We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

Today, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Fisher v University of Texas at Austin, a case which could well reassess Grutter.

Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Affirmative Action Case

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: February 21, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a major case on affirmative action in higher education, adding another potential blockbuster to a docket already studded with them.

The court’s decision in the new case holds the potential to undo an accommodation reached in the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger: that public colleges and universities could not use a point system to boost minority enrollment but could take race into account in vaguer way to ensure academic diversity.

Much more at the link. The New York Times story noted that the membership on the Court has changed since 2003, with the most notable change being that Associate Justice Samuel Alito has replaced Justice O’Connor. Granting certiorari requires the affirmative votes of four Justices, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from both the case and the decision to grant certiorari, due to her involvement with the case when she was Solicitor General.² Since the case on appeal from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was in favor of the University of Texas, there is little reason to suppose that the four Justices who wished to take this case were inclined to uphold Grutter; denial of certiorari would have let the Fifth Circuit’s ruling stand.

There are grounds on which Miss Fisher could win her case, and still not overturn Grutter. After losing initially in a smaller panel, Miss Fisher filed for an en banc³ rehearing by the Fifth Circuit, which was denied 9-7. One of the opinions by the dissenting judges concerned about the way in which the University applied the Grutter test, and whether it met the ceriteria for being narrowly tailored. It would seem unusual, however, to think that four Justices would have voted to grant certiorari on a case in which they just wished to examine how narrowly tailored the University’s policies concerning the consideration of race were, as opposed to the constitutional issue itself.

In addition, Miss Fisher’s case would seem to have serious issues concerning her standing to sue: she is on course to be graduated from Louisiana State University at the end of this semester, and by not filing this as a class action suit, her case is very nearly moot. The case is scheduled to be heard not this spring, but in the October 2012 session of the Court, by which time Miss Fisher should have been graduated. This would actually seem to be not the strongest case on which a reversal of Grutter could be based, because it could be decided on lesser issues and still leave Grutter intact. Unless the Chief Justice and Associate Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia believed that there was a strong possibility that Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, a noted hair-splitter himself, though one of the minority in Grutter, would go along with a reversal of Grutter, it would seem that voting to grant certiorari would be an exercise in futility.
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Europe Reaches a Greek Deal

By Geoffrey T. Smith, Ainsley Thomson and Costas Paris

BRUSSELS—Euro-zone finance ministers early Tuesday agreed to an ambitious €130 billion ($172.1 billion) rescue deal that will see Greece’s private creditors take an even larger loss in order to put the debt-laden country on a sustainable footing and avert a catastrophic default.

The agreement revolves around a debt exchange that calls for private investors to waive 53.5% of their principal under a massive debt swap that will cut Greece’s outstanding debt stock by €107 billion. That goes beyond a 50% haircut agreed upon at a summit in October.

Speaking after the conclusion of more than 12 hours of negotiations, Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker said the agreement “provides a comprehensive blueprint for putting the public finances and the economy of Greece back on a sustainable footing, and hence for safeguarding financial stability in the euro zone.”

The deeper private sector haircut will help bring Greece’s debt as a proportion of gross domestic product to 120.5% by 2020 from over 164% currently.

Much more at the link. But, put basically, the private creditors who have been enabling Greece to live well beyond its means for decades will have lost out on more than half of their investments, and will probably have to count themselves as fortunate to have lost only that much.

The deal has been in the works for some time now, and Moody’s Investors Services just downgraded the credit ratings of other European countries.¹ Sovereign debt, which wasn’t considered a questionable or risky investment in European democracies before, now is.

Greece’s bailout plan remains shaky. Although the Greek government approved the very serious austerity measures required by the European Union and International Monetary Fund to qualify for the bailout, Greece is still a parliamentary democracy, and new elections are not that far off. The bailout deal still requires a 100% acceptance rate by the private holders of Greek sovereign debt for a “voluntary” bond swap; private investors hold roughly €200 billion of Greek debt. Since not accepting the bond swap means not a 53.5% loss, but torches the entire deal and very probably means a Greek default and 100% loss, it is expected that the “voluntary” participation rate will be 100%.

An interesting article from the left-wing British journal, The Guardian, holds that the riots by the Greek people over the austerity measures are not just demonstrations, but a real and fundamental change, a true expression of hatred:

If ever a society seemed to be on the brink of something new it is Greece today, faced with a raw choice between death and rebirth. As this picture shows with fiery clarity, implacable forces are meeting immovable objects on the streets of Athens.

