A BLAST FROM THE PAST:



In the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index, President Obama dropped below 50% for the first time since his reelection in November. In a blast from the past, his approval is dropping even faster than it did in 2009. Then it took until mid-June for his approval rating to drop below 50%, where it stayed until just before the November election.

JURY DUTY isn't as burdensome when you don't have a job.

THE NEW ECONOMY TAKES SHAPE: that 'hopey-changey' stuff isn't working as anticipated. By liberals; conservatives knew all along that Obamanomics is unworkable.

YUVAL LEVIN: Replacing ObamaCare.

Two thoughts of my own.

Yglesias's understing of 'risk pools' is sadly mistaken. The risk pool is not the employer, and not even the insurance company (although Levin is much more nearly correct): it is the totality of all the insurance company's insurees, averaged over some extended period of time to build up reserves against catastrophic, but unlikely, events. Because Yglesias is fixated on health care and not health insurance, he conflates an insurance risk pool with a 'prepayment pool' for routine, but entirely predictable expenses.

With respect to 'cheap, renewable catastrophic policies', Yglesias again misses the point entirely. Cheap, renewable catastrophic policies are not 'low-quality health care'; it's high-quality health insurance for unlikely but potentially catastrophic events. Like automobile and homeowner's insurance, with catastrophic health insurance I pay a small premium each month in the fond hope that eventually I die having 'wasted' all those premiums by not requiring the services they cover.

To use Yglesias's affordable housing policy analogy, I'd rather live temporarily in a tent in the park while my house is being rebuilt than live permanently in Yglesias's government-owned housing project.

THE NEW CLIMATE DENIERS. Those members of the 'reality-based community' shall henceforth be known as 'reality deniers'.

EVERYONE KNOWS that white males own guns to compensate for a lack of manhood.

SEE? -- ObamaCare is already creating jobs. Just not productive jobs.

It never ceases to amaze me that people are ready willing to pay exorbitant taxes to get 'free stuff' that they could buy directly for much less.

JOHN LOTT: Fact vs. fiction on background checks in the gun control debate.

THOMAS SOWELL: The lunacy of 'proportional response'.

Back before the clever new notion of "proportional" response became the vogue, our response to Pearl Harbor was ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Japan has not attacked or even threatened anybody since then. Nor has any war broken out anywhere that is at all comparable with World War II.

Which policy is better? There was a time when we followed the ancient adage "By their fruits ye shall know them." The track record of massive retaliation easily beats that of the more sophisticated-sounding proportional response.

Back in ancient times, when Carthage attacked Rome, the Romans did not respond "proportionally." They wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with the centuries of what was called the Pax Romano -- the Roman peace.

I think we've seen sufficient evidence that 'tit for tat' doesn't work. It's time to return to making rubble, then bouncing it just to be sure.

Domestically as well as internationally.