Archive for February, 2011

Bob Maistros

So the decision of Florida District Judge Roger Vinson to invalidate all of Obamacare may just be setting up a giant game of constitutional chicken.

Think that the ruling that the entire law is unconstitutional doesn’t have any real effect now since, as my colleague Dan Calabrese wrote yesterday, “the real meat doesn’t take effect until 2014 anyway?”

Already leaving the station?

Ha.  True, the individual mandate and many of the taxes and subsidies don’t start until then.  But the O-Ring has already been busy beavers.  Check out the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“(T)he Obama administration said it has no to plans to halt implementation of the law. Already, it has mailed rebate checks to seniors with high prescription drug costs, helped set up insurance pools for people with pre-existing medical conditions and required insurers to allow children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until they reach age 26.

“’We will continue to operate as we have previously,’ a senior administration official said.”

And the Administration is seeking a stay of the ruling so it can keep on plowing forward.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Dan Calabrese

Think back to the days when the liberation of Iraq was getting closer. Remember George W. Bush invoking memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall – it was only 14 years earlier at that point – and the resultant tumbling of communist dominoes in eastern Europe?

The customary vindication.

Bush expected that, by introducing freedom into the Middle East, the U.S. could help create a groundswell of demand for democracy across that despot-friendly region. Contrary to the dishonest claims of Democrats and Ron Paul sycophants, Bush never wanted to “impose democracy at the barrel of a gun.” He wanted to give people a chance to find out what it was like, and then let the course of freedom take its course.

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