JustOneMinute

Yet More Evidence That Scientists Are Baffled By Humanity

Researchers try to pin down a statistical association between diet drinks and cardiovascular disease:

Some studies have suggested that consumption of diet soft drinks may be associated with Type 2 diabetes and development of the condition known as metabolic syndrome — high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and other risk factors. Now a 10-year epidemiological study has found a link between diet soft drinks and cardiovascular disease.

The analysis, published online in The Journal of General Internal Medicine, included 2,564 adults over 40 living in Manhattan. Researchers found that diet and regular soft drink consumption were both associated with a number of risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Even after controlling for many of those risks, including diabetes, the researchers found that daily consumption of diet soda was still independently associated with an increased risk for stroke, heart attack and death. The reasons for the association are unclear, the authors said, and the results must be interpreted with caution.

“The message for diet soft drink drinkers is not to be alarmed,” said the lead author, Hannah Gardener, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami. “What we’ve found is an association, and it might be due to chance or other unmeasured variables.”

Weird luck is always a possibility but my guess is that "unmeasured variables" is the answer - people who favor diet drinks also tend to possess some characteristic or engage in some behavior that leads to heart disease.  However, that suggests that the researchers have an incomplete list of the behaviors and characteristics for which they need to control (or are able to observe), which may leave one wondering about the accuracy and relevance of many other studies.

SURELY I CAN ILLUSTRATE THIS WITH AN INAPT METAPHOR:  Suppose NASCAR fans show a reduced life expectancy after controlling for obvious things like age, weight, race, and physical activity.  Is the solution to stop watching NASCAR?  Well, maybe further digging would establish that NASCAR fans are over-represented among groups that pick up speeding tickets and die in car crashes.  That might leave the social scientists wondering about the direction of causality - do folks who like to drive too fast also like to tune in to NASCAR or is NASCAR prompting people to drive too fast?

Or, to swing back to diet drinks, maybe people who drink diet soda are more inclined to lie to themselves and the researchers and under-report their food consumption.  Who knows?

Mittmentum

Two wins for Romney and its on to Super Tuesday.

I am thinking that Rick Santorum does not exactly project the sunny optimism for which Ike and Reagan were famous.  On the other hand, the GOP nominated Nixon twice, so maybe Santorum's The One.

Insulin Resistance, Yet Again

The Blood Sugar Solution, a new book by Dr. Hyman, touts the management of insulin resistance as the key to reversing our global epidemic of "diabesity".  Fans of Gary Taubes will nod, as will paleo- and primal dieters; I will add that Dr. Hyman is not opposed to whole grains, so he will lose ground with the hard-core.

Here is a chat with Dr. Hyman:

You emphasize that good nutrition is one of the keys to UltraWellness. What are the staples of the modern diet that we typically eat but should avoid?
Sugars in any form whatsoever, all flour products (even gluten-free), all processed food and all gluten and dairy. Eliminating these foods from your diet is the basic foundation of the 6 week program laid out in my book. Once you avoid these foods, I promise you will discover a whole new world of mother nature’s magnificent food pantry that will delight your senses, stimulate your palate, and leave you feeling clear and healthy, not to mention automatically thinner.

We are all familiar with the modern day food pyramid and the new “my plate” but your approach to nutrition is different. Were you to create the perfect plate for your average American, what would it look like?
Composing the perfect meal is an essential life skill. When you put food on your plate it should look like this:

• On half of your plate, put low-starch vegetables. (You can refill this part as much as you want).
• On one quarter of your plate, put some protein (fish, chicken, eggs, shrimp, meat or beans).
• On the other quarter, add either ½ cup of whole grains (ideally brown or black rice or quinoa) or ½ cup of starchy vegetables such as sweet potato or winter squash.

And  summary of his message:

8 Steps to Reversing Diabesity

In my new book, The Blood Sugar Solution, which comes out next February, I outline a comprehensive 8-week plan for overcoming diabesity in all its forms. Here is a sneak preview of the steps outlined in the book:

1.  
   1. Get the right tests. Most doctors focus on fasting blood sugar. This is actually a poor indicator of diabesity. The best test to tease out the condition is an insulin response test where insulin levels are measured fasting and then 1 and 2 hours after a glucose drink. Demand this test from your doctor.
   2. Get smart about nutrition. Despite the media hype and the seeming confusion amongst doctors, the basics of nutrition are extremely simply. Eliminate sugar and processed carbohydrates, include whole real foods like lean protein (chicken or fish), veggies, nuts, seeds, beans and whole grains.
   3. Get the right supplements. There has recently been a frenzy of negative reports about supplements. Most of them are unfounded. Supplements are an essential part of treating diabesity. A good multivitamin, vitamin D, fish oil, and special blood sugar balancing nutrients like alpha lipoic acid, chromium polynicotinate, biotin, cinnamon, green tea catechins, and glucomannan should also be included.
   4. Get relaxed. Stress is a major unrecognized contributor to insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalance. Push your pause button every day with deep breathing, visualization, yoga, and other relaxation techniques.
   5. Get moving. Aside from changing your diet, exercise is probably the single best medication for diabesity. Walk for at least 30 minutes every day. For some, 30-60 minutes of more vigorous aerobic exercise 4-6 times a week may be necessary.
   6. Get clean and green. Environmental toxins also contribute to diabesity. Filter your water, look for green cleaning products, and avoid plastics when you can.
   7. Get personal. While the steps above will address 80 percent of the problems with diabesity, some may need to take additional steps to optimize key areas of their biology. Remember, the medicine of the future is personal medicine. Seek out your own biological imbalances and look for ways to address them.
   8. Get connected. Research is beginning to show that we get better more effectively when we get together. Invite your friends, families, and neighbors to change their diets and lifestyle along with you. Together we can all take back our health.

In support of point 8 I should note that Dr. Hyman has been working with Rick Warren, the Purpose Driven Pastor, on church sponsored community-supported weight loss for the past year, apparently with good results.  The vision:

Warren would like the Daniel Plan to affect a billion people in the next decade, said Eastman.   “He wants to transform health through faith-based communities,” she said.  “Rick has crazy goals.”

“There will never be enough professionals — doctors, nurses and clinics — to care for all of the health needs in the world,” Warren wrote.  “But there is a church in practically every village of the world, and volunteers ready and willing to be trained.”

Let's contrast that with this recent plea for Mommy and Daddy from Times food columnist Mark Bittman:

But as obesity and its consequences ravage our health care system, we struggle not only with our own diets but also with preventing our children from falling into the same traps. Last year a brigade of parents stood watch outside a corner store in North Philadelphia in an attempt to prevent their kids from buying junk food.

They’ve been called foot soldiers, but you might call them vigilantes. Vigilantism occurs when people believe the government isn’t doing its job. We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them, because this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.

While Mr. Bittman waits for Big Government, others have turned to an even higher power.  Of course, most Upper East side liberals couldn't find a place of worship if they were standing in front of St. Patrick's...

WAITING FOR BIG BROTHER GOVERNMENT:  Glenn had this link yesterday:

DIETS: The Importance of Portion Control. But is the solution really “changes in public policy?”

In a Grand Unification of this and that I will assert that the public policy plea is an example of the anti-democratic meritocratic mindset as discussed by Lebedoff and revived by Mickey Kaus.

EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN:  Jack LaLanne was offering similar diet advice more than fifty years ago. 

YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL A HARVARD MAN (BUT YOU CAN'T TELL HIM MUCH): For the elitists out there who could never take advice from Rick Warren, here is the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid.  Exercise is the base, vegetables (yay!) and whole grains (boo!) are on the first level but otherwise, this looks a lot like the Hyman advice.

Warren Buffet Goes Off Message

Warren Buffet misplaced his script and redirected some of the blame in the housing mess:

Warren Buffett, who controls the biggest shareholding of the No. 1 U.S. mortgage lender, said banks were victimized by some homeowners who refinanced their loans before getting evicted.

“Large numbers of people who have ‘lost’ their house through foreclosure have actually realized a profit because they carried out refinancings earlier that gave them cash in excess of their cost,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said Feb. 25 in his annual letter. “In these cases, the evicted homeowner was the winner, and the victim was the lender.”

Say it ain't so - Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are getting the vapors

Berkshire Hathaway owns several bank and finance companises a factoid leading to an additional insight:

“It’s the mercenary side of Buffett,” said Jeff Matthews, a Berkshire shareholder and author of “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett.”

The most famous investor in the world has a mercenary side?

FWIW, Buffett is bullish on America - from his annual letter:

Housing will come back – you can be sure of that. Over time, the number of housing units necessarily matches the number of households (after allowing for a normal level of vacancies). For a period of years prior to 2008, however, America added more housing units than households. Inevitably, we ended up with far too many units and the bubble popped with a violence that shook the entire economy. That created still another problem for housing: Early in a recession, household formations slow, and in 2009 the decrease was dramatic.

That devastating supply/demand equation is now reversed: Every day we are creating more households than housing units. People may postpone hitching up during uncertain times, but eventually hormones take over. And while “doubling-up” may be the initial reaction of some during a recession, living with in-laws can quickly lose its allure.

At our current annual pace of 600,000 housing starts – considerably less than the number of new households being formed – buyers and renters are sopping up what’s left of the old oversupply. (This process will run its course at different rates around the country; the supply-demand situation varies widely by locale.) While this healing takes place, however, our housing-related companies sputter, employing only 43,315 people compared to 58,769 in 2006. This hugely important sector of the economy, which includes not only construction but everything that feeds off of it, remains in a depression of its own. I believe this is the major reason a recovery in employment has so severely lagged the steady and substantial comeback we have seen in almost all other sectors of our economy.

Wise monetary and fiscal policies play an important role in tempering recessions, but these tools don’t create households nor eliminate excess housing units. Fortunately, demographics and our market system will restore the needed balance – probably before long. When that day comes, we will again build one million or more residential units annually. I believe pundits will be surprised at how far unemployment drops once that happens. They will then reawake to what has been true since 1776: America’s best days lie ahead.

If that comes to pass Obama's Vice-President would willbe well-positioned to pick up a third Obama term.  Of course, that assumes that Obama dumps Joe Biden, wins the election, enjoys the recovery foretold above, and avoides the sort of scandal (or fo-po debacle) that undermined Carter and Clinton.

So What Response Did He Get From The Office Of The First Lady?

Mark Bittman of the Times wants the goverment to regulate sugar, but he apparently doesn't want Michelle Obama to get involved; he concludes with an archetypal liberal-statist plea for help from Mommy and Daddy:

But as obesity and its consequences ravage our health care system, we struggle not only with our own diets but also with preventing our children from falling into the same traps. Last year a brigade of parents stood watch outside a corner store in North Philadelphia in an attempt to prevent their kids from buying junk food.

They’ve been called foot soldiers, but you might call them vigilantes. Vigilantism occurs when people believe the government isn’t doing its job. We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them, because this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.

We need government on our side!  But wait - isn't childhood obesity the signature issue of Michelle Obama and her "Let's Move" campaign?  So when a prominent Times columnist asked for a reaction and/or a position from Ms. Obama's office, what did they say?

Sorry, I have been hiding the ball - the regulation in question is whether Florida can bar food stampe recipients from buying unhealthy foods such as sweet or salty snacks.  Obviously, libs are mostly outraged, as are plenty of 'Live free or die' conservatives.

But does anybody think Michelle Obama would support a bill like this?  Of course she wouldn't.  Does anyone think that she will be criticized by Mr. Bittman or anyone else at the Times for standing in the way of what he would seem to consider progress?  Of course not.

The bill was a on-starter anyway, since it would rely on Federal waivers that have never been forthcoming:

In 2004, Gov. Tim Pawlenty tried to make Minnesota's welfare program the first in the country to ban recipients from buying candy with food stamps, but feds didn't go for it. Last year, New York City applied for a waiver to restrict the sale of soda and sugary drinks, but that was also denied.

Well - there was a time when one could argue that most of the costs of obesity are internalized, i.e., borne by the obese person himself.  Obviously, that is no longer the case with Medicare and health insurance that cannot discriminate based on lifestyle choices or pre-existing conditions.

Evnetually the most dangerous white powder to be exported from the Western Hemisphere will be taxed and regulated, but it won't start with food stamps.

WHILE BITTMAN WAITS FOR BIG GOVERNMENT RICK WARREN TURNS TO A HIGHER POWER:

A power even higher than Michelle?  Rick Warren, the Purpose Driven Pastor, has been pushing his church sponsored community-supported diet approach.  Carbs and insulin resistance are the central focus.

Training Them To Shoot, But Not At Us!

The Times notes the tension in Afghanistan between our strategy of training Afghan security forces while ducking incoming fire from those same forces:

American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.

Despite an American-led training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars, the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously unreliable soldiers and police officers. The distrust has only deepened as a pattern of attacks by Afghan security forces on American and NATO service members, beginning years ago, has drastically worsened over the past few days. A grenade attack on Sunday, apparently by a protester, wounded at least six American soldiers.

Nearly a week of violent unrest after American personnel threw Korans into a pit of burning trash has brought into sharp relief the growing American and Afghan frustration — and, at times, open hostility — and the risks of a strategy that calls for American soldiers and civilians to work closely with Afghans.

Earlier Times coverage here, and on the reaction of the French last January.

Bush and our allies went into Afghanistan with a light footprint to avoid emulating the Soviet experience and antagonizing the locals, with dubious results.  Obama has tripled our troop commitment, with dubious results.  Osama is dead, let's move out and move on.

Such A Sunday!

Let's have the traditional All Star Academy Award open thread.

We Like Ike (For What He Avoided)

Ross Douthat pounds the table for Eisenhower and a memorial with a proper perspective:

In a 2011 Gallup poll on the greatest president, Eisenhower came in a lame 12th, in a tie with Jimmy Carter. He performs solidly in scholarly surveys, but he’s frequently ranked behind his prominent 20th-century rivals.

In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.

But ultimately Eisenhower is underrated because his White House leadership didn’t fit the template of “greatness” that too many Americans pine for from their presidents. He was not a man for grand projects, bold crusades or world-historical gambles. There was no “Ike revolution” in American politics, no Eisen-mania among activists and intellectuals, no Eisenhower realignment.

...

This is why the memorial controversy really matters. Eisenhower deserves a monument that puts him where he belongs — in the very first rank of American leaders — because the nation needs to be reminded of where true presidential greatness lies. Plenty of politicians combine inspiring rhetoric with grand ambitions. Far fewer have the gifts required to steer the ship of state away from every rock and reef, and bring it, eight long years later, undamaged into port.

Yes, but good luck.  As noted, there was no cheering section then, or now.

