AMA JOURNAL: Take Fat Kids Away From Their Parents, Force Them To Lose Weight. “This is ludicrous–the foster system is already overstretched without adding obesity to the catalogue of child abuse and neglect. It’s also kind of creepy–the sort of thing that gives paternalism a very, very bad name.” Just because the government is failing at existing responsibilities is no reason not to give it more power! And kind of creepy? This is tar-and-feathers creepy. Your children belong to the state!

Given higher obesity rates in poor and minority communities, this is also clearly a racist suggestion. The authors, and the American Medical Association, should be ashamed on multiple levels. . . .

MICHAEL YON: Rule Of Law.

TERROR: Bomb Blasts In Mumbai.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An End To Federally Subsidized Student Loans? Without all that cheap money, it will be much harder to sustain high costs.

LIZ PEEK: OBAMA HAS BLOWN IT ON THE DEBT.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Obama’s Immigration Enforcement Is In Service Of A Pro-Union Agenda.

MARK TAPSCOTT: “Washington gets $200 billion a month, Social Security costs $50 billion a month, and Obama is threatening to starve Grandma?”

So was that whole Trust Fund business just a big fat lie all along?

WELL, THERE’S AN INCENTIVE NOT TO PUMP UP YOUR STOCK PRICE: A 1% Tax on the Market Capitalization of Public Companies. Or to go private.

GLOOM, DESPAIR, AND AGONY: Why Small Businesses Aren’t Hiring.

RICH GALEN: “After watching the President for the past 26 months I have determined he has two negotiating positions: Arrogant and petulant.”

Plus this: “Everyone is talking about jobs and tax rates; government spending and entitlements. All symptoms. No one is talking about the cause of the problem: The economy is creaking along barely above water, businesses are frightened, and Americans are uncomfortable buying things because they aren’t sure they will have a job next month.”

WAITING FOR GATSBY.

JENNIFER RUBIN ON MCCONNELL’S BACKUP PLAN: “So the name of the game here for opponents of Obama’s ambition to ensconce an enlarged welfare state is to maximize Republicans’ limited power without causing an actual default crisis. Boehner and McConnell are cooperating on a pincer movement — stand firm in the bipartisan negotiations and threaten to force Obama come up with the cuts himself, in the event he won’t drop his demands for huge tax hikes and/or come up with meaningful immediate cuts. Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) hectors Obama to come forward with the specifics of his promised proposals to cut entitlement benefits.. . . Republican presidential contenders and back-benchers have the luxury of simply saying no to every attainable debt-ceiling increase option. That’s politics. Meanwhile, Boehner, McConnell and Cantor grind away, seeing if they can wear down the White House. If so, a not-very-grand bargain still may be in the offing. If not, there’s the backup plan.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Pejman Yousefzadeh.

COMPARISONS: Obama Fails To Match Bush 2003 Fundraising.

HOWIE CARR: Please Treat Me Like An Illegal Alien.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: ObamaGeddon Coming To A City Near You?

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics. The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities.

Not since the 1960s, when scores of American cities were shaken by one race riot after another, have African-Americans faced such deadly conditions: high expectations and hopes running up against a reality of vanishing jobs, shrinking government budgets and a fractured and fragmented leadership. Barring an unlikely change in economic fortunes we could soon face a new period of explosive anger and even violence; alternatively, the urban poor could fall prey to a new kind of passive despair and anomie as hope dies on one inner city street after another.

Either way, the mainstream press’s slowly fading intoxication with the Obama administration has led it to miss the dimensions of the new urban crisis now stalking the United States. The liberal Reagan, they swooned back in the good old days. No — the new FDR! No, wait! The new Lincoln!

But as the rosy glow surrounding the administration and all its works slowly dies away, many Americans will be taken aback at the urban crisis that quietly and unostentatiously took shape while the fatuously exhilarated press choirs sang about the hope and the change that was coming our way.

Read the whole thing.

JAMES TARANTO ON OBAMA’S DEBT LIMIT STANCE: Raise Taxes, Or Granny Gets It. “The kids are acting up, so he threatens to starve Granny to death. That’s just how a strong father behaves. It looks to us as if Obama may once again be overestimating his persuasive powers by relying for feedback on journalists who, for a combination of ideological, partisan and personal reasons, are predisposed to take his side.”

