Why are daughters preferred to sons?

Apparently, based on "Why daughters might be better than sons," it's plain old self-interest — a prediction about who's more likely to take care of you.

The NYT finally gets around to those statements of Jonathan Gruber and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest cagily refrains from lying about lying.

I've updated my post from yesterday that criticized the NYT for not covering the statements the Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber had made about the consequences for citizens of states that failed to set up insurance exchanges. These statements were the talk of the internet yesterday because they ruined the spin on the purportedly nonsensical D.C. Circuit opinion in Halbig.

UPDATE: Searching for "Jonathan Gruber" at 9:42 a.m. Saturday morning — about 18 hours after I published this post — I see that the NYT put up an article "13 hours ago," dated  July 25, 2014, the same date as this post. The article, written by Robert Pear and Peter Baker is titled "Ex-Obama Aide’s Statements in 2012 Clash With Health Act Stance." Excerpt:

Mr. Gruber backed away from his comments on Friday. But the remarks embarrassed the White House and could help plaintiffs in court cases challenging the payment of subsidies in 36 states that rely on the federal exchange.

“I made a mistake in some 2012 speeches in describing the tax credits,” Mr. Gruber said in an email on Friday. “It is clear from all my writings and modeling that I did over this same time period that tax credits are assumed to be available in all states. This is the only sensible reading of the Affordable Care Act and is corroborated by every single person who helped craft the law.”...

The White House played down the video on Friday, saying that Mr. Gruber had made clear in friend-of-the-court briefs that he supports the administration’s interpretation.

“His views on this are pretty clear,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “I think that he described those remarks as a mistake. But I’d refer you to his explanation for why he said them. I think what is clear is that he, like Congress, intended for every eligible American to have access to tax credits that lower their health care costs, regardless of who is operating their marketplace.”

The inconsistency between what Gruber said in the friend-of-the-court briefs in the current litigation and what he said in 2012 doesn't persuade me that he "made a mistake" back then. In 2012, the effort was to pressure and frighten the politicians in the various states so that they would set up the exchanges. Now, after so many states resisted that pressure, the effort is to preserve the federal exchanges that were set up. At both points in time, Gruber said what served the goals of the program.

What's more likely, that he "made a mistake in some 2012 speeches" or that he's lying now?

The Press Secretary Earnest isn't lying, but if you look closely at each of his remarks, you can see that he seems to know he's making a series of technically true statements that avoid asserting that Gruber is telling the truth now when he calls the 2012 remarks "a mistake." 1. Gruber's "views... are pretty clear." Check. 2. Gruber called his remarks "a mistake." Absolutely true. That's exactly what Gruber said. 3. Gruber's overarching goal has been to get health insurance tax credits to people. Again, Earnest is correct —cagily correct — because lying now about making a mistake back then is exactly what serves that overarching goal, just as saying what he said in 2012 served that goal.

Lying is a means to an end, and one can steadfastly adhere to one's end while changing your statements as needed to serve that end. That's what liars do! To justify their behavior by pointing to their dedication to a single end is only to explain the motivation to lie. Yet that's what Josh Earnest expects us to swallow.

"Clinton still hasn’t unlocked the only thing that could really turn a campaign into a movement... authentic excitement among American women at her historic candidacy."

"There have been blips of real, viral enthusiasm... But for all the ersatz hashtags pushed by would-be grassroots support groups, it sure hasn’t happened yet," observes Ben Smith.

But... Clinton shouldn’t rely on inspiration for her candidacy. There is, after all, another way to win. Perhaps she can’t run a campaign modeled on the Obama 2008 movement. The alternative is Obama 2012 — a boring, grinding affair that sold a nascent economic recovery, scorched the Republican, and plodded to the White House.

I'm sick of inspiration and claims of historiosity. We should all be perfectly jaded by now. Inoculated. It's healthful and wholesome. And so what if watching the campaign day by day is "a boring, grinding affair"? That's a problem for Smith, running his buzz-dependent website, but it's a nonproblem for the rest of us. Think of the time you can save not reading the websites that try to make something out of the presidential campaign every damned day. What will you do with all that time? Instead of thinking about how what happened in the last hour might be history, you could, for example, read history. May I recommend the Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge?



Coolidge was boring. Good boring. Let's be boring for a change.



I want a boring President. Stop trying to excite me.

Stop talking about my heart.

Does Buzzfeed have a rule about the frequency of appealing to our heart? I was curious, after writing the last post and highlighting a Buzzfeed post-with-plagiarism called "7 Miracle Babies To Warm Your Heart Today."

Searching the Buzzfeed site for "heartbreaking," I'm guessed there is a rule against more than one usage per day. How many times can reader be expected to jump at the promise of a metaphorical collapse of a most vital organ?

