I BLAME RUSSIAN HACKERS: Obamascare: 60% of online Obamacare defenders ‘paid to post’ hits on critics.

A majority of online and social media defenders of Obamacare are professionals who are “paid to post,” according to a digital expert.

“Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time,” said Michael Brown. “They were paid to post.”

His shocking analysis was revealed on this weekend’s Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson, broadcast on Sinclair stations and streamed live Sunday at 9:30 a.m. Her upcoming show focuses on information wars and Brown was describing what happened when he had a problem with Obamacare and complained online. . . .

He began investigating it after his criticism of the former president’s health insurance program posted on the Obamacare Facebook page. He was hit hard by digital activists pretending to be regular people.

If it weren’t for astroturf, would Democrats have any turf at all?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. No, Obamacare Has Not Saved American Lives.

Some studies do suggest that health insurance can saves lives. But these focus either on individuals with private coverage or on the Massachusetts health-care reform law of 2006, which primarily expanded private coverage within the Bay State. The ACA, by contrast, is primarily an expansion of Medicaid; in recent years, the share of Americans with private insurance has declined.

In 2007, just prior to the Great Recession, 66.8 percent of non-elderly Americans had private insurance. By 2015, two years into the ACA’s expansion, that share had declined to 65.6 percent. Taking the larger economic picture into account by looking back to 2007 is crucial, because the private-insurance rate fluctuates with employment. Between 2007 and 2010, employment fell by 5.5 percent and private coverage fell by 7 percent. Between 2010 and 2015, employment rose by 8.8 percent and private coverage rose by 9.5 percent.

ACA implementation has coincided with an increase in private coverage because it occurred during a period of job growth. But 300,000 fewer Americans have private coverage today than would have it if the ratio of coverage to employment had remained at its 2007–10 level over the last six years.

Left unsaid? About 75% of those who applied for coverage under ObamaCare’s expanded Medicaid program had been eligible for Medicaid under the old, unexpanded program. Essentially then, ObamaCare was a wrecking ball aimed at private insurance, and a multi-billion-dollar advertising buy for public assistance.

YOU HAD ONE JOB, HOLLYWOOD: In Major Oscars Flub, Warren Beatty Gives Best Picture Award to Wrong Movie.

PRIORITIES: Trump Seeks Sharp Increases In Military Spending, “Drastic Cuts” To State Department, EPA.

It ought to be an entertaining speech he gives to Congress tomorrow night. I’ll report in to the PJMedia homepage at about 8:45pm Eastern for the first Trump Administration primetime drunkblog.

RANDY BARNETT: Our letter to the Association of American Law Schools: Stop Political Discrimination. “There is growing awareness that conservative and libertarian scholars are grossly underrepresented in American colleges and universities and that this imbalance results from political discrimination.”

Related: The First Step to Improving Intellectual Diversity, is to Acknowledge There Is A Problem.

Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this deadlock. The American Association of Law Schools (AALS) maintains extensive records of applicants on the entry-level hiring market through the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR). With proper protections for confidentiality, scholars can systematically compare the intellectual diversity of the applicant pool, with those in fact hired for tenure-track positions. The AALS granted access to the 2007 FAR registry to Professors Trace E. George and Albert H. Yoon. Their research considered how hiring was impacted by an applicant’s race, gender, clerkship, alma mater, advance degrees, and other factors. (Among their findings, “at the intermediate call-back interview stage … women and non-whites are statistically significantly more likely to be invited for a job talk interviews,” but are “no more likely than similarly situated men and whites to get a job offer.”). George and Yoon’s important work, however, did not focus on intellectual diversity.

Plus: Can Diversity Of Thought Co-Exist With Diversity?

JOEL KOTKIN: “The cracks in the 50-year-old Oroville Dam, and the massive spillage and massive evacuations that followed, shed light on the true legacy of Jerry Brown. The governor, most recently in Newsweek, has cast himself as both the Subcomandante Zero of the anti-Trump resistance and savior of the planet. But when Brown finally departs Sacramento next year, he will be leaving behind a state that is in danger of falling apart both physically and socially.”

TO A PROGRESSIVE THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SUFFICIENTLY PROGRESSIVE: Cornel West Lacks ‘Faith’ in ‘Progressive Vision’ of Black Caucus.

