THE “LIVING CONSTITUTION” AND “Constitutional Footsie.”

Back when Helen and I interviewed Richard Posner about his book on the Constitution and terrorism, he noted that the people who usually support a “living Constitution” approach suddenly didn’t seem to favor it where terrorism was concerned.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: As Blue Dies, What Happens To the Jobs? Part One.

The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they are not always spoken of in these terms.

The most consequential question facing the United States is rarely talked about directly. Instead we operate on the basis of seldom acknowledged or scrutinized intuitions and assumptions about the implications of the vast economic transition now under way.

The basic question behind the debate is the question of jobs. In the twentieth century, mass manufacturing replaced agriculture as the bread and butter occupation that supported the broad mass of the population.

Now, clearly, that is changing.

Read the whole thing, as always. I remember the Atari Democrats. I guess I was one, once.

TOBY HARNDEN: Hilary Rosen debacle is payback for Democrats over their Rush Limbaugh attacks and ‘war on women’ meme.

UPDATE: Doubling down on stupid: NOW president: Ann Romney lacks “life experience” and “imagination” to relate to most Americans. “Stick around to the end to see Rep. Maxine Waters keep it classy by calling the presumptive Republican nominee ‘Mitt Rot-ney,’ but O’Neill is the real show here. Once again, we get to see the professional Left’s utter disdain for women who chose to stay home with their children rather than work in the workplace.”

Related: “Class warfare” and “the war on women” — 2 wars or 2 fronts in the same war? Key bit: “During the weakest post-recession recovery in history, there’s very little material to accentuate the positive with, so the Democrats are trying to make up for it by dividing the American public with class warfare and trying to convince women they need dependency on government for protection.”

Plus: “In this left-wing framework in which the vast majority of women need the government structure around them, women are not supposed to identify with Ann Romney . The left would like to alienate her from you by portraying the economically supportive husband as something only available to the rich. President Obama would like you to think that even he, as a Harvard Law School graduate, could not keep a wife at home with their 2 children. It’s an economic solution that works for so few people that it’s no choice at all.”

The only problem with this is that it’s a lie: Stay At Home Motherhood Isn’t A Luxury, Census Data Shows. “The data, though, don’t support the impression that staying at home is a luxury. A detailed 2010 study by two Census Bureau sociologist, in fact, found the opposite: While stay-at-home motherhood has become less common over time, the women who stay at home are increasingly those whose low education means they can’t earn enough money to make working outside the home worthwhile.”

And in Obama’s job-killing economy — in which over 92% of the job losses were by women — that’s increasingly true.

So there’s your headline: Dems Attack Stay-At-Home Moms Who Are Refugees From the Obama Economy.

So Obama’s attacking refugees. Women refugees. But then, what can you expect from a sexist Administration that pays women staffers less and encourages groping in an atmosphere of frat-boy entitlement?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: GSA Made Up ‘Jackass Award’ to Justify Dinners. Upside: Never a shortage of qualified recipients!

WANT TO HELP ANDREW BREITBART’S CHILDREN? Send a check to:

Breitbart Children’s Trust

149 S. Barrington Ave, #735

Los Angeles, CA 90049.

I asked Dana Loesch why there’s no PayPal and she replied that PayPal won’t let a trust set up an account. Bummer. But checks still work.

CANCER CARE: A new study suggests higher U.S. oncology spending is ‘worth it.’

Throughout the entire period, U.S. cancer survival gains were larger, reaching 11.1 years over 1995 to 1999 against 9.3 years in the EU. The researchers then compared the U.S. and EU gains using conservative, commonly accepted measures for the value of a statistical life, less the cost of the care. The U.S. comes out ahead by $598 billion. In other words, though the U.S. spends more, patients and society benefit far more.

Over 1995-1999, each $100 increase in per capita cancer spending—approximately $20,000 per cancer patient—was associated with another 2.3 years of life for the average patient. The authors are also careful to show that these results reflect real patient outcomes. Another myth is that U.S. survival rates are an artifact of the time of diagnosis, a “lead-time bias” that comes from more screening and earlier cancer detection, but without any improvement in life expectancy. Mr. Philipson’s method controls for such bias.

That’s good. Have you noticed, though, that the offical message has shifted over the last year or so from “Early detection is crucial” to “Don’t look, you might find something?”

COMING: A new book from J.K. Rowling.

Also, today only: A Cuisinart portable gas grill for $108.

REASON TV: How is DC supposed to run the world when it can’t fix its own escalators?

MATT CONTINETTI ON THE WAR ON WOMEN: “As amazing as it might seem to liberals, voters neither care about nor are aware of supercilious arguments on cable news. Their behavior is driven by the actual conditions on the ground: the economy, the deficit and debt, and the Sword of Damocles that is Obamacare. . . . But this week brought new developments from the front, when Mitt Romney pointed out correctly that more women than men have lost their jobs under Obama, when the Free Beacon reported that women are paid less than men in the Obama White House, and when Democratic adviser and overpaid consultant Hilary Rosen insulted stay-at-home moms across the country by saying Ann Romney has ‘never actually worked a day in her life.’ Within 24 hours, the Obama campaign had ordered and carried out the political equivalent of a summary execution, distancing itself from Rosen and forcing her to make a humiliating and half-hearted apology on the war’s primary battleground.”