I happened to click on "28 Men With Eating Disorders Confess Their Heartbreaking Secrets" and was pleased to see the author's name was Althouse... Spencer Althouse. Anyway, there was really only one secret: These men were anorexic and male.

Is your heart broken because these males had the additional pain of a problem usually associated with females? Maybe men should feel some special pain when they stoop to using a metaphor associated with females. Eh, Mr. Althouse?

Searching Buzzfeed for "heartwarming," I can see more than one on a single day, e.g., "Get Ready To Wipe Your Tears After You Watch This Heartwarming Short Film." I refused to get ready. Or to watch the short film. Leave my heart alone. And leave my eyes alone.

Can we get a moratorium on heart metaphors? It's not just Buzzfeed. It's everywhere. In a single short article at the NYT this month, I'm seeing: "That scene where the black girls were all talking just like old times in the bunk was heartwarming... 'My Taystee girl, you break my heart'... It’s heartbreaking, but having finally realized that Vee can’t be her mommy, she also looks more sane...." That's not sane.

The news in plagiarism.

1. Buzzfeed apologizes for 41 incidents of plagiarism found in a review of 500 posts written by Benny Johnson. Johnson, we're told, was a "creative force," but he was apparently not creative enough to reword his source material sufficiently to keep his job at Buzzfeed, which seemed to be to collect material from elsewhere and to present it in listicles like "7 Miracle Babies To Warm Your Heart Today."

2. The NYT surprised some people by muckraking plagiarism from 7 years ago by a Democrat, John Walsh, a U.S. Senator from Montana who's running this fall to keep the seat he got by appointment. The Times has what WaPo's Fact Checker calls a "nifty graphic" showing how much Walsh ripped off in his final paper for his master's degree from the United States Army War College.  Is the NYT choosing its investigative targets in a nonpartisan way or is this an effort to preempt an attack by his GOP challenger? When Walsh got his appointment to the seat Max Baucus had suddenly vacated, the NYT called it "a move Democrats hope will improve their chances of retaining the seat in what is expected to be a fiercely fought election this November." Baucus had been central in the Obamacare legislative process, and Walsh was an unknown but he had military credentials... that don't look so good anymore. (The WaPo Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler) examines Walsh's lame excuse — unfamiliarity with citation form — and gives it 4 Pinocchios.)

3. The media is so hot to see young females excel in science that it pushed a little girl so far into the limelight that her game of presenting a study of lionfish as her own original research caught the attention of the scientist who actually did the study and he spoke up. The girl's dad — one D. Albrey Arrington — was a courtesy co-author on that published study. And now a father's support of his daughter's science ambition doesn't look as NPR-ready as it did when NPR murmured admiringly over the little girl. Listen to the audio at that link. I had to turn it off a few seconds after the girl began speaking, because of the insufferable tone of her scoffing at the dumb scientists who were looking in the wrong places: "So I was like, 'Well, hey guys, what about the river?''" Ugh.

4. The New Yorker had a nice long piece on Joe Biden — "The Biden Agenda/Reckoning with Ukraine and Iraq, and keeping an eye on 2016" by Evan Osnos — and amidst all the admiration, it had to dredge up the old plagiarism stories. When he was a law student, Biden "was caught lifting five pages of a law-review paper but told administrators it was ignorance, not malice. ('I hadn’t been to class enough to know how to do citations.')" I wonder if Senator Walsh got the idea for his lame excuse from Biden. Having gotten caught committing plagiarism in law school, Biden should have taken care never ever to plagiarize again, but Biden is not the careful type. In 1987, while running for President (and simultaneously chairing the Senate committee that wrecked Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination), Biden lapsed from quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock to speaking as if Kinnock's childhood had been his own, "talking of 'my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after twelve hours.' There were no coal-mining ancestors.... He was getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and Congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden’s picture and accomplishments, including 'inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater' and 'Member, Rockettes (1968).'"

Word watch: pallid.

All of the following occurrences appeared within the last few days:

"The stakes are too high, the disappointment in some quarters — and some Supreme Court chambers — over the pallid outcome of the Supreme Court’s Fisher case too deep, the issue too mobilizing for it to fade away." Linda Greenhouse writing about affirmative action in the NYT.

"The potato farmers of Idaho are, I’m reasonably certain, distressingly pallid in appearance but no one is going around insisting that the French fry industry is going to collapse unless diversity increases there." From a discussion of the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley enterprises. 

"Jamie Dornan (the guy who's playing Christian Grey because they couldn't get Beyoncé) tries to give the pallid prose some weight by pausing significantly before informing us that his tastes are … singular, or telling Anastasia Steele that he'd like … to know more about her." A discussion of the "50 Shades of Grey" trailer in The Atlantic.