There’s much more in that story, but, in the end, it is a story about a population used to, for a generation now, living better than its production justified, and now being told that not only must their standard of living drop, but that they have to start paying on the debts they accumulated in the past, for goods and services already consumed and now gone. They must work harder, and enjoy life less, for the things they received in the past.

New elections may very well change the government, and the promises of austerity which have been reluctantly made by the current government could well be abandoned. If that happens, and depending upon when that happens, there would be huge losses among the eurozone nations which contributed to the bailout deal, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the private investors, huge losses beyond what are already anticipated. The eurozone countries are accepting the losses they have, because the Greek debt is spread so widely through their economic systems that a default and bankruptcy would mean much worse losses, much more disorderly losses, and losses which could lead to a cascading stream of bankruptcies. The Europeans are hoping to spread the losses in such a manner that everybody loses a little, but nobody, or at least nobody important, goes broke. Whether it works remains to be seen, but your editor is not optimistic.
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Rick Santorum picked up an endorsement from the lead singer of the heavy-metal band Megadeth. Santorum is the only candidate who is both pro-life and pro-Megadeth.

I can’t top that one!

Obama Contradicted: HHS Banned Determining Whether Mandate Was ‘Cost Effective’

By Terence P. Jeffrey

(CNSNews.com) – There would be no consideration of cost effectiveness.

That was the explicit condition that the Department of Health and Human Services imposed on the panel of health-care experts it commissioned to develop the “preventive services” mandate that will require virtually all health-insurance plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and contraceptives—including those that cause abortions.

The fact that HHS prohibited the panel from considering the cost effectiveness of the mandate it developed contradicts President Obama’s declaration at the White House last Friday that his administration had adopted the panel’s recommendations precisely because they will “make the overall cost of health care lower”

One economist who served on the panel, meanwhile, suggested in a dissenting opinion that the panel’s recommendations in fact might not be cost effective and that the panel’s process for arriving at its recommendations “tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determinations filtered through a lens of advocacy.”

My thanks to Chuck Serio for the reference. Much more at the link, in which the article author noted that the commission met only five times in the six months it had to complete its work, and that the committee report directly stated that, “The cost-effectiveness of screening or services could not be a factor for the committee to consider in its analysis leading to its recommendations,” “However, it should be noted that the committee did not have adequate time or resources to conduct its own meta-analyses or comprehensive systematic review of each preventive service,” and “Finally, cost-effectiveness was explicitly excluded as a factor that the committee could use in developing recommendations, and so the committee process could not evaluate preventive services on that basis.”

President Obama said:

As part of the health care reform law that I signed last year, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive care at no cost. That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services. We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money–for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody. That’s because it’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one.

We also accepted a recommendation from the experts at the Institute of Medicine that when it comes to women, preventive care should include coverage of contraceptive services such as birth control. In addition to family planning, doctors often prescribe contraception as a way to reduce the risks of ovarian and other cancers, and treat a variety of different ailments. And we know that the overall cost of health care is lower when women have access to contraceptive services.

Apparently, what “we know” was determined not by by scientific study, but by political fiat. It is entirely possible that providing artificial contraception, without any co-payments, is less expensive for insurance companies than covering childbirth throughout a woman’s reproductive years. But it is also possible that requiring a $10 a month co-payment would also be less expensive, and that requiring a $10 per month co-payment would not deny women access to contraceptive services. All that we do know is that the commission wasn’t allowed to use scientific studies on which to base their recommendations.

And that tells you that the whole commission idea was a waste of time. The regulations, if they were going to be politically determined and not scientifically studied, could have been formulated by a couple of HHS staffers in a couple of nights over take-out Szechuan chicken and shrimp lo mein. The Obama Administration wanted to make it all seem like a well-thought-out and conscientiously deliberated set of regulations, but they were never more than a political determination, and were never going to be anything but a political determination.

Why? Well, that’s obvious: our very-nobly-intended experts on the left simply know more than we do, and ought to, by right of their own superiority, determine what is good for us, regardless of whether we agree.

Administration stops pretending it has long-term debt plan

byPhilip Klein Senior Editorial Writer

President Obama spent much of last year pretending that he had a plan to tackle the nation’s long-term debt crisis. He never released an actual plan, but he gave a bunch of speeches pretending that he had. And Obama pushed the idea that he was privately ready to cut a “grand bargain” on the debt were he not thwarted by intransigent Republicans. This was a narrative dutifully reported by the media, despite the lack of any formal plan. Now, the pretending is over.

On Monday, Obama unveiled a budget that added to the debt while using a series of budget gimmicks to claim deficit reduction. And today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner conceded that the administration didn’t even attempt to do anything about the nation’s long-term debt problem.

