Apparently, based on "Why daughters might be better than sons," it's plain old self-interest — a prediction about who's more likely to take care of you.

I've updated my post from yesterday that criticized the NYT for not covering the statements the Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber had made about the consequences for citizens of states that failed to set up insurance exchanges. These statements were the talk of the internet yesterday because they ruined the spin on the purportedly nonsensical D.C. Circuit opinion in Halbig.

UPDATE: Searching for "Jonathan Gruber" at 9:42 a.m. Saturday morning — about 18 hours after I published this post — I see that the NYT put up an article "13 hours ago," dated  July 25, 2014, the same date as this post. The article, written by Robert Pear and Peter Baker is titled "Ex-Obama Aide's Statements in 2012 Clash With Health Act Stance." Excerpt:

Mr. Gruber backed away from his comments on Friday. But the remarks embarrassed the White House and could help plaintiffs in court cases challenging the payment of subsidies in 36 states that rely on the federal exchange.

"I made a mistake in some 2012 speeches in describing the tax credits," Mr. Gruber said in an email on Friday. "It is clear from all my writings and modeling that I did over this same time period that tax credits are assumed to be available in all states. This is the only sensible reading of the Affordable Care Act and is corroborated by every single person who helped craft the law."...

The White House played down the video on Friday, saying that Mr. Gruber had made clear in friend-of-the-court briefs that he supports the administration's interpretation.

"His views on this are pretty clear," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. "I think that he described those remarks as a mistake. But I'd refer you to his explanation for why he said them. I think what is clear is that he, like Congress, intended for every eligible American to have access to tax credits that lower their health care costs, regardless of who is operating their marketplace."

The inconsistency between what Gruber said in the friend-of-the-court briefs in the current litigation and what he said in 2012 doesn't persuade me that he "made a mistake" back then. In 2012, the effort was to pressure and frighten the politicians in the various states so that they would set up the exchanges. Now, after so many states resisted that pressure, the effort is to preserve the federal exchanges that were set up. At both points in time, Gruber said what served the goals of the program.

What's more likely, that he "made a mistake in some 2012 speeches" or that he's lying now?

The Press Secretary Earnest isn't lying, but if you look closely at each of his remarks, you can see that he seems to know he's making a series of technically true statements that avoid asserting that Gruber is telling the truth now when he calls the 2012 remarks "a mistake." 1. Gruber's "views... are pretty clear." Check. 2. Gruber called his remarks "a mistake." Absolutely true. That's exactly what Gruber said. 3. Gruber's overarching goal has been to get health insurance tax credits to people. Again, Earnest is correct —cagily correct — because lying now about making a mistake back then is exactly what serves that overarching goal, just as saying what he said in 2012 served that goal.

Lying is a means to an end, and one can steadfastly adhere to one's end while changing your statements as needed to serve that end. That's what liars do! To justify their behavior by pointing to their dedication to a single end is only to explain the motivation to lie. Yet that's what Josh Earnest expects us to swallow.

"There have been blips of real, viral enthusiasm... But for all the ersatz hashtags pushed by would-be grassroots support groups, it sure hasn't happened yet," observes Ben Smith.

But... Clinton shouldn't rely on inspiration for her candidacy. There is, after all, another way to win. Perhaps she can't run a campaign modeled on the Obama 2008 movement. The alternative is Obama 2012 — a boring, grinding affair that sold a nascent economic recovery, scorched the Republican, and plodded to the White House.

I'm sick of inspiration and claims of historiosity. We should all be perfectly jaded by now. Inoculated. It's healthful and wholesome. And so what if watching the campaign day by day is "a boring, grinding affair"? That's a problem for Smith, running his buzz-dependent website, but it's a nonproblem for the rest of us. Think of the time you can save not reading the websites that try to make something out of the presidential campaign every damned day. What will you do with all that time? Instead of thinking about how what happened in the last hour might be history, you could, for example, read history. May I recommend the Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge?



Coolidge was boring. Good boring. Let's be boring for a change.



I want a boring President. Stop trying to excite me.

Does Buzzfeed have a rule about the frequency of appealing to our heart? I was curious, after writing the last post and highlighting a Buzzfeed post-with-plagiarism called "7 Miracle Babies To Warm Your Heart Today."

Searching the Buzzfeed site for "heartbreaking," I'm guessed there is a rule against more than one usage per day. How many times can reader be expected to jump at the promise of a metaphorical collapse of a most vital organ?

I happened to click on "28 Men With Eating Disorders Confess Their Heartbreaking Secrets" and was pleased to see the author's name was Althouse... Spencer Althouse. Anyway, there was really only one secret: These men were anorexic and male.

Is your heart broken because these males had the additional pain of a problem usually associated with females? Maybe men should feel some special pain when they stoop to using a metaphor associated with females. Eh, Mr. Althouse?

Searching Buzzfeed for "heartwarming," I can see more than one on a single day, e.g., "Get Ready To Wipe Your Tears After You Watch This Heartwarming Short Film." I refused to get ready. Or to watch the short film. Leave my heart alone. And leave my eyes alone.

