Reckless Restraint?

Scott Ott has the following commentary on CJ Roberts bizarre ruling on Thursday:

Here’s a brief summary of the reasoning that led him to conclude the individual mandate is a tax, and thus within the power of Congress.

1. It’s not the court’s job to evaluate the wisdom or practicality of a law, merely to determine whether it violates the Constitution.
2. Respecting the separation of powers, the Court should make every reasonable effort to uphold legislation.
3. The government’s fall-back justification for the individual mandate was the power of Congress “to lay and collect taxes…to provide for the…general welfare of the United States.” (Article 1, Section 8 )
4. No matter what the law calls the individual mandate, if it looks like a tax and quacks like a tax, it’s a tax.
5. The “shared responsibility payment” for failure to buy health insurance is collected by the IRS, based on income, and clears the payor of responsibility to the law. If it were just a penalty, the payor would be considered guilty of unlawful activity before the bar of justice. But under ObamaCare, you’ve done your civic duty even if you fail to buy insurance, so long as you pay the fee.
6. Because it’s a tax, Congress may impose it without offending the Constitution’s enumeration of powers.

For years, conservatives have argued that the Supreme Court should not decide cases based on ideology or personal preference, but upon the text of the Constitution, and upon established precedent under that charter. Justices should not legislate from the bench.

While judicial lawmaking is exactly what Justices Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, and Scalia accuse Roberts of doing, he asserts precisely the opposite. He refrains from overturning a law that, clearly, he considers ill-advised, badly crafted, and ultimately doomed.

His reckless restraint, as some might view it, is anchored in the doctrine of separation of powers. He also telegraphs to his readers that the way to deal with this offensive law is near at hand, in November.

While I would prefer an outcome that supports my principles, and advances the cause of my party, my primary allegiance must be to the process established under the “supreme law of the land.”

The easier solution to a vexing problem is to have someone powerful remove it. The hard way calls for devotion, on your part, to upholding our values — using our constitutional prerogative to replace the incompetent, the corrupt, and the compromised.

If we should fail to do so this November, our whining about Roberts’ betrayal will do nothing to stop the onslaught of ObamaCare. And in the near future, when a law comes along that we wish to see upheld, we’ll be grateful for the precedent set by Roberts’ reasonable restraint.

Now evicting Obama becomes JOB ONE!

John Yoo on ObamaCare's Victory

CJ John Roberts has thrown the USA into a horrific fiscal briar patch. John Yoo explains:

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.

Obama's fervent promises that ACA was not a tax is now refuted by the CJ asserting that ObamaCare is the biggest tax increase in American history----as social prophet Rush Limbaugh already asserts. But that's never stopped the glib shape-shifter in the White House, who will simply call it a revenue mechanism and pretend that it isn't a tax. Or simply count on the MSM to throw enough dust in the air to keep everyone's eyes off the ball. That's what they're there for, except for Fox, the WSJ & a couple of honest publications. The rest such as NBC, CBS, ABC & MSNBC [CNN is fading into inconsequential thin air, except in airport waiting areas & some doctors' offices] are simply media arms of the Democratic National Committee & this Administration.

But the erudite Dr. Yoo has an excursion through US Constitutional history that the First Adjunct Professor couldn't make if he tried:

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.

Yoo's argument convinces me of the following conclusion:

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.

Robert's subtle nuance declaring the commerce clause's relevance to the ACA as unconstitutional may turn out to be an instance of being too clever by half. Sadly, the "death panels" of faceless bureaucrats in DC may soon be giving a thumbs up or down on patients with what might be simply a temporary catastrophic health setback. This may aim to knock off a number of aged or knowledgeable opponents to statism.

The duplicity of this administration and the party it belongs to is not beyond using euthanasia to increase its electoral chances down the road.

Holder Contempt Citation Suppressed by MSM

Holder's historic humbling by Congress, including 17 Democrats, has been virtually ignored by the Lamestream Media. Just like the Catholic Church's lawsuit by 46 organizations was ignored by the same culprits, except for a few seconds on CBS & much more on Fox News. Read the NYT piece and see how Holder's disgrace has been barely noticed by this notable tabloid.

John Cassidy quotes Gergen & Lizza: Snooki & Sham Wow of the Libtard Left.

The New Yorker is a trusty barometer of the giddy brain-dead left's inability to focus on the big picture:

A day on, liberals are still busy celebrating, conservatives are fulminating, and the pundits are issuing instant judgments, many of which have about as much foundation as a dissent from Samuel Alito. On CNN, for example, Gloria Berger [sic] echoed the G.O.P. line that yesterday’s ruling would turn November’s election into a referendum on Obamacare, while David Gergen doubted whether Mitt Romney would be able to ride this old nag all the way to the White House.

Gergen is the most ancient catamite in DC for the Democrat cause, but Gloria Borger [TNY's fact-checking has fallen to dismal depths] remains one of the few honest journalists in the swamp by the Potomac. Cassidy even accuses the over-the-hill spavined nag Hertzberg as being clever, when Ricky accuses John Roberts of being a "Burke, not a burka." Here's how Cassidy ends his witless diatribe:

Romney, whose campaign is partly dependent on the enthusiasm and ground work of conservative activists, still can’t stray too far from right-wing dogma—as evidenced by his failure to offer Hispanic voters anything positive on immigration reform. But if Romney were to reach the Oval Office, he would probably follow a strategy similar to Roberts’s, espousing conservative views but, when it came to acting rather than talking, hewing to the center on some big issues. My colleague Ryan Lizza has already pointed out that his pledge to repeal Obamacare beginning on the first day of his Administration is largely a political ploy. With the G.O.P. all but certain not to gain a sixty-vote majority in the Senate, there is virtually no prospect of the upper house voting to repeal health-care reform. The same thing applies to other policy proposals close to conservatives’ hearts, such as repealing the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill and privatizing social security.
With the gridlock on Capitol Hill all but sure to continue, Romney would be in much the same spot that Obama has been in since 2010: reduced to negotiating with his enemies on the big issues—the deficit, taxes, and also health care—while introducing some relatively minor polices he can enact through executive fiat. I suspect that Romney might even like being penned in. As long as the Democrats have a blocking minority in the Senate, he would have a ready-made excuse for why he can’t start dismantling entitlement programs and shutting down entire government departments. As with Roberts’s tenure at the high court, the general tenor of a Romney Presidency would be conservative, but he would end up disappointing some of the ultras.