"And in the leading roles of Will Shakespeare and his muse and lover, Viola De Lesseps, Tom Bateman and Lucy Briggs-Owen are so vibrantly engaging that they make Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie look like a pair of pallid milksops." From a Chicago Tribune review of a stage version of "Shakespeare in Love."

"Pallid dudes surrounded by dorm-room décor rhapsodize over their first console and the discovery of game-playing soul mates." A NYT article about a movie about the history of video games. 

"The whole your eyes have known, your pallid cheeks have shown; for oh! the swelling tide no bravest heart could hide, when your dear mother died." Catholic News reports on a riddle poem published pseudonymously by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. 

"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry, I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological times via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?" The U.K. Independent published that item from the 1910 diary of the naturalist WNP Barbellion.

"'The long days do wear on you,' says a pallid man named Stephen McMurray who is researching the population dynamics of sponges. He dips a spoon into a cup of instant noodles and looks through a window to the sea floor below." Undersea science at GulfNews.com.

As close as we get to Philippe Petit in Madison, Wisconsin.

Now, nobody else do that. You won't look as good, and your movie won't be as good, so there's really no point. Officially, I disapprove, but I disapprove more of the local media giving this thing air, especially if it means that in the end we get some stupid fencing or netting blocking the view.

Meanwhile, long ago...

Everybody's talking about Jonathan Gruber today, so let's see what The New York Times has.

"Mr. Gruber, 46, hates traveling without his wife and three children, so he is tracking the case from his home in Lexington, Mass. There he crunches numbers and advises other states on health care, in between headbanging at Van Halen concerts with his 15-year-old son and cuddling with the family’s eight parrots. (His wife, Andrea, volunteers at a bird rescue center.)"

Oh... that was back in March 2012, in a piece called "Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law" or as it comes up in the site search: "Jonathan Gruber, Health Care's Mr. Mandate."

So bang your head and cuddle your parrots... or go somewhere else to find out what's up with Gruber:

Studying summer flowers...

... thinking about which ones to cut and bring inside.

ADDED: I like the way Meade framed the picture to include the tree tops, and it made me want to look up the old post where the 2 trees in front of the house got planted. That was back on November 20, 2009, the first fall Meade lived here with me:



The big one is a New Horizon elm, a disease-resistant cultivar created at the University of Wisconsin.

Also from back then: here's what one commenter called a "Nice picture of Meade doing manly outdoor work":

"For 123 years, our housing policy has been to house students by their anatomy..."

But the federal government's position says it's sex discrimination in violation of Title IX not to accede to the student's self-identification.

George Fox, a Quaker school southwest of Portland, asked the Department of Education for a religious exemption from Title IX....

“I think the fact that Jayce is choosing to stay at George Fox shows the university community has been supportive of him during his whole experience here,” [said Rob Felton, a university spokesman.] “We may have a difference of opinion on appropriate housing, but all indications are he has been treated well by his peers, professors and our student life staff.”...

“I want other transgender and L.G.B.T.Q. people to see that they can have a place in faith-based education,” [Jaycen] said. “The fact that I’m here is proof of that.”

So, one question is whether Title IX should determine what policy schools can have and another is whether there should be religion-based exemptions.

I miss Jill Abramson!

Is it just me, or has the NYT become boring since the departure of Jill Abramson?

No need to tell me that you've never liked the NYT. I'm trying to focus on the change since they ousted Abramson last May. Remember, just before she was fired last April, there was an incident, reported in Politico, in which she'd "called Dean Baquet into her office to complain" that the NYT "wasn’t 'buzzy' enough," she blamed Baquet, and "Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom."

In the ensuing power struggle, Baquet got Abramson's job as executive editor, and now we are seeing the results: Not buzzy enough!

I go to the NYT site every day, looking for things to read and, I hope, to blog. I'm finding myself skimming over the front page and then leaving. I can't pinpoint what was there before that pulled me in — perhaps it was overly skewed toward aging, affluent, white females like me — but I'm not going in and hanging around.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

BTW, if you keep owning up to 'aging' then we're gonna have to revoke your status as Baby Boomer. Keep this in mind: we never age!

Here's my take on that, from last year, when I was younger (and so were you):

A conservative who hates Ayn Rand — because he loves Christianity — gives 4 reasons — nice reasons — why other conservatives love her.

Eschewing the usual insults about the heartlessness and greed of Rand-lovers, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry lists:

1. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy.... A figure like John Galt reaches into deep places inside yourself, and produces intense feelings....

2. It's possible to dissociate a book from its politics... as the conservative grows up and reads more (and better) conservative books, her politics hopefully separate a bit from Rand's extreme and insane Objectivism, even as she retains a great fondness for the books.

