Arcade action.

. . . Not everybody is buying that John-McCain-is-a-war-hero stuff. Here’s a guy (a professor at Princeton, no less) who figures McCain is halfway to being a regular Hitler. (The commenters agree, and then some.)

Not that it’s a big surprise, but the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence takes issue with the Heller ruling:

And now the Supreme Court has overturned over 100 years of judicial precedent and stood the Second Amendment to the Constitution on its head. The 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, written by Reagan appointee Justice Antonin Scalia, holds that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for self-defense purposes unconnected with service in a well regulated militia.

As Josh Horwitz, Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, recently wrote: “By deliberately omitting what test the Court is using to decide that [the District’s handgun ban and trigger lock requirement] unreasonably burden this newly proclaimed individual right to possess firearms, the Court leaves legislators and lower courts adrift at a time when public health data clearly shows the harm associated with handguns far outweighs any benefit from their use for lawful self defense.”

The decision is a terrible one and complete misreads the Framer’s intent in drafting in the Second Amendment. It is relatively narrow in scope, however, and leaves many critical questions unanswered. More importantly, it does not prevent gun violence prevention organizations from actively pursuing a wide range of legislative initiatives to reduce gun violence.

The harm from guns outweights any benefit from their lawful use. Debatable, but let’s assume it’s true. Shall we then start applying cost-benefit analyses to other articles in the Bill of Rights? Quick, grab a pencil!

A great many Americans seem to think that any person who is being held as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay deserves to be there, because he is a terrorist—and he must be a terrorist because, after all . . . he is being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The case of Huzaifa Parhat suggests otherwise.

. . . . he could remember when a liberal was someone who was generous with his OWN money. Today, everyone’s liberal with everyone else’s—and that’s the topic of today’s column.

Andrew Stegmaier, an occasional contributor to the discussion here, has begun his own blog: The Court of Peeves, Crotchets & Irks. Go check out some of his thoughtful stuff.

And you thought you were paying too much for gasoline. . . .

Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water”—at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.

A few days ago syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts swung by the Editorial Department offices for a chat. (Good guy; seems weary.) Among many other things, he talked about his series on “What Works,” charter schools, and public education. One of the things that has impressed him, he said, is the degree to which strong principals make a difference—and how hard it is to get rid of bad teachers.

Comes now this story that underscores the latter point:

In New York City, it often costs taxpayers $250,000 just to fire one incompetent teacher. Some teachers remain on the payroll even after being convicted of serious felonies, requiring districts to hold disciplinary hearings behind prison walls.

“Protecting jobs of adults without regard to how well their students perform almost certainly will lead to greater costs, stagnant academic achievement, and greater dysfunction of our public education system,” says tenure foe B. Jason Brooks of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability.

Today’s column discusses the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court rules 5-4 for gun rights.

Update: Opinion here.

If you’re interested in reading more about today’s Supreme Court decision on gun rights, you’ll find lots to keep you busy at The Volokh Conspiracy and Scotus Blog.

You can find a ginormous amount of information at Guncite.

And of course, there’s always the NRA and the Brady Campaign.

. . . is here.

I don’t want to drag this out much more, esp. since Norm said some nice things about me, but I’lm a little hung up on the mass-transit point he’s raised, for two reasons:

(a) I still don’t see where we’ve endorsed “massive” transfers of wealth for mass transit, unless you assume all mass transit has to suck up huge volumes of cash from general-revenue sources and that ticket prices never can be set to cover the cost per passenger mile. I’m not sure that’s so. Mass transit certainly might cost more on a passenger-mile basis, though that’s probably shifting because of gasoline prices (see my column from August 18, 2006, pasted below, for more details about that discussion)—but that’s a different question.

(b) We’ve been pretty thorough in criticizing knee-jerk support for mass transit especially when it would require huge subsidies; see the editorial from July 20, 2006, pasted below.

______________________________________________

Over at Tertium Quids, Norm Leahy takes the Editorial Department to task for being insufficiently conservative. That’s fine; a lot of folks take us to task for being insufficiently liberal, too.

What’s not so fine is misrepresenting the newspaper’s position, which Leahy does in abundance.

(1) He’s already had to climb down a bit regarding his claim that the paper supports higher taxes. As my colleague Bob Rayner notes, we’ve supported cutting taxes elsewhere to make a hike in the gasoline tax revenue-neutral.

