Archive for 2013

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Dads, too, want to have it all. Wanting it is fine. Expecting it is something else.

HAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE DEPENDS ON WIFE’S SELF-CONTROL. “Those in marriages in which the wives calmed down quickly during an argument were found to be the happiest. What’s more, those same marriages were shown to be happiest in the long run too.”

RECKLESS AND INSPIRED: An Interview With Jonathan Hastings About His Brother, the Journalist Michael Hastings. “I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn’t been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn’t in danger from any outside agency.”

REPORT: Testosterone Therapy Can Carry Heart Risks. Hmm. I show no signs of low testosterone, but I think this stuff remains poorly understood and would be reluctant to do it unless I had a clear problem. For some men, it’s a godsend, but I suspect that it’s overused. Of course, the men in this study already had heart issues.

ALEX TABARROK: Did Obama Spy On Mitt Romney? “As recently as a few weeks ago if anyone had asked me that question I would have consigned them to a right (or left) wing loony bin. Today, the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable.”

SO WE WENT TO LUNCH AFTER THE GYM, and the waitress told us she had started weight training in the spring and was loving it. Her secret? This book called Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe. She was impressed that we knew who he was. . . .

MILT WOLF NOT SO HAPPY WITH “Surrender Republicans.” “Why are they fighting conservatives like me?”

ED DRISCOLL: It’s Deja Malaise All Over Again. “Welcome back Carter — but then, arguably, from the implosion of the doomed Great Society onward, liberalism, progressivism, leftism, Obamaism — whatever it chooses to call itself this week — has never recovered from its own seemingly permanent crisis of confidence, simply because its own FDR-LBJ-style cargo cult view of the glories of big government is itself unachievable, as with all forms of magical thinking.” I repeat, at this point a Carter rerun is a best-case scenario — and an increasingly implausibly best-case scenario at that.

Related: Roger Simon: Liberalism: The Decline Of An Illusion. “What Republicans are now confronting is an empty machine. . . . I have no idea if Republicans will end their circular firing squad and unite sufficiently to right our country, but one thing seems abundantly clear from the events of the last weeks, including Tuesday’s election in which Terry McAuliffe barely eked out a victory over the unexciting Ken Cuccinelli. Liberalism in our country is in a more precarious position than ever. It may not even really exist. Liberalism as practiced in today’s America is a chimera, not actually an ideology but an alliance of interest groups controlled by elites for the preservation of their (the elites’) wealth and power.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: ObamaCare Shouldn’t Have Been Managed Like A Campaign.

Obamacare’s biggest problem, as I have written, was that the architects of the law demanded an enormously ambitious software project on an impossibly hubristic deadline. Whatever slim chance this had of working was ultimately doomed — not by Republicans, but by the administration’s own paranoid and self-destructive decisions to manage a software project as if it were a top-secret campaign strategy rather than a mission-critical component of the most ambitious federal entitlement expansion in almost 50 years.

Remember that when Cutler wrote that devastating memo, Democrats still had control of both houses of Congress. The administration failed to rectify the shortcomings he identified because it did not understand that making a program happen is very different from writing out a description of it.

The administration did not refuse to issue key regulations and guidelines, or to announce the final number of states that would be building their own exchanges, because Republicans used secret mind-control rays or stole the notebooks they had used to write the draft memo. They delayed because they did not want Republicans to be able to tell the public about them before Barack Obama was safely re-elected to a second term.

In other words, most of the damage was done not by lack of funding, but because the administration was either incompetent or trying to insulate itself from the perfectly ordinary, natural, legitimate and, dare I say, patriotic function of an opposition party, which is to point out to the public when the party in charge is doing something that the public wouldn’t like. Reframing “criticism of the administration” as “sabotage” deserves an Oscar for outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of political spin.

Actually, it deserves a “D” for demagoguery of the worst sort. But the truth is, they ran ObamaCare like a campaign, and steered it by politics, because campaigning is all they know how to do, and to them, politics is everything. The result was a debacle. Which is, of course, why healthcare shouldn’t be in the hands of the political class at all.

THE SILENT EPIDEMIC OF Same-Sex Domestic Violence. It’s “silent” because talking about it doesn’t advance the preferred “war on women” narrative.