And if the Tsar...

President Obama: "I hope you will keep an open mind and evalute #Obamacare based on what it does to improve lives." pic.twitter.com/79WXAkN1BK
— Stronger Together (@UniteBlue) December 1, 2013

Very sweet and patient, but I was kind of gobsmacked by the denial that the president has "'made fun' of tea-baggers." Can he really be unaware that using that term is making fun of them ipso facto? Is he that innocent, or isolated?

Well, remember when David Axelrod had never heard of hippy-punching? And Eric Holder found out what waterboarding is in 2008? Remember when Obama came out attacking his own education policy as if it were some exoticially dreadful idea from the future, luckily too remote for us to really have to worry about it?

one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you.

They seem just about as cynical as they need to be when dealing with Iran, or Israel, and then if you turn around and look back they seem to have taken on this really touching sincerity. Honestly, it's hard for me to disbelieve it, if only because so much simple faith in people looks kind of like a handicap, something you'd frankly prefer your president not to have. What's up with that?

Teabag installation by Armén Rotch, via Inhabitat.

Cheap shots and dancing dog fur

Hobbitonomics

I don't think the books ever really said,but what did Bilbo Baggins do for a living?
— Dr.ChristmasNorth! (@cindynorth1) November 28, 2013

Came up while I was en route to New Jersey keeping up with the twittericity by intellectual phone and thus unable to answer the question according to my usual thoroughly documented standards—because I can do a lot of stuff with my new phone but have not yet mastered the art of cutting and pasting URLs.

Anyway I'm now pretty confident, thanks to an essay in the Superversive which touches briefly on the economics of the Shire (it is mostly an extremely detailed account of the [jump]

Looking for a representation of Smaug that would capture his Germanic wormishness, I didn't find anything, but this, by Kihea, is satisfyingly fleshy.

Thankful

Chalchiuhtotolin, Aztec turkey god (image from Wikipedia via University of Leicester)

1. No Republican brothers-in-law. Three sisters with a total of two current and two ex-husbands, plus one helpmeet with a brother of her own, not to mention that the turkey is being cooked by a sister whose husband has three brothers-in-law of whom at least two will be showing up this afternoon, and not a Republican among them: no death panels, no gold standard, no "I'm not a racist but". We don't talk about Netanyahu but you'd be surprised how easy not talking about Netanyahu is. Indeed not talking about Netanyahu is in itself something to be grateful for.

2. No God. I don't think I could bring myself to be thankful if I thought I owed it to some choosy Deity who decided to pick me out for this particularly meager set of blessings leaving me between, on the one hand, the businesslike middle-aged black woman in a man's winter coat who will probably be standing outside my bank hoping for a dollar if I go visit the ATM, and on the other, say, Donald Trump. That must have been Simone Weil's problem. Unutterably disgusting, the idea that you just deserve three meals a day and a warm bed and millions of others don't because God. But if you understand, thanks to Darwin, that your blessings come to you entirely by chance then grateful acceptance is really the only decent attitude; that plus trying to use your blessings as well as you can, modestly, to decrease the suffering you see.

3. Brahms.

Actually there's a lot more. This is just a representative sample.

Love, actuarially

Victorian postcard, via Wikipedia.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Hobby Lobby case about how the religious freedom of the company owners requires that they be permitted to impose their religious beliefs on their employees, it may be time to note once again a wrinkle I've noted before, but with some new backup.

Namely: we sort of assume that if an insurance company "pays for contraception", that will cost them more than not doing so; we have this picture of shelling out so much per pill packet and so much per IUD and of the whole thing being on the minus side of the ledger. But actuarially speaking this is not at all the case. The costs of dealing with accidental pregnancy are so much higher than those of effective contraception that providing everybody in your risk pool with family planning costs the insurer approximately zero and saves the employer on the order of an annual $97 per employee.

