Robert.mccowen

• Say this for Halbig trooferism: the layers of bad arguments justify the Buzzfeed format. 
• Jeb Lund had to read “Paul Ryan”‘s “book”, so the least you can do is click through and get some good laffs. 
• Austerity is a catastrophe. 
• Bob McDonnell trial or Hugh Grant movie?
• Do young people like America’s great progressive hope Rand Paul? (SPOLIER: No.)
• Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party.

Shorter Verbatim some Economist hack, on The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism: “Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.”

Similarly, there were recent news accounts in which journalists are all victims, and ISIS terrorists all villains. Why can’t we get some fair-and-balanced reporting on this morally complex issue?

Between 1935 and 1945, photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration documented the nation and its people as it suffered through and emerged from the Great Depression. 170,000 images remain. Yale University has now placed them online for your exploration and you can even explore by county, which is incredibly awesome. Have fun!!

More here.

“Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers, instead of the other way around,” she said, “if white offenders received prison sentences 10 percent longer than black offenders for the same crimes, if a third of all white men—just look at this room and take one third—went to prison during their life time. Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans & so many of the communities in which they live.”

So Hillary Clinton has (“finally”) spoken out on Ferguson. Mr. Charles P. Pierce (who linked the transcript) is not at all impressed:

… What she said appears to have been written by nine consultants, eight people from marketing, seven lawyers, six ESL valedictorians, and Mark Penn. She feels very bad about the stuff that happened, as stuff sometimes will happen, because it is stuff, and it happens. Or something…

Nia-Malika Henderson, at the Washington Post, thought more of it:

… Whereas most Democrats and Republicans, and eventually President Obama, addressed the militarization of the police, Clinton actually went there on an issue that most avoided: racism and the criminal justice system.

At her speech at the Nexenta OpenSDx Summit in San Francisco, she said “we cannot ignore the inequities that persist in our justice system.” And then she did what few of her prominent fellow white Democrats have done in the context of Ferguson–she acknowledged the well-known statistics that show that blacks get treated differently than whites when it comes to everything from traffic stops to sentencing. But rather than just listing the statistics, she got personal by asking whites to put themselves in the shoes of black Americans…

And Jamelle Bouie chose to go full-metal Slate contrarian:

… The few times President Obama has made serious comments on race, he’s been candid, personal, and conciliatory. He’s either tried to universalize his experience—as he did in his 2008 Philadelphia speech—or contextualize the particular experiences of black Americans, as he did in his 2013 remarks on the George Zimmerman verdict. Put simply, being black lets Obama empathize with black Americans in a way unique to his presidency. At the same time, it acts as a limit on what he can say. Or, as I noted on Tuesday, Obama can’t address racial issues without polarizing the public along racial lines. He tiptoed around Ferguson, but given the rancor caused by his comments on Henry Louis Gates’ arrest or Trayvon Martin’s killing, it was the smart path to take.

Clinton’s statement is neither candid, personal, or especially conciliatory. Instead, it’s a little blunt, and in a good way. She asks for understanding and doesn’t give her listeners a rhetorical escape. “Imagine that,” she says, pushing her audience to conjure a world where white men were targets for law enforcement, and where their lives were routinely derailed for trivial offenses…

… Clinton was talking to white people. And she was asking them, as white people, to show empathy and concern for the conditions of their black fellow citizens. I wouldn’t say this is unprecedented, but it is rare. Especially since there’s no attempt to deflect or blame black Americans for their own problems. Clinton doesn’t mention “black-on-black crime” or give a brief respectability lecture. She simply says, Look at how we treat them, and imagine if it were you.…

I report, you yell at me in the comments decide…

Share

You have to wonder just how many police departments are this messed up:

Federal investigators are focused on one Ferguson, Mo., police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, but at least five other police officers and one former officer in the town’s 53-member department have been named in civil rights lawsuits alleging the use of excessive force.

In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.

One officer has faced three internal affairs probes and two lawsuits over claims he violated civil rights and used excessive force while working at a previous police department in the mid-2000s. That department demoted him after finding credible evidence to support one of the complaints, and he subsequently was hired by the Ferguson force.

The noxious James Pasco of the FOP makes another grand appearance.

