I sit on the board of a non-profit.  Grants come and go.  Sometimes long-term supporters fail to renew for fairly inscrutable reasons.

The message to would-be grantors to left-liberal activist outfits like Planned Parenthood is beware:  you stand on the threshold of the donation equivalent of checking into the Hotel California, crawling into a Roach Motel of perpetual support, your other priorities notwithstanding.

Hopefully, PP's scorched earth approach to relationship management will come back to bite the organization.

My sources tell me that Justice Ginsburg continued after the recording ended.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GINSBERG;  (Chewing bubblegum) The US Constitution is, like, so ... old.  The authors are all, like, old, too; dead white men, or whatever.  They didn't even have airplanes or iPods or anything.  And, like, they were slaveholders who thought African-Americans should be three-fifths of a person and women shouldn't vote.  And it's so totally, like, hard for the government to, like, do things to make things better, dontcha think?

END TRANSCRIPT

Next time can't I just make the trip in person and ring open the trading day the old fashioned way?

Newt, I like the virtual moon colony tour but I still don't see how it's a priority.

Barfly, just thinking of Reagan the candidate and the setting--the conversation was reported from the relatively relaxed confines of Mitt's campaign plane.  

In my imaginary dialogue the reporter won't give up, trying to force Romney to answer the gotcha question.  But there is absolutely no need to go on defense, not ever given the record of this administration.   Romney could riff on Keystone XL and the torpedoing of 20,000 high-wage jobs, all the foregone oil and the downstream jobs snuffed out, Solyndra, stifling EPA rules for home contractors and power plants.  The list is endless.

Yet Romney--all offense all the time against Newt--immediately falls to a defensive crouch when challenged on a jobs policy too liberal even for Pelosi/Reid/Obama in their super-majority heyday. 

And if the minimum wage is so great why settle for indexing to inflation?  Why not usher in universal prosperity by jacking it up to, say, $100 per hour in one fell swoop?  

Pretty awful article.

At the recent GOP presidential debate in Florida, Romney professed that the Declaration of Independence is a theological document, not specific to the rebellious 13 colonies, but establishing a covenant “between God and man.”  Which would suggest that Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.

The Declaration sets forth our civic religion:  certain rights are from God, not from the King or any government.  Only the political left could take the words "[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" and find therein a dangerous theocratic plot.

I may be risking the political equivalent of a hyperglycemic coma by listening to a podcast with the Ricochet crew and my favorite talk radio host, but I'm willing to risk it.  For the children.

In Ameritopia, Mark Levin effectively lays out the philosophical underpinnings of the utopianism running amok in America these days.  Mitt Romney's legislative record in Massachusetts, most prominently his health care reform, smacks of just such a utopian mindset.  

I love Mitt's morals and family values.  I also admire his business success.  I have no problem with him looking buttoned-up and telegenic all the time.  I am worried that his instinct will be to run Leviathan a bit more efficiently rather than labor to restore constitutionalism.

What Romney just did to Newt in Florida--carpet bomb him with thousands of unanswered negative ads--will later be done to Mitt on a national scale by an Obama campaign with $1 billion at its disposal.  And as the economy creaks forward and the media overstate all the wonderful new jobs being created, Obamacare will be incessantly compared with Romney's version, which he continues to support.  So the most potent weapon we have to illustrate Obama's statist overreach will be off the table.

Meanwhile, Newt has been defined for a new generation, thanks to Romney-allied super PACs.  

Time to write a check to Rick Santorum.

DocJay, many thanks.  Apology accepted.  

You make the essential point in your penultimate sentence, which I quote above.   If we fail to reassert constitutionalism, we may in the end wind up governed by a police state without respect for person, property or privacy.  At that point punitive uses of tax records, Internet search logs, Visa card bills, government electronic medical records--you name it--will be the visible manifestations of tyranny.  And, yes, under such a regime my technology could also be misused, but only because of the lawless application of the law generally against the citizenry.

Point of personal privilege:  DocJay, despite my earlier explanation of the design and function of the technology I am developing at my company, you persist in holding it up for ridicule as the signature example of Orwellian medicine of the future.  You do this even though you have,  in this instance, absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

I suggest you select from among the many real threats to individual liberty and privacy rather than making one up at my expense.

The problem with ACOs is that economic incentives are inverted for actual sick people.  With doctors and health systems being paid a fixed amount of money to keep me healthy, what happens when I fail to stay healthy--it happens, you know--and begin costing the system?

Under fee-for-service, my illness needs attention and providing me with care represents a profit opportunity.  Under an insurance scheme, I enter into a financial contract to help me manage the cost of that possibility.

Under the ACO scenario, as long as I am healthy I am delighted--lots of unnecessary free stuff is directed my way to keep me voting right.  Guess what?  Since most people are healthy at any given time this works a treat for keeping politicians in power.

But once I become sick, I become a cost-center for the provider.  Therefore, at the margin, there will be every incentive to under-treat, to delay and hope that I go elsewhere, or nature takes its course.

You're probably referring to Stockton Street, which runs through Chinatown in San Francisco.  Parking in "the City" as it is known hereabouts becomes a nonevent after awhile.  Some of the steepest hills do become a bit exciting for those luddites like me who insist on sticking with manual transmission automobiles (you wait and see, this automatic transmission thing just won't last).

I did drop a perfectly good motorcycle in an intersection at the top of a hill about 20 years ago.  I should have thought that one through before taking a bike up that street.

Katievs, thank you for a beautiful post.  I will be praying in church this morning for the entire Santorum family, especially his lovely daughter Bella.

Fantastic line.  And a great summation of the rather calibrated limousine-Marxist approach to sticking it to the Man.

Bereket, I commend Mrs. Thatcher's memorable formulation as the ideal response to your professor's concerns about income disparity per se.