"After all, where would we be without the knowledge that Democrats are pinko-communist flag-burners who want to tax churches and use the money to fund abortions..."

"... so they can use the fetal stem cells to create pot-smoking lesbian ATF agents who will steal all the guns and invite the UN to take over America? Voters have to decide whether we’d be better off electing Republicans, those hateful, assault-weapon-wielding maniacs who believe that George Washington and Jesus Christ incorporated the nation after a Gettysburg reenactment and that the only thing wrong with the death penalty is that it isn’t administered quickly enough to secular humanist professors of Chicano studies."

From the amicus brief of the Cato Institute and P.J. O'Rourke in Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, the Supreme Court case that asks the question "Can a state government criminalize political statements that are less than 100% truthful?" (PDF, via Metafilter.)

The brief is full of funny things (along with actual free-speech doctrinal analysis). I laughed out loud at footnote 15:

"Rand Paul is... strongly against abortion rights, which many libertarians disagree with."

"What is the libertarian position on abortion?"

I don't think there is a libertarian position on abortion. There was a study done by a graduate student at UCLA that found that about two-thirds of people you would identify as libertarian are pro-choice. From a philosophical perspective, libertarians generally believe the appropriate role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. The question is, is forbidding abortion a way of protecting life, or should it be viewed as a restriction of liberty? There's a plausible libertarian case on both sides. People who are consciously libertarian are more respectful of the other position on abortion, in my experience, than most pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I do not think there is an official position.

From an interesting Atlantic interview — via Instapundit — titled "America's Libertarian Moment" ("A longtime libertarian policy wonk talks about whether the philosophy can save the GOP -- and why he still doesn't think Rand Paul can win the presidency"). Via Instapundit, who says: "Rand Paul doesn’t have to be elected President to change the direction of the country."

I like libertarians when they back off from stark ideology, which really is not presentable to the American people, who require a closer approximation to something that feels like humanity. It's fascinating to watch Rand Paul supply the performance in the role of Libertarian that Americans can watch.

What happens if states turn down the Medicaid expansion money and decline to set up the health-insurance exchanges.

Michael D. Tanner explains the surprisingly extreme consequences.

[I]f a state doesn't expand its Medicaid program, most of those who would've been eligible for Medicaid will now become eligible for subsidies through ObamaCare's health-insurance exchanges. And those subsidies are paid in full by the feds.

Thus, New York, for example, would shift most of that $52 billion in new costs back to the federal government.

Of course, if states do shift those costs back to the feds, that will cause the federal cost of ObamaCare to skyrocket. If every state were to refuse to expand its Medicaid program, the feds would save roughly $130 billion in their share of Medicaid costs in 2014, but would have to pay $230 billion more in new exchange-based subsidies — for a net added cost of $100 billion. And that's just for the first year...

ObamaCare gives the feds the authority to step in, setting up and operating an exchange in any state that doesn't set up its own... [But f]ederal subsidies are available only through exchanges that the states set up. The feds can't offer subsidies through a federally run exchange.

Thus, if states neither expanded Medicaid nor set up exchanges, that would effectively block most of ObamaCare's new entitlement spending.

Given the potential for chaos in the Obamacare scheme if the states decline to participate, it's surprising that Justices Breyer and Kagan went along with the Chief Justice's opinion on the spending power.  The original legislation had the states locked in, because they'd lose all their Medicaid funding if they didn't participate. That was held to be coercive, and thus not supportable by the spending power, which requires that states be given a choice whether to run federal programs and accept various related conditions. Under the Court's ruling, the states only lose the funding for the expansion of Medicaid, which makes it possible for them to say no, as many seem to be doing.

There's an elaborate set of moves in the future, and I wonder how far ahead the Chief Justice looked when he chose his position. Perhaps Obamacare is doomed by the seemingly modest, miminalist hit it took on the spending power issue. But wouldn't Breyer and Kagan have seen ahead too? Why did they join him? I'm not ready to give him genius points for skillful playing of the long game.

"Does Rick Santorum hate freedom and happiness?"

Asks a WaPo blogger (Allen McDuffee), after reading what Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz said:

[Santorum] criticizes the pursuit of happiness! He says, “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness ... and it is harming America.” And then he says that what the Founders meant by happiness was “to do the morally right thing.” He really doesn’t like the idea of America as a free society, where adults make their own decisions and sometimes make choices that Santorum disapproves.

The lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law for rejecting a conservative applicant for a lawprof job.

The applicant, Teresa R. Wagner, was active in the Right to Life cause, and the associate law school dean is caught in writing saying "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it)."

In the NYT, Adam Liptak calls attention to the dissonance conservatives ought to feel about litigation:

“I have serious misgivings about asking the courts to fix this through lawsuits,” [Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, said]. “It threatens to intrude on collegiality, empower some with sharp elbows to sue their way into faculty jobs, invite judges into making subjective calls of their own which may reflect their assumptions and biases, all while costing a lot of money and grief.”

“At the same time,” he added, “there’s a karma factor here. Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”

"An obscure assistant professor teaching in a middling university writes an opinion piece comparing the Tea Party movement to the John Birch Society..."

"... indeed, even to the Ku Klux Klan — and Politico Arena asks us to take it seriously for comment?!"

Cato via Instapundit. I'd already seen that piece — "Tea party: Dark side of conservatism" —  but I hadn't blogged it because I didn't want to impinge on my good mood to take the trouble to summon up the degree of contempt it would have required. The writer, Charles Postel, an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University, wields 19th-century history for the purpose of demonstrating that the Tea Party is racist, and says things like "The tea party leaders disavow any racist appeals from their ranks. But historically, whether it was the JBS or Goldwater, the radical right has often had a soft spot for bigots." So, in other words, the Tea Party must be prejudiced about people like this because he's prejudiced about people like that. All purveyed under the banner of academic expertise.

For Surgeon General, Obama picks Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Link.

Poll:

What is the significance of the Sanjay Gupta appointment?
	Obama has made a strong advance in the project of merging politics and showbiz.
	Surgeon General has long been a showbiz slot, so nothing much has changed.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Cato@Liberty says:

[W]hy do we need a surgeon general in the first place? After all, can anyone name our current (acting) surgeon general?

In reality, the surgeon general is little more than the “national nanny,” hectoring us to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise more, and never ever go out without a condom. I’ve been flipping through my copy of the Constitution, and I can’t find the authorization for the federal government to take taxpayers’ money to establish an office to tell us how we should live our lives.