Can we get a moratorium on heart metaphors? It's not just Buzzfeed. It's everywhere. In a single short article at the NYT this month, I'm seeing: "That scene where the black girls were all talking just like old times in the bunk was heartwarming... 'My Taystee girl, you break my heart'... It's heartbreaking, but having finally realized that Vee can't be her mommy, she also looks more sane...." That's not sane.

1. Buzzfeed apologizes for 41 incidents of plagiarism found in a review of 500 posts written by Benny Johnson. Johnson, we're told, was a "creative force," but he was apparently not creative enough to reword his source material sufficiently to keep his job at Buzzfeed, which seemed to be to collect material from elsewhere and to present it in listicles like "7 Miracle Babies To Warm Your Heart Today."

2. The NYT surprised some people by muckraking plagiarism from 7 years ago by a Democrat, John Walsh, a U.S. Senator from Montana who's running this fall to keep the seat he got by appointment. The Times has what WaPo's Fact Checker calls a "nifty graphic" showing how much Walsh ripped off in his final paper for his master's degree from the United States Army War College.  Is the NYT choosing its investigative targets in a nonpartisan way or is this an effort to preempt an attack by his GOP challenger? When Walsh got his appointment to the seat Max Baucus had suddenly vacated, the NYT called it "a move Democrats hope will improve their chances of retaining the seat in what is expected to be a fiercely fought election this November." Baucus had been central in the Obamacare legislative process, and Walsh was an unknown but he had military credentials... that don't look so good anymore. (The WaPo Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler) examines Walsh's lame excuse — unfamiliarity with citation form — and gives it 4 Pinocchios.)

3. The media is so hot to see young females excel in science that it pushed a little girl so far into the limelight that her game of presenting a study of lionfish as her own original research caught the attention of the scientist who actually did the study and he spoke up. The girl's dad — one D. Albrey Arrington — was a courtesy co-author on that published study. And now a father's support of his daughter's science ambition doesn't look as NPR-ready as it did when NPR murmured admiringly over the little girl. Listen to the audio at that link. I had to turn it off a few seconds after the girl began speaking, because of the insufferable tone of her scoffing at the dumb scientists who were looking in the wrong places: "So I was like, 'Well, hey guys, what about the river?''" Ugh.

4. The New Yorker had a nice long piece on Joe Biden — "The Biden Agenda/Reckoning with Ukraine and Iraq, and keeping an eye on 2016" by Evan Osnos — and amidst all the admiration, it had to dredge up the old plagiarism stories. When he was a law student, Biden "was caught lifting five pages of a law-review paper but told administrators it was ignorance, not malice. ('I hadn't been to class enough to know how to do citations.')" I wonder if Senator Walsh got the idea for his lame excuse from Biden. Having gotten caught committing plagiarism in law school, Biden should have taken care never ever to plagiarize again, but Biden is not the careful type. In 1987, while running for President (and simultaneously chairing the Senate committee that wrecked Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination), Biden lapsed from quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock to speaking as if Kinnock's childhood had been his own, "talking of 'my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after twelve hours.' There were no coal-mining ancestors.... He was getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and Congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden's picture and accomplishments, including 'inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater' and 'Member, Rockettes (1968).'"

All of the following occurrences appeared within the last few days:

"The stakes are too high, the disappointment in some quarters — and some Supreme Court chambers — over the pallid outcome of the Supreme Court's Fisher case too deep, the issue too mobilizing for it to fade away." Linda Greenhouse writing about affirmative action in the NYT.

"The potato farmers of Idaho are, I'm reasonably certain, distressingly pallid in appearance but no one is going around insisting that the French fry industry is going to collapse unless diversity increases there." From a discussion of the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley enterprises. 

"Jamie Dornan (the guy who's playing Christian Grey because they couldn't get Beyoncé) tries to give the pallid prose some weight by pausing significantly before informing us that his tastes are … singular, or telling Anastasia Steele that he'd like … to know more about her." A discussion of the "50 Shades of Grey" trailer in The Atlantic.

"And in the leading roles of Will Shakespeare and his muse and lover, Viola De Lesseps, Tom Bateman and Lucy Briggs-Owen are so vibrantly engaging that they make Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie look like a pair of pallid milksops." From a Chicago Tribune review of a stage version of "Shakespeare in Love."

"Pallid dudes surrounded by dorm-room décor rhapsodize over their first console and the discovery of game-playing soul mates." A NYT article about a movie about the history of video games. 

"The whole your eyes have known, your pallid cheeks have shown; for oh! the swelling tide no bravest heart could hide, when your dear mother died." Catholic News reports on a riddle poem published pseudonymously by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. 

"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry, I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological times via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?" The U.K. Independent published that item from the 1910 diary of the naturalist WNP Barbellion.