I'm With Newt, Mostly

Newt Gingrich may take flak for this 'Let the people speak' stance on gay marriage, as reported by Politico:

I think at least they're doing it the right way [state referenda], which is going through voters, giving them a chance to vote and not having a handful of judges arbitrarily impose their will. I don't agree with it, I would vote no if it were on a referendum where I was but at least they're doing it the right way.

That is mostly my view, although I go further - I think it's fine if popularly elected legislatures rewrite the law.

My view on the judicial cram-down approach has evolved as well.  I still think it's coming, but it won't be as bad as the permanently divisive Roe v. Wade - experience will tell whether gay marriage strengthens, weakens or has no effect on marriage; experience with abortion hasn't, and won't, tell us whether life begins at conception.

Finally, everyone on the left talks about the Loving v. Virginia precedent but few seem to realize that the 1967 ruling was an example of judicial restraint.  The Supremes ducked test cases through the 50's; by 1967 a dozen states had repealed their anti-miscegenation laws and Congress had passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

If Chief Justice Roberts and the current Supremes are guided by that history they will want to see a repeal of DOMA and the legalization of gay marriage in a number of states before they impose it on the hold-outs.  At that time, the current 'states rights' arguments offered by gay-rights advocates will become inoperative, but whatev.

An Epic Fail By David Brooks

David Brooks decides that all tax breaks and government spending are created equal, with deeply dubious results:

We Americans cherish our myths. One myth is that there is more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. That’s false. Another myth is that the government is smaller here than in Europe. That’s largely false, too.

Did he say "social mobility"?  Or did he say "Susquehanna Hat Company"?  Let's focus on the 'big government' argument:

The U.S. does not have a significantly smaller welfare state than the European nations. We’re just better at hiding it. The Europeans provide welfare provisions through direct government payments. We do it through the back door via tax breaks.

For example, in Europe, governments offer health care directly. In the U.S., we give employers a gigantic tax exemption to do the same thing. European governments offer public childcare. In the U.S., we have child tax credits. In Europe, governments subsidize favored industries. We do the same thing by providing special tax deductions and exemptions for everybody from ethanol producers to Nascar track owners.

These tax expenditures are hidden but huge. Budget experts Donald Marron and Eric Toder added up all the spending-like tax preferences and found that, in 2007, they amounted to $600 billion. If you had included those preferences as government spending, then the federal government would have actually been one-fifth larger than it appeared.

...

You might say that a tax break isn’t the same as a spending program. You would be wrong.

David Bradford, a Princeton economist, has the best illustration of how the system works. Suppose the Pentagon wanted to buy a new fighter plane. But instead of writing a $10 billion check to the manufacturer, the government just issued a $10 billion “weapons supply tax credit.” The plane would still get made. The company would get its money through the tax credit. And politicians would get to brag that they had cut taxes and reduced the size of government!

Well, that certainly proves that some tax breaks can be made to resemble some direct spending.

But consider a spectrum of policies.  In case 1, the government gives me a $1,000 tax child care credit; I am free to spend this on an X-box, a vacation, or on any of a number of privately run daycare centers.

In case 2, the government gives me a voucher for $1,000 redeemable at any day care center.  Good-bye X-box!

And in case 3, the government keeps the $1,000, builds a day care center, hires staff, and waits for me to drive up to drop off the munchkins.

Would Mr. Brooks really argue that all three are equal manifestations of an intrusive "Big Government", all re-shaping the economy equally?  His math says they are equal, but who believes that?

Well.  His basic plea for tax simplification will fall on deaf ears - both parties seem to be hooked on it, and IMHO it can only happen in an environment of revenue cutting, not revenue raising.  Nostalgia buffs may recall that I rehashed this back when Mr. Brooks was fantasizing about an Obama plea for tax simplification back in December 2010.

Embarrassingly Weak Research At The Times

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times writes about a strong woman in Mitt Romney's life:

Political Lessons, From a Mother’s Losing Run

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney was 22 when his father came to him and his siblings in search of political advice in December 1969. George Romney, the former Michigan governor, was mulling the electoral prospects of another Romney: his wife, Lenore.

A onetime Hollywood starlet who quit acting to get married, Lenore Romney had few political credentials. But she had been a popular first lady, and her husband was tied up in Washington as President Richard M. Nixon’s new housing secretary. Top Michigan Republicans were wooing her to run for a United States Senate seat.

“The children laughed about it,” Elly Peterson, a Romney confidante and party strategist, later wrote in a private memoir. “Then Mitt, first, and gradually the others, began to change their minds. They finally decided she should go with it.”

Today Mitt Romney is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, facing a tough primary battle here in the state where he grew up. His Michigan campaign brochures and commercials are studded with black-and-white images of him with his father, a businessman-turned-politician he once called “the real deal.”

But a look at the lesser-known Romney, Lenore, suggests that in style, temperament and outlook, Mitt Romney is very much his mother’s son.

Well, fine.  But her passage on abortion is absurdly light:

On one issue — abortion — Mr. Romney has explicitly cited his mother’s views as the basis for his own. During his 1994 race against Mr. Kennedy, and again in 2002 when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he told voters that his mother personally opposed abortion but had taken “a very bold and courageous stand” in arguing that “a woman should have her own right to choose.” He said he felt the same way.

Longtime Michigan Republicans and political analysts, however, do not remember Lenore Romney making that argument, and what she truly believed is unclear. Abortion was legal in Michigan only to save the life of the mother; the Romney-Hart race played out three years before the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and abortion was not an issue.

“Nobody was talking about it,” Mr. Ballenger said.

Internal documents from the Lenore Romney campaign, archived at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, do hint that her aides were urging her to speak out in favor of expanding access to abortion. In one nebulously worded research memorandum, they concluded it was “more important to lessen the physical and mental dangers” than to “attempt legislated morality.” But in 1972, two years after she lost, Mrs. Romney made her personal opposition clear, much as Mitt Romney eventually did after he was elected governor.

“I am not for destroying life,” she told an interviewer then, describing her response when the question came up during speeches on college campuses. “And then I ask them, if later, they would want to kill all the old or abandoned people in the world.”

That's it?  Will Saletan of Slate had much more, including this obviously important family tragedy:

Romney’s family had its first, fatal brush with abortion in 1963. Romney was 16. His father was the governor of Michigan. Mitt’s sister was married to a young man with a 21-year-old sister who was pregnant. The pregnant young woman, Ann Keenan, desperately wanted an abortion. But abortion was illegal in Michigan. So Keenan tried an illegal abortion. She bled to death. (For more on Keenan’s death and other important episodes, see this short bibliography of the best reporting on Romney’s abortion history.)

It’s unclear what Mitt Romney knew about this tragedy at the time. (Romney, his advisers, and his press office did not respond to emails, phone calls, or written questions for this article.) Though he would later recall Keenan as a “dear, close family relative that was very close to me,” the cause of Ann Keenan’s death was hidden from her friends, and Romney’s later descriptions of the episode leave open the possibility that he learned about the abortion later. But Romney’s mother, Lenore Romney, apparently knew the truth. It affected what she preached within the family and what she espoused as an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan in 1970.

Like other moderates of her day, Lenore Romney didn’t believe in an absolute right to choose. During her campaign, she remarked, “I’m so tired of hearing the argument that a woman should have the final word on what happens to her own body. This is a life.” But Mrs. Romney did think current abortion laws were too restrictive. Her platform said: “I support and recognize the need for more liberal abortion rights while reaffirming the legal and medical measures needed to protect the unborn and pregnant woman.”

Surely that merits a mention.

How Close To The Truth Is Elizabeth Warren?

 

Elizabeth Warren has an op-ed in the Boston Globe decrying Scott Brown's support of a conscience exception for employer-sponsored health care coverage.  I am not a lawyer, but this strikes me as overheated:

Washington is so out of touch with what’s happening to families across this country that the Senate is about to vote on an amendment that would allow any insurance company or any employer to claim a vague “moral conviction’’ as an excuse to deny you health care coverage. Here’s the really astonishing news: Senator Scott Brown is not only voting for this amendment, he is fighting to get it passed.

What does this mean? If you are married and your employer doesn’t believe married couples should use birth control, then you could lose coverage for contraception. If you’re a pregnant woman who is single, and your employer doesn’t like it, you could be denied maternity care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.

Scott Brown is co-sponsoring the Blunt amendment (and the related House version), described by the Senator here.

Now Blunt claims that this bill simply restores the state of play that prevailed prior to ObamaCare.  So, my questions:

1.  Back in the day an amployer could simply not offer health insurance at all.  But could an employer offer health insurance without maternity coverage, or would that run afoul of obvious sex-discrimination laws (not to mention public policy, which routinely is pro-family)? [Answer in UPDATE, but a spoiler alert - it invokes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.]

2.  If employers previously were able to deny maternity coverage, how many actually exercised that right?  Why does Ms. Warren think that more employers will do so now? 

FWIW, Brown claims Kennedy was on his side and cites a letter from the dying Ted Kennedy to the Pope:

Brown, who favors giving employers and health insurers broad moral and religious exemptions in health care coverage, has repeatedly quoted a letter that Kennedy, dying from brain cancer, asked President Barack Obama to hand-deliver to Pope Benedict XVI in Rome in 2009.

In the letter, Kennedy admitted to "human failings" and asked for the pope’s prayers.

But Brown has seized on a portion of the letter in which the prominent Catholic politician tells the Pope that he believes "in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field." Kennedy made the comments in the context of the fight over Obama’s health care overhaul bill.

Lacking a Ouija board, who knows?

UPDATE:  As to the issue of maternity leave for unwed mothers, the Blunt Amendment simply unwrites the impact of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.  That rolls back the clock to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which is quite clear and applies to companies with fifteen or more employees; from the EEOC summary:

• Health Insurance

  Any health insurance provided by an employer must cover expenses for pregnancy-related conditions on the same basis as costs for other medical conditions. An employer need not provide health insurance for expenses arising from abortion, except where the life of the mother is endangered.

  Pregnancy-related expenses should be reimbursed exactly as those incurred for other medical conditions, whether payment is on a fixed basis or a percentage of reasonable-and-customary-charge basis.

  The amounts payable by the insurance provider can be limited only to the same extent as amounts payable for other conditions. No additional, increased, or larger deductible can be imposed.

  Employers must provide the same level of health benefits for spouses of male employees as they do for spouses of female employees.

Elizabeth Warren is not a lawyer, and apparently not a researcher.  Now, if she wants to claim that Messrs. Blunt and Brown may create a crisis for employees of very small companies, well, was that a crisis resolved by ObamaCare?

If You Believe This You'll Back Santorum

By way of Scott Johnson of Powerline and the eternally luminous Mickey Kaus I arrive at this Bold Prediction of the 2000 election by David Lebedoff.  His thesis, described by Mickey as "eerily prescient" when he launched it in 1978, revolves around the development of (and reaction to) an anti-democratic meritocracy:

The economic battle for the presidency could go either way. And that brings us to the other battle, the one that Mr. Bush expects to win: the war against the meritocracy.

This is a war over what kind of people should be in charge, and it has been raging for decades. To some extent it's a values war.

...

So what's the matter with merit? Absolutely nothing -- assuming that merit can be measured. But what if it can't? Do good college grades tell us who is better at life in its wider scope, and not just college courses? Do they tell us who would be a better president?

The meritocracy thinks that they do. This isn't just conceit. People are naturally grateful to the source of their success. To a businessman, it's the free market. To Prince Charles, it's the monarchy. To millions of Americans holding better jobs than their parents ever dreamed of, it's the school work or the SAT. Only that's not what they think. They all think it's merit.

The problem with the meritocracy is that it believes it's certifiably better at everything. It has demonstrated a proficiency at reasoning skills, and therefore thinks every problem can be solved entirely with that proficiency. If this were indeed correct, then Herbert Hoover would have been a better president than Franklin Roosevelt, and Jimmy Carter would have ranked higher than Ronald Reagan.

Another problem with the meritocracy is that it doesn't really believe in majority rule, because if we already know who the smartest people are, why should we bother to solicit the opinion of anyone else?

This has caused, not consciously but very, very pervasively, a restructuring of our institutions to avoid the will of the electorate. The classic example is Hillary Clinton's plan to overhaul health care, devised away from the public debate, in rooms full of policy experts. Increasingly, too, major decisions are made by judges and administrators virtually immune from electoral reproach, let alone removal.

Does any of that remind anyone of, I don't know, the housing meltdown, TARP and the auto bailouts? Cap and trade?  Algae-fueled cars?  C'mon, Big Government knows best!

Mr. Bush is hoping that the backlash against this elitist approach is focused on Mr. Gore. To be seen primarily as a wonk is fatal to a candidate today. Mr. Clinton flew under the voter radar because he was a Southern governor who had the good old boy thing down perfectly.

If we played "Pin The Tail On The Wonk" how would Barack do?  Would Mitt do any better?

So why does this war favor Mr. Bush? Because the voters are so alienated by the effect of the meritocracy on the very concept of consent of the governed that our elections have been transformed. Campaigns are framed to be less about issues than about the candidate's background and outlook. If a presidential candidate is seen as primarily a member of the meritocracy, the voters seem to push the other lever, even if it means tax cuts for the rich.

Values play into this war. A candidate whose principal faith is in pure reason, rather than experience, frightens most voters. As an alternative, they look for someone guided by values: tradition, constancy, patience, resolve, tolerance, dispassion, compassion, courage, good humor, humility, faith.

Faith is a good example. If you believe in God and religious tenets, you possess values other than total reliance on the power of intellect. That's why this campaign has been marked on both sides by more protestations of faith than were ever provoked by Torquemada.

Who comes off as a man of faith in this race amongst Obama, Romney and Santorum?  To be fair, I don't think Santorum does well on the "good humor" front, and I think both Romney and Obama score well on the family values/character side, but still, those two are covered in Ivy.

This 2000 article certainly foreshadows the emergence of anti-intellectuals such as Sarah Palin, although that aspect of the Republican Party has been around for a while (e.g., Reagan was smart enough not to flaunt his smarts).  I will even throw Chris Christie into the mix.  Rotundity is declasse among the elites; Christie can be as smart as he wants since he is so visibly not an elite.

If the electorate has had enough of the elites both Obama and Romney are in trouble.  Newt too.

 

Romney Lied At The Debate?

The Boston Catholic Insider responds with overwhelming force to Romney's claim that he stood up for the conscience laws protecting Catholic churches until the lawyers forced his hand.

The debate soundbite:

KING: ...Governor Romney, both Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich have said during your tenure as governor, you required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. 

And Mr. Speaker, you compared the president to President Obama, saying he infringed on Catholics' rights.

Governor, did you do that?

ROMNEY: No, absolutely not. Of course not. 

There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their report. There was no such requirement....

 Newt Gingrich was given a quick follow-up:

KING: Mr. Speaker? 

