A little political...October 9, 2012

A.S. Haley: Obamacare Could Come Before SCOTUS Again
The Supreme Court of the United States began its October 2012 term last week. Little noticed, among the various orders it issued at the outset, was a request in Case No. 11-438 (see p. 7 of the order list) that the Department of Justice -- that is, the Solicitor General -- respond to a petition for rehearing filed over the summer in a case which the Court had declined to review on June 29, 2012 -- the day after it issued its controversial decision in National Federation of Independent Business, et al., v. Sebelius upholding Obamacare as a valid exercise of Congress' power to tax.

Just what is the significance of that request? A procedural history is essential here, in order to place the matter into context...

Mitt’s Character, and Presidential Virtue
While voting is currently rather academic for me since I haven’t naturalized yet, I’ve been following U.S. politics with a certain amount of bemused interest since I first came here almost ten years ago. To an Aussie, American politics are strange, indeed.

Leaving aside my astonishment at levels of institutionalized corruption that leave me stunned, and at an equally shocking disregard of constitutional protections if the target is sufficiently despised, I find the U.S. insistence that the president be a paragon of virtue distinctly odd. Australian culture is heavily affected by being the offspring of a collection of political prisoners and petty criminals — the base assumption is that anyone going into politics is either already corrupt or highly corruptible. Add this to an Australian distrust of anything professed loudly, and you end up with people who are pretty good at figuring someone out based on what they say or don’t say and how they behave.

So despite my initial cynicism towards all the Republican candidates, I find myself warming towards Mr. Romney the more I see of him. Mostly this is because what he’s done is generally more admirable than what he says...

ABC Removes Romney’s Opening Speech from Debate Transcript
ABC News, on its website that claims it represents the whole transcript of last Wednesday’s debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, decided that they would help Obama out once again. This time, they did it by completely removing Romney’s opening statement. The last two sentences of Obama’s opening statement were cut as well as the initial part of his response to Romney’s opening statement, but it is Romney’s statement that was cut in its entirety...

The Obama Levee Breaks
President Obama might think sagging polls are his biggest post-debate problem. But it's really people like Buzz Bissinger, Stacey Dash and Bill Maher showing it's now acceptable in polite society to attack The One...

Ryan to reporter: Don’t stuff words into my mouth: Video
...Actually, Camp mischaracterized this in two different ways. First, Ryan was providing responsive answers to the gun questions. Camp was asking broad, philosophical questions, not specific questions on proposals or individual laws, and Ryan was providing philosophical answers. Second, Camp tells viewers at the beginning of the clip that the interview ended badly when he began asking about gun violence — which is patently untrue, as the video shows. It ended badly when Camp tried to connect gun violence to tax cuts, and Ryan and his team called him out for it while the cameras were still running. In fact, when Ryan challenges Camp for “stuffing words in my mouth,” Camp can’t even come up with a defense … even though his microphone is still hot...

Sesame Street received $1 mil stimulus bill grant – created “1.47″ jobs
This grant was brought to you by the letters “A” and “R” — as in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the “stimulus bill.”

Sesame Workshop, the independent nonprofit corporation that produces the popular childrens’ program Sesame Street, received a $1,067,532 stimulus bill grant in August 2010, via the Department of Health and Human Services...