The Gateway (Unhappy Signs of Aging Edition) [Revised]

In my junk folder was mail I thought said "Make Your Pension Grow," and I eagerly opened it, but it turned out I'd misread.

You know you are getting old when your pension excites you more than your penis.

No, I don't buy most of it, but it is worth considering, especially given the conservative source.

Money quote: "The oil spill isn’t Katrina: The Bush administration’s terrible handling of Hurricane Katrina convinced many people—including many otherwise supportive of the administration’s stated policies—that it simply could not govern. Whatever the Obama administration’s errors in handling the oil spill, it isn’t Hurricane Katrina. The only deaths to have resulted from the spill were clearly the fault of BP and its subcontractors. Whatever additional human suffering results from the spill will accrue mostly to people who lose their jobs as a result and, since they’ll likely collect at least something from BP, most will probably be better off than those who lose their jobs for other reasons. The key images from the spill are oil-stained birds, not suffering people." Why the Dems May Be Celebrating in November | FrumForum www.frumforum.com

"…just because Barack Obama wants congress to do something doesn’t mean it happens. The administration and Harry Reid’s office tried quite hard to get the votes together, but they just couldn’t. Not because they don’t have any leverag…e or the offices they inhabit are powerless, but because whatever leverage the White House has doesn’t change the fact that if a Senator really and truly wants to vote against cloture on a bill nobody can force him to do otherwise. Now of course it’s true that there’s more Obama could have done. He could have gone really nuclear on this topic, but he didn’t. He left some tools in the toolbox, left some arrows in the quiver. And you can say the same about his advocacy for a “level playing field” public option and his advocacy for the Employee Free Choice Act and his advocacy for carbon pricing and his advocacy for a truly independent consumer financial protection agency and his advocacy for the full version of his stimulus bill and his advocacy for DOMA repeal and one or two dozen other things. But that’s actually the point. The White House’s failure to engage in a maximum, 100 percent push for each item on the Obama agenda doesn’t demonstrate that it’s a White House that’s time and again betrayed progressive values. It demonstrates that even though in each case you can always do more, you tend to decide to leave some arrows in the quiver because there are so many legislative fights and you can’t just be going nuclear thirty times a year. Now it is true that I think one problem with this system is that it allows the White House to be deliberately ambiguous about what positions it supports, secure in the knowledge that “the votes aren’t there” for certain things and therefore saying you support them is a freebie. That’s a bad thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that this option is usually available precisely when it’s true that the votes aren’t there" Matthew Yglesias » The Limits of Presidential Power yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Marco Rubio's Health-Care Confusion [Ramesh Ponnuru]The Senate candidate tells Jim Geraghty that he likes the ban, included in Obamacare, on insurers' charging higher prices based on pre-existing conditions. App…arently he wants to repeal Obamacare and then re-pass that provision—although it's not clear from his non-clarifying clarification.One more time: If you can buy insurance at the same price whether you're sick or healthy, you have no incentive to buy it when you're healthy. Only sick people will buy it, and its price will rise and rise. If you want to have this ban and preserve something called insurance, you have to force everyone to buy it. You can't get this ban on an a la carte menu, as popular as it would be. Marco Rubio's Health-Care Confusion – Ramesh Ponnuru – The Corner on National Review Online corner.nationalreview.com

Those who get high and mighty over the superiority of Europe may want to reflect on another aspect of its superiority over both America and the Third World; its anti-Semitism is far more sophisticated (h/t to Michael Bouldin). About JCPA-European Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism: Similarities and Differences www.jcpa.org

This may be the most deranged article of all time—getting BP to put $20 billion into an escrow fund is like the Nazis? Are they going to use the money to clean birds with bars of soap made from Jews? Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny? – IBD – Investors.com www.investors.com