Charles Krathammer has a column about why Chief Justice Roberts ruled the way he did:

Roberts, custodian of the court, acutely aware that the judiciary's arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held. Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, "deferred stable settlement of the issue" by the normal electoral/legislative process....

There's only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That's undoubtedly what Roberts is telling the nation: Your job, not mine. I won't make it easy for you.

"Health Care ruling sends wave of relief through Mass." is the lead headline this morning on the Boston Globe Web site, over a news article that begins:

The Supreme Court's health care decision sent a wave of relief through Massachusetts that the benefits of President Obama's landmark law will remain intact: hundreds of millions of dollars promised for the state Medicaid program, hospitals, community health centers, and other providers.

Thousands of consumers also can continue to count on federal aid to help pay for their prescription drugs, young adults up to age 26 can remain on their parents' insurance plans, and thousands more Massachusetts residents will get help paying their insurance premiums.

Having now read the full opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, as the ObamaCare Supreme Court case is formally known, I think Chief Justice Roberts really did an excellent job in fashioning the introduction to the decision, explaining in very accessible language, as he put it, "In our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder.... Today the restrictions on government power foremost in many Americans' minds are likely to be affirmative prohibitions, such as contained in the Bill of Rights. These affirmative prohibitions come into play, however, only where the Government possesses authority to act in the first place. If no enumerated power authorizes Congress to pass a certain law, that law may not be enacted, even if it would not violate any of the express prohibitions in the Bill of Rights or elsewhere in the Constitution."

A few initial observations on the ObamaCare ruling:

1. New media beats old media. CNN's initial report, that the law was struck down, was incorrect. More reliable was an independent site called Scotusblog, which reported 866,000 visitors tuned in to its live blog of the proceedings.

2. Though the decision will widely be portrayed as a victory for President Obama — his signature legislative accomplishment was ratified as constitutional by a Supreme Court majority that included George W. Bush-appointed chief justice John Roberts — it isn't necessarily clear that it will be a victory. By calling the mandate a tax, the court made an official ruling that President Obama had violated his 2008 campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year. And the ruling also keeps ObamaCare alive as a political issue. A ruling that struck down the law might have energized Obama supporters. This ruling may make the law's opponents even more determined to elect a Republican president and Congress so that they can repeal the law or, failing that, defund it.

The attempted mortgage eminent-domain grab that has been covered on this site here, here and here has taken a new twist. After the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association voiced "very serious concerns" about the plan to a reporter from Bloomberg News, the chairman of Mortgage Resolution Partners, Steven Gluckstern, responded:

"The Washington lobbyists for Wall Street are opposed even though they agree it has merits to help average Americans who are struggling," Gluckstern wrote. "We'll take the advice of legal scholars over the comments of Wall Street's lobbyists any day."

A front-page Wall Street Journal article on News Corp.'s plan to spin off its publishing assets reports, "The publishing company could be worth around $3 billion...according to analyst estimates."

Wow. News Corp. bought Dow Jones five years ago, in 2007, for about $5.6 billion. It then sold the index business for about $600 million [Update and correction: $600 million was the domestic index business; the foreign index business brought another $300 million, for a total of $900 million] and wrote-down the value of Dow Jones by $2.8 billion.

The July-August issue of Harvard Magazine carries an excerpt of a book by a Stanford professor, Robert N. Proctor, published by the University of California Press, titled Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.

Among the reasons cited in the excerpt that cigarettes have caused a "holocaust" and ought to be outlawed is that "smoking is estimated to cause more than 20,000 spontaneous abortions — perhaps as many as seven times that."

My column this week was about how it's now open season on the tax returns of right-of-center billionaires. The examples were the Koch brothers, Ronald Lauder, and Sheldon Adelson. The latest case, news of which broke after the column ran, is Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.

The New York Times reports that the attorney general of New York, Eric Schneiderman, has begun an investigation and issued subpoenas aimed at the Starr Foundation, a $1.3 billion foundation chaired by Maurice Greenberg. The foundation supported the Chamber of Commerce, which supports tort reform and other causes not beloved by most left-wing Democrats.

Andrew Tisch has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that suggests using numbers rather than the more innocuous sounding "trillion" when speaking about the federal debt: "let's ban the word 'trillion.' It's a unit of measurement neither understood nor appreciated. If we must use the number, we should give it its proper due. Write it out with all its zeros—all 12 of them. So $15.8 trillion would be $15,800,000,000,000."

Mr. Tisch doesn't mention it, but there's a John F. Kennedy anecdote that supports his point. Kennedy's naval aide, Tazewell Shepard, recalled, "I remember, very early in his administration, when he opened one of those reports, and he looked at those expenditures which were reported in millions with tenths. He, with his usual colorful language, said, 'I want every zero put in there. I want those guys to realize they're spending money!'"

Fifty years later, we've gone from millions to trillions, but they're still spending money!

Buried toward the bottom of a Harvard Magazine article about the faculty complaining about the end to a Harvard-provided financial planning benefit comes this news about Harvard President Drew Faust:

About a month before the meeting, it became known that Faust would stand for election to the board of Staples, Inc., perhaps becoming the first sitting Harvard president to join a corporate board. (She would earn about $300,000 per year for her service; her 2010 Harvard salary totaled $714,000, plus $161,000 of other compensation, according to the University's tax return.)

Good for her to get some private-sector experience and exposure, I suppose. And one can understand her need to moonlight for extra compensation — those thrifty Yankees up at Harvard are paying her barely more than what an electrician at the Metropolitan Opera earns.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest weekly column is up at the Hoover Institution Web site. He writes, "The FDA is a bureaucratic monopolist. Currently, in the name of protecting the American public, the FDA represents a major systematic threat to drug innovation and public health. It should be stripped of its power to block the entry of new drugs and medical devices into general use."

Martin Indyk and Michael O'Hanlon, two Democratic-leaning foreign policy scholars at the Brookings Institution, have an op-ed piece in USA Today that says America is weaker now than it was before President Obama took office: "Four straight years of trillion-dollar deficits, even if not primarily Obama's fault, leave the country weaker than when he stepped into the Oval Office," they write. Indyk served in the Clinton administration as ambassador to Israel and as assistant secretary of state.

The eminent domain mortgage grab that was covered in earlier posts at this site here and here has now hit the New York Times via a column by a professor of economics and finance at Yale, Robert Shiller. "This is common sense ...We must hope this effort succeeds," Professor Shiller writes.

First the Koch brothers, then Ronald Lauder, now Sheldon Adelson. My weekly column is about how President Obama and his allies at The New York Times are targeting politically active right-of-center billionaires for tax scrutiny. Please check it out at the New York Sun here or at Reason here or at Newsmax here.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which is part of the Department of the Interior, announced that it had released a new survey about sea level rise linked to global climate change. The report shows the sea level rising between Boston and Cape Hatteras, but, over a 40 or 60 year period, shows either no change or the ocean lowering on the Pacific Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic Coast North of Boston and South of Cape Hatteras.

The Boston Globe has apocalyptic coverage.