Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a single piece so rife with them. Not sure it’s worth my while to fisk it, but others can have at it in comments.
Here are just a few (ignoring his misstatement of the purpose of government in the very first sentence):
The spin-off benefits of human spaceflight exceeds the cost.
We don’t spend any money in space, it’s all spent on earth.
We need giant government projects.
Why are we spending money on bullets instead of what I want to spend it on?
Jeff Foust reports on Mark Albrecht’s diagnosis of NASA’s ills. And in comments over there, Mark Whittington once again demonstrates himself to be a tinkerbell.
Actually, rather than enhancing the legitimacy of SCOTUS with this ruling among the public, the Chief Justice seems to have damaged it:
Thirty-seven percent (37%) now believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, while 22% think it’s too conservative. A week ago, public opinion was much more evenly divided: 32% said it was too liberal and 25% said too conservative.
In the latest survey, 31% now believe the balance is about right.
That’s got to help Mitt Romney, if he makes court appointments a campaign issue.
Solved: “Randy Barnett made a wish on a cursed monkey’s paw that his commerce clause argument would be accepted. It explains everything, no?”
Seriously, here’s what I think happened. Roberts initially voted with the others to throw out the whole law, and has spent the last several weeks trying to pick up at least one more vote (perhaps from Breyer or Sotomayor — Ginsburg and Kagan were never a possibility) to make it 6-3 instead of a narrow 5-4. At the end, he gave up, and decided to narrowly keep it instead of narrowly strike it down. I think that explains the facts, and the bizarre opinion, which was nowhere near as cogent and well thought out as what became the dissent. And I’ll bet that the new minority is pretty angry at him right now (and have been since he switched).