When medical costs associated with unintended pregnancies are taken into account, including costs of prenatal care, pregnancy complications, and deliveries, the net effect on premiums is close to zero.[10],[11] One study author concluded, "The message is simple: regardless of payment mechanism or contraceptive method, contraception saves money."[12]

When indirect costs such as time away from work and productivity loss are considered, they further reduce the total cost to an employer.  Global Health Outcomes developed a model that incorporates costs of contraception, costs of unintended pregnancy, and indirect costs.  They find that it saves employers $97 per year per employee to offer a comprehensive contraceptive benefit.[13]  Similarly, the PwC actuaries state that after all effects are taken into account, providing contraceptive services is “cost-saving.”[14]

In this way the amount a company "pays" to cover family planning for employees is actually negative, and in order for Hobby Lobby to avoid paying for its workers' contraception it would, in fact, have to pay a significantly higher premium. It is going to be arguing before the Supreme Court that it is an unbearable burden for the Affordable Care Act to require them to pay less.

I mean, I don't suppose it makes a difference to the legal issues in question, but it does to my mind make them awfully abstract. (Note: it might make a difference to the determination of whether the law imposes a "substantial burden" on Hobby Lobby. By the way, be sure to see Scott Lemieux's analysis of the issues themselves.)

The Fix-the-Debt is In

Drawing, for Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand (1938), by Robert Lawson. Via Geocache.

The "Campaign to Fix the Debt", a self-publicizing organ created as a kind of benefit performance by and for the old vaudeville team of Bowles 'n' Simpson, has been sending me the occasional email ever since I attempted to troll them by honestly answering a fake "survey" on my feelings about the prospects of fixing the debt. There was one of those scrolling-response windows where you can watch your own little post appear at the bottom and then rise, magically, in the surging tide, and finally rapture out of the box; and glory hound that I am, I wanted to see mine there. I didn't: Fix-the-Debt had some kind of censor working that department, and negative things never showed, but back in the email department they still saw me as a customer and kept me on the list. So, in today's mail:

As fans prepare for the upcoming rivalry games, let’s all root for a victory over one of our biggest rivals, the national debt.

Take a look at the graphic and then share it with your fellow fans!

The opposite of Obamacare

Looks like this Thanksgiving the obnoxious Uncle Louie ranting about how the country has been going downhill ever since the Jews and the coloreds got rid of the gold standard is threatened by a new phenomenon, your smartass nephews on the bandwagon as Novice Navigators and trying to sign the whole family up for Obamacare, and it's got the Heritage Foundation all worked up:

Facts for your #Thanksgiving dinner & the conservative alternative to #Obamacare! http://t.co/UOwfCj37pM
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) November 26, 2013

Oboy oboy thanks, Heritage! I was getting really curious about that conservative alternative to #Obamacare. Let's see...

General Dismay

Macaulay registration for the spring semester was November 12, but somehow this class hasn't gotten closed yet!

Visiting Professor David Petraeus’s Spring 2014 Course

There are still slots available for this unique opportunity. Dr. David Petraeus, Visiting Professor at Macaulay Honors College, will be teaching a Spring 2014 seminar. "Are We on the Threshold of the (North) American Decade?" will examine the developments that could position the United States—and its North American partners—to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown. This course will focus on diverse subjects: energy, life sciences, manufacturing and information technology.

Dr. Petraeus received his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Dr. Petraeus is looking for students from any area of interest with an appetite for reading and synthesizing large quantities of technical information. Students will work together to determine the policies and practices that will best enable the United States to capitalize upon the present opportunities. Excellent writing and presentation skills are a must, as is the ability to work well as part of a team.

Bold in original. Definitely not as snooty as Brooksie at Yale. And you'll be helping (North) America capitalize on those opportunities!

My inside source tells me everybody she knows who took Dr. Petraeus's fall class thought it was really interesting. Well, she does in fact know one.

And in the spring the class will be meeting in an undisclosed location! Via Business Insider.

Broken chairs and bad analogies

Munich II

By James Jay Carafano

November 24, 2013 3:44 PM

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No, that’s not a facile, partisan jab. What just went down in Geneva is, in fact, a replay of the greatest diplomatic tragedy of the 20th century.

Um, actually I'd say that (from National Review Online, link on the headline) is a facile partisan jab, if by "jab" you mean the gesture of a drunk attempting with only partial accuracy to poke his finger, rhetorically, in your chest. There ought to be a corollary to Godwin's Law to the effect that when they bring up Munich the conversation is not merely dead but starting to smell.