3. There are too few works of art in popular culture that have conservative values...

4. Rand's work does get at a crucial truth that almost everyone misses.... Free enterprise is key to human flourishing.... Most defenses of free market capitalism are typically made in a utilitarian lens.... The whole truth takes into account that part of our human nature is a deep drive to find meaning through work, productivity, and even creativity, and that the free enterprise system enables this.... This means that, much like democracy, capitalism is a deeply morally righteous system. This discourse is almost never heard in contemporary society, certainly not in the realm of culture... And I think this is a key reason why so many experience [Rand's] books as a revelation, despite all their shortcomings.

"So in the past I've been quite tempted by the idea that perhaps I'm not a woman after all."

"I mean, I'm masculine in all sorts of ways — I am ambitious, logical, aggressive, strong, and highly competitive. And I'm certainly not silly, frivolous, dainty, weak, or overly emotional ... Oh dear. That's where I run into a major problem, isn't it? When I start listing traits of mine that I'd call masculine, they're always positive. They're points of pride. Whereas when I list traits I lack that I'd call feminine, they're negatives. It seems I can't consider my own masculinity or lack of femininity without relying on some of the worst and most pernicious sex-based stereotypes. This suggests to me that the enterprise itself is suspect...."

From "Why I’m Still a Butch Lesbian," by Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart.

ADDED: Urquhart doesn't say use the word "transgender," but I think she's making an argument to young people who may be overeager to see themselves as transgender. Pay attention to the last 3 sentences of the linked essay. And look at this cartoon at her webcomic Tiny Butch Adventures.

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm frontpaging myself here:

Personally, I find it hard to believe that so many women waste so much time thinking about the extent to which they are feminine. What difference does it make? You are who you are. Isn't that valuable? Unless you have character flaws — and there are flaws that are stereotypically feminine — why should you care or seek to do anything about it? It's like paying attention to whether someone else is taller than you… except that there's room to fake it and to try to be what you are not.

I do think women can be manipulated and bamboozled by others who push them to be more "empathetic," and it's very important to learn how not to get played. But that's another reason to forget about trying to seem more aligned with the stereotype. You make yourself vulnerable to those who would exploit you by making you feel that you need to be kinder or more nurturing.

"Let's give Putin a clear choice: Either he can continue subventing and enabling the bloodletting in eastern Ukraine..."

"... or we can expose the enormous global network of offshore bank accounts, dummy companies, and real estate holdings that belong to him and his criminal elite. A mafia state should be treated as such. And information should once again be weaponized as it was during the Cold War. Moscow has already gotten a head start, by leaking compromised telephone calls between members of our State Department and between Eurocrats and NATO-allied state officials."

Writes Michael Weiss in Foreign Policy.

ADDED: There's also this from lawprof Ruth Wedgwood: "Russia’s operatives could be taken to the International Criminal Court for their role in the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine. Even ICC skeptics in America ought to be open to this approach." 

"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.))

Judge who had admittedly had an affair with the wife of a man in a child support case that was before his court...

... is protected from a lawsuit by the doctrine of judicial immunity.

From the 6th Circuit opinion (PDF):

The doctrine of judicial immunity exists “not for the protection or benefit of a malicious or corrupt judge” but for “the benefit of the public, whose interest it is that the judges should be at liberty to exercise their functions with independence and without fear of consequence.”

Judicial immunity doesn't apply to "nonjudicial actions, i.e., actions not taken in the judge’s judicial capacity," but the acts that affected the man (Robert King) — things that happened in the child support case — were judicial.

On appeal, King argues that Judge McCree’s non-judicial acts deprived him of due process. Specifically, King argues that he was “personally and directly deprived of [the constitutional guarantee of due process] every time Judge [Wade] McCree and Mott engaged in any extrajudicial contact.” Appellant Br. 21. King also argues: “Plaintiff’s due process rights were violated when McCree and Mott had sex in chambers and elsewhere, when they spent time together outside the courtroom, discussed and decided how to sentence Plaintiff for his late child support payments.” Ibid. Before the district court, King identified other allegedly non-judicial acts by Judge McCree that deprived him of due process, including: flirting with Mott from the bench on May 21, engaging in ex parte communications with Mott, giving Mott his business card, having lunch with Mott, “hav[ing] sex repeatedly” with Mott, having sex with Mott in his chambers, giving Mott $6,000, secretly discussing with Mott using jail to loosen King’s “purse strings,” and instructing Mott not to disclose the affair in order to avoid “deep shit.” r. 20 n. 16. At oral argument, King’s counsel argued that the depth and number of these non-judicial acts, as well as the intimacy of Judge McCree’s personal relationship with Mott, makes this case exceptional....

These acts, though often reprehensible, did not directly involve King....