GINGRICH: Well, the reports we got were quite clear that the public health department was prepared to give a waiver to Catholic hospitals about a morning-after abortion pill, and that the governor's office issued explicit instructions saying that they believed it wasn't possible under Massachusetts law to give them that waiver. Now, that was the newspaper reports that came out. That's something that both Senator Santorum and I have raised before. 

That report was surely this Boston Globe article from Dec 9, 2005 which describes the apparent Romney flip-flop as follows:

Governor Mitt Romney reversed course on the state's new emergency contraception law yesterday, saying that all hospitals in the state will be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims.

The decision overturns a ruling made public this week by the state Department of Public Health that privately run hospitals could opt out of the requirement if they objected on moral or religious grounds.

Romney had initially supported that interpretation, but he said yesterday that he had changed direction after his legal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, concluded Wednesday that the new law supersedes a preexisting statute that says private hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions or contraception.

''And on that basis, I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view," Romney said at the State House after signing a bill on capital gains taxes.

Hey, the lawyers made him do it, waddya gona do?  But the BCI documents a compelling case that the law had been deliberately left open as part of a legislative compromise.

Briefly, Massachusetts had a 1975 'conscience law' allowing hospitals to opt out of abortion, sterilization, and contraception.

In 2004 the Massachusetts legislature worked on a bill that would have forced hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims with no conscience exemption.  The Senate passed this bill, which died in the House.

In 2005 the legislature tried again. The Senate included an amendment expressly eliminating the conscience protection of the 1975 law; the House had an amendment explicitly endorsing it.  The final compromise dropped both amendments, which the Catholic legal strategists viewed as acceptable, per this newsletter; the thinking (or at least,the in-house spin) was that since the new law was silent the 1975 law would remain in force.

Well - I am not a lawyer, but it doesn't appear that Romney pressed his legal team to defend that perspective.  What would he do as President?  Geez, Obama shopped all over Washington until he found someone to tell him that he could ignore the War Powers Act becasue the kinetic action in Libya wasn't a war.  Why didn't Romney apply his Harvard JD and get the answers he now claims he wanted?

 

 

Charles Blow - Columnist, Social Scientist, Bigot, And Fool

Jim Geraghty of NR calls out NY Times columnist Charles Blow for a religious slur aimed at Mitt Romney:

Hmm, mocking Mormon's religious undergarments?  My, my.  Are these the standards at the Times?

As to what set Blow off, the offending portion of the debate seems to be this:

ROMNEY: John, you know, I think as Rick has just said, this isn't an argument about contraceptives, this is a discussion about, are we going to have a nation which preserves the foundation of the nation, which is the family, or are we not? And Rick is absolutely right. 

When you have 40 percent of kids being born out of wedlock, and among certain ethnic groups the vast majority being born out of wedlock, you ask yourself, how are we going to have a society in the future? Because these kids are raised in poverty in many cases, they're in abusive settings. The likelihood of them being able to finish high school or college drops dramatically in single-family homes. And we haven't been willing to talk about this.

Romney alludes to the fact that Rick Santorum made a similar point earlier, yet he didn't draw any Blow-tweets about his Magic Rosary - whatever.

Is it possible that Romney and Santorum had a point about the perils of broken homes?  Let's cut to a Times columnist for guidance:

Now allow me to set aside the personal issues for a moment and refocus on the issue at the crux of Mr. Obama’s speeches (lest it be lost in the hullabaloo): more black men need to be present in the lives of their children. On that, there can be no argument.

According to the United States Census Bureau, black children are the only group more likely to live with a single mother than in a two-parent household. (That’s in part because black men are the least likely to be married and most likely to be divorced or separated.) And, according to a 2002 report by Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group, in 1997 single black mothers were the least likely to receive full child support payments (and most likely to receive none) and only about half of black children had any contact with their absent fathers in 1996.

That was Charles Blow writing in 2008 in praise of Barack Obama - no "Hey, Muddle Mouth, my kids are amazing" here.  Evidently, how one takes the message depends on the messenger.

For another voice, let's turn to Times columnist Bob Herbert, writing on the crisis facing young black men:

I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America’s black population, especially black males.

We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. 

...Black children — boys and girls — are three times more likely to live in single-parent households than white children and twice as likely to live in a home where no parent has full-time or year-round employment.

He keeps writing abut single-parent households as though it were a bad thing.  Hater.  Doesn't he know Charles Blow has amazing kids so its all good?

Here is Times columnist, Nick Kristof on the poverty trap:

Over the last 35 years, our economy has almost tripled in size, but, according to the United States Census Bureau, the number of Americans living below the poverty line has been stuck at roughly 1 in 8.

One reason is that wages for blue-collar and other ordinary workers peaked in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A second is the breakdown in the family and the explosion in single-parent households. 

...In effect, what’s needed to overcome poverty in part seems to be a change of culture, to break self-destructive behaviors — resignation to unemployment, self-doubt, alcohol and drug abuse, disintegrating families, lack of engagement in children’s education — that create self-replicating cycles of poverty.

He keeps mentioning the breakdown in families as if its a bad thing.  Don't these Times columnists socialize at all?  Charles Blow's kids are amazing, so pipe down, Nick.

Here is Times contributor Lisa Belkin of the Motherlode Blog talking to a sociologist about the rise in singe fathers raising families:

With More Single Fathers, a Changing Family Picture

Q: Is there any measurable difference to a child being raised by a single father versus a single mother?

A: That, of course, is the most important question!  In my opinion, this needs much more research, but last year, there was a marvelous study showing that children of single fathers and single mothers faced greater developmental risks than children raised by their own two parents — risks like not completing high school and being both unemployed and out of school as young adults.  The really interesting thing here is that for children with a single mom, the risks were reduced a bit if the mother found a new partner, but for children with a single dad, the risks increased when he found a new partner.  Maybe this is only because I have a four-year-old girl, but this study conjured images of the wicked stepmother archetype from so many fairy tales.

Sweet Jiminy, doesn't the Times have any editors up to speed on the Blow household?  If they did, they would quit printing this research-based drivel and deliver the only news we need to know - single fathers raise amazing kids!

And in keeping with our goal of leaving no dead horse behind, unbeaten, we have one last bit of non-anecdotal evidence, this time torn from this weeks headlines:

For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage

By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE

...The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

Times editors have a wonderful opportunity to correct the record.  Or to address Blow's ignorant bigotry.  Does anybody anywhere think Blow will be asked to address either the Mormon slur or the anecdotal sociology?  

A HATE GROUP OF ONE:  Bill Jacobson notes that Mr. Bow was quick to spot the bigotry and hate in the Tea Party.  Maybe we could chip in and buy him a mirror.

CAN'T MAKE THIS UP:  Was it really only  two weeks ago that Charles Blow led a column with "Twitter claims another casualty"?!? 

February 10, 2012

Real Men and Pink Suits

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Twitter claims another casualty.

This week, Roland Martin, a bombastic cultural and political commentator was suspended by CNN from his role as a political analyst on the network for Twitter messages published during the Super Bowl.

One message read: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl.” Another read: “Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.”

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said the messages advocated “violence against gay people” and asked CNN to fire Martin. CNN called the messages “regrettable and offensive” and suspended him “for the time being.” Martin issued an apology in which he said that he was just “joking about smacking someone.”

And we get the expected verbiage about tolerance, diversity and respect for others.  None of which seems to apply to Mormons, none of which Mr. Blow seems to have internalized, and none of which will be applied by the Times.

Some parting wisdom from Mr. Blow:

We all have to understand that effects can operate independent of intent, that subconscious biases can move counter to conscious egalitarianism, and that malice need not be present within the individual to fuel the maliciousness of the society at large.

By "we all have to understand", naturally he means "You all have to understand...".  Pressing on:

Start with this fact: The truest measure of a man, indeed of a person, is not whom he lies down with but what he stands up for. If we must be judged, let it be in this way. And when we fall short, as we sometimes will, because humanity is fallible, let us greet each other with compassion and encouragement rather than ridicule and resentment.

Let us greet each other with compassion, unless the other guy is a Mormon.  Then he can stick it in his magic underwear.

I am marveling at this trifecta of bigotry, stupidity and hypocrisy.

They're Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover...

It's not a fine day for the Irish - in an attempt to shamrock the vote, Team Obama has opened a new front in their war on Catholicism:  

Now, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, barackobama.com was peddling “O’Bama” T-shirts, playing on the president’s wee trace of Irish blood and his joke on a visit to Ireland last year that he had “come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

But Mr. Hunt, an owner of Coogan’s in Washington Heights, noted something wrong with the message on the T-shirt itself: below the “O’Bama” was a large four-leaf clover. The shamrock, symbol of Ireland, is a three-leaf clover.

And why might a three-leaf shamrock have significance?

According to tradition, St. Patrick himself used the three-leaf clover to illustrate the Holy Trinity. Christopher Cahill, executive director of the American Irish Historical Society said that while that might be apocryphal — “basically everything associated with St. Patrick is essentially legend,” he said — the shamrock, derived from seamróg, meaning “little clover,” is properly depicted with three leaves.

C'mon, eager Obama staffers - "Trinity" is not just a Matrix reference.

This whole cultural sensitivity thing can get tricky when you aren't on the same page with the bitter-clingers.  Maybe Team Obama could invest in a subscription to Google just to keep themselves in the mainstream.

 

I APPLAUD THEIR TEAM SPIRIT:  The smartest Whte House ever - EVER! - is probably just trying to distract from Joe Biden's Road trip. 

Because He Wouldn't Recognize A Shovel Ready Job If It Appeared On Stage...

Who is in charge of the optics here?

It was a rather odd sight: as an array of museum officials, including former first lady Laura Bush, took up shovels at the groundbreaking for the first national museum dedicated exclusively to African-American history and culture, the nation's first black president sat watching, no shovel in hand.

There is an explanation:

Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St.Thomas issued a statement saying shoveling was "intended for members of the Smithsonian family — senior staff and members of the museum’s council. Former first lady Laura Bush joined the groundbreaking as she is a member of the museum’s advisory council."

So why did Barack and Michelle agree to this?

Politico Sends In The Clowns

In the course of thumping Gingrich Alexander Burns of Politico delivers a howler:

Newt: Media never asked Obama about 'infanticide' - except it did (UPDATE: Or did it?)

That is quite an UPDATE.  As if to illustrate Newt's point that the Elite Media turned a blind eye to Obama's stance on infanticide, Mr. Burns reframes the question to one about late term abortions and ignores Obama's stance on infanticide.  

Tim Graham of Newsbusters has some fun with this, and perhaps I can help - the question of Obama's positioning on infanticide attracted enough attention that the Jess Henig of the Annenberg Fact Check team took a look:

Anti-abortion activists accuse Obama of "supporting infanticide," and the National Right to Life Committee says he’s conducted a "four-year effort to cover up his full role in killing legislation to protect born-alive survivors of abortions." Obama says they’re "lying."

At issue is Obama’s opposition to Illinois legislation in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a "born alive infant" entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive.

Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 "born alive" bills as backdoor attacks on a woman’s legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been "fully in support" of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee’s 2003 mark-up session.

So was Obama lying when he said his critics were lying?  Well, let's not oversimplify this:

Whether opposing "born alive" legislation is the same as supporting "infanticide," however, is entirely a matter of interpretation. That could be true only for those, such as Obama’s 2004 Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, who believes a fetus that doctors give no chance of surviving is an "infant." It is worth noting that Illinois law already provided that physicians must protect the life of a fetus when there is "a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support."

The "born alive" bill gave legal status to infants born with (in the doctors opinion) no chance of long term viabiity.  After a lot of pro-Obama nuance, we finally get this:

But whether or not one accepts those arguments, it is not the reason Obama had been giving for his 2003 opposition. 

So, to return to the question at hand - Newt asked about the infanticide controversy, not Obama's stance on late term abortion; points off for Politico.

And was Newt right that he Elite Media never asked Obama about it?  Well, I guess that depends on where one ranks the Annenberg Fact Check people.  They only cite the National Right to Life Committee, conservative commentator William J. Bennett, and David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network as raising the issue; with all due respect, I don't think Newt had those folks in mind as "Elite Media".

Since you ask, here is the contemporaneous Times coverage of the same interview that inspired the Fact Check:

Both Mr. Obama and his critics agree that, as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee in the state legislature in 2003, he led efforts to defeat a bill called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. But they disagree about virtually every other aspect of the legislation, from its meaning and purpose to the breadth of its application.

The recent controversy erupted after an interview Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, gave to the Christian Broadcasting Network on Saturday night, immediately following his televised question-and-answer session with the Rev. Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in California. Asked about the legislation, Mr. Obama said, “here’s a situation where folks are lying” when they say he has misrepresented his position.

And after a lot of nuance we learn that Obama is acey-deucy with the Times:

In 2002, President Bush signed a federal “born alive” law.... Even organizations like the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, now known as Naral Pro-Choice America, did not oppose the bill.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that he would have been willing to vote for such a measure in Illinois had it been identical to the federal statute. But “that was not the bill that was presented at the state level,” he said Saturday. “What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe v. Wade.”

The statute Congress passed in 2002 and the one the Illinois committee rejected a year later are virtually identical....

That has led Mr. Obama’s critics to accuse him of playing fast and loose with the truth when he says he “would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported” if it had been offered at the state level.

However!

But the Illinois proposal always had a companion bill. The accompanying legislation, called the Induced Infant Liability Act, would have allowed legal action “on the child’s behalf for damages, including costs of care to preserve and protect the life, health and safety of the child, punitive damages, and costs and attorney’s fees, against a hospital, health care facility or health care provider who harms or neglects the child or fails to provide medical care to the child after the child’s birth.”

Groups that favor abortion rights say that bill would have introduced the possibility that doctors could be sued for failing to take extraordinary measures to save the lives of pre-viable infants, those born so prematurely that they could not possibly survive. As a result, they argue, it is disingenuous of anti-abortion organizations to claim that Mr. Obama was moving to quash only a narrow and innocuous definitional bill identical to federal law.

“I can tell you the sponsors always wanted the entire package of bills, which were introduced together and analyzed together,” said Pam Sutherland, who was president of the Illinois branch of Planned Parenthood at the time and is now the group’s lobbyist. “They never wanted them separated, because they wanted to make sure that physicians would be chilled into not performing abortions for fear of going to jail.”

Although views differ on the companionship of the two bills:

“Obama confuses these bills, which were entirely separate,” Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said. “They had sequential numbers, but they were not in any way linked. To call them a package is a tactic to try to reach out and grab issues in an attempt to divert attention from this one.”