With two out of three Senate seats up for grabs being Democrat this year, the GOP can gain up to twelve seats out of the twenty-two fungible Dem seats. Nelson in FL looks very vulnerable to Connie Mack, for instance. While Gergen serves as a silly tea boy to the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosi's of DC, not to mention THE WON, perhaps he should work on his golf handicap if he expects to get any face time for a second Obama disaster.

New Yorker's Partisan Hack Coll Lies & Spews Venom

Nancy-boy Steven Coll unleashes his uninformed bigoted pea-shooter on Marco Rubio, with all the venom his grass-snake stub-teeth can muster. Here's Stevie's twisted take on Obama's illegal order to not prosecute offenders of a law passed by Congress.

...the Republican Party—and leaders like Rubio—offers only empty gestures toward compromise with the Administration to fix that system, and has instead adopted a xenophobic platform that gives priority to security crackdowns and rollbacks of immigrants’ rights.
Under Obama’s plan, illegal immigrants under the age of thirty who were brought to the United States as children and have certain other qualifications, such as a high-school diploma and a clean police record, can apply for work permits and the right to live free from the fear of arrest. The decision is no Emancipation Proclamation, but it has some of that document’s transformational quality: there are few moments when a President, with a single act, can immediately uplift and legitimatize the lives of so many.
Like Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage, the new system is intended to fire up a section of the Democratic base; in November, the outcome in swing states such as Colorado and Nevada may depend on the participation of Latino voters. But that is not in itself evidence of cynicism. If a President advances civil rights because those rights are popular and might excite voters, he affirms democracy’s credibility.

Coll says not a peep about Liar-in-Chief Obama declaiming a short year ago to assembled Hispanic leaders that he could not legally do what BHO did so cynically and barefacedly for a few more votes from his favorite minority group. {The nasty LiC takes his own plantation-dwelling blacks for granted].

Then Coll trots out a totally misleading precedent on how the SCOTUS ruled that Hispanic kids would be allowed to participate in public schools. Not the same as a work permit and taking jobs away from long-time US citizens. The Nancy-boy fills us with more garbage & lies:

The same reasoning that presumes innocent children also presumes guilty parents. There are criminals among the undocumented, but most migrants came here to work, and, in many important respects, the United States invited and tolerated their activity. Migrants often took the kinds of jobs—in chicken slaughterhouses and fish canneries—that Americans did not want, for wages they would not accept. And business owners and agricultural interests frequently recruited migrants for this work. As recently as 2004, after a period in which immigration officials concentrated heavily on terrorism threats, enforcement of immigration laws against American business owners—as opposed to against individual migrants crossing the border—was almost nonexistent. To criminalize those who responded to this ambiguous employment opportunity is irrational and inconsonant with American history.

Let's examine this choo-choo train of half-baked nonsense along its constituent parts. First, there is a law against staying in the USA beyond the limits of a temporary work permit, so the presumption of guilt among parents is true. And if their children are staying in the US without being born there and not naturalized, then the kids are guilty too. Coll is breathtaking in his presumptions. The crime rate among the undocumented is about ten [10!] times that of normal American citizens. Whatever excuses Coll can concoct for this fact, it remains true. Yes, business & agricultural interests favored and recruited migrant workers for special summer tasks, but most were because seasonal jobs---like picking apples, oranges & other rapidly rotting produce if not harvested in a timely fashion---were under temporary work permits expiring at the end of the harvest season. Those jobs that were not seasonal were manned by illegals because of the harsh and dirty conditions, but largely because the amount of money paid was many times the earning power south of the border. Now that's changed somewhat. As for amnesty:

Pandering allies of the Tea Party, such as Rubio, foiled the latest effort.

It's clear that Coll is pandering to the dirigiste impulses of the Democratic Party elites who have little or no sympathy for law and order---such as the constitutional implications of Obama's peremptory apodictic order, the one which a year earlier had been unconstitutional by his own admission---unless it suits their agenda to subvert the constitution through a death by a thousand cuts.

Alabama recently passed a law that included a requirement for schools to ascertain the legal status of their students; even though that part of the statute was suspended, pending court review, enrollment of Latino children in public schools plummeted. At risk is the very basis of social mobility—education—that Rubio and other self-made conservatives cite as a linchpin of their achievements. Radical nativism is turning America’s foundational narrative into a wedge issue, and Republican leaders are going along, unwilling to challenge their base’s dislocated anger. They are undermining national cohesion in ways large and small.

Radical internationalism such as the Obama administration is undertaking is undermining national cohesion much more than giving work permits to undocumented aliens. And the SCOTUS ruling today gives the limp-wristed nancy-boys & little old ladies in tennis shoes a lot more to quiver and quake about... Can't wait until the Obamacare ruling gets published.