Earlier today, he told the Senate Budget Committee that long-term spending would be “unsustainable” even if Obama’s budget was fully adopted. Later, in a separate hearing, he explained to House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that the only intention of the Obama budget was to address deficits in the next decade, not to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path. He also trashed Ryan’s budget, which does actually solve the problem, for putting too much of a burden on seniors to pay for health care.

“We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem,” Geithner told Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

And there you have it: for President Barack Obama, busily running for re-election, out there telling us that he is the man to lead our country for the next four years, is that he has no plan at all to address the looming debt crisis, and that, when faced with an actual plan to keep us from going the way of Greece, the Democrats prefer no plan at all.

Now, remember, this was the Secretary testifying to the Congress after President Obama unveiled his FY2013 budget, the one which is based upon the enactment of the Administration’s long-stated plan to increase taxes on the top producers, and one which projects solid and sustained, if not spectacular, growth in the economy, and the one which assumes that the President’s proposed economic initiatives are passed and implemented. It is a budget which assumes as the basis of its calculations that the President gets his way in Congress, which means it also assumes that the evil Republicans are unwilling or unable to stop it. With all of that, President Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury is still testifying, under oath,¹ that the Administration does not have any plan at all to address the growing debt crisis.

I think back to our loyal Democratic commenter, Wagonwheel, who genuinely believes in our President, who wrote:

Closing the deficit gap and lowering debt depends on a growing economy, thus producing increased revenue and requiring less of an outlay to help feed the unemployed and the poor.

and

I have said in the past that we need more stimulus in order to further jump start the economy first, then phase in spending cuts,

and even back on the old site, when it was pointed out that President Obama’s huge deficit spending plans would take us along the path that Greece trod,

Come on now, Dana, we are not even close to Greece. Please be real,

is now being told by the Administration he so strongly supports that his words of support are just so much garbage, that there is no plan at all for what Wagonwheel put forth as the second half of a responsible program, reducing the deficit and debt after the economy improves, and deviating from the Greeks’ path.

With just one comment, Secretary Geithner has completely destroyed any pretense that the Obama Administration is actually trying to do its job, and ground into the dirt the claims of their loyal supporters in the field. But, it won’t matter: the loyal Democrats will support the President anyway, because the Secretary also enunciated the entirety of the Democratic position, that they aren’t the Republicans. They stand for nothing, nothing at all, but they are against the Republicans.

For Wagonwheel and our other friends on the left, that’s probably enough.
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North Korea Warns South Over Drills

Associated Press

PYONGYANG—North Korea threatened Sunday to launch “merciless” strikes against South Korea over the latter’s plan to hold live-fire drills near their disputed sea border.

South Korea plans to stage regular one-day artillery drills Monday from front-line islands off the western coast, including one shelled by North Korea in 2010, according to Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which said South Korea informed North Korea of its training plan on Sunday.

Later Sunday, the North’s military issued a statement warning of “merciless retaliatory strikes” if the training is implemented.

“Such move of the warlike forces is a premeditated military provocation…to drive the overall situation on the Korean peninsula into the phase of war,” a North Korean western military command said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

More at the link. The referenced story doesn’t mention the Great Successor, or whatever his current title of sycophancy is today, Kim Jong-un, at all, though it does reference the death of his father, the Great Leader Kim Jong-il. But the youngest¹ Mr Kim, though the stories whirling around his attempts to consolidate power following his father’s death have died out, needs to show a strong front, now, as this is the first major foreign policy test of his reign. The 영명한 동지 (“Brilliant Comrade”)² was named a Deajang 대장 , or General, on 27 September 2010, and the following day he was named vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. These dates precede the November 2010 North Korean shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, from which South Korea held similar military drills, which indicates that the Brilliant Comrade was involved in the decision to shell the island.³ The youngest Mr Kim may have put himself in a position where the North is obligated to retaliate for the exercises, if so much as one shell falls in the waters claimed by the DPRK,⁴ or risk losing face, and real political support, among the high-ranking officer corps. In Western terms, we would call it painting yourself into a corner. Whether that is what the Great Successor has done as far as North Korean politics is concerned, who knows?
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Well, reading the sign held up by the Jackass, I have to wonder: why, when the Democrats held large majorities in both Houses of Congress, including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, didn’t they actually do any of that? The real reason, of course, is that it’s all a lie: those are the things the Democrats campaign on doing, but, once in office, they never actually try to do them. A shorter term for it would be populism.

