UPDATE IV: Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero (I Am ‘Old’)

Education, Family, Feminism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, The Zeitgeist

HERE are excerpts from “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero,” my weekly column, now on RT. It deconstructs the latest episode of infantilism in America:

The new ‘poster child’ for a bully victim in America is, wait for it, not a helpless small child, robbed of lunch money by the schoolyard ruffian, but an adult entrusted with supervising them.

The Internet watched 68-year-old Karen Klein, who was charged with ‘monitoring’ bused children in the town of Greece, N.Y., dissolve in tears to the taunts of her 13-year-old charges.

Klein’s failure to fend off the feral children was captured on YouTube by her tormentors, students at the Athena Middle School in suburban Rochester.

To the sight of a feeble adult, who occupies two seats on the vehicle she’s supposed to supervise; too fat to budge and too powerless to perform the task for which she is being paid—the Internet erupted in cheers.

Klein was quickly catapulted to fame for her, yes, courage. ‘God bless, you are my hero,’ effused a woman with the handle ‘Marykate,’ in an online post.

Charitably put, Klein has not advanced adulthood in infantile America. …

… In defense of the wolverines who preyed on Klein, how is an adult such as herself to command their respect? From whom are these fiends, out on a wilding spree, expected to learn a lesson? From Supervisor Klein, who was not adult enough to holler for help? Klein lacked the wherewithal to ask the bus driver to stop the bus and set the kids straight, then and there. …

… Or, perhaps the bus drive is another fearful fatty, who was unable to dislodge herself from her seat? Perhaps the two live in fear of potential law suits, lodged by the parents who sire these good-for-nothing seventh graders? …

… Natural order is not predicated on state-enacted laws. The natural order that has worked throughout the ages to tame young terrors is predicated on hierarchy; on the preservation of clear, never-to-be-blurred boundaries between adults and kids. These boundaries were once upheld in-house—in the principal’s office, the home and the church. …

… Restore old-fashioned discipline to classrooms and school buses.

… Better still: Drain the septic tank that is our federalized education system, and with it the auxiliary personnel that infest the schools and feed off a dwindling tax base. There is now one non-teaching adult for every 8 or 9 children. …

The complete column, now on RT, is “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero.”

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

The paperback edition (softcover) of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is available on Amazon. It features bonus material, including an Afterword by Burkean philosopher, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

UPDATE I: If you must have the visual:

UPDATE II: A Facebook Friend writes on my Wall:

Sean Sheedy:

I’m appalled by these Lord-of-the-Flies adolescents. But I also recall my Irish grandmother, who would have stuffed their words back down their throats ’til they choked, and then settled back for a nip of her favorite whiskey.
The U.S. these days is sadly lacking in cranky old folks.

I reply:

SS: I love your comment. Exactly my sentiment. I grew up around wiry little old Israeli ladies, who were so tough and scary that we kids used to imagine they were witches who would eat us up if we got close enough. (There were no Idiot Pads in those days; we’d think up scary stuff for fun.) Anyone taunting these former pioneers of the Holy land, who had drained swamps in their youth, would run for his/her life. We respected our elders.

UPDATE III: Guys start fighting on my Wall over abortion. I write: “AMM: There is not a thing you can do when people go off about fetuses (which I, of course, love). As I once wrote: “Would that Republicans fussed as much over the many fully formed human-beings dying daily in Iraq, as they do over fetuses.” Fuss all you like, but not on this Wall, fetuses (which I love) are not the subject here. But, I have a very low regard for your average Republican’s “culture of life.”

UPDATE IV: A comment at WND:

Ilana Mercer, one day you will be old, and fat, and powerless, and someone will heap on the last straw…and you will break, and sob, and understand what this woman went through. Until then, you’ll be a soulless fraud.

How does the fool writing this know I am not “old”? Because of the way I look? American slobs make me sick. You know nothing about real suffering, but you think a cruel word qualifies. (Read Into the Cannibal’s Pot to get a perspective on just how disgustingly self-indulgent and full of self-pity you are.)

Americans are blind to anything and anyone that isn’t like them; you can identify with Klein because she looks like you. You cannot identify with those who do not mirror indulgence and sloth (“old” though they may be).

From the fact that someone looks OK, you deduce that they are young, have it easy, haven’t suffered like the Klein woman has (she doesn’t know what real suffering is)?

If someone looks OK in middle age, you think that comes easily and doesn’t involve hard work and disciple, and isn’t achieved despite a difficult life? You pity the slack and pile on hard-working disciplined folks, for what? Driving themselves hard (I do that)? Running 12 miles a week for the last 22 years? (I do that, come rain or shine). Not wallowing in pity (I don’t do that). Anything to excuse the way you eat and look, and the arrogance with which you treat others not like you.

