† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: President Barack Hussein Obama is facing a political crisis that no MSM pundit could have predicted in 2008: Amongst young white voters aged 18 to 24, “Obama's simply not cool anymore.” The Atlantic reports:

 

A symposium last month called "Oberlin-based Perspectives on the Obama Presidency" noted that students don't think Obama's cool anymore - all his cute little quirks have become grating, a polisci professor explained, and the real Obama can't live up to their idea of him. Students aren't even impressed that Osama bin Laden was killed, protesting that the world's most wanted terrorist was unarmed when he was shot. 

 

† There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip: When all of the provisions of the ironically-named Affordable Care Act start to kick in during 2014, 30 percent of companies say they will “definitely or probably” drop employer-sponsored health insurance plans, according to a survey of 1,300 employers, published in McKinsey Quarterly. MarketWatch reports:

 

“At least 30% of employers would gain economically from dropping coverage, even if they completely compensated employees for the change through other benefit offerings or higher salaries,” the study says.

 

It goes on to add: “Contrary to what employers assume, more than 85% of employees would remain at their jobs even if their employers stopped offering [employer-sponsored insurance], although about 60% would expect increased compensation.”

 

Late Monday, an Obama administration official took issue with the study, saying that it is at odds with findings from the Congressional Budget Office, think-tank Rand Corp. and the Urban Institute. In an email response, the official wrote that when Massachusetts initiated its own reform, the number of individuals with employer-sponsored insurance increased.

 

Though he takes issue with the McKinsey data, Washington Post policy wonk Ezra Klein finds a silver lining – albeit with the caveats that are de rigueur for libs and undercut any potential fiscal benefit – should employers drop workers “by the millions”:

[W]e could embrace it as a long-overdue opportunity to move beyond the employer-based health-care market. It might even be a chance to convert the tax break for employer-based insurance into a refundable tax credit that everyone gets, no matter their employment status. That’s long been a hope of conservatives - both John McCain and Paul Ryan have proposed versions of it - and so long as it happens in the context of a reformed system where consumers are protected, insurers are regulated, and risks are pooled, it’d be very good policy.

 

If ObamaCare does bend the cost curve in the right direction, it will surely be an unintended consequence. But that’s not likely to happen. Health insurance costs will continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation, while as many as 78 million Americans will have to leave the plans and doctors they like - and some of them will become underinsured or uninsured.

 

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: The city was forced to shut off the water at its new $11 million whale tail fountain because residents were using it as a latrine, TheDay.com (New London, CT) reports:

 

"It's sad,'' City Councilor Michael Buscetto III said during Monday's City Council meeting. “It’s two steps forward and three steps backward. There are people in the city who don't care, and they need to be dealt with."

 

Buscetto said since water started flowing in the whale fountain last month, police and fire officials have been called for people urinating, defecating and washing themselves off in the fountain water. He said some people who have cut themselves have also used the fountain to rinse off blood.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (A Teeny Weenie Scandal): New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asks the soon-to-be-former (one way or the other) Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), "How Can We Forgive You If You Won’t Go Away?":

 

A confession is just words, so much sound and fury, without an act of contrition, and the act of contrition appropriate to Weiner’s offenses is the resignation of his office. When there are real consequences for a shameful act, there can be a second chance - but the whole idea of a second chance implies that you’ve given up your first one. … [T]oo many politicians, from Weiner to Vitter to Bill Clinton, seem to think that atonement begins and ends with the apologetic press conference.

 

Weiner famously aspired to be mayor of New York. Rumor has it that Eliot Spitzer does as well. Neither man will probably ever hold that office, but right now Spitzer has a better case than Weiner - because unlike Weiner, when he disgraced himself he actually resigned.

 

Even as the chattering class debates whether Weiner’s political career is cooked, his constituents in Brooklyn and Queens say they could overlook the sexting but not the lying – proving yet again that the cover-up is worse than the crime (though some disagree in this particular case while others are befuddled by the concept of sexting). The Washington Post reports:

 

“Here, we forgive and forget pretty fast. But not like that,” said Tony Escobar, 35, who was working at a European men’s boutique called Anthony’s in Queens’s dense Forest Hills neighborhood. Escobar said that he never liked Weiner, but that he respected him - he had a “name” in Forest Hills as a guy who was responsible and real.

 

Not now.