Share

I love that everyday Bulgarian citizens are painting over remaining Soviet-era monuments to reflect their own feelings at the time and I equally love that the Russians are really getting upset about it.

Thrillist ranks the states by beer. A few assorted thoughts:

1) This is a pretty good list, all things considered.

2) I’m not quite enough of a Washington homer to seriously dispute the top 3. (I think CO/WA is a close call, but the case for CO at #3 is pretty solid). I’ve also had enough MI beers at this point to feel at least a little confident that its placement in the top 5 is pretty much indisputable. But I can’t accept MI over WA. It’s just not conceivable. I can see how the mistake would be made–if you compare the top breweries in terms of visibility and distribution, MI might appear to be stronger (Bells and Founders a great deal better than Redhook and Pyramid). And there are some impressive and innovative breweries coming out of Michigan these days, including Jolly Pumpkin and North Coast. But my sampling of smaller regional MI beers, while quite strong, doesn’t stand up to Washington’s offerings. Here, working from memory only so I’m sure I’m forgetting something important and deserving, is a first draft at a no particular order top 10 for Washington: Old Schoolhouse; Black Raven; Maritime Pacific; Reuben’s Brews; Boundary Bay; Two Beers; Airways; Bale Breaker; Big Time; Valholl; Elysian. Of the smaller MI breweries I’ve sampled multiple beers from, only one or two (Kuhnhenn, obviously) would I seriously consider placing on this list. WA beer is much closer in quality to the big three states than a midwest or east coast beer drinker might realize because the other big three export some of their best beers widely; in Washington it’s really only Elysian, among the stronger breweries, that has any notable distributional reach. I suppose I should go be a proper beer tourist in Traverse City, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor before I’m express too much certainty here, but I’m not seeing it.

3) I haven’t had enough beer from WI or VT to have a strong opinion here–I’ve had virtually nothing from Wisconsin, as New Glarus is hard to find around Dayton. Vermont beers I’ve actually had haven’t really impressed (and no, I’ve never managed to get my hands on Heady Topper). But by all accounts these are states much like WA, so I’ll withhold judgment.

4) I am very skeptical about PA ahead of NY. And the growth in OH, thanks in part to some minor changes in the law, is really impressive these last few years. The greater Dayton area had zero breweries in 2010, and we’re months away from double digits now. (I’m writing from the tasting room for Warped Wing, the best but by no means the only strong contender of the new Dayton breweries.) Several new Cincinnati Breweries, in particular Rhinegeist, are excellent.  If we’re not ahead of PA today, we probably will be soon.

5) We now have an additional reason to feel sorry for esteemed LGM commenter Anderson.

Memories of Butter?

This is an acceptable name for something only if dairy cows have been obliterated by whichever flavor of apocalypse comes home to roost. In between shifts at the sludge plant you smear Memories of Butter on your protein cube and weep silently when the child who doesn’t know any better asks you what it was like during the Before Time.

In a world where there is butter, this is literally the worst possible marketing. The butter is three feet away. Once moved to action by the memory of butter, you can reach out and acquire butter. Our operative theory was that it was badly mistranslated from French, or at least there was something lost in translation. What that could possibly be we do not know.

Perhaps the Canadian friends of LGM can help explain.

Some years ago, my brother was working at a big recording studio on an ad campaign for a butter substitute product. The tag line for the ad campaign was “Tastes Like Butter.” After many, many hours of recording ads, the lawyers came in at the last minute and insisted that the tag be changed to “Buttery Taste.”

Butter. I don’t care what they tell you they’re putting or not putting in your food at your favorite
restaurant, chances are, you’re eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it’s almost
always the first and last thing in the pan. We sauté in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice
brown, caramelized color, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au
beurre); that’s why my sauce tastes richer and creamier and mellower than yours, why it’s got
that nice, thick, opaque consistency. Believe me, there’s a big crock of softened butter on
almost every cook’s station, and it’s getting a heavy workout. Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

Beyond parody, but not beyond highlighting. TPM does the hard work of listening through an hour of Rep. Steve King (IA-Douche Canoe) explaining racism in modern America to a sympathetic local radio host:

“I’ve watched them pit us against each other for a long time. And by the way, it also should be said that someone like Lacy Clay, who’s a member of the Congressional Black Caucus — there is no ‘Congressional White Caucus.’ It is a self-segregated caucus and it is a caucus that they drive an agenda that’s based on race. And they’re always looking to place the race card. They’re always looking to divide people down that line. And I have friends in that caucus. I get along with them personally, but their agenda is to play the race card. And we have a President who had a perfect opportunity to eliminate a lot of this friction in this country, and instead, he and his attorney general have been in a place where they’ve created friction rather than eliminated it.”