Cut spending, the first item on the list? In FY2007, the last year that the Republicans controlled the Congress, total federal outlays were 19.7% of GDP, which was way too high, and produced a $160.7 billion deficit. Since the Democrats won control of the Congress, total federal outlays have shot up, to 20.8% of GDP in FY2008, when George Bush was still our President, to over 24% every single year since Barack Obama was inaugurated. President Obama’s proposed budget calls for total spending of 23.3% for FY2013 and in the mid 22% range for as far into the future as he can project, including years in which he projects steady economic growth and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be only memories.¹

Even the last item, the one the Democrats like so much, Raise Taxes for the Super Rich, the Democrats could have done, in 2009 and 2010, when they had solid majorities, but they didn’t even try! The 2001/2003 tax cuts were scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, yet the Democrats who controlled the eleventy-first Congress never even brought a bill to retain those cuts for everyone below $250,000, and let them expire for above that income — one of Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign promises — until after the 2010 elections, after they had already lost. Warren Buffett, the billionaire who says that we should raise taxes on the rich, runs a corporation, Berkshire-Hathaway, which owes the IRS a billion dollars in back taxes, dating from 2002, because he’s nothing but a hypocrite.

Cut small business taxes? The President’s FY2013 budget proposal calls for increasing taxes on above $250,000 earners, but ²/₃ of those filers are actually unincorporated small businesses! The Democrats say that they want to cut taxes for small businesses, but actually propose increases on taxes which impact small businesses, and then let companies like Berkshire-Hathaway, run by an Obama supporter, withhold their legally-owed taxes for years and years.

Cut corporate welfare and big business subsidies? Most people have heard of Solyndra, because it failed so badly after Obama Administration porkulus plan loan guarantees, but it turned out that there were 11 other solar-energy firms which did the same damned thing, all failing, because the Democrats weren’t ending corporate welfare or business subsidies, but simply moved the subsidies to companies which they favored.

The people for whom good, rank-and-file working class Democrats have been voting for all of these years have been lying to them, lying to them all along. They say the things their voters want to hear, and then once they have their votes in their pockets, don’t do any of the things their constituents voted for them to do.

This is the part that Republicans just don’t understand. The Democrats treat their supporters like absolute idiots, lying to them continually, and yet their supporters keep supporting them! Republicans lied to their supporters, too, about cutting spending, but that resulted in the abandonment of the Republicans in the 2006 elections, and the rise of the TEA Party faction in 2010, something the Republican leadership never anticipated, and some Republican officeholders discovered wasn’t to their liking in the 2010 primary elections.

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Cross-posted on Truth Before Dishonor
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Police Find Crack In Suspect’s Butt: Ramon Blair Arrested In Florida

The Huffington Post   Kyle McGovern First Posted: 02/17/2012 6:27 pm Updated: 02/17/2012 6:52 pm

Florida police arrested and charged a 28-year-old man with possession of cocaine after they found crack in, well, his crack, according to Martin County Sheriff’s Office records obtained by the TCPalm.

Ramon Blair was taken into police custody on Feb. 13 after an informant told officers that a man with $100 worth of crack cocaine “on his person” would be with a woman in a white four-door Pontiac with no hubcaps. Police stopped the vehicle just before 11 p.m. and found Blair, who had cocaine residue in his right nostril, according to WPBF 25 News.

A second informant told police that Blair had approximately $300 worth of crack cocaine on him, but a search on the scene turned up no results.

While in custody, officers did a more thorough search of Blair. When they asked him to undress, squat, and cough. Police then noticed what seemed to be a “wad of white paper” in Blair’s buttocks.

No Shared Sacrifice By Michelle Obama as She Skis Aspen

February 18, 2012
By Lonely Conservative

You’ve got to hand it to Michelle Obama. It’s one thing to talk about shared sacrifice and fairness. It’s another to live it. Oh wait. Never mind. She’s jetted off to Aspen, Colorado with her daughters to ski and hobnob with the 1% over this President’s Day weekend. I wonder what this trip is costing us.

Michelle Obama has embarked on a skiing vacation with her daughters in Aspen, Colorado, according to the Aspen Daily News.

The first lady, who just returned last month from 17 days of relaxation in Hawaii, is skiing in Colorado on Presidents’ Day Weekend for the second year in a row. Last year she went to Vail.

Michelle’s decision to ski out West again instead of hitting slopes closer to Washington would seem an inopportune choice for a first lady who is helping her husband campaign on issues of “fairness.”

The Obama campaign has set itself up as the defender of the poor and the middle class against the “One Percent,” a theme which clashes with the image a first lady who is taking frequent and exclusive vacations.