UPDATE: Human Shields: Obama to use Social Security recipients as human shields if GOP doesn’t give him massive tax increase.

BRIAN TAMANAHA: How Law School Policies Entrench The Elite.

The key dynamic involves the students who are made to pay full fare. Typically, they will be in the bottom half of the LSAT/GPA profile of students admitted to the JD class at any particular school. The highest ranked schools have students with the highest LSAT/GPA combination—with LSAT numbers steadily falling as you travel down the ranking. For example, an applicant with a 171 LSAT would have placed in the bottom 25 percent of the class at Yale, but in the top 25 percent at Michigan, Penn, Berkeley, Virginia, Duke, and so on.

An applicant in this position would be confronted with a tough choice: go to Yale and pay full price ($50,750 this year), or attend a lower down school, say Duke ($44,722), with a tuition discount of half or more; Yale at $150,000 tuition over three years or Duke at $70,000. When you add in projected expenses, the final price would be $207,000 for a degree at Yale versus $118,000 for a degree at Duke. (The numbers work out similarly for a choice between Harvard and Duke.)

Applicants from wealthy families who can help financially wouldn’t hesitate to go to Yale. But applicants from middle class families—school teachers, middle management, small business owners, solo practitioner lawyers (parents who exhausted their resources helping their child make it through college without debt)—will find the Duke offer hard to turn down. Evidence of this wealth effect can perhaps be seen in the fact that, although its tuition is among the highest in the country (and the school rarely awards full scholarships), only 73 percent of Yale 2011 graduates had law school debt—among the lowest in the country. (At most schools 80 to 95 of graduates have law school debt.)

This might not seem like a major concern because a student who goes to Duke will have an outstanding career anyway. That is correct as far as it goes, but there is more. Law is a highly elitist, credential-oriented profession. Harvard and Yale degrees open more doors, more easily than do Duke degrees. Consider that in the history of the United States Supreme Court, seventeen Justices attended Harvard, ten attended Yale, and seven attended Columbia; no other law school counts more than three; Duke has none.

I turned down free rides from Duke and Chicago to go to Yale with only modest scholarship money. That was the right decision then — and I remember joining with another student who had the same experience in persuading (successfully) a prospective student to turn down those free rides and come to Yale. I’m not so sure it would be the right decision today, even allowing for the above. But maybe.

And, as Brian notes, the impact grows much greater when the choice is between schools farther down the ladder. “In this manner, the tuition-scholarship relationship to the higher-versus-lower-school choice constitutes an allocation matrix that uniformly funnels wealthy applicants to the higher school, securing the attendant advantages, while people with less financial means divide between higher and lower. Multiply this out by tens of thousands of like decisions each year and the effect is large. The pricing structure of law schools thereby helps the wealthy in America further consolidate their grip on elite legal positions.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: The Issue Isn’t Default, But Government Shutdown.

THE HILL: GOP leaders split on when to push for balanced-budget amendment. Early and often?

THE HILL: Republicans want records from Justice officials about botched gun operation.

LAW STUDENTS CAN’T GET JOBS, but the ABA is protecting professors from being fired. Works for me!

GALLUP: U.S. Debt Ceiling Increase Remains Unpopular With Americans. “Despite agreement among leaders of both sides of the political aisle in Washington that raising the U.S. debt ceiling is necessary, more Americans want their member of Congress to vote against such a bill than for it, 42% vs. 22%, while one-third are unsure. . . . A follow-up question finds Americans more sympathetic to the Republicans’ argument than Obama’s. Specifically, when asked to say which is their greater concern, 51% say raising the debt ceiling without plans for major future spending cuts concerns them more, while 32% are more concerned with the risk of a major economic crisis if Congress does not take action.”

CHANGE: Rhode Island Cities Run Out Of Other People’s Money. “Government spending really is a zero sum game–if you truly want to have your open-ended, silver-plated retirements for various subsets of government employees, then that really does mean you need to spend less money on Stuff Constituents Like. I look forward to this fact dawning on political dead-enders of every flavor.”