Jim Newell, at Wonkette, once called Steve King “probably the biggest asshole in Congress.” Steve King seems determined to hang on to that title, despite all competition.

Via Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, who adds “It’s going to be fun to watch entire 2016 GOP presidential field suck up to this dude.”
***********
Apart from updating our point&mock lists, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Share

Well, here we go:

The Ukrainian government says its troops have destroyed military vehicles that crossed the border from Russia into eastern Ukraine.

The office of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced the news Friday on the presidential website. It said Ukraine destroyed a “significant” portion of the military column.

British media had reported early Friday that a large column of Russian armored personnel carriers and other vehicles crossed the border into Ukraine. At a subsequent news conference, NATO leader Anders Fogh Rasmussen confirmed the sighting of “a Russian incursion.”

The curse of living in interesting times, and what not.

makingstarwars:

The Ghost is so badass in the series. You’re going to want this Lego set so bad after the show hits.

After Coca-Cola cut the cocaine after the formula, it was very important to let drinkers know that it was “pleasing without being effeminate.”

I have a friend in the science writing game (many actually; I’m a wealthy man that way).  This particular friend has built a career out of writing about physics, mostly, along with a bit of math,* all with a truly distinct style, voice, and stance.  The work begins from the true premise: physics and the habits of scientific thinking penetrate (or should) every aspect of experience.  Science ain’t just for the boffins — it’s of value and available to anyone willing to crack a book and wind their brain.

My friend has lots of strengths as a writer, full stop, and as a writer about science.  It’s not just the catchy and earned interplay the work achieves between popular culture and real scientific concepts.  What I love as I read books and articles from my friend is the way each piece is built experientially.  The ideas emerge as the narrative voice lives, does actual stuff (road-trip to Vegas! drop acid! check out the rides at Disneyland!).  This is a writer who wants readers to feel their new knowledge down to the bone.  And to have fun with it while they’re at it.

So my friend put out a book a couple of years ago that showcases all this fine writerly stuff on a topic that doesn’t usually make most folks’ lists of beach reading.  Titled The Calculus Diaries it tells the story of what happens when a fully grown adult — a former English major –sets out to master calculus,  both for the beauty of the math involved and to discover its power as a  guide to just about whatever one may encounter in daily life.

My friend has lots of friends, as it happens, many of whom we share.  One of those was talking to yet a third party a few nights ago, and told that person about the book.  The next day, some of the details had vanished, as they are wont to do.  And so this last person in the chain did what anyone would:  ask the magic Google machine to find that tome about the English major who decided to learn calculus.

Then this happened:

Oops.

Or rather, what’s telling is that plenty of folks are pissed off at the Google-bot’s assumption here, but no one, I think, is even remotely surprised.  Ben Lillie — the man behind Story Collider, by the way — is the person who told McManus (whom I don’t know) about The Calculus Diaries, by Jennifer Ouellette, possibly also known to some of you as Jen-Luc Picard, proprietress of Cocktail Party Physics.

Ben wrote up a lovely post for his Tumblr on all this, with at least two motives behind the writing, both of which I share.

One is simply to make sure that our mutual friend Jennifer gets all the credit she deserves for having written a wonderful tale and guide-for-the-math-perplexed that I believe serves as a great gateway drug to really important mathematical ideas.  Also, maybe, this’ll help sell some  books.

The other is to use this bit of search-algorithm-”optimization” to cast the obvious sidelight on the fact of embedded sexism in tech — and really society at large.  That pathology is easy to see when you get dudebros making obvious and public tools of themselves.  But (and of course you see this in the way racism persists) when you set the non-sexist/racist/bigot/asshole bar at the level of not being that guy, not using the c word or the n word, or what have you, the deep social and cultural conditions in which actual racism, sexism, discrimination makes itself felt don’t get touched.  Ben wrote a line I can’t beat on this theme:

One of the wonderful things about relying on computers to help us is that if we’re not careful they’ll tell us who we really are.

