WHEREFORE, Captain Justice, Guardian of the Realm and Leader of the Resistance, primarily asks that the Court deny the State’s motion, as lacking legal basis. Alternatively, the Citizen Accused moves for an order in limine modifying the speech code as aforementioned, and requiring any other euphemisms and feel-good terms as the Court finds appropriate. –In which we learn that lawyers can have a sense of humor.
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Scribbling, scribbling, scribbling on the Internet.
From October, 2013
Obamacare Makes Republicans Look Good
So sayeth John Dickerson, not without reason: Let’s go back in time. During the debate over the law, the president had a difficult balancing act. He had to argue that the status quo in health care was a disaster while at the same time not threatening the status quo for those people who were happy with their health care or who feared it would get worse under his changes. A CBS poll at the time showed that people were quite afraid that whatever the president did, it would hurt their plans. Sixty-nine percent worried that the ACA would affect the quality of…
Do You Use Your Blog to Give Individual Advice?
If you do, the state can shut you down: A moment’s reflection reveals that restrictions on advice are all around us, commonly in the form of occupational-licensing laws. And as government has grown, so too has the amount of advice that it seeks to regulate. In North Carolina, a state dietitian board ordered a blogger to stop giving advice on the low-carb “Paleo” diet because he is not a licensed dietitian. In Texas, the veterinary board ordered a licensed veterinarian to stop giving pet-care advice to people in foreign countries, who often had no other access to veterinary care. And in Kentucky, the…
Homer Simpson Almost Solved Fermat’s Last Theorem
Don’t believe me? Read.
Want Your Kids to Be Better Educated and Wealthier?
Remain married to your spouse, if at all possible. Note that the positive effect of having parents that remain married is even stronger when the parents in question never even went to college. Note the following as well: The idea that marriages have such strong spillover effects strikes some as a spurious correlation. But there is evidence of a causal relationship, too. MIT economist John Gruber, studying the effect of divorce on later incomes, found that adults “exposed to unilateral divorce regulations as children are less well educated, have lower family incomes, marry earlier but separate more often, and have higher odds…
Get Your Flu Shots!
And don’t believe nonsensical hype regarding flu vaccines.
James Clapper Throws the Obama Administration Under the Bus
Following up on this post, we have yet another indication that the intelligence community is pushing back against White House claims that it knew nothing about spying on friendly foreign governments: The nation’s top spymaster said on Tuesday that the White House had long been aware in general terms of the National Security Agency’s overseas eavesdropping, stoutly defending the agency’s intelligence-gathering methods and suggesting possible divisions within the Obama administration. The official, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that the N.S.A. had kept senior officials in the National Security Council informed of surveillance…
Yes, It’s Time for Yet Another Obamacare Rollout Calamity Update
And we have quite a lot of ground to cover. A poll indicates that seventy percent of American voters want a delay of the individual mandate. I am frankly surprised that the number is not higher. There has been a lot of talk about extending the enrollment period. Insurance companies don’t like that idea, because it cuts into their profits. In the event that you hear anyone trying to excuse the administration’s incompetence regarding the Obamacare rollout by repeating the tired old line about Obamacare being “more than a website,” remind those people that it is precisely the problems with the…
The Smell of Panic
Jonah Goldberg has a lot of fun at the expense of Greg Sargent, who is less a journalist and more a hack on behalf of the Obama administration, and the Democratic party. But in the midst of the entirely warranted Sargent-bashing, let’s not forget that Sargent’s calls for a bipartisan fix to Obamacare’s problems reek of fright and desperation. As Goldberg properly notes, “[t]he president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The Right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any…
The Government Shutdown Was a Terrible and Disastrous Idea
So sayeth Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry. I align myself entirely with their comments, and the following is both bracing and completely accurate: Prior to the government shutdown, the House Republican leadership offered a plan to force the Senate to hold a symbolic vote on defunding Obamacare before allowing it to move on to a so-called clean continuing resolution — one, that is, with no anti-Obamacare provisions. The plan was denounced by various conservative groups as a sell-out and caused a revolt in the caucus. A few weeks and a government shutdown later, all Republicans had to show for their…