So Obama would have supported the bill that mirrored the Federal law if he could have figured out how, with a Democratic majority, to send just that out of committee and not the companion piece.  Uh huh - per the Fact Check piece, we learn that the problem was not insurmountable:

And in fact, the 2005 version of the Illinois bill, which passed the Senate 52 to 0 (with four voting "present") after Obama had gone on to Washington, included an additional protective clause not included in the federal legislation: "Nothing in this Section shall be construed to affect existing federal or State law regarding abortion." Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor says that Obama would have voted for that bill if he had been in state office at the time.

 Yeah, that's the one he woud have supported. 

Well - missing from the Times piece is a quote from the Obama campaign, which supports Newt's point.  And I do think Newt had in mind a question at a nationally televised debate, of which the Democrats had many.

The Politico is no doubt working on this.

SINCE YOU ASKED:  In pre-convention coverage of Obama's 'Catholic problem', John Broder of the Times delivered this summary of the issue:

Republicans are gearing up campaigns to depict Mr. Obama as a radical on the question of abortion, because as a state senator in Illinois he opposed a ban on the killing of fetuses born alive.

Mr. Obama has said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill. Mr. Obama has opposed the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions for similar legal and constitutional reasons.

That explanation did not wash with many abortion foes and most Republicans.

''When you look at his opposition to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which many Mass-attending Catholics view as bans on infanticide, Obama's more extreme than any other Democratic presidential candidate,'' said Leonard Leo, who directed Catholic outreach for Republicans in 2004, and is an informal adviser to the party and the McCain campaign.

Gosh, I feel like a lot of nuance about the 2003 bill was lost in translation.

MORE IS LESS: The Huffington Post and the WaPo had coverage, and apparently the issue made it to Obama's "Fight the Smears" website.

SEND BETTER REBUTTALS: Naureen Khan of the National Journal weighs in:

FACT CHECK: Gingrich Claim on Obama Infanticide Vote A Stretch

Obama did not vote to legalize infanticide, and the media did not ignore the issue.

The media did not ignore it? This is Newt's claim, from the Newsbusters transcription:

“You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide.”

A more impressive rebuttal would be to find an instance of someone actually asking Obama about this.  Literalists can (and no doubt will) argue that Newt's objection is met by the media asking other people about Obama's thought process, but since Newt was sitting on a stage before a nationally televised audience with a CNN interviewer, I would have thought his meaning was clear.

AND SPEAKING OF LITERALISTS:  Erik Wemple of the WaPo picks one side but nods to the other:

That exchange alone [between William Bennet, Costello, and nurse turned newsmaker turned blogger Jill Stanek] would appear to nullify Gingrich’s claim about the elite media circa 2008. After all, Gingrich said merely that “Not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide.” That formulation means that the members of the elite media didn’t need to ask Obama directly---they just needed to ask why. Another CNN segment on the same matter [between Benet and James Carville]...

And the nod to an alternative reality, after noting that John McCain raised the issue during a national debate:

Now who made Obama issue that defense? Could it have been debate moderator and elite media standard bearer Bob Schieffer? No, it was McCain, who used the debate to go after Obama on his record on abortion in Illinois. That turn of events would align with Gingrich’s media worldview, which is that you cannot rely on the left-leaning media to pose tough questions to liberal politicians. Such labor thus defaults to their political opponents.

Broken down word for word, Gingrich’s haymaker against the media looks like just another flailing attempt by an undisciplined politician to demonize an institution that conservatives despise. Yet if you consider what Gingrich may have intended to say — i.e., that Obama wasn’t pressed personally by the “elite media” on this question — there may be some daylight here for the speaker. Coming to a firm conclusion on that question, however, will take at least two more hours of database research, plus an analysis of umpteen 2008 primary debates, and then some.

In other words, based on a perfectly reasonable intrepetation of Newt's accusation (which was live, not a legal brief), Newt is right, or at least, unrebutted.  Oh.

Well, if their goal is to prove Newt's point that the media relexively covers for Obama, Mission Accomplished.

Debate Night Open Thread

The Final Showdown!  Will it be Mittsanity?  Can you spell 'Santorum' without 'SATAN'?  Must see TV!  Live, 8 PM Eastern, on some news outlet or other...

The Devil Made Him Do It

Matt Drudge is featuring a Rick Santorum speech from 2008:

"Satan has his sights on the United States of America!" Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has declared. 

"Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

MORE 

The former senator from Pennsylvania warned in 2008 how politics and government are falling to Satan. 

"This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?" 

"He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions." 

Santorum made the provocative comments to students at Ave Maria University in Florida. 

That does not sound like a mainstream candidate for President.

More Of That Smart Diplomacy

At an "informal" G-20 meeting Hillary wears the real power color while everyone else wears white for a group photo.  One more norteamericano who can't get on the same page as our neighbors to the south.

Israel, Iran, Iraq And The Far-Sighted Barack Obama

Our President was criticized for his possibly precipitate withdrawal from Iraq. However, in evaluating the mechanics of a hypothetical Israeli attack on Iran the NY Times notes an unheralded subtlety:

Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.

...

Given that Israel would want to strike Iran’s four major nuclear sites — the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak and the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan — military analysts say the first problem is how to get there. There are three potential routes: to the north over Turkey, to the south over Saudi Arabia or taking a central route across Jordan and Iraq.

The route over Iraq would be the most direct and likely, defense analysts say, because Iraq effectively has no air defenses and the United States, after its December withdrawal, no longer has the obligation to defend Iraqi skies. “That was a concern of the Israelis a year ago, that we would come up and intercept their aircraft if the Israelis chose to take a path across Iraq,” said a former defense official who asked for anonymity to discuss secret intelligence.

I assume the US would not have scrambled jets to tangle with the Israeli Air Force, but failing to do so might have antagonized Iraqis unhappy with our taking Israel's side, and putting Iraq on Israel's side, in the effort against Iran.  So now the US can keep its hands clean diplomatically.  That contradicts what John McCain said last November:

And McCain said the withdrawal will hurt Iraq and benefit its long-time regional rival. "It is hard to see the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq as anything but a win for Iran," he said.

Well, it increases the challenge faced by Iran's diplomats and air defense planners.  Who suspected Obama the Peacemaker was actually laying the groundwork for a bit of warmogering?  USA Today noted this airspace argument a few days ago, but I have not seen it widely discussed.  (OK, we aren't going to start blogging about my areas of ignorance, there being only 24 hours in the day...)

A Riveting Feel-Good Story

The Times reminds us why they are the greatest paper in the world with a fascinating account of kidney donation chains.

To illustrate with a simple example - John would be delighted to donate a kidney to help his daughter Sally, but he is not a good genetic match; Martha would be delighted to help her cousin Bill, but they don't match either. 

However!  If all four people register with the National Kidney Registry, they may discover that John is a match for Bill and Martha is a match for Sally, in which case, everyone wins. Using high-tech computer skills, the NKR team puts together much longer daisy chains:

As a dawn chill broke over Chicago on Dec. 20, Mr. Terry received a plump pink kidney in a transplant at Loyola University Medical Center. He did not get it from Mr. Ruzzamenti, at least not directly, but the two men will forever share a connection: they were the first and last patients in the longest chain of kidney transplants ever constructed, linking 30 people who were willing to give up an organ with 30 who might have died without one.

What made the domino chain of 60 operations possible was the willingness of a Good Samaritan, Mr. Ruzzamenti, to give the initial kidney, expecting nothing in return. Its momentum was then fueled by a mix of selflessness and self-interest among donors who gave a kidney to a stranger after learning they could not donate to a loved one because of incompatible blood types or antibodies. Their loved ones, in turn, were offered compatible kidneys as part of the exchange.

Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”

This is an inspiring feel-good story, which is fine, since public awareness and support makes this networking effort even more successful, so the Times does not poke at a couple of questions that might break the mood.  But here we go:

1.  Hey, those one-percenters are good for something!  Let's hear about the founder:

Garet Hil and his wife, Jan, may never fully recover from the snowy night in February 2007 when they took their 10-year-old daughter in with flu symptoms and emerged with a shocking diagnosis of nephrophthisis, a genetic kidney-wasting disease. They could not imagine sacrificing her youth to dialysis.

Because Mr. Hil and his daughter shared the same blood type, he assumed he would be able to give her one of his kidneys. But two days before surgery, doctors canceled the operations after discovering that his daughter had developed antibodies that would most likely cause rejection.

Jan Hil and six other family members volunteered but were also ruled out. Mr. Hil and his daughter joined several of the registries that had started to arrange kidney exchanges, but the pools were small and they never found a match. Fortunately, one of Mr. Hil’s nephews then was tested and was able to donate.

After the successful transplant, Mr. Hil, a veteran business executive, could not shake his frustration that a more effective registry for paired kidney donation did not exist. “The exchange systems out there weren’t industrial strength,” he said.

By the end of 2007, the Hils had formed the National Kidney Registry and rented office space in an old clapboard house in Babylon, N.Y. The couple invested about $300,000 to start it, and Mr. Hil, who is now 49, ran the registry without a salary.

“The goal was very simple: get everybody transplanted in under six months if you had a living donor,” he said. “One of the things that drove us was the enormity of the problem. The other thing that drove us was that we understood the pain of being in that situation.”

Mr. Hil turned out to be the right person to infuse the budding science of kidney exchange with an entrepreneurial spark. A former Marine reconnaissance ranger with an M.B.A. from the Wharton School, he had managed a series of data and logistics companies in Boston and New York and understood the worlds of both computing and finance.

He had made his money and could step off the career track to give the registry his time and the resources of his software-consulting firm. He had a background in quantitative math and enough drive to plow through medical texts about organ compatibility. Over time, he led a team in designing sophisticated software that evolved to build ever-longer chains.

Disney-hero handsome, with a cleft chin and thick wavy hair, Mr. Hil marketed his registry to hospitals with PowerPoints and passion. The transplant world initially regarded him as an interloper. But he has now persuaded 58 of the country’s 236 kidney transplant centers, including many of the largest, to feed his database with information about pairs of transplant candidates and their incompatible donors.

They aren't kidding about the handsome, based on this pic from the organization website.  Left unexplored - how did he accomplish all this without a Federal program or Congressional hearings?

Apparently competition is maybe not so bad - from a year-old story about an earlier chain we glean this:

Last fall, the United Network for Organ Sharing, an organization that oversees the nation's organ and transplant network, finally began its long-awaited pilot program that will attempt to do just that and link all of the eligible patients from the nation's more than 200 transplant centers.

But Garet Hil, founder and president of the National Kidney Registry in Babylon, N.Y., which organized the 32-person chain, said UNOS's pilot program "is a failure."

Mr. Hil, who runs a consulting and software development company, sits on the Kidney Paired Donation Pilot working group that has been trying to make the program work.

"I've witnessed a program with a flawed design, working in a bureaucratic way that's not going to get many people transplanted," he said Friday in a phone interview. "The program has been out since October and it's only done two transplants and we've done 60 since then -- including this chain" of which UPMC was a part.

He argues that his registry -- which he started three years after enduring struggles to get his 10-year-old daughter a kidney transplant -- is already a truly national program because it represents 55 transplant centers that collectively do about two-thirds of all transplants in the United States.

Eventually, he hopes, his registry will become the official national program.

"The transplant centers are going to vote by joining the registry," he said, noting that UPMC signed on with the registry late last year.

He has a host of criticisms with the pilot program, including that it allows only small chains that would give just two or three people new kidneys at a time, while the National Kidney Registry runs chains, like this recent one, where dozens of people get new kidneys.

Ken Andreoni, an Ohio State University transplant surgeon who chairs UNOS's kidney committee, has heard Mr. Hil's arguments and concerns before and he believes he's just being too impatient.

"I'm in this for the 50-year- and 100-year-long issues," he said, adding that they will take time to solve.

He concedes the pilot program is slowed by the bureaucracy of having to follow rigid rules that aim to maximize successful transplants and minimize risk.

But that's the price you pay when you're creating what is to be a real national program that answers to everyone, unlike Mr. Hil's registry.

50 years?  What's the hurry?

Finally, these chains are often launched by Good Samaritan donors.  Should we pay volunteer donors?  This very tricky question is tackled in The Lancet.

Sunday Morning Layup Drill

'Hope and Change' is sooo 2008 - Team Obama is looking for a new slogan for 2012:

WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Winning The Future. Greater Together. We Don't Quit.

They may not be official but those are all phrases that could in one form or another be candidates to become President Barack Obama's re-election slogan.

I know we can help.

THE ROAD TO THE FINAL FOUR:  Not having even checked I am willing to bet that the winning entries will include either LOL or OMG.

PITCHERS AND CATCHERS HAVING REPORTED... Maybe Obama can bond with the bitter-clingers by resurrecting "We Are Family".  Or he could appeal to ironists with "So Happy Together".  "Gonna Walk (Before They Make Me Run)"?  Probably not.  And why am I stuck on popular music when there are so many other roads before me?  Over to Hit et al...

PUTTING NEW JERSEY IN PLAY:  Would "Better Together" encroach on New Jersey's "Perfect Together"?  Is ripping off the NJ slogan really the way Team Obama wants to go?  Geez, if they are going to steal a state campaign, why not go with "I Love Obama"?  I'm sure someone somewhere (and everyone at the Times) would keep a straight face.

STAYING POSITIVE:  "We Don't Quit" is a negative message almost as dumb as Nike's ridiculous "No Fear" campaign.  I'm begging you, don't tell athletes what they won't be doing; tell them what they will be doing.  And don't tell people not to think of pink elephants unless you want them to do just that.

SKIMMING THE POSSIBILITIES:  "Greece is the word"; "Fore More Years"; "Audacity II - The Recovery"...

When Is A Tie Not A Tie?

When is a tie not a tie?  And when is a tie-breaker not a tie-breaker?  When our friends in the liberal media are reporting on Obama.

In the course of criticizing Rick Santorum, the reliable Charles Blow set me off with this aside:

Then again, charitable giving doesn’t appear to be high on Motor Mouth Santorum’s list of priorities. As The Washington Post pointed out, based on Santorum’s tax return disclosure this week, he has given the least amount to charity of the four presidential candidates who have disclosed their tax returns. (Ron Paul has not.) His charitable giving was just 1.8 percent of his adjusted gross income.

The Obamas were the highest, giving 14.2 percent, even though their income was second lowest.

Obama won with 14.2%?  That seems odd, since even the Huffers headlined the news that Romney gave 16% to charity over 2009-2010.  So what did the WaPo report?

Here we go:

Romney and Obama vie for title of most charitable; Santorum gave least to charity

Posted by Aaron Blake at 12:40 PM ET, 02/16/2012

The most charitable presidential candidate in the 2012 election is ... a tie!

A tie?  So when did the tie become a vic for the Big O?  Pressing on, we are not surprised to learn that watching journalism majors write about taxes can get ugly:

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, despite having the second-lowest income of the four candidate/spouse combos, gave the highest percentage of their $1.8 million income to charity in 2010, at 13.6 percent.

