Vin Suprynowicz

SPECIAL TO THE SHOTGUN NEWS

Imagine you’re driving to visit relatives in another state, this summer. A cop pulls you over and asks to see your driver’s license. Then, even though your license is current, he cuffs you and hauls you off to the calaboose. Your crime? You were driving on a license from your home state; you neglected to get a new and separate drivers license, in advance, for each state you were planning to pass through.

Ridiculous? Of course it is. Article IV of the Constitution stipulates that “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state,” and Congress is empowered to make laws describing how “such acts, records and proceedings shall be proved.”

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Congressmen Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich. have sent a letter to an estimated 52 insurance companies asking them to provide detailed information on their company-funded executive conferences and retreats, as well executive pay for individuals making more than $500,000 per year including salaries, bonuses, stock options, pensions, and percs — both executives and for board members — Fox News reports.

The congressmen also want data on the firms’ annual sales, net income, and dividend payments from 2003 to 2008, including detailed profit breakdowns for all health insurance products the companies have sold.

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A key contention of President Obama and the congressional sponsors of health insurance “reform” is that a health insurance “exchange” — allowing consumers to choose between private health plans with premiums artificially jacked-up by government mandates, and a government program with artificially low premiums — would increase competition.

In fact, “It would reduce competition by driving lower-cost private health plans out of business,” reports Michael Cannon, co-author of the book “Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It,” in an Aug. 6 Cato Institute paper titled “Fannie Med? Why a ‘Public Option’ Is Hazardous to Your Health.”

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One point that probably deserves further mention about last week’s Dead Kennedy Funeral Parade was the behavior of the press, which wept and moaned and gnashed its collective teeth with nary a soul saying “Enough, already,” as though the corpse of a Pharaoh was headed for its final hoedown with the sun god. I’m surprised they didn’t decide to embalm the guy so people could troop past and touch the yellowed cadaver like they’ve been doing with Vlad “The Impaler” Lenin for the past 70 years.

It was all further evidence that statism has become something close to a national religion, the subtext being that great things can be accomplished only through the giant wealth transfer schemes now underway in Washington. Oh, woe is us! Who will loot our paychecks now?!

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The most revealing moment in Edward “Ted” Kennedy’s political life came on Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his presidential challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a “giveaway” question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, “What color is grass?”

Roger Mudd asked: “Why do you want to be president?”

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For her birthday I bought the brunette a cat door.

I realize that on the list of great romantic gifts — the one with “surprise getaway to Tahiti” and “romantic cruise down the Seine” near the top — this entry ranks somewhere down near “cordless electric drill.” But if you’d spent months having to get up twice a night to let various feline companions in or out of the sliding glass door as they bugled their urgent need to go hunt moths in the moonlight, or whatever the heck it is they do out there, you might be a little less hasty to condemn.

Not that the gift actually did any good. As it turns out, the Fur People — both the normally intelligent female and the one generally referred to as “the dork” — are clearly convinced this little swinging plastic door is some kind of demonic Kitty Guillotine. They draw away from it, hissing and cowering, and now insist on being let out the (conventional) door at the far end of the living room, instead. No good deed goes unpunished.

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There are thrift shops in town with signs up, seeking to buy Michael Jackson LPs and other “related material.”

They do this because people have been coming in since the “King of Pop’s” untimely demise, asking to BUY Michael Jackson stuff. I understand.

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In a free market, we’re so familiar with how prices are set — how manufacturers decide how much of a thing to make and what they can afford to pay for labor and raw materials — that we rarely even think about it.

Set salaries too high and charge too little for the product, go bankrupt. Pay too little, your unskilled workers can’t do the job.

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Traveling the television talk-show circuit this weekend, Barack Obama’s aides and advisers tested the waters for likely public response should the new president completely gut his campaign pledge to middle-class Americans that “You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.”

Mr. Obama has already signed tax hikes on alcohol and cigarettes, with no exemptions for the middle class. But the aides indicated the president now contemplates going much further.

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Our hummingbird has returned.

She’s a black-chinned, I believe, not the world’s most colorful model. But she has a distinctive habit of hovering down to look us right in the face, one at a time, as we sit out in the back yard to watch the sunset. “Checking in,” we call it.

Perhaps she, too, wants to make sure we’re still the same strange creatures who always maintain the feeder full of sugar water. (Never use honey.)

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