Would you believe it? The judge who blocked the @PPact videos is an Obama guy!

I know. I was shocked, too. Via Mollie Hemmingway at The Federalist (if you don’t have a fainting couch, you may need to invest in one before reading this):

A federal judge late Friday granted a temporary restraining order against the release of recordings made at an annual meeting of abortion providers. The injunction is against the Center for Medical Progress, the group that has unveiled Planned Parenthood’s participation in the sale of organs harvested from aborted children.

Judge William H. Orrick, III, granted the injunction just hours after the order was requested by the National Abortion Federation.

Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President Barack Obama. He was also a major donor to and bundler for President Obama’s presidential campaign. He raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him, according to Public Citizen.

I know, gang. I know. Take a moment to recover from the news that a California liberal judge who not only was appointed by Obama, but was a campaign bundler, might be making rulings based on political ideology. I can wait.

Feel better? Let’s go.

This should really not be surprising to anyone, considering this is politics as usual in the United States of America. As my colleague and intellectual superior, Leon Wolf, pointed out yesterday, the rule of law has been replaced by a system built entirely on prosecuting the hell out of people, and it has been heavily peppered with judges who act solely on political ideology and allegiance rather than the Constitution and the law.

So, while people and organizations can run to friendly judges appointed by their political allies, what used to be a system of laws is now a system of feels. If we feel you’re harming our cause, we’ll find something to bring you down. If we don’t like you, we can (at least until someone notices we’re engaging in prior restraint or the like) silence you. You don’t have freedom of speech so law as we have political activism in lieu of an actual judicial system.

P.S. If you want the First Amendment to succeed, consider donating to the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing the Center for Medical Progress and is currently matching all donations dollar for dollar.

Via: Red State

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The Federalist: The ObamaCare Death Spiral Is Still Coming

By David Hogberg, The Federalist

Even if King v Burwell case fails at the U.S. Supreme Court next month, the future for the ObamaCare exchanges is still far from assured. Even if people on the 37 federal exchanges get to keep their subsidies, chances are they will eventually be caught in the vortex of the “death spiral.”

A death spiral occurs when not enough young and healthy people sign up for health insurance. Thanks to Obamacare’s design, a death spiral is inevitable. Here’s why.

Obamacare’s community rating results in insurance prices that are higher for younger people than they would be in a free market, and its guaranteed issue allows people to sign up for insurance even if they get sick, so young and healthy people have ample incentive to forgo insurance. This leaves the insurance “risk pool” older and sicker and, hence, more costly to insure. Premiums will have to rise to cover those costs, leading some of the younger and healthier people who did initially sign up to then drop out. The risk pool then becomes even older and sicker, premiums rise again, and the process repeats.

A study by the late Conrad Meier examining the effect of these laws on eight states shows that premium hikes of at least 20 percent (and usually higher) are the canary in the coal mine for a death spiral.

Is the Death Spiral Bogus?

Leftist economist Paul Krugman strongly disagrees: “There is no death spiral: On average, premiums for 2015 are between 2 and 4 percent higher than in 2014, which is a much slower rate of increase than the historical norm.” The lack of death spirals “should inspire major doubts about [conservative] ideology.”

Who says a death spiral prediction is completely wrong if a death spiral doesn’t occur immediately?

Yet, he complains, those who made predictions about death spirals aren’t admitting their errors but “pretend that [they] didn’t make the predictions [they] did.” This is serious stuff, since refusing “to accept responsibility for past errors is a serious character flaw in one’s private life. It rises to the level of real wrongdoing when policies that affect million of lives are at stake.”

Via: The Federalist

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