NRO's The Corner: Obamacare ‘like a house on fire’ with more flammable parts yet to come

This makes a Bryn Mawr seminar (unless they prefer to call them “ovulars” now) on post-modern themes in the sermons of Thulsa Doom seem like a really productive use of time.

this convo has gone into weird places but can we all at least agree that obamacare is a job-killing tax-and-spend armaggedon that's ruined the country irreversibly and we are forever doomed i feel like this is now beyond question

Well, we all know how the 'job creator' class likes the whine the most when things are going their way.

likes to whine the most

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373579/foolish-anti-vax-cause-rich-lowry

here entirely and solely for the comments

The problem of reemerging diseases is a problem of illegal
imagration. In third world hell holes they don’t have mandatory vacation protocols for Jenny McCarthy to rail against.
Vaccinated fence jumpers number in the many millions. Anti Vaxers grumble but take the shots or their kids can't go to school.

They come here with the blessing of Marco Rubio and spread
formally dead diseases.

Whooping cough, measles, polio are all making a resurgence
but don’t blame Jenny McCarthy blame Juanita Martinez

I propose we make illegal imagration against the law.

mandatory vacation protocols

Altalena Vekis • 4 hours ago

And is it just COINCIDENCE that while Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, Lincoln had a secretary named Vaccine?

lord help me i lol'd

formally dead diseases

Les maladies revenantes!

Spring is upon us at last, and with it is the new spring issue of National Affairs. Among the offerings:

-Jim Manzi on how to revive American innovation
-Ron Haskins on whether government can encourage marriage
-Judah Bellin on reforming student loans
-Gabriel Schoenfeld on the trouble with shield laws
-Ilan Wurman on originalism and the founders
-Diana Schaub on the Gettysburg Address

-Ron Haskins on whether government can encourage marriage

After which he examines whether government can contain communism.

‘Seems an Awful Waste’
By Jay Nordlinger
March 25, 2014 8:36 AM

When I saw the headline “Aborted babies incinerated to heat UK hospitals” (story here), I thought of Sweeney Todd. Reason is, I saw this Sondheim musical recently, and reviewed it here. Sweeney Todd can put you in a macabre frame of mind.

Remember, Mrs. Lovett is a maker of meat pies. Her friend Sweeney has just killed someone — and will kill many more. They are talking about how to dispose of the first victim’s corpse. And Mrs. Lovett gets an idea.

“Well, you know me, sometimes bright ideas just pop right into my head, and I keep thinking . . . Seems a downright shame . . .” Sweeney wonders, “Shame?” Mrs. Lovett continues, “ Seems an awful waste . . . Such a nice plump frame Wot’s-his-name has . . . Had . . . Has . . . Nor it can’t be traced. Business needs a lift — debts to be erased — think of it as thrift. As a gift. If you get my drift . . .”

Sweeney doesn’t. Mrs. Lovett continues, “Seems an awful waste. I mean, with the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it.” Sweeney says, “Ah!” Mrs. Lovett answers, “Good, you got it.”

“Mrs. Lovett, what a charming notion,” says Sweeney, “eminently practical and yet appropriate as always. . . . How delectable! Also undetectable.”

A question: If an unborn child is just a “meaningless blob of protoplasm” (the phrase I grew up with), what’s the rumpus about using this blob for a little fuel? Why the squeamishness?

Either it’s a baby or it’s meaningless matter. Decide, please. (The cries I always heard were, “It’s not that simple!” Then you grew up, thought, and realized, “Yeah, it kind of is, actually.”)

(the phrase I grew up with)

I am so glad Jay finally grew up.

"meaningless blob of protoplasm”

25 results, half of them Nordlinger.

“We’re gathered to celebrate Women’s History Month, but I don’t celebrate Women’s History Month,” announced writer Mona Charen, one of the panelists. “It doesn’t interest me whether a person who happens to share my chromosomes sits in the Oval Office. It doesn’t interest me how many women members of the Senate there are.”

What interests Charen and the other women on the stage is their belief, as Charen put it, that “feminism has done so much damage to happiness.” And the solution to this damage, it turns out, is matrimony — the same thing that will solve problems such as income inequality and the Republican Party’s standing among women.

“We should show concern for everybody by extending the marriage franchise to everybody,” panelist Mollie Hemingway proposed. “Everybody go out, right now, go get married if you’re not married,” she said to laughter, “and we should be able to solve all these problems.”

“If we truly want women to thrive,” Charen concurred, “we have to revive the marriage norm.”

putting the cats bag in the bag eh

Mona Charen and Hemingway, writers and think tankers, follow that advice obv.

"We have to revive the marriage, Norm"

http://ifanboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/norm-peterson.jpg

man, fuck you for making me read dana milbank!

I got a better one for you.

holy fuckin shit holy fuckin shit holy fuckin shit holy fuckin shit

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/375135/happiness-jay-nordlinger

hahahahaaaaa omg omg nothing more perfect will happen

Before I click, is it anything like Brooks' column

it's definitely an amusing if inevitable development. at the very least they've finally found the guy capable of filling john simon's shoes.