The wealthiest couple, Mitt Romney and wife Ann, finished slightly ahead, giving 13.8 percent to charity — most of it to the Mormon church. Of course, Romney also made far more than anyone else in 2010, at more than $21 million.

I know what you are thinking, even if you are a WaPo reporter - 13.8% is more than 13.6%.  But we can move Obama to the front with a simple adjustment!

But when you calculate charitable giving based on adjustable gross income, Obama actually takes a lead. He and Michelle gave 14.2 percent of their AGI, while the Romneys gave 13.8 percent.

Oh, please - do we really have to look at Obama's 2010 tax return?  In 2010 Barack and Michele reported a Gross Income of $1.795 million; their AGI was $1.728 million.  By applying their charitable deductions to the smaller base the WaPo arrived at their winning 14.2%.

But just what was that income adjustment?  Well, from page 1 of the return we see that $18,000 was their share of a self-employment tax (associated, I have no doubt, with their book royalties, and I don't want to know more) and $49,000 was due to a tax-deductible contribution to self-employed retirement plan (similar to an IRA.)

So Michelle and Barack win the "Most Charitable" title because they contributed a higher proportion of their Gross Income to a tax-advantaged retirement plan?  I understand that charity begins a home, but really? 

The Romneys win on a comparison based on Gross Income; the Romneys still win if we allow the Obama's AGI adjustment for $18,000 of taxes but disallow the voluntary, tax favored self-serving retirement savings.

And for a real tiebreak, maybe we can look at both 2009 and 2010.  The Romneys move up to 16% for the two years.  And the Obamas?  Ooops - GI was up a lot at $5.623 million, charitable giving was up a little at $329,100, and their donation rate was 5.9%.  Totaling over the two years, the Obamas averaged 7.7%.

But that is probably too complicated for the WaPo, so let's not even mention the tax and legal issues associated with Barack's Nobel Prize.

Nor do we want to delve into the propriety of an incoming President enjoying his bully pulpit to sign a book deal - as is the custom, the Obama are donating those royalties to charity. Back when he was an unknown private citizen with no eye on the White House, Barack was donating at a Santorum-like level, so let's not mention that either.

Well - twisting these numbers to come up with a win for Obama must have been harder than solving a Rubik's cube.  Good job by the WaPo and great echo chamber effort by Blow.

Saturday AM

The traditional "End of Linsanity" open thread.

Searching For The 98%

Glenn Kessler of the WaPo tries to bring the reality-based community home to reality on the oft-cited yet bogus stat that 98% of Catholic women use birth control.

Guess Who's Coming To Stats Class

The Pew Research Center releases a feel-good study about race relations in America which ducks the tough questions.  Here is CNN's take:

(CNN) -- Forty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage, the rate of marriage across racial and ethnic lines in the United States is on the rise, according to a new study released Thursday.

And while such "intermarriages" continue to grow, so too does public acceptance of such unions, according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends project.

Not to be the skunk at this garden party, but...

First of all, the Supreme Court (Loving v. Virginia) struck down a law barring whites from marrying outside their race; I presume other races were free to mingle.

And we care because the Pew study is surprisingly coy on the question of just where the progress has ocurred in the inter-racial marriage front.

As they note in an earlier study, the wave of Asian and Hispanic immigration since 1980 has created vast new opportunites for inter-racial marriage.  So, is the new all time high in the intr-marriage rate being driven by Hispanics marrying whites and blacks while whites marry Hispanics and Asians?  It is hard to tell from this data, but that seems to be the case.

If one believed, back in 1980, that the dominant white culture was irredeemably racist and could never reconcile themselves to people of any color, news of increasing intermarriage between whites and Asians is encouraging.  (We did fear the Yellow Peril, endure Pearl Harbor, nuke Japan, and fight in Korea and Vietnam, after all, yet we seem to have overcome).

However, if one believes that, following the end of the legalized Jim Crow era, the real story is reconciliation or lack thereof between whites and blacks, well, this Pew study has buried the truth too deeply for me to find.

Just as a question mark, I will note this, from the Pew 2010 study: the newlywed intermarriage rate for whites rose from 3.2% in 1980 to 8.9% in 2008 (p. 13).  However, in 2008 49% of those white intermarriages were to Hispanics; 18% to Asians; 20% to 'other'; and 14% to blacks.  That suggests that roughly 1.3% of whites 'outmarried' to blacks.  Is that up from the aggregate 'outmarriage' rate of 3.2% in 1980, when there were many fewer Hispanics and Asians?  Pew knows, but I don't.

Well, its a nice feel-good story.  Happy Valentine's weekend.

 

Trouble In Paradise

[UPDATE:  HHS Secretary Sebelius addressed this very point with reporters with what sounds like a major concession to the no-contraception coverage crowd; see UPDATE below.]

Back in the Business section Katie Thomas of the Ministry of Truth discovers and covers a  problem with Obama's previously brilliant contraception compromise:

Self-Insured Complicate Health Deal

Yeah they do.  Last Saturday the Times had noted that many large Catholic institutions had slipped out of state regulation and under the Federal ERISA umbrella by self-insuring after states such as New York and California had adopted strict rules about the provision of contraception coverage to employees.  However, there was no mention of that issue in their reporting on Obama's "compromise" (or by Obama himself).

Nontheless, we now get this (my emphasis):

The Obama administration thought it had found a way to ease mounting objections to a requirement in the new health care act that all employers — including religiously affiliated hospitals and universities — offer coverage for birth control to women free of charge.

It would make the insurers cover the costs, rather than the organizations themselves.

But the administration announced the compromise plan before it had figured out how to address one conspicuous point: Like most large employers, many religiously affiliated organizations choose to insure themselves rather than hire an outside company to assume the risk.

Now, the organizations are trying to determine how to reconcile their objections to offering birth control on religious grounds with their role as insurers — or whether there can be any reconciliation at all. And the administration still cannot put the thorny issue to rest.

Uh huh - that point is so conspicuous that the Times has taken nearly a week to cover the Administration's lack of clarity on that subject.  My goodness, the bishops were making that very point on the Friday Obama announced his "compromise", but I guess the bishops don't have the Times fax number the way the White House press office does.

The administration has remained mostly silent on how self-insured institutions will be treated, other than to say that the details will be worked out in meetings with religious leaders in the days and weeks to come.

“This policy will be developed collaboratively so that the ultimate outcome works for religious employers, their workers and the public,” an administration official said Wednesday.

I have become a broken record saying the current deal as widely reported is not final and may yet change.  But the InstaPundit gets results!

Nicholas P. Cafardi, dean emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University, a Catholic institution, said that President Obama gave the bishops exactly what they asked for.

“The only serious issue left is self-insurance,” he said Wednesday on a conference call with reporters. “But the Obama administration has said it wants to work with these organizations so they’re not required to violate their conscience. I’m sure they mean that in good faith.”

The conference call was arranged by Faith in Public Life in support of the contraception deal, so even supporters are saying that the current ground needs to be revised "in good faith".

Let's close with thoughts from Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

“There’s been a promise to have a conversation, but we haven’t heard about when it’s going to be,” he said. “We’re waiting for that.”

UPDATE:  HHS Secretary Sebelius was asked about this by reporters today.  From the Washington Times:

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday that self-insuring religious employers will be exempted from a contraception coverage mandate, clearing up a question raised by Catholic groups and other opponents who continued protesting the rule this week.

“Yes, I think that we will apply it to both,” Mrs. Sebelius told reporters, saying a new rule the administration offered last week to quell criticism will apply both to religious employers who buy plans for their workers and to those who self-insure.

“Whether it’s an insured plan or self-insured plan, that the employer who has a religious objection doesn’t have to directly offer or pay for contraception,” she said as reporters gathered around her Wednesday after a hearing on President Obama’s proposed budget before the Senate Finance Committee.

No one knows what that means, since the rules have not been finalized.  For a religious employer who buys coverage from an insurance company, the Obama game was "Let's Pretend" - the employer pays a premium for health coverage other than contraception services and the insurer provides the contraception coverage "for free", presumably paid for by the premiums collected from the company.

Just how that accountung chicanery could be applied when the employer is also the insurer remains utterly mysterious, but Ms. Sebelius says it is all taken care of.

If the national result is similar to the outcome in New York and California, this new rule will further divide the opposition.  Large Catholic institutions went the self-insurance route; small institutions felt they could not afford the liability.

That means Notre Dame is safe.

DECLARING VICTORY WHILE CONCEDING DEFEAT: Here is how Politico covered Ms. Sebilius' remarks:

But Sebelius reiterated that the administration is committed to respecting the beliefs of religious employers, including those that self-insure.

“Whether it’s an insured plan or a self-insured plan, [the rule will mean] that the employer who has the religious objection doesn’t have to directly offer or pay for contraception,” Sebelius said.

“At the end of the day,” Sebelius said, the policy “is a big triumph for women.”

FOR THE LEGAL EAGLES:  The Times and the WSJ offer varying views on the law behind the contracption "compromise".  Just how will the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act apply?

LIFE'S MYSTERIES:  Amidst some info on the self-insurance market the Times includes this:

In a curious twist, several Catholic organizations have chosen to self-insure in recent years to avoid the requirements of the state mandates, said Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

Curiouser and curiouser.

NANCY PELOSI: Make 'em pay!  Where is the liberal respect for a diversity of viewpoints?

Soft Bigotry

In the course of an interesting article about how to promote college success among disadvantaged New York high school students, Tina Rosenberg of the normally hyper-sensitive NY Times presents this (my emphasis):

The second way that Posse is subversive is that it shows that academic chops do not completely determine college success. It demonstrates other important factors: whether a student has social support, a sense of belonging and a network that can offer advice. People from a dominant culture take these things for granted, but minority students have to build them. Posse helps. Every Posse member I talked to said having the group is crucial.

Groan.  Are Asians no longer a majority?  Do the famed 'dragon moms' really take their kids effort and selection of friends for granted?

And even amongst the dreaded dominant whites, do all kids simply coast along on a strong network of friends and family?  Do parents really just "take for granted" that they have worked hard in order to move to a safe neighborhod and put their children in good schools?  Please - otherwise talented white kids who lack social skills or come from difficult domestic situations are left to drift to wherever they drift without anyone outside their immediate circle fretting about their lack of opportunity and achievment.  Certainly we aren't seeing charities and NY Times article focusing on the problems of the under-achieving offspring of one-percenters.

Social support is important for everyone; some families and communities are successful at providing it, and some need help.  No one takes it for granted.  Grr.

Read Their Lips - Rexip Mimscray Taxes

Team Obama projects a consistent story on their pledge not to raise taxes for those earning les than 250,000 - the ObamaCare mandate is, or maybe isn't, or maybe is a tax.

Two Americas With Two Legal Departments

There is an interesting divide on legal analysis of Obama's contraception decision.  On the left, at least as exemplified by Linda Greenhouse of the Times, we are told that the law says one thing; over on the right, the law is presented with an important difference.  Spoiler Alert - we will eventually see that the reality-based commuity has not yet made a full reconciliation with reality.

Here is Ms. Greenhouse on the background to the relevant religious freedom issues:

In the escalating conflict over the new federal requirement that employers include contraception coverage without a co-pay in the insurance plans they make available to their employees, opposition from the Catholic church and its allies is making headway with a powerfully appealing claim: that when conscience and government policy collide, conscience must prevail.

...

What they now claim is a right to special treatment: to conscience that trumps law.

But in fact, that is not a principle that our legal system embraces. Just ask Alfred Smith and Galen Black, two members of the Native American Church who were fired from their state jobs in Oregon for using the illegal hallucinogen peyote in a religious ceremony and who were then deemed ineligible for unemployment compensation because they had lost their jobs for “misconduct.” They argued that their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion trumped the state’s unemployment law.

In a 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court disagreed. Even a sincere religious motivation, in the absence of some special circumstance like proof of government animus, does not merit exemption from a “valid and neutral law of general applicability,” the court held. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion, which was joined by, among others, the notoriously left wing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

A broad coalition of conservative and progressive religious groups pushed back hard, leading to congressional passage of the tendentiously titled Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It provided that a free exercise claim would prevail unless the government could show a “compelling” reason for holding a religious group to the same legal requirements that applied to everyone else. After a Catholic church in Texas invoked that law in an effort to expand into a landmark zone where no new building was permitted, the Supreme Court declared the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional as applied to the states. The law remains in effect as applied to the federal government, although its full dimension remains untested.

First, very modest props to Ms. Greenhouse, who at least acknowledges the relevance of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. At the Daily Kos, the legal clock stopped in 1990 with Smith; the ensuing Congressional pushback (under a Democratic Congress and President) is not mentioned.  TPMDC notes that the 1993 Act exists and might apply but finds an expert to assure them that, since the insurer provides the contraception coverage "for free!" (all the premiums collected from the employer carefully being applied elsewhere), the act won't be relevant. 

Over on the right, the WSJ offers analysis from two prominent righties, Ed Whelan and David Rivkin.  They amend and extend Ms. Greenhouse's explanation of the 1993 act:

The 1993 law restored the same protections of religious freedom that had been understood to exist pre-Smith. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act states that the federal government may "substantially burden" a person's "exercise of religion" only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person "is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest" and "is the least restrictive means of furthering" that interest.

Wait a second - that "least restrictive" qualifier seems to loom large.  It is not enough that the goverment has a compelling interest - it needs to demonstrate that other methods of advancing that interest won't be adequate.  That caveat makes a bit of a hash of legal anaysis such as this from Ms. Greenhouse:

The question would then be whether the case for the mandate, without the broad exemption the church is demanding, is sufficiently “compelling.” Such a case would pit the well-rehearsed public health arguments (half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and nearly half of those end in abortion – a case for expanded access to birth control if there ever was one ) against religious doctrine.

Really?  Maybe the case will hinge on whether the insurance mandate is the best way to advance this interest.  Back to Rivkin and Whelan:

Does the mandate further the governmental interest in increasing cost-free access to contraceptives by means that are least restrictive of the employer's religious freedom? Plainly, the answer is no. There are plenty of other ways to increase access to contraceptives that intrude far less on the free exercise of religion.

Health and Human Services itself touts community health centers, public clinics and hospitals as some of the available alternatives; doctors and pharmacies are others. Many of the entities, with Planned Parenthood being the most prominent, already furnish free contraceptives. The government could have the rest of these providers make contraceptive services available free and then compensate them directly. A mandate on employers who object for religious reasons is among the most restrictive means the government could have chosen to increase access.

The mandate also fails the "compelling government interest" test. Given the widespread availability of contraceptive services, and the far less restrictive other ways to increase their availability, the government can hardly claim it has a "compelling" interest in marginally increasing access to birth control by requiring objecting employers to join in this effort.

