"Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male."

"But the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. From 'The Searchers' to 'The Godfather,' from 'The Sopranos' to 'The Americans,' what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form."

That sounds so right wing! Except the "deconstructing" part.

From "Red Dead Redemption 2 Is True Art/The season’s best blockbuster isn’t a TV show or movie. It’s a video game" by Peter Suderman in The New York Times.

The other day, I tried to watch this video, "Red Dead Redemption 2: 13 Things We Love About It (And 8 Things We Don't)"...



... but I had to stop because the enthusiasm of the players was just too... I don’t want to say annoying... but just irrelevant to my life.

I first encountered that video not at the NYT but at "South Park: All the Red Dead Redemption 2 References," which I was reading because someone I know told me he was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and the only thing I knew about it was it was the game everyone in South Park was playing when Al Gore was trying to get them interested in fighting global warming.

"Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admit in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited to State-Run Exchanges."

Peter Suderman shows and explains why the D.C. Circuit's opinion in Halbig makes sense (despite efforts of Obamacare supporters to portray it as nonsensical).

Here's what Gruber said (and there's video at the link):

What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.

The whole point was to coerce the states to set up the exchanges, and the consequences were supposed to be dire. That was the point. Now, the courts are asked to read the statute not to result in those consequences because they're unthinkably harsh. Congress couldn't have meant that.

Fix it, courts.



(The illustration is "Fix it, Daddy," by Frank Kelly Freas, a cover for Astounding Science Fiction, October 1953.)

AND: Remember, the original ACA had the states losing all their Medicaid funding if they declined to participate in the Medicaid extension. The mindset was: Make them an offer they can't refuse. (In NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice Roberts limited the incentive to the Medicaid extension so that it wouldn't be coercion, because if it's coercion it's not within the spending power. (Congress may attach conditions to money it offers the states, but the states must have a choice, and Congress lacks constitutional power to simply dictate that states carry out a federal program.))