And it appears that the apparatchiki of the Democratic Party are scared sh*tless of Marco Rubio as #2 on a Romney ticket.

Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Dies

As Political Officer in the Saudi Embassy of the USA, I personally was one of the last Americans to meet this senior Prince, whose fanatical devotion to Islam was only exceeded by his hatred of America. The one grew out of the other, in that like many "devout" Muslims, Nayef regarded America as the personification of "The Great Satan."

I was with the US Ambassador at the time and doing an introductory round of visits with Ministers. The Ministry of the Interior in Saudi Arabia is much more powerful than the Dept. of Justice in the USA, and Minister Nayef had almost absolute power to imprison almost anyone he wished, outside of VIPs, which I as a diplomat happened to be at that time. Even back then, Nayef was a difficult "get" and I can remember his half-smirk, half-sneer as he treated Ambassador West and myself to a perfunctory interview. After that, the only American I think he met was an occasional Ambassador and Louis Freeh, who investigated the Dhahran bombings which killed 19 American personnel.

The presumptive new Crown Prince Salman is so highly regarded among the senior princes that King Faisal, way back in the sixties, always had him by his side. I am glad for America's sake that Prince Salman, another Prince I have met and have a medal from, is eventually going to be, God-Willing, running that oil-rich kingdom. Like King Abdullah, he is a warm and gracious human being.

Obama as Whinging Loser

Obama is basically unevolved. Here is a WSJ article by James Taranto to that effect:

Peter Baker of the New York Times informs us in a "news analysis" that "for Barack Obama, a president who set out to restore good relations with the world in his first term, the world does not seem to be cooperating all that much with his bid to win a second." Thanks a lot world, you ingrate!

The world's perfidy notwithstanding, "polls show Mr. Obama with a double-digit advantage over [Mitt] Romney on foreign policy," Baker notes. But in a cruel twist of fate, "in the latest New York Times-CBS News poll, only 4 percent of Americans picked foreign policy as their top election concern."

Fate is cruel to Obama in more ways than one: "If anything, the dire headlines from around the world only reinforce an uncomfortable reality for this president and any of his successors: even the world's last superpower has only so much control over events beyond its borders, and its own course can be dramatically affected in some cases. Whether from ripples of the European fiscal crisis or flare-ups of violence in Baghdad, it is easy to be whipsawed by events."

All indisputably true. It's also true that into every life a little rain must fall, but that's not much of a defense for a poorly performing employee whose boss is considering whether to renew his contract.

Lately we've seen a spate of articles blaming Obama's failures on impersonal forces beyond his control. Thus Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

Lost in the chatter about whether President Obama will win a second term in November is an even bigger--and perhaps even more important--question: Is it possible for a president--any president--to succeed in the modern world of politics?
Consider this: We are in the midst of more than a decade-long streak of pessimism about the state of the country, partisanship is at all-time highs and the media have splintered--Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth--in a thousand directions all at once. . . .

"Due to the evolution of our politics and media, we may never see a two-term president again," said Mark McKinnon, a senior strategist for President George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
We are going to go out on a limb and predict that we will see another two-term president, though perhaps not this year.

"In the same years when presidential politics changed so greatly, governing did, too," writes the Times's Tom Wicker: "It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues--energy and the economy, for instance--are more complex than they were."

Hey, wait a minute. Didn't Tom Wicker die last year?

Why yes he did. That quote came from a column he wrote in April 1980, the last time a Democratic president was in the midst of an unsuccessful re-election bid. And he's not the only one whose 32-year-old plaints sound awfully familiar.

"The Presidency today is entangled in the great crisis of all established authority," wrote Henry Graff, a Columbia University historian (now emeritus) in the Times July 25, 1980. "Executives of every kind--political, educational, ecclesiastical, corporate--are under incessant public attack." The president's life, Graff wrote, "is under such relentless scrutiny that he can only seem ordinary, never extraordinary. No man is a hero to his valet, and America is now a nation of valets."

Graff did not mention Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth.

"Watching President Carter try to juggle all the contradictory foreign and domestic problems of the nation during a presidential election and an economic recession, you have to wonder who can do it and who can govern America,"

wrote James Reston, another Times columnist, in June 1980.

Reston, who died in 1995, concluded: "Carter's campaign theme is clear. It is that while the economic figures are not on his side, the economic 'trends' are changing for the better, and that, as he hopes to demonstrate in his meetings with world figures, he knows more about foreign policy than [Ted] Kennedy, Reagan or [John] Anderson."

Then again, it's easy to be whipsawed by events.

"The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world," declared the subheadline of a Jan. 13, 1980, Washington Post story, whose author, Walter Shapiro, has since ascended to Yahoo! News.

Titled "Voters Expect to Elect a Mere Mortal," the Shapiro story (quoted by the Media Research Center) observed: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. . . . Some voters have entirely discarded textbook notions about presidential greatness and believe that Carter is doing as good a job as anyone could in facing new and difficult problems and in coping with an independent and restive Congress."

In August 1980 (in a story not available online), Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser, now an editor, described the speech in which Carter accepted the Democratic nomination:

President Carter in 1980 had to try to explain why he had not become the sort of leader Jimmy Carter promised to be in 1976. . . .Not surprisingly, this 1980 Carter sounded much more defensive. Carter's 1976 acceptance speech contained no negative references to . . . Gerald R. Ford. it was entirely a positive statement.
About a fourth of last night's speech was devoted to lambasting the Republicans and Ronald Reagan. If the Grand Old Party should win in November, Carter said, "I see despair . . . I see surrender . . . I see risk." He also sees repudiation, of course, which explains his defensiveness. . . .

