via todaysdocument.tumblr.com

Bonfire Night in Lewes - a gallery on Flickr

Nine of of the 18 photos from Bonfire Night in Lewes - one of my curated digital gallerys on Flickr; click through to the gallery; once there, click the Next button to view the images.

      
 via www.flickr.com

Scan of a print I purchased at The Tom Paine Printing Press, Lewes. Click to enlarge.

Those "V for Vendetta" masks are a bit problematic....

via www.flickr.com

I doubt most Occupiers sporting Guy Fawkes masks (these particular ones are licensed TimeWarner products) realize they're wearing the face of a homicidal, Papist, anti-democratic royalist bent on blowing up what was at the time one of the most democratically representative national governing assemblies since Antiquity.

We Remember

 

Unexpected legacy left by hero of Flight 93 - Yahoo! News

Mark Bingham died Sept. 11, 2001, while saving countless lives. Just how many will never be known.

The openly gay rugby player was one of the heroic passengers who led a revolt against the terrorists on United Airlines Flight 93. The hijackers planned to slam the plane into the White House or the U.S. Capitol, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. Instead, the plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pa., killing the terrorists and passengers – but nobody else.

The most visible torchbearer of Bingham’s legacy is Alice Hoagland, his mother. After losing Bingham -- her only child -- Hoagland became a tireless advocate for issues that were important to her son. Now 61, the retired United flight attendant is a proponent of aviation safety, a spokesperson for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, and an avid supporter of rugby.

via news.yahoo.com

Another "Why" of the UK riots - Society without solidarity - Kenan Malik

Having broken communities and eroded social bonds through the unremitting promotion of the market, politicians responded both by, ironically, expanding the state and by blaming the poor. Where once families, and communities and collective institutions helped define right and wrong, increasingly the state has stepped in to impose such social norms, through everything from citizenship classes for children to parenting courses for adults. As a result, morality has come to be seen not as difficult choices one has to wrestle with, or norms one works through within a collective setting, but as a set of predetermined rules provided as a state hand-out. Morality has ceased to be ours.

At the same time, politicians have increasingly taken to blaming the poor themselves, rather than their social and economic policies, for the breakdown of family life, a lack of social values, a selfish disregard for the needs of others, and a rampant consumerism. The same values that many tolerate among bankers are condemned in the unemployed and the poor. And with condemnation has come repression, from increased CCTV surveillance to punitive workfare rules.

Because the Right has appropriated the arguments about moral failure, many on the Left have rejected moral arguments altogether. The Left talks much about the social and economic impact of neo-liberal policies. But little about its moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. Morality is as important to the Left as it is to the right, though for different reasons. There can be no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too.

via www.eurozine.com

Starkey on UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture... and this is only the beginning - Telegraph

Condemned as a racist for his comments on 'Newsnight' following the riots, the historian David Starkey speaks out against those who tried to silence him for confronting the gangster culture that has ruptured our society.

via www.telegraph.co.uk

From Starkey's article, where he also lashes back at Piers Morgan:

One of the most striking things about the England riots is where they did not happen: Yorkshire, the North East, Wales and Scotland. These areas contain some of the worst pockets of unemployment in the country. But they are also characterised by a powerful sense of regional or national identity and difference that cuts across all classes and binds them together. And it is this, I am sure, which has inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta” culture and its attendant, indiscriminate violence.
.....
Fortunately, there is a powerful narrative of freedom that runs like a golden thread through our history. “The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in,” counsel declared repeatedly in Somersett’s Case, about the legality of slavery in England, in 1772.

For the other pernicious legacy of the reaction to [Enoch] Powell['s 20 April 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech about immigration] has been an enforced silence on the matter of race. The subject has become unmentionable, by whites at any rate. And any breach has been punished by ostracism and worse. As the hysterical reaction to my remarks shows, the witch-finders already have their sights on me, led by that pillar of probity and public rectitude, Piers Morgan, who called on Twitter for the ending of my television career within moments of the Newsnight broadcast.

From one reader comment:

I believe Mr. Starkey is right and the only way to reverse that trend is by...honestly voicing our opinions about race. I'm well aware that I'm creating a charter for ignorant racially-biased cretins to spew thinly-veiled hatred but I would much rather deal with that than have to continue to live in this mute and mutant condition we have endured for so long.

Another reader's observation:

There are moments when the Celtic/Saxon divide in British politics is manifest. The raging Scottish accent is a leit motif of militant unionism, and almost every Labour Party leader has been Scottish or otherwise [C]eltic.... The Conservatives do well in England, England is currently almost entirely blue,* but the [C]eltic fringe, and the immigrant populated inner cities, vote, as a population, for 'anyone but' the Tories.** There is not one single Scottish Tory MP.

More from The Coffee House, the blog of the British publication, The Spectator (est. 1828).

*the color of the Conservative Party
**the Conservative Party