Month: June 2012

The number of Facebook users in the US declined again last month. Reihan speculates about the company's future growth: 

[O]ne wonders if Facebook faces the same dynamic as Craigslist: users might be turning to more specialized services that do a better job at narrower social media functions, hence Mark Zuckerberg’s unilateral decision to purchase Instagram, a start-up that may well have proven a formidable threat to one of the core functions of Facebook that accounts for so much of it’s stickiness, i.e., obsessively clicking through the photographs of friends and acquaintances. Twitter, of course, has a flourished as a vehicle for status updates, and indeed it has enabled the rise of the gourmet food truck business model, among many other things. 

Coverage from earlier this year here, here and here.

Romney's insta-ad attacking today's decision:

Despite the rhetoric from Republicans today, Paul Waldman expects the GOP to basically give up on repeal:

Republicans are going to drop health care very quickly. They took their shot with the only avenue they had to kill the ACA, and they came up short. The legal battle is over, and they know that once they start talking about repealing the whole thing, it makes it easier to talk about the benefits of the ACA that will be repealed, particularly since they have given up on even bothering to come up with a "replace" part of "repeal and replace." Oh, they'll still condemn the ACA when they're on Fox, or when they're talking to partisan audiences—just enough to reassure base conservatives that they're still angry. But in short order, they're going to move on to other topics now that the legal question has been settled.

Along the same lines, Francis Wilkinson bets that Romney won't run on Obamacare repeal:

Republicans successfully campaigned against the health-care law in 2010. The question is whether a repetition of that success is possible given the expanded electorate and the extensive media coverage that accompany a presidential campaign. There is a reason Republicans traditionally have avoided campaigning on health care. If Romney bucks that trend in the months ahead, he risks rediscovering why.

Nate Cohn downplays the electoral consequences of today's decision:

If the Court had gone a different direction, the electoral consequences could have been more significant. But since the ruling preserves the status quo, the fundamentals of the health care debate remain essentially unaltered. Dissatisfaction with the health care law is already priced into the President’s approval ratings—Obama’s pursuit of health care reform was a defining element of his first term, and voters have already judged him on that basis. Opposition to the health care law was never driven by arcane constitutional concerns, even if many viewed it as government overreach.

Nate Silver echoes:

[B]e wary of whatever the polls say for the next week or two — the short-term reaction to the news of the ruling may not match its long-term political effects. As before, the presidential election is mostly likely to be contested mainly on economic grounds. Next week’s jobs report is likely to have a larger effect on the election than what the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

He once again promises to:

Frum provides a reality check:

[E]ven if Republicans do win the White House and Senate in 2012, how much appetite will they then have for that 1-page repeal bill? Suddenly it will be their town halls filled with outraged senior citizens whose benefits are threatened; their incumbencies that will be threatened. Already we are hearing that some Republicans wish to retain the more popular elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Which means the proposed 1-page bill will begin to grow.

By moving to Canada.

A reader writes:

There's something quite odd in my view about the Scalia opinion in the back. It's not a Scalia rant by and large; in fact it reads at the outset rather majestically, like he's delivering the opinion of the court. Even more strangely, it refers repeatedly to the "Ginsburg dissent," but Ginsburg is in the majority on most issues. What's all this about? Were the tables turned midway? Did Roberts first sign on to Scalia's opinion and then bail on him? Is that what Ginsburg was ribbing Scalia over in her ACS remarks? I suspect there is an amazing an untold backroom story behind this decision. It may be a while before we learn it. But the sense I have is that Scalia had the votes to take a sledgehammer to ACA, and then lost Roberts. Was it Scalia's overreaching and his overheated rhetoric that did him in? This may make an excellent Supreme Court mystery. But it points in the end to the complicated and rather ornery personality of Nino Scalia as a real burden for the court's conservatives.

That's a lot of fingers tapping on their desks. But no ACA decision yet.

Yep, that's what the right now means – contempt for a settled body of law:

A permission structure has been built in the form of legal precedent — including many bad decisions by liberal judges — slowly making it possible for Washington to do what sounds absurd on its face: forcing us into intrastate commerce in the name of regulating interstate commerce.

Who knew that leaving things as they are was such a radically leftist position; and making abstract ideological cases to undo decades of legal precedent is actually conservative? Only the current American "right", which is now about as conservative as the far left.

For minute-by-minute coverage, it's hard to beat SCOTUS blog's live-blog of the healthcare decision. For a Republican perspective, Avik Roy's live-blog over at NRO's healthcare blog is worth a read. And the Beast is providing live video reaction here. Jonathan Cohn has a primer on what to expect:

The Supreme Court convenes at 10 a.m. The justices have two other decisions to deliver, so they might not get to the health care case until 10:15 or so. Even then, the ruling and its effects may not be immediately clear. The Court must effectively address four separate questions and the justices may write multiple decisions.

Sahil Kapur plots SCOTUS's rightward lurch: