LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA:

Related: George Will: Obama’s Never-Mind Presidency.
Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.”

Related: 54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues. “Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.”

LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Part-Time Jobs Up, Full-Time Jobs Down. “This is the ObamaCare effect. Obama’s health care law incentivizes employers to drop workers to below 30 hours per week in order to avoid incurring liabilities or fines. Or, if the employer is near the 50 employee mark, to trim down to below 50 to escape ObamaCare altogether.”

We heard a lot about “McJobs” during the George H.W. Bush recovery. Nobody seems to be using that term much under Obama.

THIS IS GOOD: More and more Americans are becoming concealed-carry permit holders. “We’re only halfway through 2013, and it already looks like plenty of states are on track for their biggest permitting years on record.”

"For those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected never know" -- note found in the pocket of a dead Marine, Khe Sanh, 1968.

AN INVITATION TO FRAUD
Over at NRO, Yuval Levin pursues a basic issue raised by the Obama administration’s delay of Obamacare’s employer mandate, announced this past Tuesday. Following up on the final version of a 600-page regulation released on Friday, Levin observes:

In 2014, applicants can more or less be deemed eligible for subsidies in the state-run exchanges if they say they are eligible. If it has no external sources of information regarding what insurance employers offer, the rule states, “the exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan and eligibility for qualifying coverage in an employer-sponsored plan for the benefit year for which coverage is requested without further verification.” In fact, the exchanges are not only released from the obligation to verify whether applicants are eligible for employer coverage, they are also released from the obligation to confirm applicants’ statements regarding their household incomes before providing them with what is supposed to be an income-based benefit.

Levin adds:
Opening the door wide open to fraud could well increase the number of people in the exchanges, but it will also make that number far less meaningful—casting a shadow over whatever is achieved by the enrollment effort set to launch in the fall. It will also, needless to say, increase the cost of the exchange subsidies. The administration is clearly worried enough about enrollment to take that risk and bear that cost. It seems to be operating under the assumption that the way to secure Obamacare’s future is to get as many people as possible into the system and receiving subsidies. Maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong, but they certainly seem increasingly desperate.