Leahy cites one passage in one editorial about revenue neutrality and labels it “conditional advocacy.” He must have missed this passage in an earlier one:

Lawmakers should offset the gasoline tax hike by cutting taxes elsewhere—perhaps by completing the long-delayed full implementation of the car-tax cut. (The car tax is not a road user fee; it is a levy on property.) This will require economies in other state programs. Deal with it. Set priorities. If the transportation crisis is as dire as the governor et al. claim, then other services that reaped the proceeds from Mark Warner’s massive tax hike four years ago should now move to the back seat.

That isn’t terribly conditional, is it? No.

(2) But, Leahy says, the T-D also has supported allowing local-option taxes in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. True. But there is a significant difference between supporting the option in those regions to raise taxes, as we have repeatedly done, and supporting the raising of taxes in those regions, as we have never done. We also supported the option of voting for John Kerry in 2004—but we never supported John Kerry.

Leahy says we support telecommuting. True. I’m not sure how that qualifies as ideological deviationism, but it’s true nonetheless.

(3) He says we support mass transit. True in part and false in part. I thought we had been pretty clear when we wrote:

Public transit has its place. That place is in densely populated urban centers such as Northern Virginia and the Richmond region. From a cost-benefit perspective, bus service, commuter rail, and similar programs make little sense in most of the Old Dominion. Virginia (population density: 191 people per square mile) is not New Jersey (1,175) or even Massachusetts (816). Building a huge transit network where no demand exists won’t make people ride; it will merely create a white elephant.

(4) Leahy says we are against sprawl. To be precise, we have opposed govevernment “policies that subsidize sprawl.” We have said “new development [should] pay for itself.” Again, I’m not sure how that qualifies as a departure from limited-government principles, but perhaps Leahy is reading from a different conservative catechism.

(5) Then Leahy says “the paper is for . . . limiting choice and property rights.” To quote an infamous Washington Post correction about evangelicals, there is no factual basis for that statement.

We have been almost strident defenders of property rights. See, e.g., a February 19, 2006, editorial, “Kelo Redux”: “Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London was to property rights largely as Plessy v. Ferguson was to racial equality...”

(6) Finally, he says the paper supports “massive wealth transfers to prop-up economically inefficient transit.” Again, there is no basis in fact for that statement.

If Leahy doesn’t like the newspaper’s positions on the issues, that’s fine. Lots don’t. But it would be nice if he’d get them right before he decides he doesn’t like them.

. . . being green:

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.”

Ditto for the baseball caps. “We have a union cap or an organic cap,” Mr. DeMasse says. “But we don’t have a union-organic offering.”

According to this NYT article about politicized hiring at the Justice Department (politicized hiring? in Washington? Who woulda imagined!). . .

Another applicant, a student at the top of his class at Harvard who was fluent in Arabic, was relegated to the “questionable” pile because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that advocates civil liberties.

Ya gotta love ‘em.

Calling CAIR a civil-liberties group is something like calling the White People’s Party “a group that advocates protection of endangered species” (the WPP argues white people should receive protection under the Endangered Species Act). Technically true, perhaps—but less than half the truth, and the least important part of the whole truth.

A little background on CAIR here.

Gay Couple Feels Pressured To Marry.

One of the many reasons health care in America is so expensive is that it is so good and delivers so much. Consider premature babies:

Nearly 13% of all babies in the U.S. are preemies, a 20% increase since 1990. A 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences found that the 550,000 preemies born each year in the U.S. run up about $26 billion in annual costs, mostly related to care in NICUs. That represents about half of all the money hospitals spend on newborns. But the number, large as it is, may understate the bill. . . .

For hospitals struggling with cost overruns in other areas, NICUs can be havens of healthy revenue growth and profits. Children’s National sets the goal of 4% profit margins overall, but NICU profits can be double that. Last November the hospital unveiled a $75 million tower that features various specialty units to treat heart and brain problems of preemies. Its expansion plans include a second NICU that will open in 2009. It will have 54 beds, boosting Children’s total preemie capacity by 25%. All of the rooms will be private and will be equipped with Internet systems that allow neurologists to monitor brain function from their homes.

People in Northern Virginia want more transportation projects to ease traffic congestion—as long as they’re done slowly and don’t change anything..

. . . instead of getting stuck in phone-tree purgatory: Get Human.

Patients aren’t the only ones who have the right to choose. So do doctors and pharmacists. Today’s column explains.

Proof here:

The irony is that health and the quality of personal relationships are among the most potent predictors of whether people report they are happy—and they are often the two things people sacrifice in their pursuit of greater wealth.