And so they do.  And what this one little story means as a practical matter is that as long as the assumption that men do math and women don’t runs so far below the surface that even the Google breathes it back at you….then that’s how you know the war on women, like plenty of other battles, ain’t close to over.  La lucha continua, as we used to say.

Discuss — and go buy some books.

*There’s been a recent detour into mind-brain stuff, but we all have our briar patches, don’t we?

Image: François de Troy, Astronomy Lesson of the Duchess du Main, 1702-1704

Share

This is horrible:

The fatal shooting of a teen Saturday afternoon by a Ferguson police officer outside an apartment complex sent angry residents into the street, taunting police and firing shots.

Michael Brown, 18, was shot at approximately 2:15 p.m. in the 2900 block of Canfield Drive.

His mother, Lesley McSpadden, said the shooting took place as her son was walking to his grandmother’s residence.

Piaget Crenshaw, 19, said she was waiting for a ride to work when she saw a police officer attempting to place Brown in the squad car.

She then said she saw the teen, hands in the air, attempt to flee. Several shots hit Brown as he ran, Crenshaw said. She complied with a request that she give photos of the scene to authorities.

This is unsurprising:

“Stand your ground” laws hinder law enforcement, are applied inconsistently and disproportionately affect minorities.

Those were the main findings from the ABA National Task Force on Stand Your Ground Laws. In a preliminary report (PDF) that was officially unveiled during a Friday session at the ABA Annual Meeting, the task force found that states which have some form of stand-your-ground law have also seen increasing homicide rates.

The task force, which was co-chaired by Leigh-Ann Buchanan of Berger Singerman and Jack Middleton of McLane Graf Raulerson & Middleton, conducted its investigation throughout most of 2013. It also found that stand-your-ground laws carry an implicit bias against racial minorities. In terms of the laws’ effects, the task force found that there was widespread confusion amongst law enforcement personnel as to what actions were justified and what were not.

As LGM reader PK observes, I guess the laws are working as intended…

If liberals are disorganized, how are they so good at getting false flag operatives into Congress as Republicans? http://t.co/igSrtEFunW

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) August 5, 2014

Via Dave Weigel, who explains:

For the better part of a year, young DREAMer activists (young people brought to the country illegally by their parents) have been ambushing Republican politicians and asking them to explain themselves. Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, experienced activists both, confronted Iowa Rep. Steve King while he was touring his district with Sen. Rand Paul. There is, arguably, no member of Congress more bold in his opposition to any kind of legalization than King…

0:56: King stands up, offended that Andiola thinks he insults people. “You’re very good at English,” he says. “You can understand the English language, so don’t play with it.”

1:17: King asks for reassurance that Andiola is not a drug smuggler…

(What, are her calves the size of cantalopes?… )
***********

Apart from deploring the new depths to which GOP standardbearers keep sinking, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Share

From the Ladies Home Journal, May 1957:

After taking this quiz, act appropriately. Whatever that may be.

For some organizations in the wake of Hobby Lobby, the only acceptable answer is “no contraceptive coverage for you.” The Supreme Court may well go along.

Eighteen months ago, I linked to the NYTimes slide show and related story on Siglinda Scarpia and Goathouse Refuge:

… Ms. Scarpa, 72, lives in a wooden house painted robin’s egg blue, in the middle of an open woodland, with old oaks and pines rising over sandy soil. With its second-story porches covered with the canes of Lady Banks’ roses, Carolina jasmine and wisteria, the house could be something out of a children’s book.

Some people come here to adopt a cat from the Goathouse Refuge, the animal sanctuary she runs, tucked back in the woods. Others come to buy her pottery or ceramic art, which is displayed in the sunny showroom on the first floor of this whimsical house: abstract pieces that evoke storms brewing in the sky; clay roasting pots shaped like squashes, with frogs or artichokes on their lids; or teacups molded like the face of a cat, the lines of cheek and jaw, nose and mouth drawn by a knowing hand…

Yesterday, commentor Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism linked to an urgent letter on the Goathouse Refuge Facebook page:

