#NARRATIVEFAIL: Busted: Audio of Obama Lawyer Arguing Obamacare Is a Tax Stuns WH Chief of Staff Jack Lew. “Jack Lew, the Obama White House Chief of Staff, was trying to persuade Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that Obamacare was not a tax. But it didn’t work out so well for Lew when Wallace played audio of the Obama lawyer arguing that Obamacare was a tax in front of the Supreme Court.”
Related: 75% of Obamacare Costs Will Fall on Backs of Those Making Less Than $120K a Year.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Eric Alterman holds forth on intellectual integrity.
ASKING SENATORS: #TAXORNOTAX.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on mobile electronics.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: A Tale of One Tragedy and Two Campaigns.
WHAT OTHER NUMBERS CAN’T WE TRUST? Libor scandal: How I manipulated the bank borrowing rate.
ROBERT PUTNAM: Poverty Isn’t About Race Any More: “Over the last 30 years there has been a remarkable growth in the black middle class while at the same we’ve seen a collapse in the white working class, especially when it comes to family structure.”
TEN QUESTIONS FOR BRANDON DARBY.
MITT ROMNEY DOING DISASTER RELIEF. “Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign is helping storm relief efforts in Ohio. Spokesman Chris Maloney says the state campaign headquarters in Columbus is open Sunday for donations of water, flashlights, non-perishable foods and other items needed in the aftermath of severe storms Friday evening that knocked out power to much of the state amid a heat wave. He says a Romney bus in Ohio this week for campaign office openings will be diverted Monday and Tuesday to deliver supplies to shelters, fire stations and churches in hard-hit areas.”
A ROBOT THAT CAN BEAT YOU AT ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS every time. But I think it’s cheating.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Is Meritocracy A Sham? “Gentry liberals believe that people who score high on SATs, do well in college, and get through the PhD process are, well, smarter than people who don’t do those things and that society will be better off if the dumb people get out of the way and let the smart ones make the important decisions. (And the unimportant ones too — like how big a Slurpee should be.) . . . Wealth and entitlement corrupts the meritocratic elite. Members of this elite can no longer see society easily from the perspective of ordinary people and so their decisions increasingly reflect their own interests rather than those of the people they are supposed to represent.”
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” THING GOING? As hated leaders are replaced by even more brutally oppressive regimes, the Arab Spring has become a sick joke. “On Monday, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, warned that the mayhem caused by the so-called Arab Spring has resulted in the creation of new Al Qaeda training camps throughout the Middle East, especially in Syria and Libya, where British jihadis are receiving training in terrorist tactics. They are intent, he added, on returning to Britain to launch attacks here.”
A NOVEL APPROACH TO PENOLOGY: Reading offers Brazilian prisoners quicker escape.
Brazil will offer inmates in its crowded federal penitentiary system a novel way to shorten their sentences: four days less for every book they read.
Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.
Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,” said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.
A special panel will decide which inmates are eligible to participate in the program dubbed “Redemption through Reading”.
I suspect the main result will be more-literate criminals, but maybe I’m too cynical.
HOTELS OFFER FITNESS BOOT CAMPS FOR GUESTS. I like fitness, but the boot-camp thing never appealed.
WHY PEOPLE CHEAT AND STEAL.
WHY EXERCISE doesn’t actually help you lose weight. I dunno, but it sure influences the quality of the weight you have. But note this: “Diet also plays a role. According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, people who consume a lot of easily digestible carbohydrates (most Americans) are going to be less willing to exercise because of the metabolic effects of such a diet. Energy that ends up trapped in fat cells (just one of the awesome side effects of a high-sugar diet) isn’t available to fuel the rest of the body, and one of the results is lethargy.”
Back to the Gary Taubes thesis. The other side of it is, exercise makes your body look better when it’s slim, so you have more incentive not to cover up those nice muscles with fat. At least, that’s how it seems to me. Call it the Rippetoe Corollary.
AT AMAZON, a big sale on computer games.
ELON MUSK wins a bet over the Tesla Model S, makes donation to charity anyway. (Via Rand Simberg).
THE SWITCH IN TIME THAT EMBARRASSED NINE? CBS: Roberts Did Switch His Vote.
UPDATE: If Roberts was hoping to win over the New York Times, he chose poorly.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Byron York: Conservative anger growing over Obamacare decision.
MORE: Rasmussen: SCOTUS ratings slip after ObamaCare ruling.
A NEW LOGO FOR THE ROLLING STONES. Did anyone expect, when they were new, that they’d be unveiling a 50th Anniversary logo? Despite their superannuation, however, the Stones are still cooler than the thoroughly passe Shepard Fairey.
I FIND YOUR LACK OF PROFESSIONALISM DISTURBING: Confused By Wi-Fi, SWAT Team Raids Wrong House.
Imagine you’re sitting at home, comfortable on the couch, watching the Food Network, when all of a sudden a heavily armed SWAT team breaks down your door and storms into your living room.
That’s what happened to 18-year-old Stephanie Milan, who was watching TV in her family’s Evansville, Ind., home last Thursday (June 22), when a team of police officers broke down her storm door — the front door was already open — and tossed a flash-bang stun grenade into the room.
“The front door was open,” Ira Milan, Stephanie’s grandfather and the property owner, told the Evansvile Courier & Press. “To bring a whole SWAT team seems a little excessive.”
Turns out, however, that the SWAT team had the address wrong.
We should abolish official immunity for no-knock raids. Police are clearly unable to handle this function responsibly.
UPDATE: More here.
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