Carter's acceptance speech in 1976 was a magical moment, perhaps the high point of his political career. Carter spoke quietly that night in the lilting cadence of a Baptist preacher with a sure sense of himself and his message. . . .

There was no magic in Thursday night's speech. Instead, a weary convention heard the sounds of slogging from a worried politician who knows he is in deep trouble.
Listen closely and you can hear the sounds of slogging echo across the decades. They emanate not just from the failed president but from sympathetic journalists trying to absolve him of the responsibility for his failure.

The Progressive Project is destined to fail in the USA as it has around the world, with wreckage such as Cuba & North Korea only two lonely sentinels of totalitarianism [I leave Africa & Burma out of this----Putin's Russia is also close to Hannah Arendt's definition].

Obama has demonstrated equal amounts of presumption & arrogance----now he is having a panic attack as his campaign desperately seeks to avoid talking about the terrible economic slump similar to the one that Carter had created 32 years ago.

He gets absolution from a fawning obsequious national press corps devoid of journalism and critical investigative attempts to probe the corruption everywhere in this amateur's administration.

No wonder The Amateur is the top selling non-fiction hardcover for almost a month in the NYT best-seller list. The American People are much smarter than the smirking silly "reporters" who are lapdogs to this third-rate loser who whines at the first sign of criticism.

We learned in the 1980s that the presidency was still big. It was Jimmy Carter who turned out to be small.

The Progressive Project is destined to fail in the USA as it has around the world, with wreckage such as Cuba & North Korea only two lonely sentinels of totalitarianism [I leave Africa & Burma out of this----Putin's Russia is also close to Hannah Arendt's definition].

Obama has demonstrated equal amounts of presumption & arrogance----now he is having a panic attack as his campaign desperately seeks to avoid talking about the terrible economic slump similar to the one that Carter had created 32 years ago.

He gets absolution from a fawning obsequious national press corps devoid of journalism and critical investigative attempts to probe the corruption everywhere in this amateur's administration.

No wonder The Amateur is the top selling non-fiction hardcover for almost a month in the NYT best-seller list. The American People are much smarter than the smirking silly "reporters" who are lapdogs to this third-rate loser who whines at the first sign of criticism.

Judicial Restraint a Crock if used incorrectly

George Will has a good column in the Wapo today:

Because judicial decisions have propelled American history and because a long-standing judicial mistake needs to be rectified, the most compelling of the many reasons for electing Mitt Romney is that presidential elections shape two of the federal government’s three branches. Conservatives, however, cannot coherently make the case for Romney as a shaper of the judicial branch until they wean themselves, and perhaps him, from excessive respect for judicial “restraint” and condemnation of “activism.”

In eight years, Ronald Reagan appointed 49 percent of the federal judiciary; Bill Clinton appointed 43 percent. Clint Bolick says that the power to nominate federal judges has become “the grand prize in presidential elections,” because presidents now choose appointees with special attention to judicial philosophy and because human longevity has increased.

In his lapidary new book, “Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court,” Bolick, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, notes that Reagan was especially systematic and successful in appointing judges who would not surprise him, and his successors have emulated him. Since Barack Obama appointed Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens, whose liberalism surely surprised his appointer, Gerald Ford, the court’s liberals are all Democratic appointees, the conservatives all Republican appointees, and both cohorts frequently are cohesive in important cases.

The average tenure of justices has grown from eight years in the young Republic to 24.5 years today. There have been four presidencies since Reagan’s, but two of his Supreme Court appointees, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, still serve. Of the dozen justices confirmed since 1972, only one, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was 60 when appointed. If Clarence Thomas, who was 43 when nominated, continues to the same age as the justice he replaced (Thurgood Marshall, 83) he will serve 40 years, eclipsing the court record of 36 (William Douglas).

Since Thomas replaced Marshall 21 years ago, no appointee has altered the court’s balance: Four liberals replaced liberals and two conservatives replaced conservatives. Today, however, two conservatives (Scalia and Kennedy) and two liberals (Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer) are in their 70s. So if Obama wins he may be able to create a liberal majority; if Romney wins he may be able to secure a conservative majority for a generation.

And, Bolick hopes, a conservative majority might rectify the court’s still-reverberating mistake in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases. It then took a cramped view of the 14th Amendment’s protection of Americans’ “privileges or immunities,” saying these did not include private property rights, freedom of contract and freedom from arbitrary government interference with the right to engage in enterprise. This led in the 1930s to the court formally declaring economic rights to be inferior to “fundamental” rights. This begot pernicious judicial restraint — tolerance of capricious government abridgements of economic liberty.

One hopes that Romney knows that on today’s court the leading advocate of judicial “restraint” is the liberal Breyer, who calls it “judicial modesty.” Contemporary liberalism regards government power equably, so the waxing of the state seems generally benign. Yet Romney promises to appoint “restrained” judges. If, however, the protection of liberty is the court’s principal purpose, it must not understand restraint as a dominant inclination to (in the language of Romney’s Web site) “leave the governance of the nation to elected representatives.”

Such as those elected representatives who imposed Obamacare’s individual mandate? Or those representatives who limited (with the McCain-Feingold law) the freedom of political speech of persons acting as individuals? Or those who limited (with the law that Citizens United overturned) the speech rights of people associated in corporations? Or those who seized private property under eminent domain not for a clear “public use” but for any “public benefit” that enriches government? (This abuse was ratified by a “restrained” court majority in Kelo v. New London.)

“When courts fail to enforce the Constitution,” Bolick writes, “typically they say that the proper recourse is through democratic processes — which offers hollow comfort given that presumably it was democratic processes that created the constitutional violation in the first place.” As Madison warned: “Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression,” and in this nation “the real power lies in the majority of the community.”