As many of you know, a shooting range opened last May directly adjacent to the refuge, with the outdoor shooting galleries only 80 feet from our property line. This situation has put us in even greater need of your support. Please consider a donation at this link: http://www.goathouserefuge.org/donate/ …

Because of a petition we started against the shooting range, my calls to the sheriff’s office, and my and my neighbors’ complaints, the shooting range people started blasting us on a very right-wing radio station, saying that we were against the second amendment, that we cared more about cats than our country. Some people started breaking in at night to the refuge to try to intimidate me. Then people started posting on Craigslist that they were driving more than one hour to come here and use our cats for target practice…

Because of the constant shooting, we were not able to hold our most important fundraiser this spring which brings in about $30,000 every year. In addition, we were not able to hold the other smaller spring fundraisers. Even our adoption rate decreased dramatically because people became afraid to come here.

We are now in a desperate situation and need financial support ASAP. The refuge needs $10,000 by this Friday to meet payroll. We have large bills that are due for veterinary services, food, and care for the cats. We need support immediately or we will be forced to close the refuge. I am already trying to transfer some cats to good organizations and to people we can trust, breaking my heart and the hearts of all the people who are working here and who put so much love and energy into caring for these creatures. We can supply bills to you if you would like to pay them directly…

Even if you can’t donate, you can help spread the word — especially if you’re in the Pittsboro area.

Share

It’s not a market; it’s a racket.

What is life like inside the immigrant detention centers the U.S. has set up to house the thousands of migrants fleeing Central American gang and drug violence?

I went down to Artesia, New Mexico last week to see for myself what has become of these vulnerable families. What I found brought me to tears. Mothers and their children are being hidden away, held in inappropriate detention facilities without access to adequate services, medical care, or legal counsel. And they are being deported in the middle of the night without warning and without the opportunity to a fair hearing.

I was able to speak first-hand with several of the moms, all who shared their feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. I could see the fear and desperation in their eyes. Many of the moms are young and some have been recently widowed, with painful stories of domestic abuse and wide-spread violence driven by drug cartels and gangs. Their stories reflect what the research has consistently documented: increasing rates of gender-based violence in Central America, where rape is now a common fate for women and girls as young as 8-years-old. In fact, in Honduras, gender-based violence is now the second highest cause of death for women of reproductive age. And yes, while these mothers themselves were targets of violence in their home communities, what ultimately drove these mothers to flee was not their own safety. They were fleeing for the sake of their children, many of whom were just too little to make the journey on their own.

…

One mother, Carla, told me her story while weeping, her two-year old daughter wiping her mother’s tears with visible concern on her round face. Carla fled Guatemala City after her husband was murdered. Once apprehended by Border Patrol, she and her daughter were held in a freezing, crowded cell and she was denied a blanket for her daughter. Carla had to remove her own t-shirt just to try to keep her daughter warm. She suffered the same conditions when she was transferred to Arizona, where officers laughed and insulted both her and her daughter, calling them “poor” and other names. When we met, Carla told me that her daughter had been suffering from severe diarrhea for more than five days, and that the doctor insisted she just keep giving her more water. In fact, all of the mothers I spoke to informed me that their children were suffering from some sort of dietary issue, whether it was diarrhea, not eating, or losing weight. I was told over and over again, “there is no medicine here, just water.” Carla said she had to beg for more than 24 hours just to get a diaper for her daughter.

These are basically inhuman conditions and are the official American response to a refugee crisis. If we aren’t going to allow people into our nation escaping horrifying violence, then what do our values mean? And then even if we aren’t sure we are going to allow them into our nation, is it that hard for a nation this wealthy to provide humane conditions while we figure out what to do? The answer to that question of course is no, it is not that hard. We could obviously provide diapers for babies. And we don’t.

….On how U.S. policies have made the Central American crisis much worse.

Some of you may know that there is a new hashtag/tumblr site featuring women who are “against feminism.” But most of you probably didn’t know about Confused Cats Against Feminism. It’s as awesome as it sounds. Sadly, my cat is against feminism too. “Feminism” means my arm, right?

I spend a long weekend in the heartland and brought back this postcard from the edge (click to embiggen). I think the guy standing in the blue shirt is the owner of the hotel where I was staying.

Share

Via TPM:

A federal appeals court dealt a huge blow to Obamacare on Tuesday, banning the federal exchange from providing subsidies to residents of the 36 states it serves.

A divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the text of the Affordable Care Act restricts the provision of premium tax credits to state-run exchanges. The two Republican appointees on the panel ruled against Obamacare while the one Democratic appointee ruled for the law.

“We conclude that appellants have the better of the argument: a federal Exchange is not an “Exchange established by the State,” and section 36B does not authorize the IRS to provide tax credits for insurance purchased on federal Exchanges,” Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote for the court.

His ruling was joined in a concurring opinion by George H. W. Bush-appointed Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

So first the Republicans whined about the onerous burden of requiring states to stand up their own exchanges, and after the feds stepped in to provide platforms for the slacker states, they found this technicality to void the subsidies.

Honest to Christ, these bastards will do anything in their power to keep people from having access to decent healthcare. Will the general public finally wake up and see these pricks for the insurance-company bag men and craven political actors that they are? Probably not.

The ruling can be read at the link above.

Share

To the extent that there’s an argument against reading the ACA to include subsidies on the federal exchanges, it has to be that while Congress intended the subsidies to be available on both, reading the literal language of an isolated provision it says that the subsidies are only available on state exchanges, so tough luck.  This is, to be clear, a terrible argument, but it’s the best one available.  To my amazement, as I first saw on Twitter yesterday, some conservatives are arguing that Congress actually intended for the federal exchanges not to include subsidies.  For example, Ramesh Ponnuru:

Supporters of Obamacare have been lamenting that the law shouldn’t be crippled by a mere “drafting error.” But it’s not at all clear that restricting tax credits to state-established exchanges was a drafting error. If Obamacare had proven more popular, or resistance to it weaker, then most states would have established exchanges. And if the law were put in place as written — with the restriction on tax credits — then the few holdouts would be under pressure to establish exchanges to get credits for their residents. Other health-care legislation before Congress at the same time as Obamacare had the same restriction.

It’s wrong, then, to say that Congress obviously didn’t intend to include this restriction.

This argument is…amazing.  It may be true that many members of Congress were too optimistic about states creating their own exchanges.  But we also know that Congress anticipated that some states would not create their own exchanges…because the statute gave the federal government the power to create exchanges when states wouldn’t.  Ponnuru’s reading of the statute can’t explain why they bothered to do this at all.  The actually existing Congress assumed that some states would not participate but wanted the exchanges available in all 50 states.  So Ponnuru’s explanation is plainly wrong, and we’re left with an implicit assumption that Congress established the power to have the federal government to create exchanges but wanted them not to work, which is absurd.

In addition, we know that Congress anticipated significant state resistance because of the way it structured the Medicaid expansion.  If Congress thought that all but a few states would establish exchanges with little direct incentive to do so, then surely the huge gobs of federal money that comes with accepting the Medicaid expansion would be more than enough for states to buy in.  But Congress didn’t think that, and until the statute was ineptly re-written by John Roberts all existing Medicaid money was contingent on accepting the expansion.  Ponnuru’s explanation cannot account for this either.

But there’s a more fundamental problem with the arguments made by the majority of the D.C. Circuit panel and the Republicans cheering them on.  The ACA was not written by Republicans — it was written by public officials who wanted to substantially increase access to medical care.  The central function of the subsidies wasn’t to create incentives for state governments; it was to ensure that the non-affluent uninsured who didn’t qualify for Medicaid could purchase insurance on the exchanges.  To not provide subsidies on the federal exchanges would defeat the very purpose for which they were constructed.  If you understand the ACA from the standpoint of those who passed it, this couldn’t be more obvious.  Conservatives trying to evaluate the goals of the ACA are like elephants trying to play a toy piano.

And, needless to say, this is why as a first approximation zero supporters of the ACA either inside or outside Congress are persuaded by this latest ad hoc attack on the law.  In addition to the other ways in which it’s silly it’s premised on not comprehending what the ACA was trying to accomplish.

Last year the Journal of the American Medical Association released a study aiming to determine the relationship between body mass index and the risk of premature death. Body mass index, or BMI, is the ratio between your height and weight. According to the National Institutes of Health, you are “normal weight” if your ratio is between 18.5-24.9.  Everything over that is “overweight” or “obese” and everything under is “underweight.”