Ms. Greenhouse simplifies the 1993 law down to a rule that says the government can trample any religious belief it chooses if the objective is good.  Rivkin and Whelan find the law to be more nuanced.  As to the actual text, well, no prizes for guessing who is right:

(b) Exception: Government may substantially burden a person's exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person-

(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and

(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

Interestingly, Ms. Greenhouse was aware of this nuance when she wrote about the law back in 1997:

Supported by President Clinton and defended by his administration in court, it provided that no level of government could enforce laws that ''substantially burden'' religious observance without demonstrating a ''compelling'' need to do so and without using the ''least restrictive means available.''

For purposes of evaluating ObamaCare from the left, "least restrictive" seems to have become water under the bridge since 1997.  Well, we have all passed a lot of water since then.

Going forward, a lot of earnest liberals who still take the Times seriously will insist that, based on the analysis of the Times leading Supreme Court reporter (and supplemented by the DKOS or TPDMC), the contraception mandate is A-OK.  And righties will cite the WSJ and insist the opposite.  I see Two Americas clashing at cocktail parties all over this great nation.

MORE:  The White House was advised of the issues:

Ambassador Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University School of Law, does not agree with the president's decision, but his analysis of Supreme Court rulings suggests that it is uncertain how courts will decide these cases.

"I would have to tell [President Obama], that my honest answer about the law is that I think it is unclear as to what is required here," Kmiec said, because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Employment Division v. Smith (1990)

...Congress attempted to overturn the Smith decision by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993. The Supreme Court then overturned RFRA, at least as it applies to state law, which leaves its application at the federal level unclear, Kmiec explained.

There has been one case, though, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao de Vegetal (2006), in which the Supreme Court did say that RFRA applies to federal law. That case "would be taken account of," Kmiec said, but "I don't think it's clear, it's unmistakable, that it does."

Kmiec, who worked in the Obama administration as ambassador to Malta, presented his legal opinion to the White House in November.

"I think there is an argument both ways. So, I'd have to say to the president, that one is a question mark," he said.

Nevertheless, Kmiec has communicated to the president that a broad religious exemption should be given, even if it is not required.

"The way I put that … when I gave him my advice in November was, this is an opportunity for you to do more than the law requires. You could have said that you admire the millions of people that have been helped and assisted and continue to be helped and assisted by the work of the Church and you want to go the extra mile, even if the Constitution doesn't demand it of you."

Interesting - as described by Ms. Greenhouse, the 1997 decision was about Federalism and the power of the states versus the Federal government, not a separation of powers scuffle between Congress and the Supreme Court:

Rather, this was the third major Supreme Court decision in as many years, grounded in three separate lines of constitutional analysis, to reject Congress's expansive interpretation of its own powers and to take a generous view of the role of the states in the Federal system.

Justice Kennedy said that by requiring ''searching judicial scrutiny'' of any state law that had the effect of making it more difficult for people to practice their religion, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a ''considerable intrusion into the states' traditional prerogatives and general authority to regulate for the health and welfare of their citizens.''

And the 2006 case seemed clear enough as to the applicability to Federal law.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER:  Presumably this has been beaten to death at the Volokh Conspiracy.  Does anyone have links to especially cogent articles there?

JUMP BALL:  From Thomson-Reuters:

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California Los Angeles, said different courts could reach different conclusions on those questions. He said the latest revision to the rule doesn't necessarily defeat the religious groups' claims, which he described as plausible.

"I suspect that many institutions will find the compromise inadequate, because they'll still see the new rule as requiring complicity with sin," Volokh said.

But timing is everything:

The challengers also face the burden of proving that the issue is ripe enough for a lawsuit. Until the government finalizes the rule, no one can bring litigation, said Laura MacCleary of the Center for Reproductive Rights, adding that courts would likely dismiss the suits.

 

In A Footnote To Their Coverage Of Obama's Glory...

Laurie Goodstein of The Ministry of Truth explains that Obama's "compromise" on contraception has split his critics.  Only deep in the story do we find a candle flickering for the sort of compromise we still believe will be forthcoming on the matter of self-insured institutions:

A moment for the pom-poms:

Obama Shift on Providing Contraception Splits Critics

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The near-unified front led by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to oppose a mandate for employers to cover birth control has now crumbled amid the compromise plan that the Obama administration offered last week to accommodate religious institutions.

The buried news is the non-split among the Catholics on a critical point (my emphasis):

After three weeks of protest that united the bishops with many priests, nuns and prominent Catholic laypeople from the political right and left, the Obama administration announced what it called a compromise on Friday. It said that the Catholic institutions would not have to pay for the birth control coverage or refer their employees to it, but that it would all be covered directly by the insurance companies.

The contrast in responses from Catholic organizations has been more a matter of tone than content. They are all in agreement that certain issues still need to be worked out, like what to do about Catholic institutions that are “self-insured,” meaning that they act as both the insurer and the employer.

Hello!  The self-insurance escape hatch is what allowed a number of large Catholic institutions to escape strict state contraception mandates in, for example, California and New York.  If even Obama's ostensible allies think the new rules need to show flexibility for the self-insured, then where are we?  Well, we are in need of further accomodation.  And having demonstrated the importance of liberal Catholics to his PR strategy, Obama can hardly hang them out to dry now.

So - does Obama listen to the traditionalist Cathoic leaders scream from now until November and then accomadate them?  Does he endure their screaming until November and then toss his liberal Catholic allies under the bus?

Or does he somewhat promptly admit that his "insurance companies will provide it for free" fantasy simply makes no sense when there is no insurance company, and extend the exemption?

This is far from over.

FURTHER COMPLICATIONS:  The Supreme Court may gut ObamaCare in June, rendering this controversy moot; maybe stalling until then makes sense.

Of course, by then Dem activists may have gotten gay marriage written into the Democratic Party platform, which may oblige Obama to evolve on that issue sooner than he would prefer.  Or can Obama morph "Say I Do" into "Say I Do Prefer To Pretend To Keep Thinking It Over"?  Well, if Obama has to jump on the gay marriage bandwagon now rather than after the election, perhaps a broader contraception exemption will balance the angst felt by the two sides.

No Middle Ground

Gretchen Reynolds of the Times comes back to the new emerging wisdom in exercise - short and intense workouts beat long, patient ones. Some famous studies demonstrated the efficacy of high intensity training for athletes, but this new study looks at sedentary middle-agers:

In proof of that idea, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, recently gathered several groups of volunteers. One consisted of sedentary but generally healthy middle-aged men and women. Another was composed of middle-aged and older patients who’d been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

...

the researchers also developed a gentler but still chronologically abbreviated form of HIIT. This modified routine involved one minute of strenuous effort, at about 90 percent of a person’s maximum heart rate (which most of us can estimate, very roughly, by subtracting our age from 220), followed by one minute of easy recovery. The effort and recovery are repeated 10 times, for a total of 20 minutes.

Despite the small time commitment of this modified HIIT program, after several weeks of practicing it, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness.

And this may come as a surprise - they liked it!

Almost as surprising, the cardiac patients have embraced the routine. Although their ratings of perceived exertion, or sense of the discomfort of each individual interval, are high and probably accurate, averaging a 7 or higher on a 10-point scale, they report enjoying the entire sessions more than longer, continuous moderate exercise, Dr. MacDonald said.

“The hard work is short,” she points out, “so it’s tolerable.” Members of a separate, exercise control group at the rehab center, assigned to complete standard 30-minute moderate-intensity workout sessions, have been watching wistfully as the interval trainers leave the lab before them. “They want to switch groups,” she said.

Left unmentioned - 30 minutes of slow cycling on a stationary bike takes you near the pinnacle of tedium (in a modern gym a television would be available, which is not so for the lap swimmers.)  However, a serious interval effort is only boring to people who think that being waterboarded would be boring. For the rest of us, pain is not dull.

FULL DISCLOSURE:  I was a skeptic, but science is science.

MY CONTRIBUTION TO ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE:  Yesterday David Brooks took a swipe at Paul Krugman, who naturally responded.  This detail catches my eye:

But I do want to make a point about the nature of social explanation.

David says,

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.

True enough. But suppose we apply the same logic to another problem, say obesity:

I don’t care how little manual work Americans engage in these days, or how available fast food has become, it still doesn’t make sense not to stay at your ideal weight through diet and exercise.

This is also true — yet few people do this (I don’t, although I’ll get on the treadmill in a few minutes).

If Krugman is truly reality-based he'll know what to do when next he gets on that treadmill.  All aboard the Distress Express!

Oh, and he needs to switch to low-carbs, slow-carbs.  This shouldn't be a partisan fight, but I assume Krugman will want to make it one (the vegetarians are mostly on the left and a diet based on grass-fed beef is not a sustainable model for the world.) 

Well - both sides agree that sugar is out, so be sure to exclude fruit juices and sports drinks.  Refined carbs generally are the treats of the devil and do give some special thought to wheat gluten.  Some theorists believe that there are two types of people in the world - those who know they are sensitive to gluten, and those who have not yet realized they are sensitive to gluten.

LET ME ADD: Bryan Caplan's response to Krugman was far more interesting (and far less practical) than mine.  Just a snippet:

When someone drops out of high school, overeats, or fails to exercise, you tell us that their behavior is only "human."  But if a conservative or libertarian objects to paying taxes to help people who make these choices, you get angry.  Question: Why are you so forgiving of people with irresponsible lifestyles, but so outraged by people who don't want to pay taxes to help people with irresponsible lifestyles?

Hmm, because these poverty-deniers are haters?  Or racist?  Or racist haters?  I am rarely successful trying to think like a lib.

Clearing A Vey High Bar

Andrew Sullivan, the infamous cartographer of Sarah Palin's birth canal, has outdone himself with his strangest and most inaccurate sentence yet.  Writing on the topic of Obama's transcendent genius and the contraception compromise, he delivers this:

Liberal Catholics on contraception - roughly 98 percent of us - are fine with the compromise.

Gay men use contraception?  Safe sex, sure but birth control?  I try to learn something new every day.

As to the 98% stat, that is phony.

For a better guess as to support for the Obama proposal, why not try a real poll?  Here is Pew Research:

Among Catholics who have heard at least a little about the issue, 55% favor giving religious institutions that object to the use of contraceptives an exemption from the federal rule, while 39% oppose exempting those institutions.

Does Obama's "Let's pretend" compromise - employers will pay for health coverage that does not incude contraception coverage; insurers will then bundle in contraceptive coverage for free and we will all pretend that the employer didn't pay for it - really satisfy the 55% calling for an exemption?  And since no one knows how self-insured institutions will be treated (maybe they will buy "free" contraception coverage from themselves?), it seems premature to declare a success.  Pew did add this:

The survey shows little difference in opinions among people interviewed before the administration’s proposed modification on Feb. 10 and those interviewed afterwards.

Still, Obama's scheme was enough to bring home the true-belivers who never really left.  This bit of analysis from Andrew shows a special lack of self-awareness:

The Vatican and Bishops and their theocon friends on the far Catholic right remain opposed, isolating themselves badly. Yes, they'll shore up the Christianist base - but they weren't going to vote for Obama anyway.

Uh huh.  But per the Pew poll, the real support for Obama's position comes from the left:

By about two-to-one (64% to 29%), Democrats say religious institutions should be required to cover contraceptives like other employers; liberal Democrats (72%) are more likely than conservative and moderate Democrats (58%) to favor this approach.

Were these people really in play with a Romney or Santorum candidacy?

Meanwhile, back in the political center:

Independents are split: 48% say religious institutions that object to the use of contraceptives should be required to cover them like other employers, while 46% favor giving religious institutions an exemption.

Well, Andrew eventually got bored writing that Bush was a genius, breaking with him on the issue of gay marriage; one wonders when Andrew will grow impatient waiting for Obama's evolution to a supportive stance on that subject.

 

For The Cynical And Skeptical Among Us

Back on the contraception front, two stray thoughts vex me.

1.  Did Obama need this fight in order to re-bond with the anti-religious left?  Maybe his evolution on endorsing gay marriage has been deferred until after the election, so he needed to establish his anti-church cred with this.

2.  We write of Missing Persons - in the tick-tock about the decision-making process on the contraception rule and the narrow religious exemption, we hear about Kathleen Sebelius, Melody Barnes, and Valerie Jarrett,all of whom have obvious roles to play based ontheir position in the org chart.

But nowhere do we learn whether a woman who once pulled down $300,000 per year to advise a hospital on public health issues chimed in on this debate.  Given her background, why wouldn't she?  (And does anyone doubt where she would come out?)

Wheel Of Fortune

Santorum catches Romney in a national poll, which calls for a Rick Roll open thread.

In another month Mitt will be well positioned as the 'Anybody But Santorum' candidate.

I Continue To Sniff A New Deal On Contraception Coverage

When is a final rule not a final rule?  When it has been announced by Obama as the final rule in the contraception controversy.  Apparently the "final rules" are anything but, which means there is plenty of time for some revisions and accomodations.

An Incomplete Contraceptive Coverage Compromise

Cary Coglianese | 02/13/12

In Friday's highly publicized announcement, President Obama may have helped contain the political firestorm over the new federal mandate that health plans cover contraceptives. But the embers are still hot.  And legally speaking, nothing has changed. On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule that looks just like what it announced on January 20 – the very announcement that set off the recent firestorm.

What's going on?

Speaking to CNN just after the president’s announcement, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated, “We’re pleased to announce that the final rule, which will be published later this afternoon, will include this important balance.” She reiterated that “as of the end of today the rule will be finalized.”

But  the rule HHS finalized on Friday actually put in place nothing like what the president announced. On the contrary, the final rule enacts the very same terms that HHS had announced on January 20th. Churches are exempt from the mandate but the only concession religious nonprofits receive is the promised one-year “enforcement safe haven.”  An accompanying guidance, also released Friday, would make the safe haven contingent on a nonprofit completing a certification and providing written notice to its employees that its health plan provides no coverage for contraceptives. In an explanatory preamble to Friday’s final rule, HHS did state that it plans to “work with stakeholders” on a separate rulemaking that would enact the compromise the President announced and even “to develop policies to achieve the same goals for self-insured group health plans.”

But it is clear that the federal government has not even begun to initiate this new rulemaking; it only “will work with stakeholders to propose and finalize this policy before the end of the temporary enforcement safe harbor.”

So at this point the rules don't exist, most importantly the rules for the self-insured; many Catholic institutions went the self-insurance route to escape state laws in, for example, New York and California.  Whether that ploy will still work will depend, obviously, on what the new rules are.  And those rules are subject to ongoing negotiation.

It ain't over 'til it's over.  And maybe not even then.