Although Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch because it has “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” it is dangerous to liberty when it is unreasonably restrained. One hopes Romney recognizes that judicial deference to elected representatives can be dereliction of judicial duty.

Oblamer can only blame himself for being the most corrupt POTUS in US history, but the SCOTUS is squeaky clean in comparison. Let them exercise stare decisis.

Fouad Ajami's New Book on The Syrian Rebellion

Fouad is an old friend who stayed in my apartment for weeks after arriving in DC many years ago to teach at SAIS. Later, after I married, he rented my condo, so I served as his landlord for many months until unloading the place on the market.

Fouad's latest book is evidently up to his high standards & is reviewed by Dexter Filkins, narrator extraordinaire of the Iraq War. Ajami means "Persian" in Arabic & denotes his own Shia background, though Fouad is as worldly a connoisseur of earthly delights as any Qajar Shah...! His portrayal of the Alawites, the sect which controls this unhappy country with a paltry 12% of the population, is interesting and I must buy the book just for that section.

I lived in Beirut while studying Arabic for a year and visited Damascus many times, as I've done many times since. It is my favorite Arab city. I've stayed in the Sheriton Hotel Filkins describes in his own short comments on his personal experiences there. I remember the delicious Syrian food most of all!!

Syria, like its little sister Lebanon, which it claims as a lost province, is a land of countless minorities. [I can remember in Beirut celebrating holidays for the seventeen [!!] sects and ethnic minorities represented sufficiently in the tiny country to warrant a holiday!] Just as an example, the latest compromise leader of the Syrian insurrection chosen last week is Kurdish, just to insert a very smallish minority with no aspirations to grandiose plans in the offing that might supplant the general goal to oust the dictator Bashar, the Stick Insect.

I can always remember arriving at the Syrian border after driving from London in my BMW in June, 1974, on my way to Beirut. The sign said "La Syrie, berceau de l'humanite" and my instant reaction was "et sa tombe". Perhaps this was an instance of proleptic thought, as both Filkins and Ajami believe that the Syrians will fight each other to the death.

Meanwhile, that sleazy POS Vlad the Empoisoner is sending neo-Soviet ships to Latakia to buttress the chinless czar Assad. You can bet the chinless Obungler will sit this one out, as his re-election is the highest priority this spineless degenerate has on his agenda for the time being.

Oblamer Outed as Bogus Fraud

David Maraniss has a new book out on the egregious liar infesting the Oval Office, called Barack Obama, The Story.

Here's a snippet of how Maraniss debunks the book ghostwritten by an unconvicted terrorist:

David Maraniss’s new biography of Barack Obama is the first sustained challenge to Obama’s control over his own story, a firm and occasionally brutal debunking of Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up. The 672-page book closes before Obama enters law school, and Maraniss has promised another volume, but by its conclusion I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century. The false notes in Obama’s family lore include his mother’s claimed experience of racism in Kansas, and incidents of colonial brutality toward his Kenyan grandfather and Indonesian step-grandfather. Obama’s deliberate distortions more clearly serve a single narrative: Race. Obama presents himself through the book as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was, Maraniss writes, and the narrative “accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white.”
That the core narrative of Dreams could have survived this long into Obama’s public life is the product in part of an inadvertent conspiracy between the president and his enemies. His memoir evokes an angry, misspent youth; a deep and lifelong obsession with race; foreign and strongly Muslim heritage; and roots in the 20th Century’s self-consciously leftist anti-colonial struggle. Obama’s conservative critics have, since the beginnings of his time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait at face value, and sought to deepen it to portray him as a leftist and a foreigner.
Reporters who have sought to chase some of the memoir’s tantalizing yarns have, however, long suspected that Obama might not be as interesting as his fictional doppelganger. “Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs…significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use,” the New York Times’s Serge Kovaleski reported dryly in February of 2008, speculating that Obama had “added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.” (In one of the stranger entries in the annals of political spin, Obama’s spokesman defended his boss’s claim to have sampled cocaine, calling the book “candid.”)

Obama is either a serial chronic liar or a silly drama queen----probably both, according to Maraniss.

Maraniss’s deep and entertaining biography will serve as a corrective both to Obama’s mythmaking and his enemies’. Maraniss finds that Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal struggles prosaic and later exaggerated. He finds that race, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood. And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view him through the prism of race “can lead to a misinterpretation” of the sense of “outsiderness” that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition.
Maraniss opens with a warning: Among the falsehoods in Dreams is the caveat in the preface that “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”
“The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive,” Maraniss responds in his own introduction. The book belongs in the category of “literature and memoir, not history and autobiography,” he writes, and “the themes of the book control character and chronology.”

BuzzFeed helps explain through Ben Smith just how Maraniss unmasks Obungler as a consummate eff-up fabulist embellisher.

Maraniss, a veteran Washington Post reporter whose biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, helped explain one complicated president to America, dove deep and missed deadlines for this biography. And the book’s many fact-checks are rich and, at times, comical.

Just count the examples of rib-tickling happy horsesh*t that the First Impostor slings at the reader in "Dreams" & prepare to howl in amazed disbelief at the fertility of a mind obviously versed in deception or "choom"---The First Bullsh*tter's name for Maui Wowee.

