scotusblog

• The third round of the Masters has started. Lee Westwood, who has been playing some really good golf over the last two years, is tied for the lead. My golf instructor told me to watch Fred Couples. He had problems yesterday with 16, 17 and 18 and had a disappointing round of 75. Today he is three under through eight holes and is in fourth place. Not bad for a 50-year-old man. Tom Watson is in 11th place and he is 60. Everyone is watching Tiger Woods, who is playing the kind of up-and-down golf that he sometimes plays. He is clearly in the hunt. The weather is perfect. There should be some great golf today.
• With Judge John Paul Stevens stepping down from the Supreme Court, SCOTUSBlog had a really nice piece yesterday discussing on how the “Kennedy court” will be shifting.
• When is the Catholic Church going to simply hold a press conference and come clean? When are they going to stand up for the people they say they serve?
• I hope that everybody realizes that the health-care debate is not over. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.
• There’s an excellent article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the public opinion of healthcare reform at the time that reform passed. It’s kind of interesting when you drill through the numbers. 90% of the population thought that is a good idea to have tax breaks for small businesses to help cover workers and make healthcare more affordable. 36% of Americans thought it was a good idea to reduce Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. Of the stuff that was asked but not in the bill, 69% of Americans thought that was a great idea to allow Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. By the way, where was that in the final bill?
• Finally, a lot of Americans are really upset over the individual mandate. I’m not sure I understand their objections, but their argument goes something like how can Congress force me to buy a product? The problem with healthcare is that if you do not have health insurance and get sick it is possible for you to run up a bill that you can never pay off ($500,000 – $2,000,000 in some cases). That’s the problem. To me, the individual mandate forces us to join the largest insurance pool possible. This in turn drives down costs for all of us. I guess you can look at it the other way. Suppose you are a 20-year-old healthy male and decide that you’re not buying into any insurance plan. In your early 30s you develop hypertension but don’t take your medication and still don’t go to a doctor or join a health-care plan. In your 40s, as your kidneys begin to fail, should you be allowed then to join the health-care pool? Individual mandate should help premiums stay low for all of us.
• Has anybody seen any new movies? Anything good out there?

Update

• Phil Mickelson powered behind back-to-back eagles is six under today and has taken the lead at the Masters. Tiger Woods started off strong but has been struggling most of the day.
• When is Sarah Palin‘s five minutes of fame going to be over? Snake oil science? Did she go to school? I mean, did she even go to high school? Man, I find her irritating.
• Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, died in a plane crash. Wow, this is weird.
• Michael Steele holds the key to the Republican hopes in November, or so he says. Do you think that he has a head injury? Is that why he acts the way that he does?
• Republican restraint and fiscal responsibility. Don’t laugh.
• Is it legal for the President of the US to order to have someone killed? What if that someone were a radical Muslim cleric living in Yemen? What if this cleric were an American citizen with ties to two people who were known terrorists?