"'The long days do wear on you,' says a pallid man named Stephen McMurray who is researching the population dynamics of sponges. He dips a spoon into a cup of instant noodles and looks through a window to the sea floor below." Undersea science at GulfNews.com.

Now, nobody else do that. You won't look as good, and your movie won't be as good, so there's really no point. Officially, I disapprove, but I disapprove more of the local media giving this thing air, especially if it means that in the end we get some stupid fencing or netting blocking the view.

Meanwhile, long ago...

"Mr. Gruber, 46, hates traveling without his wife and three children, so he is tracking the case from his home in Lexington, Mass. There he crunches numbers and advises other states on health care, in between headbanging at Van Halen concerts with his 15-year-old son and cuddling with the family's eight parrots. (His wife, Andrea, volunteers at a bird rescue center.)"

Oh... that was back in March 2012, in a piece called "Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law" or as it comes up in the site search: "Jonathan Gruber, Health Care's Mr. Mandate."

So bang your head and cuddle your parrots... or go somewhere else to find out what up with Gruber:

Jonathan Cohn / The New Republic:
Did Jonathan Gruber Just Endorse the Anti-Obamacare Lawsuit? — Obamacare architect offers an explanation for his 2012 quote — Did the people who designed Obamacare intend to deprive millions of people of health insurance, just because officials in their states decided not to operate their own insurance marketplaces?
Discussion: Power Line, Hit & Run, Hot Air, Washington Post, Bloomberg View, The Incidental Economist, The Federalist, Forbes, Washington Monthly, Patterico's Pontifications, The Daily Caller, Watchdog.org, Talking Points Memo and Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion

John Sexton / BREITBART.COM:
Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Once Again Ties Subsidies to State-Based Exchanges — Did Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber make the same mistake twice? A new audio clip finds him once again explaining that Obamacare subsidies are tied to state health exchanges.
Discussion: Wall Street Journal, The Daily Caller, RedState, The Federalist, The PJ Tatler, Hot Air and Instapundit

Peter Suderman / Hit & Run:
Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admit in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited to State-Run Exchanges (Updated With Another Admission) — Earlier this week, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that, contrary to the Obama administration's implementation …
Discussion: National Review, Forbes, American Spectator, The Incidental Economist, Power Line, Althouse, No More Mister Nice Blog, The Federalist, Lawyers, Guns & Money, ACASignups.net, The PJ Tatler, RedState, Instapundit and Balkinization

Kimberley A. Strassel / Wall Street Journal:
The ObamaCare-IRS Nexus — The supposedly independent agency harassed the administration's political opponents and saved its health-care law.
Discussion: Fox News, National Review and Power Line

Adrianna McIntyre / Vox:
Has a key Obamacare architect given the lawsuit against it a boost?
Discussion: American Prospect, NewsBusters and National Review

Michael F. Cannon / Forbes:
ObamaCare Architect Jonathan Gruber: "If You're A State And You Don't Set Up An Exchange …
Discussion: National Review, Hot Air and Power Line

Ryan Radia / Competitive Enterprise Institute:
Obamacare Architect Admitted in 2012 States without Exchanges Lose Subsidies
Discussion: The Federalist, National Review, The Daily Caller, Sister Toldjah, Talking Points Memo, Bloomberg View, Patterico's Pontifications, Fox News and Washington Post

I'm not recommending those articles, by the way. They just acknowledge the current issue, but — for example, in the case of Jonathan Cohn — perhaps just to perform in the theater of dismissing it as nothing... as a "speak-o" or whatever.

(By the way, contrary to possible popular belief, the word "speak-o" was not coined today. It has had an Urban Dictionary definition since 2004.)

UPDATE: Searching for "Jonathan Gruber" at 9:42 a.m. Saturday morning — about 18 hours after I published this post — I see that the NYT put up an article "13 hours ago," dated  July 25, 2014, the same date as this post. The article, written by Robert Pear and Peter Baker is titled "Ex-Obama Aide's Statements in 2012 Clash With Health Act Stance." Excerpt:

Mr. Gruber backed away from his comments on Friday. But the remarks embarrassed the White House and could help plaintiffs in court cases challenging the payment of subsidies in 36 states that rely on the federal exchange.

"I made a mistake in some 2012 speeches in describing the tax credits," Mr. Gruber said in an email on Friday. "It is clear from all my writings and modeling that I did over this same time period that tax credits are assumed to be available in all states. This is the only sensible reading of the Affordable Care Act and is corroborated by every single person who helped craft the law."...

The White House played down the video on Friday, saying that Mr. Gruber had made clear in friend-of-the-court briefs that he supports the administration's interpretation.

"His views on this are pretty clear," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. "I think that he described those remarks as a mistake. But I'd refer you to his explanation for why he said them. I think what is clear is that he, like Congress, intended for every eligible American to have access to tax credits that lower their health care costs, regardless of who is operating their marketplace."

UPDATE 2: I've got more discussion of the new NYT article in a new post where I also look closely at what Josh Earnest said.