In Dreams, for instance, Obama writes of a friend named “Regina,” is a symbol of the authentic African-American experience that Obama hungers for (and which he would later find in Michelle Robinson). Maraniss discovers, however, that Regina was based on a student leader at Occidental College, Caroline Boss, who was white. Regina was the name of her working-class Swiss grandmother, who also seems to make a cameo in Dreams.
Maraniss also notices that Obama also entirely cut two white roommates, in Los Angeles and New York, from the narrative, and projected a racial incident onto New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago.
Some of Maraniss’s most surprising debunking, though, comes in the area of family lore, where he disputes a long string of stories on three continents, though perhaps no more than most of us have picked up from garrulous grandparents and great uncles. And his corrections are, at times, a bit harsh.
Obama grandfather “Stanley [Dunham]'s two defining stories were that he found his mother after her suicide and that he punched his principal and got expelled from El Dorado High. That second story seems to be in the same fictitious realm as the first,” Maraniss writes. As for Dunham’s tale of a 1935 car ride with Herbert Hoover, it’s a “preposterous…fabrication.”
As for a legacy of racism in his mother’s Kansas childhood, “Stanley was a teller of tales, and it appears that his grandson got these stories mostly from him,” Maraniss writes.
Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,” Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact, Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumable suffering a heart attack.”
Most families exaggerate ancestors’ deeds. A more difficult category of correction comes in Maraniss’s treatment of Obama’s father and namesake. Barack Obama Sr., in this telling, quickly sheds whatever sympathy his intelligence and squandered promise should carry. He’s the son of a man, one relative told Maraniss, who is required to pay an extra dowry for one wife “because he was a bad person.”
He was also a domestic abuser.
“His father Hussein Onyango, was a man who hit women, and it turned out that Obama was no different,” Maraniss writes. "I thought he would kill me," one ex-wife tells him; he also gave her sexually-transmitted diseases from extramarital relationships.
It’s in that context that Maraniss corrects a central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963.
“It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first surfaced in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse” prompted her flight back to Seattle.
Obama’s own fairy-tales, meanwhile, run toward Amercan racial cliché. “Ray,” who is in the book “a symbol of young blackness,” is based on a character whose complex racial identity — half Japanese, part native American, and part black — was more like Obama’s, and who wasn’t a close friend.
“In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard complaining about how rich white haole girls would never date them,” Maraniss writes, referring to Hawaii’s upper class, and to a composite character whose blackness is. “In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.”
As Obama’s Chicago mentor Jerry Kellman tells Maraniss in a different context, “Everything didn't revolve around race.”
Those are just a few examples in biography whose insistence on accuracy will not be mistaken for pedantry. Maraniss is a master storyteller, and his interest in revising Obama’s history is in part an interest in why and how stories are told, a theme that recurs in the memoir. Obama himself, he notes, saw affectionately through his grandfather Stanley’s fabulizing,” describing the older man’s tendency to rewrite “history to conform with the image he wished for himself." Indeed, Obama comes from a long line of storytellers, and at times fabulists, on both sides.
Dick Opar, a distant Obama relative who served as a senior Kenyan police official, and who was among the sources dismissing legends of anti-colonial heroism, put it more bluntly.
“People make up stories,” he told Maraniss.

And First and Foremost, Barack Oblamer, the First Fingerpointer, stands as the Primary Example of Storyteller Par Excellence.

Shame on the MSM, which will never be trusted again after the American People throw this impostor out of office.
UPDATE:Obsequious Suck-Up Libtard James Fallows has a totally anodyne and boring book review in the Sunday Times which has zero of the points above, lest he be admonished by his betters on the Times' Political Corrections Committee. I can remember when Fallows had a backbone of sorts.

Heat Beat Thunder in OKC 100-96

LeBron did foul KD in the last seconds, but Kevin is a gentleman & said simply "I missed the shot" to repeated questions by reporters. LeBron & KD hit 32 apiece, but KD got 16 late in the fourth quarter. And Dan Patrick made the key point that KD charged Battier, but Shane was charged with a foul----so KD would have been out of the game with his sixth foul halfway through the fourth q.

Wade recovered from his 19 pts off 19 shots of his first game, but Westbrook hit 27 pts off 26 shots. Bosh & Battier excelled & the Heat & Thunder play their next game Sunday night in S. Florida.

LeBron James has seen his share of great starts turn into faulty finishes.

So with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh providing the help he needed, he wasn't letting another one get away Thursday night.

The NBA's young playoff darlings deserve every ounce of the sting that comes with squandering home-court advantage in the NBA Finals, writes Marc Stein. Story

James scored 32 points, got a disputed big stop on Kevin Durant and the Miami Heat held off a furious fourth-quarter rally behind their three All-Stars to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder 100-96, tying the NBA Finals at one game apiece.

"We had played too well in the first 36 minutes to try to let this one slip away from us," James said. "We just wanted to make one more, two more plays than they made and come out with a victory and we were able to do that."

Wade rebounded from a poor opener to add 24 points and Bosh had 16 points and 15 rebounds in his return to the starting lineup for the Heat, who snapped a four-game Finals losing streak with their first victory since Game 3 against Dallas last year.

"It's been so long since we've had them all together," Heat forward Shane Battier said. "They played like the All-Stars that they are and that's the effort that we need."

Now they go home to host Game 3 on Sunday and the next two after that, knowing they don't have to hear the noisy Thunder fans again -- not to mention all their critics -- if they win all three.

Miami blew a 13-point lead in Game 1 and seemed headed toward a repeat of the second game of the Finals last year, when it blew a 15-point edge on its home floor.

Not this time.

"This is a good team and we didn't want to be down 2-0," Bosh said. "We know in order to accomplish our goal, we have to win on the road. We're a good road team. We've done it before. They posed a great challenge because they haven't lost up until today. But we felt that we let one get away and we felt that we could play a much, much better game in Game 2."