 

“From the beginning, he should have hid himself” if he couldn’t make himself tell the truth, Escobar said of the congressman. Escobar looked as sharp as the clothing store, in a sea-green shirt and a stylish haystack of gelled hair. His face bore a look of disgust. “But he lied.” …

 

The congressman’s tendency to speak from the heart was at the root of his in-your-face persona - excused it, somewhat. Without that, what was he? …

 

Behind the counter at the Pasticceria Amore in Queens, Scarlett Palacio, 23, said that Weiner had not followed a clear rule. Everybody messes up, she said. But the decent thing to do is tell the truth about it.

 

Or, if you can’t, have the decency to stay silent.

 

“If you screw up, you gotta man up for it,” Palacio said.

 

Weiner’s scandal is red meat to the NY media and the steady drip of lurid details emerging daily will test the forbearance of even the most jaded NY voter who will eventually become less than thrilled that his elected representative chooses to be the butt of penis jokes for an unnecessarily prolonged period that would immediately end with his resignation.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Today’s Letter Is “I.” As In Ingrate.): A Congressional report prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into U.S. nation-building efforts concludes that COIN is a FAIL of tragic proportions. The Washington Post reports:

 

The hugely expensive U.S. attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.

 

The report calls on the administration to rethink urgently its assistance programs as President Obama prepares to begin drawing down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this summer. …

 

Because oversight is scanty, the report says, the fund encourages corruption. Although the U.S. plan is for the Afghan government to eventually take over this and other programs, it has neither the management capacity nor the funds to do so.

 

The report also warns that the Afghan economy could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

 

The “single most important step” the Obama administration could take, the report says, is to stop paying Afghans “inflated salaries” - often 10 or more times as much as the going rate - to work for foreign governments and contractors. Such practices, it says, have “drawn otherwise qualified civil servants away from the Afghan government and created a culture of aid dependency.”

 

Even when U.S. development experts determine that a proposed project “lacks achievable goals and needs to be scaled back,” the U.S. military often takes it over and funds it anyway, the report says. …

 

The report recommends multi-year congressional funding for the aid program that would plan ahead for the increased civilian responsibilities as the number of troops decreases and calls for “a simple rule: donors should not implement projects if Afghans cannot sustain them.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): Three years after becoming the first charter school in MA to form a union, teachers at Brighton’s Conservatory Lab Charter School are considering dissolving it, The Boston Globe reports:

 

[T]he elementary school quickly became a poster child for the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the state’s second-largest teachers union, which had launched a charter-school unionization campaign.

 

The development stunned and embarrassed charter school supporters, who had long seen unions as antithetical to the very idea of these independent public schools, which rarely employ union teachers. They argued that it was the absence of unions at charter schools that allowed administrators to make quick changes to staffing and scheduling in the pursuit of innovation.

 

But now Conservatory Lab is facing dwindling union interest among its teachers and growing frustration over its affiliation with the federation, which frequently attacks the academic accomplishments of charter schools and last year tried unsuccessfully to block an aggressive expansion of these schools.

 

The teachers are weighing whether to stay affiliated with the federation or join a professional teacher group that is not a union organization. A decision is expected by the end of the month.

 

Becca Iskric, the union’s vice president and temporary president, tells The Globe that some teachers felt the union was more interested in its own agenda than in the needs of the school, and pressured teachers to promote unionization at other charter schools in the state.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, The Mother Of All Bailouts: Part II): PolitiFact rates claims by GM and Chrysler that they have fully repaid American taxpayers for the billions they received through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as being “half true.”  For his part, Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler takes President Barack Hussein Obama to task for his own “phony accounting” on the auto industry bailout:

 

Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan. …

 

Under the administration’s math, the U.S. government will receive $11.2 billion back from Chrysler, far more than the $8.5 billion Obama extended.

 

Through this sleight-of-hand accounting, the White House can conveniently ignore Bush’s loan, but even the Treasury Department admits that U.S. taxpayers will not recoup about $1.3 billion of the entire $12.5 billion investment when all is said and done. …

 

Under the president’s math, Chrysler paid back 100 percent of Obama’s loan and less than 70 percent of Bush’s loan. A more honest presentation would combine the two figures to say U.S. taxpayers got back 90 percent of what they invested. …

 

If the auto industry bailout is really a success, there should be no need to resort to trumped-up rhetoric and phony accounting to make your case.