We Hear From The Department Of Good Ideas And False Choices

Nick Kristof joins in on the contraception debate.  No prizes for guessing what side he is on - he trivializes the opposition, presents reams of information documenting the notion that contraception care is a good idea (and who disputes it?), delivers a bit of misinformation, wrings his hands and concludes with a false choice and a bold exhortation to Do The Right Thing.

First, the trivia - his title is "Beyond Pelvic Politics".  Please - would he use a title of "Wedding Bell Blues" on a post about gay marriage?  Of course not, since that would be a matter of grave moral urgency.

Next, he draws on this study to argue that contraception care is a good idea, and the cheaper the better (since he is a lib, "cheaper" means 'paid for by someone else'). 

Here is the misinformation:

I wondered what other religiously affiliated organizations do in this situation. Christian Science traditionally opposed medical care. Does The Christian Science Monitor deny health insurance to employees?

“We offer a standard health insurance package,” John Yemma, the editor, told me.

Oh, snap, you silly intolerant Catholics.  But wait!  This is from the Christian Scientist website, Basic Teaching, first paragraph, my emphasis:

The heart of Christian Science is Love. It's about feeling God's goodness. It's based on the Bible and is explained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and other writings by Mary Baker Eddy. It addresses major points about God, good and evil, life and death, sacrament, salvation, and more. Christian Science encourages people to see things from a spiritual perspective, as Jesus taught. Jesus said, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also...” (John 14:12). Mary Baker Eddy said, “these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural...” (Science and Health, p.xi:14). This can mean resolving difficult challenges with health, relationships, employment, and so on through prayer, although people who practice Christian Science are free to make their own choices about what to think and do in each situation, including health care.

And the Times story to which Mr. Kristof links makes that same point:

Publicly, the church has always said that its members were free to choose medical care. But some former Christian Scientists say those who consult doctors risk ostracism.

The truth may lie somewhere in between, said Rennie B. Schoepflin, a professor of religious history at California State University in Los Angeles and author of “Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America.”

“There has never been a monolithic ‘Church of Christian Science,’ ” he said. “There has always been a tension between those in the church who were more zealous and those who were less so.”

Well, then - maybe they aren't such a great example of a religious group that squashed its own beliefs to accodate the rest of us.

Next we have some hand-wringing:

After all, do we really want to make accommodations across the range of faith? What if organizations affiliated with Jehovah’s Witnesses insisted on health insurance that did not cover blood transfusions? What if ultraconservative Muslim or Jewish organizations objected to health care except at sex-segregated clinics?

What if a Jewish group did what?  Why ask me?  First, our country has had employee-sponsored health care for something like sixty years - are we having a problem with Jehovah's Witnesses, or Muslims, or Jews?  And more importantly, this is (OK, was) a free country - if a group sponsored by the Jehovah's Witnesses has a quirky health care plan to which Mr. Kristof objects then by all means, don't take a job there.  What happened to respecting diversity or (dare I suggest it?) the religious freedom ostensibly enshrined in the Constitution?  I should add that Mr. Kristof holds a cramped view of the Constitution:

But in general I’m more sympathetic to judicial intervention to protect minorities than to protect principles (such as separation of church and state, privacy, or even freedom of the press).

Well, Catholics are still a minority in this country, and the bishops are an even smaller minority.  But I suspect that is not what he means.

Let's press on to the false choice:

The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.

Declining to pick up the tab for someone else's contraception is quite a different action than taking a second or third wife.  We might even describe declining to pay as "inaction".

In this case, we should make a good-faith effort to avoid offending Catholic bishops who passionately oppose birth control. I’m glad that Obama sought a compromise. But let’s remember that there are also other interests at stake. If we have to choose between bishops’ sensibilities and women’s health, our national priority must be the female half of our population.

Why must we choose between the religious conscience of Catholics and the desire of women to have their health care paid for by someone else?  From the Guttmacher Institute study lauded by Mr. Kristof we learn that federal progrms that deliver these services are cost-effective.  Great - if Obama thinks this service ought to be "free", he ought to put up a bill, corral the votes, and pay for it, so that any woman lacking contraceptive coverage is eligible for yet another Big Government program.

The bishops and their followers are not trying to ban contraceptive use; they are not even trying to ban federal funding of contraceptive use.  They just want to avoid funding it themselves.  The notion that this conflict can only be resolved by trampling their religious freedom is false.

THE DEPARTMENT OF GOOD IDEAS NEVER SLEEPS (WHICH MAY BE THE PROBLEM...) Since individual liberty and property rights are no longer an issue, here is a Big Idea - many studies document that caffeine enhances mood, cognition, and physical performance.  And what employer doesn't want happy, alert, energetic employees? 

So, the Wake Up And Smell The (Free!) Coffee Act of 2012 will require every employee to provide either a free coffee station (Keurig is fine!) for each twenty employees, or hand out vouchers for the local delis and Starbucks.  I have no doubt we can gin up studies demonstrating that the enhanced employee energy will make this a self-financing effort, i.e., FREE! - if not a Laffer Curve, call it a Gulper curve. Other than Mormons, there should be no religious objections.  And clearly, we are talking about real money - let's flash back to Gutmacher and the financial obstacles to contraception:

Methods of contraception vary not only in their effectiveness, but also in their costs and the timing of those costs. Condoms are relatively inexpensive on an individual basis, but 50 cents or a dollar per use can add up to substantial amounts of money over a year, much less the 30 years that the typical woman spends trying to avoid pregnancy. Brand-name versions of the pill, patch or ring can cost upwards of $60 per month if paid for entirely out-of-pocket, although generic oral contraceptives can cost considerably less; these methods also require periodic visits to a health care provider, at additional cost.

$60 per month or less for pills?  $1 per day for condoms?  Have they priced a cup of coffee lately?  I never get out for less than a buck fifty, which runs to maybe $30/month right there, and I am not even talking about the crumb cake.  Poor women (and men!) who lack mental acuity and physical energy because they haven't had their daily Joe need this program. 

What do we want?  A half-caf mocha latte!  When do we want it?  NOW!

There is an umnet need here.  If only we had a community organizer in chief in the White House.

No Way Out - Or Is There?

On Saturday the NY Times presented a story on the contraception controversy that raised more questions than it answered.  However, we see the glimmer of a possible further accomodation by Team Obama that may resolve this puzzle.  Organizations that self-insure are subject to Federal, not state law; but the Federal law has not achieved its final finalization.  Wiggle room!

Back to the Times:

N.Y. Law on Contraceptives Already in Place, and Catholic Institutions Comply

By JOSEPH BERGER and THOMAS KAPLAN

Although Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York has vociferously argued that a national requirement for religiously affiliated institutions to cover birth control in their insurance plans is immoral and unacceptable, some Roman Catholic organizations in his own backyard have for 10 years been grudgingly complying with a state law making them do precisely that.

Then why, one wonders, are Catholic leaders so wound up now about the Federal rule after suffering in silence for so long?  And why do only "some" organizations comply?

Some New York Catholic institutions — including the Archdiocese of New York, led by Archbishop Dolan, and the Diocese of Brooklyn — chose to self-insure rather than pay for contraception after New York State adopted a requirement in 2002 that any insurance policy with a prescription drug benefit provide coverage for birth control.

We hear about California:

One of the most contentious laws was approved in California in 1999; the measure effectively provided an exemption to churches but not to religiously affiliated hospitals, universities or social service organizations. Catholic Charities of Sacramento unsuccessfully challenged the law in court.

 “It was pretty much a useless exemption, because the large employers are not churches,” said Carol Hogan, a spokeswoman for the California Catholic Conference. She said many large Catholic institutions in California, like hospitals, have since elected to sidestep the law by insuring themselves.

Self-insurance is the escape hatch, but it may not work at the Federal level; this is from a fact sheet prepared by the office of the Governor of Massachusetts:

State jurisdiction

State insurance laws apply only to the "fully insured" market, which is regulated by the state Division of Insurance. If an organization elects to self-fund its employee benefits plan – i.e., pay health claims from its own resources rather than buy health insurance – that organization is not subject to Massachusetts state insurance laws and would not be required to provide any particular outpatient services.

Some large employers, including municipalities, corporations, hospitals and universities, have their own private agreements with insurers and are considered to be "self-insured." Pursuant to the federal Employee Retirement Insurance Security Act (ERISA), self-insured plans are regulated only by federal law, and would not be subject to Massachusetts health insurance laws. However, both fully insured and self-insured health plans will have to comply with the federally mandated benefits under the Affordable Care Act.

So a Federal rule could eliminate the escape hatch employed by many Catholic entities.  But what is the new Federal rule?  The latest protest from the bishops hints that the status of self-insured plans is still a bit of a jump ball:

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

·It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

Hmm.  One wonders whether a further compromise might be reached on the topic of the self-insured - perhaps they could be allowed the same escape hatch that has already been adopted in many states.  Smaller Catholic entities in the currently free states would be affected (as they have been in New York), but large entities would probably soldier on on a self-insured basis.

Certainly, the President's Immaculate Contraception fantasy - the insurance companies will provide it for free - makes no sense in the context of self-insurance.

Contraception, Ongoing

Clarice Feldman surveys the field in an excellent American Thinker piece.

FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS:  The Politico reports on Obama's careful analysis behind the contraception decision:

In the end, Obama was motivated by personal conviction, aides said. He made the passionate case that several million women — many neither Catholic nor rich enough to pay $60 a month for contraception — should have access to free birth control, even while working for church-run institutions.

Let's move past Obama's "free" fantasy and ponder a different question - just how many women work for Catholic-run groups?  I don't know either but since the entire US workforce is roughly 130 million, I doubt whether "millions" of poor women are working for the Catholic Church.

Maybe we can develop a bit of a ballpark figure.  The United States Conference of Catholic Bishps website includes these employment factoids:

In 2003-2004, the total, full-time equivalent teaching staff in Catholic elementary/middle and secondary schools was 162,337. (That was with a total student enrollment of roughly 2.5 million)

Catholic hospitals employ over 598,934 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs).

Today, the Catholic Charities network — more than 1,600 local agencies and institutions nationwide — provide help... thanks to the dedication of more than 51,000 staff and 175,000 volunteers.

We are not provided with an employment figure for Catholic universities and colleges.  However, were are told that

Over 720,000 students attend 221 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States.

That is roughly one third the number of students in the elementary and secondary schools.  If total employment at the lower levels is 162,337 it can hardly be higher for the colleges and universities.

So, adding up charities, hospitals, schools and colleges we come to total employment of about 970,000 (600,000 + 50,000 +2 x 160,000).

Well, if all of those employees are women with a twin sister we can get to "millions" of women.  Otherwise, it appears that Obama went to mandates based on phony intelligence.

Oh, whatever - we never took that "reality-based" stuff seriously anyway.

And He's Off!

As goes Maine, so goes CPAC - let's have the traditional Mitt-mentum open thread.  A New England guy winning in New England - breakthrough stuff.

I Guess I'm Still Stuck On Stupid

I have made the mistake of peeking at the NY Times headline story before the caffeine has kicked in fully.  Thier gist seems to be that the "less government" crowd is a bunch of hypocrites, but there is a glaring problem with their numbers.  Or at least, I am glaring - here we go:

Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and ROBERT GEBELOFF

LINDSTROM, Minn. — Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Wait - Medicare is now a "safety net" program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit - we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible.  Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.

Pressing on, this problem re-emerges quickly:

There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year.

Dozens of benefits programs provided an average of $6,583 for each man, woman and child in the county in 2009, a 69 percent increase from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. In Chisago, and across the nation, the government now provides almost $1 in benefits for every $4 in other income.

The reporters addressed my question in the next paragraph, so my aneurysm subsided:

Older people get most of the benefits, primarily through Social Security and Medicare, but aid for the rest of the population has increased about as quickly through programs for the disabled, the unemployed, veterans and children.

So if most of the benefits are for a non-safety net program, why are we reading about it?  The fog thickens here:

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

Well I need to track down that CBO analysis, because if it is counting Social Security and Medicare then no kidding - the aging baby boom is undoubtedly hoovering up a larger share of benefits in 2007 than in 1979 [the obvious is true - see UPDATE].  That tells me nothing about, for example, the impact of the 1996 welfare reform, but it makes a great story for the Ministry of Truth.

Well, the day is yoing, and following Dan Rather I say "Keurig!".

IF I MAKE IT BACK... Eventually I hope to develop two points - first, the Democrats have long wanted to deliver middle-class entitlements paid for by "the rich", because that is where the votes are.  Healthcare and college subsidies are two biggies for them.

Secondly, someone (IIRC, Ms. McArdle herself) had a cogent post noting that what looks like a safety net on the way down can look like absurdly high marginal tax rates on the way back up.  If someone falls from $40,000 to $20,000 in income and picks up $15,000 in benefits on the way down they (presumably) lose those benefits as their situation improves.  That creates a high effective rate and greatly reduces the incentive to get back to work.

One solution has been to move the cut-offs and break points up into middle class territory, which of course leads to the sort of headlines the Times delivers today.

UPDATE:  From Sally Pipes of Forbes, last December:

The Congressional Budget Office just released a major new investigation into household income trends over the last three decades. Researchers found that while the total amount of benefits paid out by government social safety-net programs rose between 1979 and 2007, the share going to the poor actually shrank.

In other words, relatively affluent members of American society now consume a bigger share of government benefits. As the CBO put it, “government transfer payments are . . . moving away from households in the lower part of the income scale.”

Why? The CBO continued: “That shift reflects the growth in spending for programs focused on the elderly population (such as Social Security and Medicare), in which benefits are not limited to low-income households.”

And from the CBO report on income inequality:

Effects of Transfers on Different Income Groups. The shifts in the relative importance of different transfer programs since 1979 moved the distribution of transfer benefits away from households in the lower part of the income spectrum to some extent (see Figure 14 on page 24). Rapid growth in Medicare, which is not means tested (in other words, not provided to people based on a test of need determined by their income and assets), tended to shift more transfer income to middle- and upper-income households. At the same time, spending on Aid to Families with Dependent Children and its successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, has declined relative to market income; benefits from those means-tested programs are heavily concentrated at the bottom of the income scale. As a result, households in the lowest-income quintile received 54 percent of federal transfer payments in 1979 and 36 percent in 2007.

Obama Has Changed?

Richard Stevenson of the Ministry of Truth explains that Obama has evolved in office; he offers two examples from this week, but one is utterly unconvincing.

The thesis:

But as his handling of two controversial decisions this week showed, there is little doubt that he is different, changed by three years in the White House in ways that speak to fundamental questions about him among both his supporters and his critics.

If Mr. Obama was naïve back when he began his presidential run five years ago Friday, as many Republicans asserted during the 2008 campaign, he is a lot less so now. If he aspired to post-partisanship when he took the oath of office, as many of his admirers hoped, he is much more openly combative and political now. If he thought then that he could change how Washington works – a proposition viewed skeptically, to say the least, by many experienced people in both parties — he has opted, for now, to play by its existing rules.