PARTY OF YOUTH AND DIVERSITY: Democrats Name 72-year-old White Man To Respond To Trump’s Address.

ANDREW MALCOLM: The truth about Trump’s worrisome war on media.

President Trump let slip the secret during his first news conference. Here’s what he told shouting reporters trying to trip him:

“I’ll tell you something, I’ll be honest — because I sort of enjoy this back-and-forth. And I guess I have all my life.”

As do his supporters and a good number of detractors, who’ve turned Trump appearances and his press secretary’s news briefings into TV ratings hits on cspan.org and cable.

Enough Americans have witnessed or perceived media misinterpretations and bias to enjoy seeing its elite members handed back some guff, even crudely. And there’s now a vibrant, imperfect social media on 24-hour online patrol.

Meanwhile, media members who blithely passed along Obama’s serial lies about, among many things, keeping your doctor and health plan under ObamaCare, are now on Alpha Alert for Trump untruths, visibly relishing each one.

The Washington media needs to stop whining, get off their high horse and do the jobs they chose, reporting accurately what a president says now and putting it in true context to what he said last year or last night.

It isn’t whining — it’s anger. And it may be with us a while, because the Democratic-Operatives-with-Bylines lost big in November, and the second stage of grief is the most difficult one to get through.

I THINK RUSSIANS HACKED IT: Trump: DNC chairman’s race ‘rigged.’

I JUST NOTICED THAT I’M RANKED #5 AMONG ALL LAW AUTHORS ON SSRN. Thanks to all the folks here who’ve helped by being interested enough to read my stuff.

PUTTING THE A.I. IN C.I.A.:The Data-Driven Transformation of Intelligence.

Data correlation has always been part of intelligence tradecraft, however, it is largely still a product of analysts laboriously reading through of mountains of intelligence reports. There is a limit to the type of reports available to analysts, who have limited time to make assessments. There is a better way for analysts to tackle intelligence problems given the amount of data that exists—or could exist with the right focus—on just about anything or anyone.

Imagine if in the post-mortem of the Crimea invasion analysts, working with data scientists, could take the datasets tied to the missed indicators and fold them into algorithms that drive artificial intelligence (AI). This AI could then help analysts predict future outcomes and focus resources. As this human-machine ”red” teaming matures, AI could learn to think like an adversary by looking for data, in specific combinations and quantities, to anticipate when little green men will be on the move, for example.

A very real problem in the intelligence community is a tendency towards consensus-building — squashing the insights of more imaginative analysts.

A.I.-driven analysis might not be any better than the traditional kind, but it might provide renegade analysts with an electronic imprimatur for breaking through the consensus.

AMERICANS LIKED OBAMA BUT DIDN’T LIKE HIS POLICIES; WITH TRUMP IT SEEMS TO BE THE REVERSE: Many Americans Disapprove of Trump but Are Open to His Agenda, Poll Finds: WSJ/NBC News poll shows negative views at a historically high level for a new president but support from a ‘critical middle.’

President Donald Trump remains a historically divisive figure after one month on the job, despite growing optimism about the economy and support from a cross-section of Americans who either opposed his candidacy or backed it reluctantly, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The poll found that 44% of Americans approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance, while 48% disapprove, making him the first president of the post-World War II era with a net negative approval rating in his first gauge of public opinion.

New presidents traditionally have enjoyed a postelection honeymoon with Americans. It took Barack Obama 32 months in office before his approval fell enough to match Mr. Trump’s current net rating of negative four. It was 41 months before George W. Bush’s dropped that far.

Mr. Trump’s approval rating may have been worse were it not for support from a surprising corner of the electorate. His job performance won positive reviews from 55% of respondents who had voted for a third-party candidate in November, who didn’t vote at all or said they supported Mr. Trump mostly to oppose Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The Journal/NBC News pollsters called this group “the critical middle” in the nation’s partisan warfare and said it accounted for just over one-third of all respondents.

All the media hate for Trump — and hate it is, in distinct contrast to the fawning over Obama — drives his favorables down, though with people who hate the press, a nontrivial demographic, it probably has the opposite effect.

Plus: “Asked about the course of the country, 40% said the nation is headed in the right direction. That is up from 33% in December, and 18% in July.”

“PORNO FLICKS?” Rachel Dolezal, white woman who identifies as black, now jobless, may soon be homeless.