 

Meanwhile, in this Wall Street Journal op-ed, University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel questions the Obama administration’s talking point that without government intervention the auto industry would have collapsed:

   

If the government hadn't stepped in and dictated the terms of the restructuring, the story goes, General Motors and Chrysler would have collapsed, and at least a million jobs would have been lost. The bailouts averted disaster, and they did so at remarkably little cost.

 

The problem with this happy story is that neither of its parts is accurate. Commandeering the bankruptcy process was not, as apologists for the bailouts claim, the only hope for GM and Chrysler. And the long-term costs of the bailouts will be enormous. …

 

General Motors was a perfectly viable company that could have been restructured under the ordinary reorganization process. The only serious question was GM's ability to obtain financing for its bankruptcy, given the credit market conditions in 2008. But even if financing were not available - and there's a very good chance it would have been - the government could have provided funds without also usurping the bankruptcy process.

 

Although Chrysler wasn't nearly so healthy, its best divisions - Jeep in particular - would have survived in a normal bankruptcy, either through restructuring or through a sale to a more viable company. This is very similar to what the government bailout did, given that Chrysler is essentially being turned over to Fiat.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Illegal Immigrants Swamping Small Town America: The Supreme Court upholding the Legal Arizona Workers Act breathes new life into Hazleton, PA’s anti-immigration ordinances – the granddaddy of local efforts to avoid being engulfed by a tsunami of illegals that their infrastructure and coffers cannot accommodate – when the justices ordered the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its September 2010 decision in Lozano v. City of Hazleton, The Legal Intelligencer reports:

 

The high court's order in the Hazleton case is known as a "GVR," meaning that the justices granted a writ of certiorari, vacated the 3rd Circuit's decision, and without comment remanded it for reconsideration in light of the May 26 decision in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting. …

 

Passed in 2006, Hazleton's ordinances have never taken effect because U.S. District Judge James M. Munley of the Middle District of Pennsylvania granted an injunction at the request of a coalition of civil rights groups.

 

At the time, Munley's decision was the first of its kind, but a wave of similar ordinances and statutes were passed around the country, leading to a series of lawsuits.

 

Now the 3rd Circuit must reconsider whether to uphold Munley's injunction in light of the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision that upheld the Arizona law.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): Following on the heels of IL and NY, MA became the third blue state to balk at participating in the federal government's Secure Communities initiative that targets illegals who are gang members and violent felons for deportation, The Washington Times reports:

 

It comes as more states are challenging the Obama administration's immigration efforts. From the right, Arizona has led a battle to empower local police to check immigration status, while the rebellion against Secure Communities highlights concerns from the left that Mr. Obama is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, many of whom do not have the extensive criminal records on which the president has said he wants to focus.

 

But it was unclear whether Massachusetts has any option. Secure Communities operates on fingerprints that local law enforcement agencies send to the FBI every time someone is arrested and booked. Homeland Security officials say they retain the right to run them through immigration databases to see whether there are illegal immigrants who should be prioritized for deportation.

 

The Boston Globe reports that the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, can do little to stop the program from being implemented:

 

Launched in 2008, the Secure Communities program runs the names and fingerprints of everyone arrested through federal immigration and criminal databases. The purpose is to ensure that offenders who are in this country illegally, especially violent criminals, are detained and deported. …

 

The program, now being used in 42 states, was adopted in Boston in 2006, when the federal government launched it as a pilot program. The city is the only Massachusetts jurisdiction in the program.

 

In a June 3 letter to US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick’s public safety secretary, Mary E. Heffernan, said that more than half of those deported under Boston’s program were not criminals. About 1 in 4 of those deported had been convicted of a serious crime. …

 

However, [Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis] said yesterday that his statistics differ sharply from the state’s.

 

Davis said Boston police have checked 44,000 sets of fingerprints since 2008, and, of these, about 775 people have been taken for deportation. He said the program is nabbing serious criminals, including murderers and rapists.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): Like NYC, CA has haves and have nots when it comes to the exercise of Second Amendment rights, reports The Washington Times:

 

The California state Senate voted 28-8 … to exempt itself from the pointless gun-control laws that apply to the rest of the populace. Legislators apparently think they alone are worthy to pack heat on the streets for personal protection, and the masses ought to wait until the police arrive.