Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

Linda Greenhouse, longtime Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times and currently a Yale law professor, penned an op-ed for the Times in which she emoted that Arizona has become a Nazi-esque “police state” where it is a crime to be “breathing while undocumented.”

Now, I don’t want to dwell on Greenhouse’s gas, since she not only misread the law, she literally read the wrong law (an earlier draft that was changed before passage, actually).

But that bit about “breathing while undocumented” strikes a chord. Because, you see, under Obamacare, it is now something of a crime to “breath while uninsured,” too. In fact, if you really want to hear the government say “Deine papieren, bitte!” just wait until that law is fully implemented, assuming the “new nullifiers” fail.

So here’s where that wacky proposal I mentioned earlier comes in. Let’s throw it all back to the states. Arizona can be an illegal-immigrant-free zone and New York can hold an open house for everyone. The same goes for health care. States that want universal health care can provide it, including to illegal immigrants (or should I just say “immigrants”?). Other states can let the market rule. The feds would save piles of money that can go to paying off our credit cards (or to antiterrorism, to deal with undocumented New Yorkers/terrorists).

Arizona using law enforcement to protect the borders that the Federal government refuses to protect is “police state” fascism, but that same Federal government hiring an additional 15,000 IRS agents to fine people or withhold refunds for not having health insurance is health care “reform.” The former is specifically dictated in the U.S. Constitution. The latter makes a mockery of the Constitution’s “Commerce Clause” (if you’re not engaging in said commerce of purchasing health insurance how does Congress have the legal authority to regulate that?)

That’s the Liberal’s logic. Of course, George Orwell called it something different.

Here’s George Will on Arizona’s new immigration law:

It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation’s borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government’s refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists “comprehensive” immigration reform.

Arizona’s law makes what is already a federal offense — being in the country illegally — a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona’s right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer’s character and motives, saying she “caved to the radical fringe.” This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a “fringe” of their state?

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy — judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes — because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things “beyond the reach of majorities.”

But Arizona’s statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make “a reasonable attempt” to determine the status of a person “where reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of “reasonable” will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights — the Fourth Amendment — proscribes “unreasonable searches and seizures.” What “reasonable” means in practice is still being refined by case law — as is that amendment’s stipulation that no warrants shall be issued “but upon probable cause.” There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of “reasonable suspicion.”

Brewer says, “We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status.” Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of “evenness” as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona’s law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Probably 30 percent of Arizona’s residents are Hispanic. Arizona police officers, like officers everywhere, have enough to do without being required to seek arrests by violating settled law with random stops of people who speak Spanish. In the practice of the complex and demanding craft of policing, good officers — the vast majority — routinely make nuanced judgments about when there is probable cause for acting on reasonable suspicions of illegality.

Arizona’s law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism.

I’m a little behind on the Earf Day stuff, but here’s John Stossel:

Every Earth Day brings out new scaremongering from silly people.

This year, one scare is that BPA, a chemical in plastic, causes “obesity, breast cancer, to prostate cancer, diabetes, brain disorders, such as attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, liver disease, ovarian disease, disease of the uterus, low sperm count in men.” That’s according to a new documentary called “Tapped.” So you better not drink bottled water!

Yes, huge amounts of BPA fed to rats cause problems, but there’s no good evidence that tiny amounts, locked into plastic, hurt people. In fact BPA saves lives, by stopping botulism.

“Tapped” claims that many other dangerous chemicals poison bottled water. Toxicologist Dr. Stephen King says in the film that we should be “horrified” at all the chemicals in bottled water. But when we called him, he sent us a study that says: “testing” reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed — at levels no different than routinely found in tap water.

The director of Tapped, Stephanie Soechtig, claims that cancer rates are up as a result of these chemicals, but that’s another myth. Cancer incidence rates are flat. They would have declined, if not for new screening methods.

Life spans are up, too.

So ignore the Earth Day alarmism. Economic progress is what makes life better.

Tapped also suggests that because bottled water companies take water from the earth, the world will run out of water! But over the last 20 years, thanks to economic progress, a BILLION people GAINED access to improved drinking water, according to the WHO.