Rachel Dolezal, the infamous white woman who for years passed herself off as African American and rose to become head of an NAACP branch, is now jobless, on food stamps and expects to soon be homeless.

A defiant Dolezal, 39, recounted her current plight to The Guardian. Dolezal said she’s only been offered jobs in reality television and porno flicks. A friend helped her come up with the money for February’s rent and she doesn’t know how she’s going to pay for March.

And she still says she’s not white.

After lying to one employer and adopting a public persona which announced that she would be a difficult employee, Dolezal’s current situation shouldn’t come as any surprise.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judge rules San Diego State railroaded accused student by denying him adequate defense.

San Diego State University violated “procedural fairness” by refusing to let a student accused of rape have an advocate “with the same or substantially similar skills, training and experience” as his accuser’s advocate, a California court ruled.

Judge Joel Wohlfeil ordered the university to “dissolve the finding” by Dr. Lee Mintz, who also served as the school’s investigator, that “John Doe” did not stop having sex with “Jane Roe” when she asked.

It also must take back its finding that Roe “became incapacitated” and Doe “continued to have sex with her.” Mintz characterized those findings as “sexual assault” and “rape.” . . .

Doe’s lawyer had presented text messages and phone records from Roe that undermined her claims about the duration of sex and her alleged incapacitation, noting she was able to walk “normally” out of Doe’s apartment and down to her friend on the street. A polygraph examination also supported Doe’s version of events, his lawyer said.

Wohlfeil’s Feb. 1 “minute order” denounces the university’s “well-intentioned, but deeply flawed, administrative system to investigate and review complaints of student misconduct,” which stacks the deck against accused students.

I don’t actually think that it’s well-intentioned.

SOME YEARS AGO, THE EXPERTS IN NEW YORK PUBLISHING: decided that “cozy mysteries” (mysteries like those of Agatha Christie, solved by amateurs, revolving around private relationships, and often involving eccentric characters) were passe.  Not that people didn’t want to read them, mind, but because people SHOULDN’T want to read them, because they were objectively bad.  Some books on how to write mysteries left cozies out altogether, save to tell you they shouldn’t be written because they’re not “real” mysteries.  Real mysteries are solved by professionals, and cozies weren’t nitty gritty and didn’t show class struggle.  Or something.  Anyway, they stopped accepting cozies.

This was before indie, but the market always finds a way.  There were readers for these mysteries (yours truly among others.  Yes, I also read police procedurals, but the mood for these kind of mysteries is different, and I’m not always in the same mood.  Just because I adore steak, doesn’t mean I don’t eat popcorn.) And so they found a new outlet in “craft mysteries” which were allowed to exist because the mystery was solved due to some specialized knowledge of a “craft.”

In the early 2000s due to a strange confluence of my publishing house at the time looking for someone to write craft mysteries and my kids needing shoes, I found myself more or less compelled to write three of these. (Mind you, the only thing even vaguely akin to a craft I’d had time for was furniture refinishing because… well, we needed furniture too.)  By the end of this, I had a good thing going with my science fiction at Baen and named an utterly unreasonable price to do a 4th book.  By that time, I had a strong idea that indie was viable, and I wanted this series cut off, and the books to revert, so I could continue the series indie.

It “only” took it close on ten years to revert, because these things — lighter than air, sillier than a sitcom — sell.  My heavens do they sell.

This is the first book in the series, the others will be coming out soon, and then I’ll finish the fourth.  To those keeping score at home, yes, it is set in the same town as my Shifter series at Baen, and some of the characters of each series have walk ons in the other.  Only the mystery characters aren’t aware of ANY supernatural stuff, which you know is what would happen.

Anyway, this is Dipped, Stripped and Dead.  You might love it.  You might hate it.  Or — more likely — it might while away an idle hour and amuse you.

(Of note, this is under a pen name, because it was demanded I do these under a “White Bread” name.  Apparently in New York Publishing, “Sarah Hoyt” is ethnic.  What can one do but say “Shine on, you crazy diamond.”?)

PRESENTING THE YOUTHFUL, ENERGETIC FACE OF THE PARTY OF DIVERSITY AND YOUTH WHO AS A MATTER OF COURSE OWNS THE FUTURE: Did we mention youth?  And Diversity?  And the Future?  I mean, that’s how they sell themselves, right?