Neat story about a kid with leukemia who saves a city with help from the Make a Wish Foundation and a few thousand folks.

He got the key to the city:

I just cry. #SFBatKid pic.twitter.com/cOKYg31kJ1

— Nancy Hennen (@Tweetbrk) November 15, 2013

And saved a damsel in distress, who hugged him for his heroism:

#SFBatKid saves damsel in distress! pic.twitter.com/BOjHxNN6kG

— Mike Pelton (@KRON4MPelton) November 15, 2013

Nice pictures from John Sexton at Breitbart, here.

Lots more here.

Great stuff.

John Fund asks if Obama is violating the Constitution with impunity:

At last night’s annual Federalist Society dinner in Washington there was general agreement that Obama had violated the Constitution. “A president has discretion to prioritize which lawbreakers to prosecute in federal court, but there is no ‘enforcement discretion’ to determine which laws on the books he will enforce,” constitutional scholar Ken Klukowski told me.

But the problem is that anyone wanting to challenge President Obama’s extra-constitutional action would have to show standing in court — some injury that would allow litigation to go forward. “He’s been clever about this,” Utah Senator Mike Lee told me. “If you are simply reducing legal burdens on people rather than curbing their behavior, it’s hard to prove an injury. It’s a dangerous precedent because it could give presidents a path to ignore laws they don’t like.”

Everyone seems to think that these matters can only be resolved by lawsuits. But standing is famously difficult to establish in these situations. Justice Scalia once wrote to attempt to dispel the notion that the courts were the place to resolve a political branch’s overreaching:

Our system is designed for confrontation. That is what “[a]mbition . . . counteract[ing] ambition,” The Federalist, No. 51, at 322 (J. Madison), is all about. If majorities in both Houses of Congress care enough about the matter, they have available innumerable ways to compel executive action without a lawsuit —- from refusing to confirm Presidential appointees to the elimination of funding. (Nothing says “enforce the Act” quite like “. . . or you will have money for little else.”) But the condition is crucial; Congress must care enough to act against the President itself, not merely enough to instruct its lawyers to ask us to do so. Placing the Constitution’s entirely anticipated political arm wrestling into permanent judicial receivership does not do the system a favor. And by the way, if the President loses the lawsuit but does not faithfully implement the Court’s decree, just as he did not faithfully implement Congress’s statute, what then? Only Congress can bring him to heel by . . . what do you think? Yes: a direct confrontation with the President.

If I recall correctly, this passage was about whether Congress could force the President to defend a statute in court — but it could apply to Obama rewriting statutes to change effective dates of provisions, to conform to his electoral comfort. “[T]hey have available innumerable ways to compel executive action without a lawsuit —- from refusing to confirm Presidential appointees to the elimination of funding” — and if things get bad enough, they have . . . impeachment.

There. I said it.

Any way you slice it, we need to talk about Obama’s lawlessness. Nothing will happen if we don’t.

John Boehner, July 22, 2009:

Tonight we’ll hear the president likely say some — repeat some of the myths that he’s been repeating over the last several months.

First he’ll say, if you — if you like your plan, you can keep it. But, clearly, under the Congressional Budget Office estimates, 23 million Americans will be forced out of their private health insurance into a government-run plan.

And Lewin and Associates, a consulting firm, health care experts, estimate that number could be as high as 114 million.

Paul Ryan, speaking at the vice-presidential debate, October 11, 2012:

Look at all the string of broken promises. If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7-point million — 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.

After finding these quotes, I looked to see if they were accurate. The answer appears to be . . . yes and no. 20 million is the high end of the range; the worst-case scenario. 12 million is the lower end of the range.

As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.

The figure represents the worst-case scenario, CBO says, and the law could just as well increase the number of people with employer-based coverage by 3 million in 2019.

The best estimate, subject to a “tremendous amount of uncertainty,” is that about 3 million to 5 million fewer people will obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022.

Here’s the thing, though: these estimates are for losses of employer-provided coverage.

That’s the coming storm. That’s the effects of the employer mandate — the one Obama has already illegally delayed a year — not the individual market, which he is illegally and fecklessly pretending to “fix” administratively as we speak.

AN ASIDE ABOUT THE INCOMPETENCE OF POLITIFIACT: By the way — and this is so bad that I think it will merit a separate post and some hounding from me — PolitiFact repeatedly published an analysis that understated this by a factor of four. In a cut-and-paste that appears in three completely separate “fact-checking” pieces (maybe more) they said this:

CBO, along with the similarly nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, settled on a range of 3 million to 5 million fewer people, on net, obtaining coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed.

While 3 million to 5 million people is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also quite a bit lower than the 20 million figure Priebus cited. So where did the 20 million number come from?

Each year, doofuses. EACH YEAR.

Yes, 3 to 5 million is quite a bit lower than 20 million. But 3 to 5 million each year for four years is 12 to 20 million, which is not “quite a bit lower” than 20 million.

BACK TO THE MAIN POINT: Any way you slice it, there were predictions that this law would cause people to lose their plans. So yeah, we were warned. And you are still being warned — because the real crapstorm is still on the horizon.