SCOTUSblog on ObamaCare: The way to get news

At about a minute before 7:00 am, Pacific Time, I tuned into SCOTUSblog, which has long been my source for understanding in plain English what the highest court delivers in legalese.  The wonderful folks there did it, again.  Like with this plain speak at 7:32:

Amy Howe: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding. 

Reports were that at one point, the live "readership" at SCOTUSblog exceeded half a million!  Who cares for CNN or MSNBC or Faux Noose or CBS or ABC or .... 

Poem of the day: I, a stranger and afraid ... In a world I never made

To re-assure myself of the world in which we have to deal with issues, here is a re-post from an earlier one--a profound poem by A.E. Housman:

The Laws of God
THE laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I , and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

Life and its complexities!