Even if we were running out off fresh water, modern technology would be the answer, not the problem. One desalinization plant in Florida converts 9 billion gallons a year – more than is used for all the bottled water sold in the US.

“Tapped” does get one thing right: bottled water is a waste of money. Tests I’ve done show it’s not healthier or better-tasting.

By the way, how do we get plastic? Polymers from evil, evil petroleum!

President Barack Obama is quickly approaching the half-way point of his first term and he’s already breaking a number of records. Unfortunately for him, they’re almost all bad records — and almost all tied to the poor economic situation of the country.

His job approval rating is already the worst in 50 years that’s been seen by any president at this point in their presidency. Approval ratings are usually – but not always – tied to economics.

While there’s still time for his administration to correct the demise, one gets the feeling that the almost unprecedented hostility his administration has towards business, which appears to be mired deep in leftist economic ideology, proves that such a correction (as Clinton made in his term) will not occur, and Obama risks becoming the most disliked one-term president since Jimmy Carter.

What are some of the other historic but poor key performance indicators for Obama?

See Gross Domestic Product and the Unemployment Rate – probably the single two most important economic figures for any president.

I crunched some numbers, courtesy of the Federal government’s own data, namely the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) for GDP, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for unemployment data.

Obama’s GDP numbers, scored quarterly as opposed to monthly unemployment data, are not horrible, but nowhere near strong enough to save him alone.

Adjusted for inflation (using the BEA’s 2005 dollars scoring) Obama has had a lackluster .18% (that’s point-1-8) economic growth. By contrast, President George W. Bush (scored the same) had a 2.0% quarterly average. Put differently, the Bush GDP was 11 times more successful than Obama. But again, lots of presidents have lackluster GDP years.

But the most dire picture for Obama regards the unemployment data, and underemployment data — the latter being persons who purposely take a job at part-time or less equitable than their previous one in order to avoid complete unemployment. 20.3% of the U.S. workforce was underemployed in March.

The U.S. government has kept standardized unemployment data since 1953 (data previous to that was less standardized).  That’s 63 years. During those 63 years the historical annual average is 5.72 percent. The historical annual median is 5.59 percent.

The Obama presidency is a whopping 9.49 percent. This means that Obama has the dishonor of being ranked as having the next-to-last (#62) and fourth-from-last (#60) rank of annual unemployment rates in 63 years.

Ironically, the worst year was 1982, under Reagan, but prior to his economic tax cuts and incentives. So, short of Obama pulling a Reagan and encouraging business growth and private-sector spending through tax cuts in order to expand the size of the economy and employment numbers, one doesn’t see much light at the end of the tunnel.

This is highly significant considering that many economic conservatives felt luke-warm about the Bush economy, even though Bush’s unemployment average was 5.14, well below the historic annual mean and median — six of eight Bush years were in the top 50% of the unemployment rates, and most of those during the period in which his tax cuts had peaked and most encouraged business hiring and investment. Unfortunately for Bush, he had some bookend poor years, from the 9-11 aftermath on one side, and the tax cuts sunsetting (thus discouraging further business spending and investment) on the other side.

(By the way, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations monopolize the best employment data, proving that the late 40s and 50s were truly unprecidented growth periods in our nation’s history.)

So, what does this mean?

Well, put simply, the first thing it means is in the words of the late Patrick Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. The economic data does not lie and bodes poorly for both the president and our country.

It also means that the private sector is hedging their bets (and their employment and investment) and do not buy the Obama sales pitch that the trillion-dollar stimuluses worked, or that his ObamaCare health plan is not a tax or will magically save them money.

The latter notion was so ridiculous that even ABC News and former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos — hardly your right-wing tea party attender — called out Obama in an interview accusing him of raising taxes during a poor economy — something that only the most Marxist of economists would do.

Companies including AT&T, Deere & Co., AK Steel, Prudential and Caterpillar have all publicly announced in the past few weeks that the ObamaCare plan will force them to lay even more people off to save costs. Verizon alone found that the plan will cost them $970 million. You can hire a lot of people with $970 million.

Some news reports announced that companies “unexpectedly” cut payrolls in March — many tying that decision to the health care law. But there should be nothing “unexpected” about companies laying personnel off when the health care law is 2,000 pages of disincentives for business. Comedian Dennis Miller put it best, noting, “Only Democrats would consider losing doctors but adding 14,000 IRS agents a successful health care plan.”