In this case the only way the Munich analogy is even discussable is to begin by understanding that the conference was called to decide not what to do about Hitler but what to do about Czechoslovakia, accused of mistreating its ethnic-German [jump]

White House Fool Report

On Thursday, the White House Correspondents’ Association and 37 news organizations submitted a letter to the press secretary, Jay Carney, protesting what photographers said amounted to the establishment of the White House’s own Soviet-style news service, which gets privileged access to Mr. Obama at the expense of journalists who cover the president.

Via Josh Feldman at Mediaite.

So Friday the above, showing the Oval Office completely filled with press photographers, was the official photo of the day, like they're trying to be sarcastic or something. But they just prove the point of how Soviet they really are: everybody knows the press is free to shoot the president doing all that presidenty stuff. Booo-ring! But it's the White House employee Pete Souza that gets the truly newsworthy pix, like how Obama and Sasha went swimming in Florida once.

Pete Souza/Reuters, August 15 2010, via The Guardian.

And you know why, right? Totally Soviet-style! They have to have control over the image just in case Sasha gets purged and sent off to the labor camp, so they can Photoshop her out and pretend she never existed.

Pete Souza/White House, via The Atlantic. Originally a photograph of Obama with his then-close collaborator John Boehner; after the paranoid president decided Boehner had "betrayed" him one time too many, the Speaker's face was clumsily replaced with that of speechwriter Cody Keenan. Boehner's fate remains unknown—he's become an "un-person".

Moral derpitude

Image via Picy.

Dana Milbank judges the nuclear option severely, though confusedly:

Democrats were fully justified in stripping Republicans of their right to filibuster President Obama’s nominees — yet they will come to deeply regret what they have done.

Cheap shots and extreme shrieking

Secrets of Glenn's success:

Greenwald: "Extreme hackery", "endless shrieking" made me what I am today.

Extreme hackery: Democrats, who shrieked endlessly about NSA during Bush, now most pro-NSA group of anyone http://t.co/HygELQJnTA
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

@firetomfriedman Depends what Dems you mean - my platform was pretty much built by liberal bloggers linking constantly to my NSA work
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

Hey, you're welcome. Any time you need me shrieking and hacking so you can advance your career another step, pal. 'Coz everybody really loves being treated as an asshole by the person they essentially created.

The Shrieking Affliction. From Magic: The Gathering, via.

Lamar!  and Leviticus! and more below the fold:

Emperors of the hundred valleys

Updated 11/24/2013

A wonderful piece on NPR 10 days ago by the company social scientist, Shankar Vedantam, on the "public leadership" professor Ronald Heifetz and his concept of adaptive leadership as more psychiatry than surgery:

"The dominant view of leadership is that the leader has the vision and the rest is a sales problem," he says. "I think that notion of leadership is bankrupt." That approach only works for technical problems, he says, where there's a right answer and an expert knows what it is.

SIX MILLION DOLLARS!

Retro beer ad, from Barcelona.

Really mystified for hours by this:

How the US drove Syria into civil war (note date) http://t.co/xs9Jhn9Jwj
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 18, 2013

I looked at the Wapo article (noting date) and found that it was about the third Manning document dump, the one with all the US state department cables, and US funding of anti-Assad Syrian exile forces, and I'm thinking what does that have to do with the civil war? The article was published in April 2011, just a month after the beginning of large-

Dirty DC Secret

Heracles taming Cerberus. Athenian red-figure amphora, c. 520-510 BC. Paris. Musée du Louvre F204 © Musée du Louvre. Via.

Dear terrorized-left friends who are fond of telling us how Obama "wants to cut Social Security", here is your reading assignment: an article by Jackie Calmes in today's Times explaining that nobody wants to cut Social Security:

“It’s a lot harder than you’d think to find Republicans who’d actually want to cut entitlements, or Democrats who want to raise taxes,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The only person who seems to have consistently been interested in a grand bargain is the president, and frankly I’m not even sure about him.”