Durant scored 32 points for the Thunder but missed a short jumper with 9.9 seconds left after appearing to be bumped by James. The basket would have tied a game the Thunder trailed the entire way.

Oklahoma City's explosive point guard Russell Westbrook finished with 27 points, eight rebounds and seven assists but shot 10-of-26 from the field.

SN: Heat beat Thunder in Game 2
The Thunder nearly came back from another big deficit, but were they struck down by a late non-call?
• Comment and vote!

James Harden tried to keep the Thunder in it early and finished with 21 points, but this time the Thunder couldn't come back from a double-digit deficit after spotting Miami a 17-point advantage during their worst first half of the season.

"That was the game. We can't start off down 18-2," Durant said. "We can't go down that much, especially at home. We've got to correct it."

It was the first home loss in 10 postseason games for the Thunder, who had overcome a 13-point deficit in Game 1.

James had what was his career high, 30 points, in the opener, but afterward said Wade needed to be Wade -- All-Star, Olympic gold medalist and finals MVP.

In Game 1, Wade was 7-of-19. He wasn't sharp in the last round and continues to hear reports that something is physically wrong with him. He was all but asked Wednesday if his explosiveness was a thing of the past, what must have been insulting to a player who, though 30, still believes he's not far from the top of the game.

Wade bounced back in a big way, not quite at the level he was as the 2006 Finals MVP, but certainly good enough with the help around him now for the Heat to win another one.

"Just know that I'm always going to keep coming back until I don't play this game no more," Wade said. "I know my abilities, I know what I'm capable of and it was good."

He spun into the lane and found Bosh for a dunk that seemed to have the Heat safe at 98-91 inside the final minute, but a 3-pointer by Durant cut it to 98-96 with 37 seconds left. After James missed a 3-pointer, the Thunder got the ball into Durant, who appeared to be knocked off balance by James as he missed the baseline shot attempt.

Durant said only that he missed the shot, saying he would have to watch the tape to see if he was fouled.

James then sank the insurance free throws -- finishing a 12-for-12 night at the line -- as fans booed loudly over the no-call.

Bosh started after coming off the bench in every game since returning late last round from his nine-game absence with a strained lower abdominal muscle. The Big Three joined Battier and Mario Chalmers in the lineup, the first time Miami had gone with that first five all season.

It sent the Heat on their way to a terrific start, and Battier matched his surprising 17-point performance in Game 1 by going 5-of-7 from 3-point range, providing all the help the superstar trio needed.

James had his fifth straight 30-point game, breaking Wade's franchise playoff record, and added eight rebounds. He defended Durant early in Game 1 and helped put the league's scoring champion in early foul trouble, just one of the problems the Thunder had early.

Another loud, blue and white crowd tried to inspire them to rally, but the team could just simply never get close enough to until the final minutes.

Heat in Final Meat Locker Mode?

The third-rate merry pranksters over at ESPN on the tube & elsewhere are gleefully pointing fingers at LeBron & DWade for the last three losses.

In Game 5, I thought that LeBron had run out of the metaphorical gasoline & was running on fumes---so did not break to basket as much. When he did, he'd lost a step and KG was able to handle his drives into the paint. Defensively, Pierce was able to shoot over him. Still LBJ's average of 30 pts/game & around 10 rebs ain't shameful numbers.

Dywane has to pick up big first half numbers all the way through the first half, not die on the vine in the 2nd qtr.

But Spoelstra has to stop over thinking in almost every compartment. In fact, Eric might be the one to bite the bullet if the Heat don't pan out this year. If Chris Bosh doesn't do a low post tonight very well---curtains for young Eric, IMHO.

Tabloids NYTimes & WaPost Downplay Walker Slam-dunk

Wisconsin voters have thrown the MSM into a frenzied frazzle. The most hilarious BS imaginable flows effortlessly from the mouths of imbeciles like Ed Schultz ["Walker will be indicted any day now"] and Larry O'Delirious [Walker "squeaked out" a victory]. Of course, Fargo Fats is beneath contempt and 53-46 is the margin by which Barry Obama "squeaked out" a victory over John McCain!?!

The prevailing meme among the chronic losers on the left [I'm talking moral universe here] followed the DNC talking points religiously [as close as these inverts will ever get to religion!] by parroting on CNN & MessNBC & UpChuck Todd on NBC's post election coverage that "outside money" had somehow brainwashed Wisconsin voters into choosing a "far-right fanatic" who had "already destroyed the Middle Class" in my native state.

Indeed, Walker and I both hail from Wauwatosa, which last I checked was third-largest city in the state---after Madison and before Green Bay!

I seem to be the only one who noticed among news hounds of electronic & print media [correct me if I'm wrong] that those exit polls that EVERYONE complained were completely unreliable when indicating early on that the actual election would be a toss-up-----were universally cited as the source to say that Obama was seven points ahead of Mitt Romney. Anyone see that if an exit poll is far off on the actual election, it may also be far off on an election six months out???

Nearly scalped butch-cut Rachel Maddow joined her brainless bookends Fatso Fats & Larry O'D in bewailing the influence of big money --- which by her skewed account had GOP sources outspending the unions & dizzy Dems 7-1 [CBS Evening News with Steve Pelley had it at GOP & Superpacs $33 million to unions & Dems at $16 million----CBS is far more reliable than the DNC outlet at NBC.

FoxNEWS allowed itself to be played a bit. Its reporters didn't even bring up the outlandish claims that MessNBC & its delinquent parent NBC were proclaiming. Here's Karl Rove:

The results were a historic setback for organized labor, which failed to oust Gov. Scott Walker in a citadel of modern progressivism. And how it must have stung that 38% of union households voted for Mr. Walker, up a point from 2010 when he was first elected.