Please be more direct, editors.

Justice Sotomayor is here arguing in effect that if a constitutional referendum doesn’t go the NAACP’s way, then its effects are invalid. This is not an exaggeration: Justice Soyomayor argues explicitly that Michigan’s voters would have been within their rights to, for example, lobby university authorities to adopt race-neutral admissions standards but that by adopting a constitutional amendment insisting on race neutrality, thereby transferring the decision from the education bureaucrats to the people themselves and their constitution, they “changed the rules in the middle of the game.” Her opinion is legally illiterate and logically indefensible, and the still-young career of this self-described “wise Latina” on the Supreme Court already offers a case study in the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethnic-identity politics over the law. Justice Sotomayor has revealed herself as a naked and bare-knuckled political activist with barely even a pretense of attending to the law, and the years she has left to subvert the law will be a generation-long reminder of the violence the Obama administration has done to our constitutional order.

the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethniccorporate-identity politics over the law

fixed it for ya

Wow so much violence give the US a legal bandaid.

ok i'm to the left of sotomayor but i still think her legal reasoning doesn't quite pass the BS detector. the hyperbole and race-baiting surrounding that observation i could do without.

I somehow doubt you are to left of Sotomayor on issues of affirmative action.

Kennedy's reasoning OTOH throws off all kinds of BS alarms. "If we talk about race we're perpetuating the idea of race, but if we ignore it it'll all go away like the fantasy it is."

that's the standard right wing line about affirmative action: that it's the REAL racism

Kevin Williamson continues to embarrass himself.

That was the short version??

think i finally stopped reading this (any future armond reviews aside of course)

perhaps of use: http://www.donotlink.com

Conservative students have to put up with liberal commencement speakers all the time. Democratic and liberal bigwigs dominate the commencement circuit. Once in a blue moon, liberal students (and faculty) are asked to put up with a conservative speaker. But will they? No. At least not at Rutgers. (See the news here.)

Someone on the Democratic side — perhaps President Obama — should say, “I hate the Republican party and everything they stand for, but this is wrong. This is not right in America.” Is there anyone big enough on the Democratic side to do that?

Personally, I wouldn’t like it if a Democratic former secretary of state were hounded out. There has got to be some Democrat, somewhere, who doesn’t like what has happened at Rutgers.

P.S. If conservatives wanted to try their hand at the Left’s game, they could say, “Rutgers apparently can’t stand the sight or sound of an independent black woman.” They could direct the same gibe at Brandeis (for Hirsi Ali). But that is a dirty game.

P.P.S. What a gracious woman Condoleezza Rice is. She should run for president. But then, in view of 2012, does the American public appreciate graciousness? They chose Obama and Biden, those true gents, over Romney and Ryan.

One of my friends from Standford had Condoleeza Rice as her thesis advisor, I asked if she actually signed her thesis or just stamped it with her cloven hoof.

Recent losing presidential candidates ranked by graciousness (most gracious to least)

1. McCain
2. Kerry
3. Romney
4. Gore (with much justification)

I don't remember the VPs well enough to really rank them on this scale but terrifyingly enough John Edwards might come out on top here? Tempted to go back one more election, my vague memory is that Jack Kemp despite being politically horrifying in many ways seemed like a relatively gracious dude.

he was.

otm:

Andrew C. McCarthy @AndrewCMcCarthy
Advice for #Benghazi Select Cmte: Don't Draft @AndrewCMcCarthy for special counsel - My @NROcorner post http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/377243/advice-benghazi-select-committee-dont-draft-mccarthy-andrew-c-mccarthy …

Kevin Williams:

His demeanor is that of a man who has been diagnosed with cancer who puts on a brave face, gets up every morning, and reiterates his determination to “beat this thing.” (Not that I don’t think the presidency is a cancer, but that’s a point for a different post.)

It’s a remarkable talent he has. When he was getting beat up politically for his association with that goofy racist clergyman, he lectured us on the evils of racism, as though we’d been the ones sitting in on those hateful sermons. Every time he has some spectacular screw-up, which seems to be about once a quarter, he pronounces himself outraged, as though he had not failed us but had been failed himself.

So Barack Obama has sworn that he will not tolerate the incompetence of the Obama administration. I’d like to think that that means he is going to resign, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

how witty! watch your back, jay nordlinger! just kiddin' there's room for both

in HELL

Every time he has some spectacular screw-up, which seems to be about once a quarter, he pronounces himself outraged, as though he had not failed us but had been failed himself.

wow it's almost like authority figures are not omniscient superheroes.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_05/thats_kind_of_racist050539.php

Discussing Williamson's description of African-Americans and all single women

remarkably risk-averse compared to traditional conservative constituencies such as white men and business owners.
remarkably risk-averse compared to traditional conservative constituencies such as white men and business owners.