These days, I welcome almost any expression of bi-partisanship in Washington, even if it’s cheap grandstanding that accomplishes almost nothing.  In today’s offering, proud Americans across the political spectrum are busying themselves expressing righteous outrage over something we can all agree on:  U.S. Olympians should not be wearing uniforms made in China.

Reports the AP:

Republicans and Democrats railed Thursday about the U.S. Olympic Committee’s decision to dress the U.S. team in Chinese manufactured berets, blazers and pants while the American textile industry struggles economically with many U.S. workers desperate for jobs.

 Sen. Harry Reid, ever the patriot, suggested they should the just burn the stuff:

“I am so upset. I think the Olympic committee should be ashamed of themselves. I think they should be embarrassed. I think they should take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile and burn them and start all over again,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference on taxes.

Reid goes on to say that “[i]f they have to wear nothing but a singlet that says USA on it, painted by hand, that’s what they should wear.” I don’t know about that, Senator Reid. Nonetheless, we sure do appreciate this burst of patriotism.

It does not seem that long ago that I’d spend summer afternoons sitting at my kitchen table scouring an actual paper copy of Newsday for baseball box scores and tracking this statistic and that. But it was. In fact, it was really long ago.  This unhappy grim truth dawned on me tonight when I turned on the #ASG.  Don’t get me wrong: seeing the best players on one field is still #surreal – it’s just that #Idon’tactuallyrecognizemostofthem, especially the ones who aren’t #NewYorkYankees.   #Sandoval? #Gonzalez? There’s a #Fielder named “Prince”? #What?

All of them look like they’re in junior high school. To make matters worse, @GeorgeBrett looks like he could star in a #Cailis commercial, Derek Jeter is a DiMaggio-like elder, Rickey Henderson was hitting weak pop-ups last night in the #lame celebrity softball game against Jenny Finch, and my boyhood hero Don Mattingly – get this – is managing…the freaking Los Angeles Dodgers. (Come to think of it, to my kids, @DonMattingly will be older and more distant than @MickeyMantle was to me.)

 As my teenage nieces might tweet: #Sigh.

@PabloPicasso once said that “Youth has no age.” I have no idea what this means, but I’ll contemplate that while I watch these kids, some of whom were my daughter’s age (under 3) #whenIwasincollege, play the #ASG. #Awesome.

John Fabian Witt, a Yale law professor and law historian, wrote a fabulous and insightful piece for Balkaniztion.com that is a must-read on the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling.  (It’s so good that I am posting it now, even though it’s about a week old.) Based on Roberts’s training and intellectual lineage, Witt writes,

“it should be no surprise that the chief justice had an intuitive feel for what he called the “functional approach” of the Act’s individual mandate as the equivalent of a tax makes perfect sense. Roberts’s practical evaluation of the Act seems quite plausibly to have been the result of professional training and mentoring that allowed him to draw on a long history, going back eighty years to the beginnings of a remarkable line of American jurists yoked together by relations of mentorship and professional connections.”

Witt’s article is eye-opening reading for those of us who have spent the last week or so scratching our heads over the ruling and how conservatives won with Justice Kennedy but lost with Justice Roberts.

As much as Republican campaigns may salivate at making 2012 a “referendum” on Obamacare, the SCOTUS ruling is a boost for President Obama.  There’s nothing scientific about this observation, but the President (perhaps temporarily) enjoys a timely new gloss of competence.  He can now make the argument to voters that he promised “transformative” things and, whatever the political consequences, stuck by the rhetoric by seeing through truly “landmark” legislation that had eluded liberals for so long. For a President defined by disappointment, failure and pettiness, the defense of Obamacare – now with a blessing, of sorts, from Justice Roberts – will put some much-needed wind in the sails.  To borrow from a friend of mine who is a non-affiliated voter and my go-to Obama-barometer: “He seems like less of a loser.”