Bernstein's just being polite; Obama doesn't want to do it either. He just wants to appear to be properly deferential to Mr. Petersen and his legions of crazed budget balancers, and the Village Party, which commands few votes but a lot of TV, and its ancillary good-for-John-McCain gossips.

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps FDR's budget-balancery was all an act too; just something to toss at J. Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller the way you toss Cerberus a honey-soaked bun when you want to burglarize the Underworld.

It's amazing to me that people who are willing to suspect the president of lying about virtually everything he does insist they can tell from his vague statements of sympathy with Bowles and Simpson that he must be a passionate advocate of their stupid proposals. Have they really not noticed how every time he signs off on a plan to cut, say, Medicare, it turns out in the fine print that nobody's benefits were touched and the program ends up healthier than before?

Just don't tell the Republicans.

Is Carl Hulse DeMinted?

Protest as schmatte marketing. Found art by HurricaneVanessa.

Carl Hulse at the New York Times seems intent on demonstrating that if it was a Republican president they'd just pull the Affordable Care Act, apologies all round, what-what:

Angry Americans voice outrage at being asked to pay more for health coverage. Lawmakers and the White House say the public just doesn’t appreciate the benefits of the new health law. Opponents clamor for repeal before the program fully kicks in.

Uncertain Justice

Eric Holder on possible prosecution of Snowden companion Glenn Greenwald via Washington Post):

“Unless information that has not come to my attention is presented to me, what I have indicated in my testimony before Congress is that any journalist who’s engaged in true journalistic activities is not going to be prosecuted by this Justice Department,” Holder said.

“I certainly don’t agree with what Greenwald has done,” Holder said. “In some ways, he blurs the line between advocate and journalist. But on the basis of what I know now, I’m not sure there is a basis for prosecution of Greenwald.”

Holder on Republican House plans to impeach him for crimes as yet to be determined (via Rumproast):

To the extent that there are concerns about policy differences that I might have with certain members of Congress, I’m not certain that rises to the level of impeachment.

You see what's going on here, right? His attitudes toward Greenwald and himself are virtually identical! The attorney general obviously plans to have himself rendered to a black site and tortured till he confesses to himself that he... umm...

The Wanchoress

I used to really like Raddatz back when she was NPR's military expert, too.

.@rmasher2 Hahaha. To "liberal media" an Obama success just means he's failed to commit suicide correctly.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2013

But enough about me, let's talk about NSA. Are they watching me?

Another MacRitchie monkey. From the Singapore photoblog JustCapture.

Little did I imagine, when I suggested on Friday that They Might Not Be Watching Us, how soon and explosively it was going to turn out that a bunch of American writers disagree with me, as laid out in a new report from the distinguished and beloved PEN America under the title

Chilling 

EffECts:

NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor

which finds that

None Durst Call it Treason

Apparently New York's crypto-Communist mayor-elect Bill de Blasio divulged his secret intentions of collectivizing the real estate market, some time before the election, according to the New York Post:

“Everything you heard about me is true. . . I am not a free-marketeer. . . I believe in the heavy hand of government,” de Blasio stated matter-of-factly during an hour-long presentation to some of the city’s biggest real-estate developers.

Author of the story is Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who also put it on the air yesterday. No source of any kind is cited other than Charlie's personal contacts who witnessed the remarkable performance.

Of course it stands to reason that if de Blasio wanted to reveal the terrifying truth to some group of people who could be trusted to understand and keep it quiet until after the election he would choose

 Jared Kushner of Kushner Properties, Stephen Green of SL Green Realty, Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization and Jeff Blau, chief executive of the Related Companies. Scott Rechler of RXR Realty... hosted the event at his offices.

Because those guys are naturally so sympathetic to Leninist attacks on private property rights. On Gasparino's general reliability, I'll let the trade speak:

@CGasparino Might be the last time you got one right, as well.
— Richard Melville (@richmelville) November 1, 2013

Triumph of the Won't

From my RWNJ pal Doug Brink, who sees a Leni Riefenstahl at work in the photos of the president with the troops:

This image still bothers me...

The White House poster recently noting Veterans Day weekend... It bugs me...

From the White House Facebook page

Maybe what disturbs me is how it compares with other historical images. [jump]