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin: Why This Week Was Ominous For Obama. “This was a week in which the once pliable national media pretty much called out a key campaign plank — the Buffett rule — as nothing more than a gimmick. So two gimmicks — soak the rich and paint Romney as anti-women — blew up in the White House’s face. And then my colleague Glenn Kessler pretty much shredded Obama’s invocation of Ronald Reagan to push his tax scheme.”

What’s most revealing to me is that Obama had to invoke Reagan. Were there no Democratic past Presidents he wanted to be associated with? LBJ? Carter? Clinton?

JAMES TARANTO: The Battle of All Mothers: Hilary Rosen and the misogynistic foundation of contemporary feminism. Just as the Occupy Movement is best understood as a struggle between two different factions of the elite, so too feminism is primarily a struggle for power among different groups of women.

ANDREW MALCOLM: Who’s This Man Pretending To Be President?

TYLER COWEN: “Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming, but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they’re wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don’t have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals.”

JOHN PODHORETZ: Barack Obama vs. Stay-at-home Moms: The Democrats’ Cultural Wrong-Foot. “By asserting that a woman who spent nearly 30 years of her life taking care of five sons ‘never actually worked a day in her life,’ Rosen wasn’t just being nasty about a woman she wanted to paint as out of touch with ordinary people. She was expressing a fashionable and aggressive liberal opinion about female social roles and the responsibilities of women to play the role Hilary Rosen wants them to.”

ROGER SIMON: Why Liberals Are The New Squares. “How could a generation that has not changed its worldview one jot since 1968 be considered cool?”

MARK TAPSCOTT: What’s Color Of Change Hiding About Itself?

KEYSTONE UPDATE: House GOP hopes to revive Keystone fight with tie to highway bill extension. “House Republican leadership will take another crack at forcing approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline on legislation extending federal transportation funding for another 90 days.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Ann Romney — Latest Target In Democrats’ War On Moms. “We would suggest that Ann Romney, and stay-at-home moms like her, work hard every day. . . . Working moms have our respect, too, since their lives are made even tougher by President Obama’s economic policies — especially his war on domestic energy. If Rosen and the Democrats really want to help working moms, they should cut taxes and regulations on families, businesses, energy and entrepreneurs so that more moms and dads can find jobs at higher wages.”

ENEMIES LISTS: GE Ex-CEO Jack Welch Blasts Obama Leadership.

President Obama’s “divide-and-conquer” approach isn’t what great leaders do, Jack Welch said Thursday. . . .

“It was the insurance executives in health care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil companies as oil prices go up. It was Congress if things didn’t go the way he wanted. And recently it’s been the Supreme Court,” he said.

“He’s got an enemies list that would make Richard Nixon proud.”

Welch, who helmed GE for 21 years and founded the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, penned an op-ed article for Reuters with wife Suzy Welch this week in which he tackled the idea of Obama’s enemies list.

“Surely his supporters must think this particular tactic is effective, but there can be no denying that the country is more polarized than when Obama took office,” Welch wrote.

Just the opposite of what was promised.

SALENA ZITO: Dem’s comment ignites ‘mommy wars.’

As the White House scrambled on Thursday to prevent “mommy wars” damage by a Democratic adviser, one expert cautioned that politicians need to learn to communicate with female voters, who factor strongly in this presidential election.

“Most of the attention paid to them has been superficial rather than substantive,” Catherine Wilson, a Villanova University professor specializing in how women affect politics, said as Twitter chatter carried on the argument of whether a stay-at-home mother works as hard as a career woman.

Since 1980, more women have voted in presidential elections than men, said Sara Grove, another expert on women voters at Shippensburg University.

Democratic leaders backed away from consultant Hilary Rosen for disparaging Ann Romney, wife of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, in a CNN interview as someone who “actually never worked a day in her life.” Bowing to pressure midday, Rosen issued a statement of apology acknowledging “poorly chosen” words.

President Obama told an Iowa television station that families are off limits in campaigns.

Tell it to the people who covered Sarah Palin, some of whom have been invited to dinner with Obama.

WHY APPLE SHAREHOLDERS should fear the government.

ROSEN/ROMNEY UPDATE: This Is What A Twitter Firestorm Looks Like.

MAINE: Democratic Legislator Calls for Cheney’s Execution. Amusingly, he’s the chair of the “moderate caucus.”

OFF MESSAGE: Biden: ‘War on women is real.’

TOM MAGUIRE: Dershowitz and the Zimmerman affidavit – crime in the passive voice. “The affidavit claims that Zimmerman ‘profiled’ Martin but does not describe the profiling. Walking from patio to patio rather than sticking to the sidewalk? Peering into windows? Being black? No guts at all.”

Is profiling a crime?