AFRICAN AMERICANS not as low on Vitamin D as previously thought. Apparently, the blood test doesn’t work properly with black people because of differing blood chemistry.
Archive for 2013
November 23, 2013
IT’S OKAY TO MAKE STUDENTS UNCOMFORTABLE WITH RACIAL REMARKS so long as they’re white students. I don’t think anyone has a right not to be “uncomfortable” in class — but since universities feel otherwise, I’m glad to see people extending the principle evenhandedly.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 36 Things I Wish Someone Told Me About Divorce.
THE COLLAPSE OF IMMIGRATION REFORM: “A powerful, well-organized coalition did everything it could, with no results. Now advocates are preparing to shift from lobbying to revenge.” Sounds constructive.
CHANGE: For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. The notion that people are moving their lives online as a form of escape is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Well, better to live in a Neal Stephenson world than in a John Ringo one. . . .
DAD TAKES cute daughter pics.
A BUNCH OF WHITE CHICKS, SITTING AROUND TALKING ABOUT MEN: “Very amusing, or enraging (if you’re the type to get steamed over the obvious fact that it would be considered outrageous for a bunch of men to get all hyper and cheeky over a comparable topic about the value of women).”
A TERRIBLE MOTHER’S GUIDE to dangerous holiday gifts.
U.S. WINE CONSUMPTION has almost doubled over past 15 years. But we’re still way behind Australia and Europe.
ROBERT HEINLEIN still needs your vote.
TOM MAGUIRE ON THE OBAMACARE DELAY: If I Were An Enterprising RNC Attack Dog . . .
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 198.
MASS HYSTERIA: Erroneous gun reports cause chaos at LAX.
KINDA LIKE OBAMA HIMSELF: WaPo: HealthCare.gov contractor had high confidence but low success.
DANIEL HENNINGER: Worse Than ObamaCare: Obama’s biggest failure is that he hobbled the U.S. economy.
For many Americans, the Obama leadership meltdown began five years ago. In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn’t Barack Obama’s fault. But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country’s economy is still sick.
Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents’ basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.
Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama “legacy.” Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart.
For five years, news stories have chronicled the social and economic deterioration in America of people with no jobs or weak jobs.
Here’s a headline over a Gallup report: “In U.S. Fewer Believe ‘Plenty of Opportunity’ to Get Ahead.”
Two from The Wall Street Journal recently: “Parents Serving as Emergency Support for Adult Kids,” and “Workers Stay Put, Curbing Jobs Engine.”
On Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put out a report saying the U.S. has become a threat to global recovery. The OECD ratcheted down growth estimates almost everywhere for the rest of this year. For the euro-zone nations: -0.4%; for “emerging” India it’s down to 3%; South Korea: 2.7%. . . .
In February 2009, he got $831 billion of stimulus spending. Not even seismographs can detect the results. Every speech he outputs about “middle-class folks” offers them the same solutions: more public spending on education, on public infrastructure projects and, even now, on alternative energy. As he tirelessly repeats what remain promises, the Labor Department’s monthly unemployment-rate announcement on Friday mornings has become a day of dread.
A normal post-recession growth rate of at least 4% would have made it possible for Mr. Obama and his progressive allies to chase virtually any pie-in-the-sky policy they wanted. Instead, the U.S. has fallen far off its normal 3.3% growth rate.
A U.S. president, faced with such devastating labor-market problems and persistently weak growth, should do anything—anything—that will give the American workplace more lift. Instead, he’s willing to entertain just one idea: more federal spending.
The other ideas don’t offer sufficient opportunities for graft and vote-buying.
“IT’S COMPLICATED:” Here’s how paying for an Obamacare plan is supposed to work.
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JAMES TARANTO: The Senate Gets MAD: The politics and psychology of the “nuclear option.”
Majority rule is always in the immediate interest of the majority party. But there are three countervailing incentives that have stopped majority senators from supporting a change in the rules: ideological moderation, concern for the institutional power of the Senate, and long-term self-interest. The first two of those incentives have gradually weakened for political reasons. The third suddenly broke down for perverse psychological reasons.
Each party used to have a fair number of ideological outliers: liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, or “moderates” if you prefer. Most of the Gang of 14 fit this description: They included liberal Republicans Lincoln Chafee and the Maine Ladies as well as Democrats Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Mark Pryor. Of those six, only Pryor and Susan Collins are still in the Senate. Of the 14, only five are.
Of the nine who’ve departed, eight have been replaced by either liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. The lone exception, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was replaced by Joe Manchin, one of the three Democrats who voted against the nuclear option. Pryor was also among the dissenters. The general trend, in the Senate as in the country, has been toward ideological polarization of the parties.
The end of the filibuster entails a serious diminution of the Senate’s power vis-à-vis the president and the House. As we observed this July, the Senate’s power consists largely in its ability to withhold consent from both House-passed legislation and presidential actions (nominations and treaties). Thus majority rule enhances the power of the majority party at the expense of every individual senator, regardless of party.
As the Senate has become more partisan, and members elected during an earlier age have retired or died, concern for the Senate’s institutional power has diminished. Yesterday’s third Democratic dissenter, Carl Levin of Michigan, is one of only three remaining Democratic senators first elected before 1984.
There’s less institutional memory than there used to be.
$1.2 MILLION JUDGMENT AGAINST GETTY AND AFP for stealing a Twitter user’s photos. You know, the DMCA was put together before big media companies figured out that most of the stuff on the Internet worth stealing would come from someone else. If they’d thought that through, they might have favored a less punitive approach . . . .