Read the whole thing.

The first lady plans to keep this vacation low-key and has no public events scheduled. Gee, I wonder why.

Your editor has no problem at all with the President and his family taking vacations. The President works very hard, and the whole family lives their lives in a huge fishbowl But I do have to wonder just how the President and his campaign can really sell their populist theme to the voters when the First Lady and their daughters go jetting off to Colorado to ski, at the time when the Administration tells us that we all will have to sacrifice.

To which I’d give a hearty middle finger

You’ve probably already read about this: A “state” food inspector deemed a North Carolina pre-schooler’s home-packed lunch “inadequate,” and made the little girl eat an “approved” school lunch of chicken nuggets instead. Worse, the school sent a bill to the girl’s mom for the nuggets!!

Are you freakin’ kidding me? I’d send back that bill with an attached digital photo — that of my middle finger. Also attached would be a request for the school/state to demonstrate exactly how a lunch of chicken nuggets is “better” than a packed lunch consisting of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice, and potato chips.

This is what you get when you get government bureaucracies deciding how best to rear the subjects’ citizens’ children. According to the internal link Hube provided:

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

In other words, the school had an actual lunch inspector — an abomination in itself –  because it was required to do so by the federal government.  Our federal government is adding multiple billions to the national debt, every day,  in large part because our oh-s0-well-meaning government keeps sticking it’s nose into the public’s private business.  I’m trying to picture what James Madison would have said if someone had told him that the Constitution he was helping to write would lead to a federal government which monitored kids’ lunches at school.  Even Patrick Henry, who fought so hard against the ratification of the Constitution, saying that it was a foolish mischief which would seize governmental control away from the states and infringe the liberties of the people, would never have imagined this!

Your editor wonders if there is, perchance, a link between the person featured in the first short story in this article, and the events in the second.

Who Wants to See Tina Korbe’s Thighs?

Posted on | February 16, 2012 |

The title of this post is not a hypothetical question, because last week the aforesaid Miss Korbe joined her Hot Air colleague Ed Morrissey for a video interview with Rick Santorum, which I didn’t see until somebody brought it to my attention yesterday:

Our keen-eyed readers will note that at the 0:28 mark of the video, Miss Korbe gives a little tug at the hem of her skirt and, not to get all Melissa Clouthier about it or anything, some folks might say that’s kind of a telltale clue that your skirt’s too doggone short.

OK, so how this came to my attention: Tuesday I blogged about Melissa’s criticism of the dress and behavior of some young ladies at CPAC and, as I said, I wanted to be responsible without being too judgmental. That is to say, I hesitate to judge a lady’s morals merely because she feels obliged to follow contemporary fashion.

Much more at the link. I wonder, would this be the same Mr McCain who defined Rule 5 Blogging? It seems to be, and he even has his original listed in the category “Rule 5.” And, quite frankly, though Miss Korbe’s skirt does appear to be on the short side, it’s certainly no shorter than the female Fox News Channel anchors. Heck, Miss Korbe is at least wearing a long sleeved blouse and jacket, while you can catch Alisyn Camarotta and Gretchen Carlson and Juliet Huddy doing Fox & Friends in New York City, in February, in sleeveless dresses as often as not.

Dear Mr. President: Paying your fair share begins at home

Posted by: Phineas on January 26, 2012 at 1:05 PM
President Obama spent much of his recent State of the Union address declaring that the rich need to pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Maybe he should have given that speech to his staff, first:

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Because how unfair — indeed, un-American — it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet’s secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.

Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven’t paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama’s White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That’s up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration’s last year.

Nearly one-third of Obama’s aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.

(Emphasis added)

On a scale of 1-10 on the Public Secrets Hypocrisy Meter™, this hits an “11.” But, coming as it does from the administration of the most cynical, fork-tongued president since Richard Nixon, it also isn’t surprising.

May I suggest that Congressman Issa’s Oversight Committee, in the moments when it isn’t digging into Operation Fast and Furious, summon these federal employees to explain to Congress why they are not obeying federal law and paying their fair share?

Meanwhile, have a look at the rest of Andrew Malcolm’s article; it seems tax evasion is a favorite sport for federal employees.

What do you expect when the Secretary of the Treasury himself was confirmed, despite having made “careless” and “avoidable” mistakes on his income taxes? It’s kind of like President Obama pushing for the so-called Buffet Rule, with the esteemed Warren Buffet telling us that millionaires like himself should pay more in taxes, while his company, Berkshire-Hathaway, has owed back taxes since 2002.