And the first example:

The most recent manifestations of Mr. Obama’s more prosaic approach came this week with his shift in course on a crucial element of his campaign fund-raising and his handling of the backlash against his policy on insurance coverage for contraception.

In the first case, he abandoned his long-held position against steering his campaign contributors to friendly “super PACs,” the outside groups whose vast expenditures on negative advertising are reshaping politics. Faced with the choice of running for re-election armed with a principle or with potentially millions more dollars to help offset the current Republican advantage in the super PAC wars, he set aside the principle, prompting quiet cheers from party operatives and expressions of outrage from advocates of tighter campaign finance controls.

Hello!  This is the guy who had been in favor of public financing for years, until he had an advantage over John McCain in 2008 and opted out of public funding.  From the linked story:

The decision comes four years after Mr. Obama became the first presidential candidate since the Watergate era to turn down public financing and the accompanying spending limits, allowing him to raise $750 million for his 2008 campaign.

Back in 2008 the Times had more coverage and even inveighed against Obama's reversal of a long-espoused view.  But now Obama's latest "show me the money" shift is a surprising reversal illustrating his reluctant embrace of Washington's evil ways, or something. Please.

The Contraception Controversy Would Have Been Avoided If Obama Were President

Helene Cooper and Laurie Goldstein of the Ministry of Truth pick up the pom-poms to cover the contraception controversy and assure their readers of two points - Obama is caving in to the Religious Left, not the dreaded Religious Right; and none of this would have happened if Obama had been in charge.

Their lead:

WASHINGTON — For the White House, the decision announced Friday to soften a rule requiring religious-affiliated organizations to pay for insurance plans that offer free birth control was never really driven by a desire to mollify Roman Catholic bishops, who were strongly opposed to the plan.

Rather, the fight was for Sister Carol Keehan — head of an influential Catholic hospital group, who had supported President Obama’s health care law — and Catholic allies of the White House seen as the religious left. Sister Keehan had told the White House that the new rule, part of the health care law, went too far.

Well, that's OK then.  As long as he's not cravenly caving to righties.

Our intrepid reporters also deliver the spin of the aides who have it in for HHS Secretary Sebelius.  Readers at home can play "Where's Barack?"

Meeting with his top advisers in the Oval Office last week amid rising anger from Catholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders — a fed-up Mr. Obama issued an order meant for Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. Ms. Sebelius and agency lawyers had initially told the president they needed a year to work out a compromise that had seemed obvious to some in the administration from the start: make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies.

But in difficult internal negotiations, a group of advisers had bested Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others and sold the president on a stricter rule. Now the political furor surrounding it was threatening to consume signs of economic improvement giving a boost to the White House and put the Obama re-election campaign on the defensive.

Time was up, Mr. Obama told his advisers, according to officials in the meeting. Ms. Sebelius, a Catholic who, along with the president’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, had pushed hard for the new rule, was not there, but the message came through: Figure out a way to make something like the Hawaii model work.

Oooh, she wasn't even in the meeting when she got her come-uppance?  Not good.  But there's more about how our fed-up President finally took charge:

At the White House, the internal debate had raged since last fall, when administration officials started looking at how to put the rule into practice. All agreed early on that churches would be exempt. The question revolved around colleges, charities and other religiously affiliated institutions that employed people of different faiths.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York met with Mr. Obama and argued in favor of a broad exemption. Shortly after, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, and other proponents of the rule began a series of meetings with officials to argue against an exemption for religiously affiliated institutions.

Throughout that debate, administration officials said, Mr. Obama pushed hard for a version of the Hawaii rule. But Ms. Sebelius and others at the Department of Health and Human Services said it would take time to resolve whether the administration could emulate that approach. In the end, with the State of the Union address imminent and time passing to work out the new rules governing the carrying out of the health care law, the administration announced on Jan. 20 that religious-affiliated institutions — but not churches — would have to offer the insurance.

“All hell broke loose,” one administration official said, leading to Mr. Obama’s sharp orders in the Oval Office last week.

It's a shame our wise and wonderful President couldn't carry the day last fall.  Didn't he have any allies inside the White House?

What had not been anticipated enough, despite warnings from Mr. Biden; the former chief of staff William Daley; Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Bruce Reed; and the deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, administration officials said, was that allies would be furious, too.

That's all?  No wonder.  And no worries - he got Bin Laden!

AN ANSWER FOR MICKEY:  A few days back Mickey Kaus had this question:

What does he do all day? Are you impressed with the image of Obama-at-work left by Ryan Lizza’s “Obama Memos” piece in the New Yorker? The President’s decision-making method–at least as described in the piece–seems to consist mainly of checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him...

Now we know - sometimes he pushes back hard against the memo prepared for him, then caves in.

Cat Blogging In A Harsh New Light

The Atlantic delivers the most fascinating and disturbing article I have read... well, in a while - How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.

It's long and no summary will do it justice, but the elevator pitch is this: an eccentric researcher has discovered that the common cat parasite that infects roughly one third of all humans and is believed to lie latent in the brain actually seems to cause reduced reaction times (leading to more traffic deaths), personality changes, and schizophrenia in the genetically susceptible.

The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

Did Richard Nixon have a cat?  And is there an infectious agent behind the "cat people, dog people" dichotomy?

Lest you are still untroubled, this bug may be a trigger for schizophrenia:

Many schizophrenia patients show shrinkage in parts of their cerebral cortex, and Flegr thinks the protozoan may be to blame for that. He hands me a recently published paper on the topic that he co-authored with colleagues at Charles University, including a psychiatrist named Jiri Horacek. Twelve of 44 schizophrenia patients who underwent MRI scans, the team found, had reduced gray matter in the brain—and the decrease occurred almost exclusively in those who tested positive for T. gondii. After reading the abstract, I must look stunned, because Flegr smiles and says, “Jiri had the same response. I don’t think he believed it could be true.” When I later speak with Horacek, he admits to having been skeptical about Flegr’s theory at the outset. When they merged the MRI results with the infection data, however, he went from being a doubter to being a believer. “I was amazed at how pronounced the effect was,” he says. “To me that suggests the parasite may trigger schizophrenia in genetically susceptible people.”

OK, that was a longish elevator ride.  Read it all, or go crazy trying.

Send Better BS

In an insult to the intelligence of his readers, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones takes on the old chestnut - when is a law not a law?

His gist:

Most of Obama's "Controversial" Birth Control Rule Was Law During Bush Years

The right has freaked out over an Obama administration rule requiring employers to offer birth control to their employees. Most companies already had to do that.

Hold on - the "right" (including, of course, many lefties) is freaking out over the religious freedom issue; we aren't hearing from most employers or mainstream corporate America on this.

Pressing on:

President Barack Obama's decision to require most employers to cover birth control and insurers to offer it at no cost has created a firestorm of controversy. But the central mandate—that most employers have to cover preventative care for women—has been law for over a decade. This point has been completely lost in the current controversy, as Republican presidential candidates and social conservatives claim that Obama has launched a war on religious liberty and the Catholic Church.

Despite the longstanding precedent, "no one screamed" until now, said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University.

In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn't provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don't offer prescription coverage or don't offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC's interpretation of the law, you can't offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.

And when is a law not a law?  Let's cut to Times coverage of the EEOC lame-duck announcement (which followed the Bush v. Gore decision):

''It's not binding on the courts, but they will give it deference,'' said Ellen Vargyas, a lawyer at the commission. ''The hope is that employers and employees will look at this and want to comply with the law, that this will be their guide.''

Not binding?  The EEOC adopted a non-binding rule which the Bushies basically ignored.  The EEOC rule was upheld in one court case (Erickson v. Bartell Drug Co.) and in a different venue rejected by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, as described in a Weekly Standard article to which Mr. Baumann links:

Just two years ago (2007), the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, apparently the only federal appellate court to take up these questions directly, answered the employment discrimination question with a no. "While contraception may certainly affect the causal chain that leads to pregnancy, we have specifically rejected the argument that a causal connection, by itself, results in a medical condition 'related to' pregnancy for PDA purposes," Judge Raymond Gruender wrote for a 2-1 majority in Standridge v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.

These were not cases that hinged on a First Amendment religious freedom argument and neither reached the Supreme Court, yet clearly "the law" was unsettled at best.  We are left to wonder how the Roberts Court, with six Catholics, might have dealt with such a case.  Presumably the advent of ObamaCare made appeals seem moot.

 

I Still Want My Free Lunch

As Obama prepares to backpedal on his new contraception rule, we continue to be amused by this liberal spin:

Rep. Mike Quigley (IL) is one of the few Democrats openly pushing the issue as a both a moral and political victory (as he did in this Tuesday op-ed). He told TPM that while he understands that inserting religion into this argument can lead to a broad range of responses, he said that pro-choice Democrats need to get on board with the White House plan and stay there.

“If you’re pro-choice, the most important thing you need to is be pro-education and [pro-]contraception,” Quigley said. “Even if you’re just thinking so practically and cold-heartedly with, ‘oh, it’s an election year’, you know what? The vast majority of Catholic women want access to birth control, are on birth control and they want free birth control in their plan.”

It's free!  HHS Secetary Sebelius peddled the same fantasy in the intro to her recent USA Today piece:

One of the key benefits of the 2010 health care law is that many preventive services are now free for most Americans with insurance.

It's free because someone else pays for it?  Not really.  The consensus among economists is that, regardless of who writes the check, payroll taxes and employee benefits are mostly borne by the employee in the form of lower wages.  Of course, with health insurance there is also a favorable tax treatment so the government is chipping in, but still - its not "free" to employees just because it is not in their paycheck.

Can we find a prominent progressive economist to explain this to the unicorn-riders on the left?  Yes We Can:

Prof. KRUGMAN: I mean, I do agree that someone will pay, and it won't be, in the end, for the most part, the businesses that are obliged to extend coverage to their employees. It will show up possibly in lower wages, possibly in higher prices for the products that these firms produce.

The best things in life may be free, but contraception coverage isn't one of them.

RIDING IN ON HIS UNICORN:  Obama has just announced his "accomodation", which relies on magical thinking and a suspension of any belief in economics.

The gist, as I followed it - if a religious group has an objection to providing contraception coverage than:

(a) the employer doesn't have to pay for it;

(b) the insurance company must contact employees and volunteer to provide the coverage free of charge and without copays.

He looked serious; maybe he really believes that shifting costs eliminates costs. 

In my world, at least, an insurance company would want a bit pf demographic information about a company's workforce before quoting a health care premium to the employer. If the insurance company can reasonably predict that a certain number of employees will take up the "free" contraceptive coverage, the quoted premium will be adjusted accordingly.

Now, it may be that it Obama's world the insurance compay will be utterly shocked (shocked!) to learn that some women will want the "free" contraceptive coverage, and this unexpected expense will simply come out of their exorbitant profits.  Maybe Obama is that dumb.

But more charitably, it may be that this approach is being tossed out as a nod and wink fig-leaf to religious employers.  Everyone knows who is paying for the "free" coverage, but everyone will pretend that it is being paid for by the beneficient insurance company.

Eliminating the administrative role of the employer might be enough.  And one might argue that since the insurance expense is ultimately borne by the employees as a group, there is no religious freedom problem for the employer. On the other hand, the employer is writing the checks to the insurer, and those checks include an expected price for the "free" contraception coverage. 

Troubling.

CAN'T FOOL SARAH KLIFF OF THE WAPO:

The catch in Obama’s contraceptives compromise

By one report’s measure, it costs about $21.40 to add birth control, IUDs and other contraceptives to an insurance plan. Those costs may be offset by a reduction in pregnancies. But unless drug manufacturers decide to start handing out free contraceptives, the money to buy them will have to come from somewhere.

Where will it come from, since neither employers nor employees will be paying for these contraceptives? That leaves the insurers, whose revenues come from the premiums that subscribers pay them. It’s difficult to see how insurance companies would avoid using premiums to cover the costs of contraceptives. They could, perhaps, use premiums from non-religious employers. Those businesses wouldn’t likely object on faith-based grounds, but they probably wouldn’t be keen on footing the bill for people who aren’t on their payrolls.

I'm going long umbrellas, because IUDs and condoms are going to start falling from the sky.  Freely.

Mouse Up!

An orphan drug that has already passed FDA safety tests turns out to reverse (yes, reverse!) Alzheimer's - in mice.  Human trials will start soon and should produce results within the year.

Scott Turner, director of the Georgetown University Medical Center's Memory Disorders Program, who was not involved in the research, welcomed the findings.

"This looks very exciting," he said. "This is a brand new way to move forward in human trials of Alzheimer's disease and it works great with mice."

Turner, a neurologist and leading expert in Alzheimer's disease, however cautioned that more study was needed to see if the same results can be seen in humans.

"One obstacle is that the mice may not be a good model of Alzheimer's disease. We have so many things that work in mice and we try them in humans and they just completely fail," he said.

...

Trials should begin in the next month or so, Landreth said.

"Perhaps the most important thing is to ask the question: Does this drug work in human beings as it does in mice? Does it get into the brain? And does it have an effect on amyloid levels and increase ApoE levels?

"We need to do that in normal human beings and see if humans are like mice."

And the drug:

Bexarotene was initially made by US-based Ligand Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Targretin.

It gained orphan drug status in the United States -- approval by the US Food and Drug Administration -- in 1999 as a treatment for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a rare cancer of the immune system that manifests in the skin and liver.

The Japanese pharmaceutical giant Eisai bought the worldwide rights for it in 2006. Bexarotene is now available in 26 countries in Europe, North America and South America.

The study abstract is at Science Magazine; the article is available to subscribers.

Oatmeal Later

Rick Santorum strides forward as the latest Non-Romney Non-Newt:

His candidacy all but dismissed just days ago, Rick Santorum won the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses and a nonbinding primary in Missouri on Tuesday, an unexpected trifecta that raised fresh questions about Mitt Romney’s ability to corral conservative support.

Mitt Romney is the bowl of cold oatmeal placed in front of the Republican electorate.  They know it's the sort of breakfast of which their doctor might approve, but they are in no hurry to dig in.  The good news?  That oatmeal isn't getting any colder.

With his triumphs, Mr. Santorum was also suddenly presenting new competition to Newt Gingrich as the chief alternative to Mr. Romney, the front-runner. Where Mr. Gingrich has won one state, South Carolina, Mr. Santorum has now won four, including Iowa.

Newt was supposed to show his grass-roots support by winning these caucus states.  Oops.

Apparently Romney is now turning his (metaphorical) guns toward Santorum.  That may (or may not!) reduce the likelihood of an eventual Romney-Santorum ticket.