The new young people, who vaguely remember the 2008 election which was "something about Obama saying we needed a change."

A quote from the opening paragraph of a NYT article about the kids who'll be voting for President for the first time this year.

Who are these people, the super-young voters? They're not the same people who went moony over the "Hope" poster.

“The concern for Obama, and the opportunity for Romney, is in the 18- to 24-year-olds who don’t have the historical or direct connection to the campaign or the movement of four years ago,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics. “We’re also seeing that these younger members of this generation are beginning to show some more conservative traits. It doesn’t mean they are Republican. It means Republicans have an opportunity.”

An opportunity. Think they'll blow it?

"Recently, however, I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle."

"It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something – something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true."

Anderson Cooper comes out.

What do you think of Cooper's statement?
	Sexuality should be kept private, and it really doesn't have anything to do with his journalism.
	If you don't come out earlier, it's more dignified to act like you think it should be private.
	It was wrong to be in the closet, so... better late than never.
	He soberly balances factors, and his view of the balance changed. I respect that.
	He's a gay hero. I congratulate him for his courage.
	We already knew, so this is meaningless.
pollcode.com free polls

"When I asked Rebecca Traister what hashtag she would suggest as an alternative to #havingitall..."

"... she came back with: #StumblingTowardParity,‬ #PushingForBetter,‬ #StillWorkingOnIt,‬ #GuysThisIsYourProblemToo,‬ #DemandingMoreForMoreOfUs,‬ #Feminism‬."

How about #reality?

Tweeting with Taranto.

@jamestaranto That was a rounded-off number, kinda like saying you've got 25 more years to do affirmative action.

— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse) July 2, 2012

"There were other science fiction writers, and we loved them, just as there were baseball players besides Willie Mays and rock groups besides the Beatles..."

"... but we loved him best, and when I try to remember why, I have to conclude, proudly, that it wasn’t because his alien worlds were so magazine-cover thrilling, or his dystopian predictions so convincing, or his speculative inventions so original — they were, but plenty of others’ were too."

"Johnson is incapable of bullsh*tting."

The quote in the post title, which appears at 3:34 in that video, comes from a GQ Magazine article from last November titled "Is This the Sanest Man Running for President?"

"I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically."

I just said, to Meade, after he misread the title of the last post as something I'd written, when it was a quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial. (Not that the Wall Street Journal was calling anybody a genius. It was characterizing what other people were saying about John Roberts, and, in my view overstating it.)

I decided to check my impulsive assertion. Have I ever called anybody a "genius" (without sarcasm)?

On February 15, 2008, I called Jane Fonda "some kind of media genius... a media genius — a media whore." And I called Eve Ensler "genius" for thinking up a play — "The Vagina Monogues" — that's so completely easy to produce and perform — "3 women sit on stools and get to read their lines off index cards."

On June 28, 2001, Howard Kurtz had called Mitt Romney a "boring genius," and I restated that as "a genius at being boring."

On March 14, 2012, I called Rush Limbaugh a "media genius," but not "enough of a genius" to have deliberately set off the Sandra Fluke flap for publicity purposes.

On December 30, 2011, I said "The guy's a genius!" about James Franco, but that was complete sarcasm.

October 14, 2011, I say this about Steve Jobs: "Here we are, mourning our loss of a genius, and the genius (apparently) fell for the monumental stupidity of 'alternative' medicine." I'm only referring to his reputation as a genius, and I'm calling him stupid.

June 14, 2011: I say "The idiot is a genius!" about Sarah Palin.

January 24, 2008: I refer to Dolly Parton as a "pop culture genius."

I see I need to amend my original quote: I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically or in the specific category of genius: media genius.

ADDED: Contemplate the possibility that John Roberts is a genius — a media genius.

"The commentary on John Roberts's solo walk into the Affordable Care Act wilderness is converging on a common theme: The Chief Justice is a genius."

"All of a sudden he is a chessmaster, a statesman, a Burkean minimalist, a battle-loser but war-winner, a Daniel Webster for our times."

So begins the Wall Street Journal editorial, overstating the convergence and — big surprise — setting up a critique of the Chief. His approach to the taxing power, the editors say, is new and scarily unconstrained. They're disturbed that Congress can configure a tax that shapes behavior that it could not simply command, and yet they admit — as they must — that tax law does that all the time. Congress can't compel you to go into debt to buy a house, but you'll pay less taxes if you have a mortgage interest deduction. Congress can't require you to get married, but single taxpayers get stuck with higher tax rates. Why is this new area of taxing so shocking?

