Caveat: On Justice Roberts and ObRomneyCare

I'm not sure that Roberts' siding with the constitutionality of ACA is a good thing. First and foremost, because I'm not sure there's much that's progressive about the ACA – it's always struck me as being so compromised with the insurance industry and the status quo that it wasn't likely to really offer much genuine reform. All Roberts has shown is that he will take the side of corporations – which we already knew from e.g. Citizens United. And as many commentators have already pointed out, he nevertheless managed to reject that the ACA was valid due to the Commerce Clause in the Constitution, calling the mandate fines a tax instead. As a result, he's provided ammunation to the Republicans who can attack Obama as "tax-and-spend" – thus doing Obama no favors while nevertheless avoiding besmirching the court's allegedly non-partisan reputation. He gets the best of both worlds, and plants the seeds for further erosion of the Commerce Clause.

One blog, Stop Me Before I Vote Again, had what I found to be a bitter, cynical, but largely accurate summary of what's going on with this. And one commentor on that blog post, going by the name "Picador," had a thought that I feel is worth quoting:

Roberts has actually done us a favour here: he's pulled back the curtain a bit on the whole "government of enumerated powers" illusion. His decision is perfectly in line with legal precedent: after all, the government essentially already has an individual mandate for every citizen to buy a predator drone or a cluster bomb from a defence contractor (stored and maintained by the CIA and US Army, of course), so why not health insurance too? Once the power to tax is unrestricted, do you really even need the commerce clause anymore?

Indeed. Via our taxes, we've been mandated to support a vast, planetary-scale war-machine for decades. How is mandating that people buy healthcare coverage that different?

On a lighter note, the humor/meme site, Buzzfeed, has a posting of people who have – no kidding – announced via Twitter that they're moving to Canada due to their disgust with the creeping socialism in the U.S. This is hilarious.

Caveat: 에헤라디야!

Kids know more than we sometimes give them credit for. Exhibit A:
My student presented me with a spontaneously created drawing today. She said it was her 원어민 (won-eo-min = native-speaking [English] teacher, i.e. a foreigner) at her public school – his name is George.
picture
Look at what he’s drinking. The green bottles say 소주 (soju, i.e. Korean vodka). He’s saying “에헤라디야” [e-he-ra-di-ya] which is a sort of interjection that means something like “Oh, yeah!” as in “I’m very happy.”
A fourth-grader either knows these things about her foreign teacher because they’re obvious, or because he’s told his students about them directly. I’m not sure that’s really very professional, either way. I think this revealing little moment points up some of the big issues with Korean EFL education – i.e. the lack of professionalism in so many of the teachers that come over here to work. I don’t blame the foreigners – it’s a lack of quality control.
Just don’t ever forget – kids know: they see through you.
picture[Daily log: walking, 3 km]

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