Bloomberg reported, “The costs may reduce corporate profits by as much as $14 billion as companies account for the impact of the health-care reforms, according to benefits consulting firm Towers Watson.”

This news should strike fear into the heart of any Democrat running for re-election, and cause them to offset — and I thought Democrats loved “offsets” — the cost of ObamaCare with some other kind of business incentives. Instead of such common-sense campaigning, Democrats plan another show trial where business leaders are forced before Congress to explain their anti-Obama conspiracy.

The Wall Street Journal mocked the idea that these companies had a hidden agenda, noting that they’re simply following “the Financial Standard Accounting Board’s 1990 statement No. 106, which requires businesses to immediately restate their earnings in light of their expected future retiree health liabilities.” So the government regulates that companies must come clean on their perceived losses, and when they do so, then pulls them before a Congressional panel to attack them for following these Congressional regulations!

House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Henry Waxman (D, Idiocracy) explained that these companies’ analysis is in “conflict with independent analyses.” By “independent analysis,” Rep. Waxman means the Congressional Budget Office, which is controlled… by Congress. Worse, the CBO only judges the estimates given to them (by Democrats on Congress, that is), all other research is considered out of scope, and the CBO scores statically, not dynamically, meaning they don’t take into account how investment and hiring behavior is affected by surpluses or deficits.

Finally, 18 states of the Union have now filed lawsuits against the federal government for violating the Tenth Amendment, which gives states and the people in those states the sole power over anything not specified as a federal power in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. No matter what the Supreme Court says on this matter, combining this federal power grab with a poor economy, GDP, unemployment and Waxman War on Business, the Obama Administration will have a very deep hole to get out of by Novembers of 2010 and 2012.

Rule number one of standing in a hole and digging it too deep is: stop digging. But thus far Obama is “shovel ready” and heaving away.

“Instead of asking, ‘What should we do about people who are poor in a rich country?’ The first question is, ‘Why is this a rich country?’

“Five hundred years ago, there weren’t rich countries in the world. There are rich countries now because part of the world is following basically libertarian rules: private property, free markets, individualism.”

– David Boaz, Cato Institute.

Below are some very interesting points made by Univ. of California Professor Eric Smith:

From 1971 to 2000, offshore facilities and pipelines were responsible for only 2 percent of the oil in U.S. waters. The bulk of it (63 percent) came from natural seepage, and 22 percent came from municipal and industrial runoff. Worldwide, natural seepage is the largest source (47 percent) of oil in water, followed by spills from ocean transportation (33 percent). In short, the risk of oil spills from platforms is small.

In contrast, there are relatively high environmental costs associated with importing oil as opposed to producing it in the United States. There are three problems with importing oil: First, spills from tankers and barges are the largest human-caused source of oil in the oceans. Oil is more likely to be spilled from a tanker than from a platform, and tankers have the potential to cause catastrophic spills. The groundings of the Exxon Valdez (off Alaska), the Castillo de Bellver (South Africa), the Amoco Cadiz (France), the Irenes Serenade (Greece) and the Torrey Canyon (Britain), to name a few, all had severe effects on local ecosystems.

Second, the countries from which we import oil have lower environmental standards than the United States has. In particular, many foreign oil producers choose to vent methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — directly into the atmosphere rather than spend extra money to capture or flare it. Mexico, for example, produces less than half the oil that the United States produces but emits six times as much methane.

Third, shipping oil to the United States requires burning a huge amount of diesel oil, the exhaust from which is greenhouse gas pumped into the atmosphere. Just as environmentalists argue that eating locally grown food is better for the planet because it saves transportation costs and energy, locally produced oil has less of a negative impact. Depending on the country of origin and the tanker size, 1 percent to 3 percent of the oil in every tanker is consumed merely for delivery.

Great commentary. But here’s one the professor didn’t mention regarding domestic off-shore drilling: right now, countries like China are drilling in those same waters which so many people deny our own companies access to. Those foreign countries, in turn, sell that oil to the very countries from whom we purchase foreign oil.

We’re not protecting our environment, but simply ensuring that we pay more for oil.