How old does the writer think I am, what with a daughter who is 29-years old?

Misplaced compassion and envy; that’s what this country is increasingly about.

What I once said in an interview about reason and misplaced compassion obtains: “In well-functioning people, the intellect is not separated from the affect (i.e. the emotional). They are integrated. When people are rational, they observe reality as it is, and are more likely to be concerned with justice and avoid misplacing compassion.”

UPDATED: Screwed By The SCROTUM & Its Chief Politico (Obama On Top)

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts, The State

“Anticipating A Turn of The Health-Care Screw,” last night’s Barely-a-Blog post title, was apt.

The SCROTUM would fail to dissolve “the hulking bill,” Orwellianly titled “The Affordable Care Act.” The Supermen Court, after all, doesn’t follow natural law; individual rights, or even the founders’ federalism.

Why, the Constitution itself, in all its amendments, has long since veered from the just law. All the more so the jurisprudence that “interprets” this already flawed, dead-letter scroll. (“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law.“ More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”)

“As affable as he is,” said a September 15, 2005 blog post titled “Judge Roberts: Smooth Operator?”, during Roberts’ confirmation hearings, “Roberts, regrettably, is no Janice Rogers Brown.”

Their devotion (and dotage) prevents President Bush’s lickspittles from realizing that he too considers Rogers Brown ‘outside the mainstream,’ to use the Democrats’ demotic line. Let’s hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist.” AND, “here’s the thing that unsettles: Roberts seems to be all about the moves.”

Lyle Denniston, of the SCOTUS Blog, speaks to the technicalities of today’s decision, in “Don’t call it a mandate — it’s a tax”:

Salvaging the idea that Congress did have the power to try to expand health care to virtually all Americans, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of the crucial – and most controversial — feature of the Affordable Care Act. By a vote of 5-4, however, the Court did not sustain it as a command for Americans to buy insurance, but as a tax if they don’t. That is the way Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., was willing to vote for it, and his view prevailed. The other Justices split 4-4, with four wanting to uphold it as a mandate, and four opposed to it in any form.

“The Roberts Court is Born”:

Today’s Supreme Court is often referred to as Anthony Kennedy’s Court. Although Kennedy is the swing justice who usually casts the deciding vote in close cases, the landmark ruling this week in the healthcare cases clearly mark the maturation of the “Roberts Court.”
Chief Justice John Roberts was the surprising swing vote in today’s Obamacare decision. Although he agreed with the four conservative justices, including Kennedy, that the individual mandate was not a regulation of interstate commerce, he voted with the Court’s moderates to hold that it was justified as a tax. Because people who don’t obtain insurance pay a tax to the IRS, the mandate was within Congress’s power to raise taxes for the general welfare. As a result, the Affordable Care Act was upheld.
With this deft ruling, Roberts avoided what was certain to be a cascade of criticism of the high court. No Supreme Court has struck down a president’s signature piece of legislation in over 75 years. Had Obamacare been voided, it would have inevitably led to charges of aggressive judicial activism. Roberts peered over the abyss and decided he didn’t want to go there.

UPDATE: Absolutely right is the New York Time: “The decision was a victory for President Obama and Congressional Democrats, affirming the central legislative pillar of Mr. Obama’s presidency.”

AND, so was “SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES: ARIZONA ET AL. v. UNITED STATES.”

So, for heaven’s sake. Quit the denial. Liberty was not sundered with Obama. It’s long gone.

Anticipating A Turn of The Health-Care Screw

Federalism, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Law, The Courts

Nothing short of a total repeal of Obama care will do, because such a repeal will amount to nothing more than a “do no more harm” injunction. However, even in the unlikely event that the SCOTUS deals a set back to Obama’s politburo of proctologists in the waiting, and repeals the hulking bill–we are still screwed, as we currently labor under a costly, unwieldy “patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Free market incentives are not exactly robust in the current Third-Party system.

Until tomorrow, Amy Howe anticipates the health-care decision, “In Plain English,” at the SCOTUS Blog:

Once the Court does turn to health care, there are four questions before it. Three of those questions revolve around the “minimum coverage” provision, popularly known as the “individual mandate.” Of course, the question keeping the White House, Congress, and everyone else in the country on pins and needles is whether the mandate – which would require virtually all Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty – is constitutional: can Congress, using its power under the Constitution to regulate commerce between the states, make people buy health insurance? (More detailed Plain English discussions of the substantive issues in the case, including the individual mandate, are available at this link.)