The election has implications for November. The Badger State now looks more like it did in 2000 and 2004, when Democrats narrowly carried it by margins of 5,708 votes and 11,384 votes, respectively. President Obama's campaign now admits Wisconsin is a tossup. That isn't an encouraging trend in a state he won by 414,818 votes.

The recall contest was expected to be close. A Democratic pollster had the race at three points just a few days out. GOP tracking surveys showed the contest tightening as well. Yet Mr. Walker won by 172,739 votes, up from his 2010 margin of 124,638 votes.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Team Obama, after all, has bragged about how strong its ground game is at registering, persuading and turning out the vote.

Last month, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told congressional Democrats in a closed-door meeting (reported by Politico) that "we're building the best grass-roots campaign in modern American political history . . . that will help all Democrats up and down the ticket." Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also boasted on CNN in May that the Wisconsin recall would be the "dry run we need of our massive, significant dynamic grass-roots presidential campaign."

After the debacle, witless crone Debbie W-S had the chutzpah to vaunt to a slightly befuddled Piers Morgan that the WI vote was a partial success for the Demonrats because the Dems had wrested the State Senate away from the GOP. The frizzy-brained ditz neglected to mention that the State Senate is not scheduled to meet again until March 2013 after the state redistricted the Dems out of any future contention---absent a landslide for the First Imbecile, which ain't gonna happen.

Debbie W-S is the best weapon the GOP have against the Dems, who are too thick to realize this &/or too arrogant to admit that she's a horrible mistake which keeps on mistaking [sic].

Jon Stewart to his credit had a hilarious sendup of the dizzy Dems to celebrate his schizoid political POV. Worth catching on Mediaite if the link doesn't work.

Tabloids NYTimes & WaPost Downplay Walker Slam-dunk

Wisconsin voters have thrown the MSM into a frenzied frazzle. The most hilarious BS imaginable flows effortlessly from the mouths of imbeciles like Ed Schultz ["Walker will be indicted any day now"] and Larry O'Delirious [Walker "squeaked out" a victory]. Of course, Fargo Fats is beneath contempt and 53-46 is the margin by which Barry Obama "squeaked out" a victory over John McCain!?!

The prevailing meme among the chronic losers on the left [I'm talking moral universe here] followed the DNC talking points religiously [as close as these inverts will ever get to religion!] by parroting on CNN & MessNBC & UpChuck Todd on NBC's post election coverage that "outside money" had somehow brainwashed Wisconsin voters into choosing a "far-right fanatic" who had "already destroyed the Middle Class" in my native state.

Indeed, Walker and I both hail from Wauwatosa, which last I checked was third-largest city in the state---after Madison and before Green Bay!

I seem to be the only one who noticed among news hounds of electronic & print media [correct me if I'm wrong] that those exit polls that EVERYONE complained were completely unreliable when indicating early on that the actual election would be a toss-up-----were universally cited as the source to say that Obama was seven points ahead of Mitt Romney. Anyone see that if an exit poll is far off on the actual election, it may also be far off on an election six months out???

Nearly scalped butch-cut Rachel Maddow joined her brainless bookends Fatso Fats & Larry O'D in bewailing the influence of big money --- which by her skewed account had GOP sources outspending the unions & dizzy Dems 7-1 [CBS Evening News with Steve Pelley had it at GOP & Superpacs $33 million to unions & Dems at $16 million----CBS is far more reliable than the DNC outlet at NBC.

FoxNEWS allowed itself to be played a bit. Its reporters didn't even bring up the outlandish claims that MessNBC & its delinquent parent NBC were proclaiming. Here's Karl Rove:

The results were a historic setback for organized labor, which failed to oust Gov. Scott Walker in a citadel of modern progressivism. And how it must have stung that 38% of union households voted for Mr. Walker, up a point from 2010 when he was first elected.

The election has implications for November. The Badger State now looks more like it did in 2000 and 2004, when Democrats narrowly carried it by margins of 5,708 votes and 11,384 votes, respectively. President Obama's campaign now admits Wisconsin is a tossup. That isn't an encouraging trend in a state he won by 414,818 votes.

The recall contest was expected to be close. A Democratic pollster had the race at three points just a few days out. GOP tracking surveys showed the contest tightening as well. Yet Mr. Walker won by 172,739 votes, up from his 2010 margin of 124,638 votes.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Team Obama, after all, has bragged about how strong its ground game is at registering, persuading and turning out the vote.

Last month, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told congressional Democrats in a closed-door meeting (reported by Politico) that "we're building the best grass-roots campaign in modern American political history . . . that will help all Democrats up and down the ticket." Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also boasted on CNN in May that the Wisconsin recall would be the "dry run we need of our massive, significant dynamic grass-roots presidential campaign."

After the debacle, witless crone Debbie W-S had the chutzpah to vaunt to a slightly befuddled Piers Morgan that the WI vote was a partial success for the Demonrats because the Dems had wrested the State Senate away from the GOP. The frizzy-brained ditz neglected to mention that the State Senate is not scheduled to meet again until March 2013 after the state redistricted the Dems out of any future contention---absent a landslide for the First Imbecile, which ain't gonna happen.

Debbie W-S is the best weapon the GOP have against the Dems, who are too thick to realize this &/or too arrogant to admit that she's a horrible mistake which keeps on mistaking [sic].

Jon Stewart to his credit had a hilarious sendup of the dizzy Dems to celebrate his schizoid political POV. Worth catching on Mediaite if the link doesn't work.