"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy."

From a list of 35 aphorisms about lying.

But none of the aphorisms on the list is the aphorism I am looking for. You know the feeling that there is an aphorism that's already out there for something you're trying to say in aphorism form. You can say it briefly, but not in the words that must be in the aphorism.

Here's as close as I can get to saying what seems to me to be a rough paraphrase for a reasonably well-known aphorism: He who lies about small things will lie about big things. Or: Little lies foretell big lies.

What I'm looking for is the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" of lying.

Sources tell Jan Crawford that Chief Justice Roberts really did switch sides.

The CBS reporter heard from "two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations."

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law...

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold....

"A week ago, 36% said the court was doing a good or an excellent job. That’s down to 33% today."

That's Rasmussen's new poll, which also has 28% saying the Court is doing a "poor job," which is "up 11 points over the past week." And "56% believe justices pursue their own political agenda... up five points from a week ago."

Thirty-seven percent (37%) now believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, while 22% think it's too conservative. A week ago, public opinion was much more evenly divided:  32% said it was too liberal and 25% said too conservative.

What we'll never know is what these numbers would have been if the case had gone the other way — if Chief Justice Roberts hadn't found that tax loophole.  (Am I the first person to wisecrack that Roberts found a tax loophole?)

I'm guessing that the opinion shift would have been greater if the Court had done the more dramatic thing and taken the whole health-care reform down, as the dissenting conservative justices wanted to do. For one thing, the media would have gone nuts attacking the Court. We do know that, I think, because they pre-condemned the Court pretty severely on the mere anticipation of the decision that was not to be.

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral gets 4-and-a-half stars on Yelp.

"How can you not give a Church 5-stars - maybe it's just the Catholic guilt in me but if you go to Church, even if only once a year, you should give it 5-stars :-)"

I never noticed Yelp had ratings on churches. Fascinating. I was Googling St. Patrick's Old Cathedral — which is in Little Italy in New York, prompting one Yelpist to say "it's funny when the patron saint of another country is in the wrong ethnic neighborhood." She gives 4-and-a-half stars, and perhaps that half-star deduction is for ethnicity mismatching.

The Romneys — 30 of them, on summer vacation — do the Romney Olympics, family meetings, chores from the "chore wheel," and talent shows on the sage that "Papa" (Mitt) built.

WaPo reports from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire:

The Romney Olympics have long included a mini-triathlon of biking, swimming and running that pits Mitt and his five sons and their wives against one another. But after Mitt once nearly finished last, behind a daughter-in-law who had given birth to her second child a couple of months earlier, the ultra-competitive and self-described unathletic patriarch expanded the games to give himself a better shot.

Now they also compete to see who can hang onto a pole the longest, who can throw a football the farthest and who can hammer the most nails into a board in two minutes....

By day, the Romneys kayak and water ski — one sport at which Mitt excels — play tennis and basketball, stage a “home-run derby” and horse around on a slip-and-slide. Most of the grandchildren (there are now 18) put on a talent show on a stage that Papa, as they call Mitt, constructed in the backyard....

At night, the adults gather for family meetings, with each evening focused on a frank and full discussion of a different son’s career moves and parenting worries.

Each member of the family picks a daily chore from a “chore wheel,” so as to share cleaning tasks evenly....

That's so damned wholesome, I don't know what to say. I'm considering something politically cranky like: Imagine how the media would fall over themselves describing the perfection of Obama if his family had a vacation with even one third this much family-osity. Eh. Too predictable! Make your own jokes.

"I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called."

Wrote Fania Pascal, back in the 1930:

I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

That's quoted in Harry G. Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit." Frankfurt aptly wonders if that really happened like that:

It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings — so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

"Daybreak Sunday found 789,358 in the Washington region still without power..."

"... facing another sweltering day and the prospect of returning to work Monday before electricity is restored to their homes."

Seems like an occasion to make political jokes, but I'll refrain.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz offers to "make a deal on this email thing."

Email thing. That's the way this woman addresses me (in email received this morning). She's referring to the thing of her sending fundraising email on Saturdays.

But I'm doing it because the stakes this year are so incredibly high....

So let's make a deal:

You pitch in $3, or really whatever you can, before our critical FEC fundraising deadline tonight to help those Democrats out...

And I promise you, this will be the last email you get from me today.

Comedy. It's what's for breakfast.