But before the Court can decide whether the mandate is constitutional, it must first decide whether it can even rule on this question at all. The potential obstacle to the Court’s review of the mandate is the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA), an 1867 law that prohibits lawsuits to challenge a tax until the tax has actually gone into effect and needs to be paid. At least one lower court has concluded (and the federal government once even argued) that the “penalty” which would be imposed on someone who doesn’t buy health insurance under the mandate is a “tax”; therefore, this line of reasoning goes, someone who believes that the mandate is unconstitutional cannot bring a lawsuit making that argument until after the mandate actually goes into effect in 2014.

If the AIA applies to the lawsuit over the mandate, then the Court cannot consider the challenge to the mandate even if both the federal government and the states challenging the law want the Supreme Court to decide the case. So if at least five of the nine members of the Court were to conclude that the AIA does apply to the mandate, that would be the end of the matter. The Court would not discuss, much less rule on, whether the mandate is constitutional, nor would there be any reason for the Court to weigh in on what parts of the law, if any, can survive if the law is unconstitutional – the “severability” question. Instead, the Court would skip straight to the fourth and final question, dealing with the constitutionality of a provision that expands eligibility for Medicaid, the state-federal partnership that provides health care to the poor.

What the Court will in fact decide about the AIA obviously remains to be seen tomorrow. After the oral argument in March, most Court watchers believed that the Court would not regard the AIA as a bar to reviewing the mandate. But if that issue went the other way, that decision would postpone a decision on the mandate until well after the presidential election – which might be an appealing option both for political reasons and if the Court is having a hard time coming up with a majority to resolve the mandate issue.

At least for tomorrow, all that anyone will really be interested in with regard to the AIA is the Court’s bottom line: can it review the mandate issue or not? If it agrees with both sides that it can, all eyes will then turn to that constitutional question. Most Americans care about the bottom line: is the mandate constitutional? Even if the Justices disagree on the reasoning, the mandate would still survive.

If the mandate does survive, then the Court’s work is almost done; all that would be left would be the Medicaid issue, which we will discuss in a moment. But if at least five Justices vote to strike down the mandate, then the Court will have to decide what other parts of the law, if any, fall with it. On this “severability” question, the Court will again have several options. It could allow all of the rest of the ACA to stay in place; it could conclude that the rest of the law must go too (as the states have argued); or it could settle on a middle ground – for example, as the federal government argued, by striking down the provisions that are inextricably linked to the mandate but allowing the others to go into effect.

Finally, as long as the Court doesn’t conclude that the entire ACA must fall, it will have to resolve one more issue: does another provision of the Act violate the Constitution because it effectively coerces the states, requiring them to comply with the ACA’s expanded Medicaid eligibility requirements or risk losing all of the money that they receive for Medicaid from the federal government? The lower court agreed with the federal government that it does not, and the Justices seemed to be leaning that way at oral argument. But as we saw on Monday when the Court announced its decision in the Arizona case, the oral argument is not always a foolproof predictor of how the opinion will turn out.

So check back tomorrow; we’ll have our first reporting on the decision as soon as it is announced, and then we’ll break it down into Plain English as soon as possible after that.

CNN Moves Into Campaign Mode

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military

Have you noticed how desperate the Obama heads on CNN are becoming, as the election approaches? Although not quite as blatant as MSNBC, CNN’s John King, Jessica Yellin, Dona Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Piers Morgan, are, nevertheless, sounding positively shrill.

Expect the BHO “bitch pitch,” coming from likes of CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux and her colleague Jessica Yellin, to crescendo in the coming weeks. The women folk are especially devoted to distribution and soft militarism (“nation building,” massacre mediation, etc).

I hear Big Daddy sexual overtones when these females talk about Their Man (perverts all).

Especially noticeable is the way CNN is attempting to shape the GOP message, for what that message is worth.

It does so by presenting to the public regular Republican commentators who’re left-liberals in all but name.

In addition to being a plain idiot, Ana Navarro, for example, is a Republican identity politics activist, who would have liked BHO to have delivered on his immigration promises. Known for siring —and surrounding himself with—stupid women, John McCain had once employed the gaseous Navaro as his consultant.

Another liberal Republican, who’s part of the CNN task force entrusted with moving the GOP “forward,” is John Avlon, “chief speechwriter for former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.”

A Rockefeller Republican though he may be, David Frum does not deserve to be lumped with these boorish bores. But if he fails to veer even more to the Left, especially on immigration, I expect him to go the way of Bay Buchanan (an establishment Republican, in my opinion) who no longer appears on CNN.

CNN is being extremely crafty about crafting the meta-message.