This study was a meta-analysis, which is an analysis of a collection of existing studies that systematically measures the sum of our knowledge.  In this case, the authors analyzed 97 studies that included a combined 2.88 million individuals and over 270,000 deaths.  They found that overweight individuals had a lower risk of premature death than so-called normal weight individuals and there was no relationship between being somewhat obese and the rate of early death. Only among people in the high range of obesity was there a correlation between their weight and a higher risk of premature death.

Here’s what it looked like.

This is two columns of studies plotted according to the hazard ratio they reported for people.  This comparison is between people who are “overweight” (BMI = 25-29.9) and people who are “normal weight” (BMI = 18.5-24.9).  Studies that fall below the line marked 1.0 found a lower rate of premature death and studies above the line found a higher rate.

Just by eyeballing it, you can confirm that there is not a strong correlation between weight and premature death, at least in this population. When the scientists ran statistical analyses, the math showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between being “overweight” and a lower risk of death.

Here’s the same data, but comparing the risk of premature death among people who are “normal weight” (BMI = 18.5-24.9) and people who are somewhat “obese” (BMI = 30-34.9).  Again, eyeballing the results suggest that there’s not much correlation and, in fact, statistical analysis found none.

Finally, here are the results comparing “normal weight” (BMI = 18.5-24.9) and people who are quite “obese” (BMI = 35 or higher). In this case, we do see a relationship between risk of premature death in body weight.

It’s almost funny that the National Institutes of Health use the word normal when talking about BMI. It’s certainly not the norm – the average BMI in the U.S. falls slightly into the “overweight” category (26.6 for adult men and 25.5 for adult women) — and it’s not related to health. It’s clearly simply normative. It’s related to a socially constructed physical ideal that has little relationship to what physicians and public health advocates are supposed to be concerned with.  Normal is judgmental, but if they changed the word to healthy, they have to entirely rejigger their prescriptions.

So, do we even have an obesity epidemic? Perhaps not if we use health as a marker instead of some arbitrary decision to hate fat.  Paul Campos, covering this story for the New York Times, points out:

If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that does not increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

That’s 79%.

It’s worth saying again: if we are measuring by the risk of premature death, then 79% of the people we currently shame for being overweight or obese would be recategorized as perfectly fine. Ideal, even. Pleased to be plump, let’s say, knowing that a body that is a happy balance of soft and strong is the kind of body that will carry them through a lifetime.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

…Hapless official lands in Brazil’s net. But seriously, folks:

“The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States Embassy has been asked to leave Germany,” a government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement.

German officials have been frustrated in their efforts to receive clarification from Washington since last summer, when it was reported that the National Security Agency had been monitoring the digital communications of millions of Germans. The government tamped down that uproar, but fury flared anew when it was revealed last fall that the N.S.A. had been monitoring Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

Although President Obama has offered assurances that the United States will no longer spy on Germany, two cases of suspected American espionage that have come to light in the past eight days have sparked a fresh round of outrage.

The newest cases apparently refer to a pair of old-fashioned human spies rather than digital eavesdropping. Fascinating. Feel free to discuss that or whatever.

Share

Kansas Republicans pushed through a series of massive tax cuts.  As always, they were justified as a free lunch — economic growth would be so explosive that revenues would actually rise! How did that work out? 

Instead, job growth in Kansas trails the nation. The state’s rainy-day fund is dwindling to zero. Month after month, revenue comes in even lower than fiscal officials’ most dire expectations.

In the rest of the country, school budgets are finally beginning to recover from the toll of the last recession; in Kansas, they’re still falling. Healthcare, assistance for the poor, courts, and other state services are being eviscerated.

But they have more great ideas!

More tax changes were enacted last year. The top rate was cut to 3.9% in stages through 2018. But other cuts were reversed; much of a sales tax reduction was canceled, and the standard deduction was cut back, effectively raising taxes for the middle- and working-class.

In all, as the CBPP documents, the changes will cut the taxes of the wealthiest 1% of Kansans by 2.2%. The poorest 20% of Kansans will see their taxes rise by 1.3%.

The impact on overall state revenue has been devastating. Despite Laffer’s prediction, the state ended fiscal 2014 with a shortfall of $338 million.

In conclusion, upper-class tax cuts cannot fail — they can only be failed.