"'Don’t Get Screwed By Obamacare, Find A Sugar Daddy!' Says Dating Website."

Okay, I agree that's pretty sleazy.

But I'm not sure I'm allowed to complain, because back in the summer of 2008, I said this:



And that was picked up right here by Meade — I talk back to him here — whom I married just about exactly one year later.

ADDED: Still waiting on the sonata!

Bill Scher does not accept that it was a lie to say "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it."

IN THE COMMENTS, pm317 said: "If you like your plan Video montage from NYMag. What did that Scher guy say -- Obama didn't say it like it was some talking point and that he said it because he was asked about it? How dumb can he be?"

Are the 2 terms of a 2-term-presidency equal in length?

The only interesting answer is no, so it should be obvious that if I'm asking the question I think there's a nonobvious answer.

I arrived at the perception of the subtle question as I attempted to defend this sentence — over at the new Bloggingheads episode — "On The Glenn Show, Glenn and Ann check in on Obama a year into his second term." It's only 8 months since the second inauguration, 2/3 of a year. Someone pointed out that it's just inaccurate to say "a year into his second term," but — even though it's not my assertion — I felt called to defend it. My first — and boring — effort at defense was to say: it was rounding.

My second effort was: "Some people may feel that after the election, the new term (in spirit) begins."

My interlocutor said:

But even under that view (which would raise awkward questions about when his administration is going to end, when the Bush administration ended, and whether Obama's two terms are of equal length), it still isn't one year into his second term. The election was in November, not September.

I could combine my 2 arguments and say the rounding up is less egregious when you take 8 and a half months up to a year, but at that point I lost interest in the question whether the above-quoted statement is defensible because I saw the subtlety of the question that became the post title.

Here's my thinking. Each presidential term begins on the 20th of January following an election that occurs on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. That's about an 11-week gap. Let's commit to the idea that first term of a 2-term presidency does not begin until he becomes President, because despite all the attention he gets and the lameness of the actual President, he doesn't have presidential power. But after the election to a second term, he is already President and he's gotten the affirmation that he will continue in the presidency for a second term. Reelection suddenly vaults him to the stature of a 2-term President, and he's got 4 years and 11 weeks in a forthcoming unbroken unit of power.

In this view — which is practical and not formal — the second term is 22 weeks longer than the first term. Notice that this analysis doesn't require you to say that the previous presidency ended on Election Day or that the second term will end on Election Day. The added length of the second term comes from the early end to the first term.

I do a Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury that's ostensibly about whether Obama has weakened and what the NYC police are doing after stop and frisk.

The folks at Bloggingheads put it this way:

On The Glenn Show, Glenn and Ann check in on Obama a year into his second term. Has his vacillation on Syria and the Fed hurt his credibility? Ann argues that the Larry Summers controversy exposed an anti-science crowd on the left—but maybe a small dose of delusion is healthy. Turning to the end of NYC's stop-and-frisk program, Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate. Are liberal gun-control measures breeding a nation of victims? Finally, Glenn criticizes the secrecy of the security state under Obama.

There's an awful lot going on in that diavlog, and I think we talk past each other more than usual. "Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate" is a terrible summary of what I say. 

Go to the link if you want to hear the whole thing. I'll excerpt a part that deals with something I care about: the unlikelihood that anyone is really making truth their highest value.



I'm highlighting what I had to say, so click to continue the video when you get to the end of this clip if you want to hear Loury's response. The lead-up to this clip is about the trouble Larry Summers got into at Harvard when he suggested that there might be a biological explanation for the scarcity of females in the highest levels of math and science.

Topics?

If I were recording one of those Bloggingheads diavlogs this morning, what would you like to hear me talk about?

Not much is getting said about the Chelsea/Bradley Manning transgender announcement.

I'm thinking it must be disappointing to some people that mean/stupid things haven't been said. Or did I miss something? There's nothing about Manning at all currently trending on Memeorandum. A search for "Chelsea Manning" at rushlimbaugh.comcomes up empty. The Blaze only quotes the Washington Post on the difficulty of reporting about someone who's acted in the past under one name and gender and now asks to be referred to differently.

I can't find anyone saying anything that gives pro-transgender advocates an opportunity to pounce. Where did all this restraint come from?

Here's James Joyner at Outside the Beltway handling the issue with great sensitivity a day after an almost agonizingly reticent discussion of the topic with Joshua Foust on Bloggingheads:



I don't think I've ever heard more hemming and hawing on Bloggingheads (and that's saying a lot).

ADDED: I do see this piece in NRO by Kevin D. Williamson, "Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman," which comes across as serious and not mean-spirited. Key passage:

We have created a rhetoric of “gender identity” that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought to be considered mutilation rather than therapy. This is not to discount the feelings of people who suffer from gender-identity disorders — to the contrary, those feelings must be taken into account in determining courses of treatment for people who have severe personality disorders.

That's very focused on surgical intervention, which requires the participation of doctors. Speaking of things that can be disconnected, you could disconnect that surgery from more speech- and expression-based things about names, pronouns, dress, and behavior. Why can't those things be treated more like other matters of conscience, like religion, where we leave people to their own notions?

"What does anybody learn? I'm not sure what the purpose of these teaching moments are."

Wonders John McWhorter, talking to Glenn Loury about the Paula Deen thing (which the NYT columnist Frank Bruni had declared a "teaching moment").



It's at least a teaching moment in the sense of: this'll teach you not to be the next teaching moment.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lem said: "I voted with my wallet.... and I don't have much. In fact, I have nuthing."

"Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?"

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.

Bloom concludes:

Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers [Hanna Rosin described here]? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.

Bloom says nothing about the baby-faced picture of Trayvon Martin that the media tended to use. Sweet faces manipulate us emotionally even when they are black. And an individual's face isn't quite the same as his skin color, because the mind is revealed through the face (albeit incompletely and often deceptively). Bloom displays the media's favorite photo of Jared Loughner and declares that we don't feel much empathy toward that face. But the problem with that face is not inborn ugliness. It's craziness in the expression. We are properly repelled by that.

It is the true sociopath — I would suggest — whose does evil things but keeps a normal-looking face. We need to challenge ourselves to recognize the sociopaths in our midst. And let's not try to overcome our aversion to faces like Loughner's or Adam Lanza's. These people have terrible problems that we ignore at great risk.

ADDED: The post title corrects a typo that appears in The New Yorker ("bothers" for "brothers").

"A startling number of teen girls have admitted to having a schoolgirl crush on bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev..."

"... proclaiming their love for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect on social media."

The media is to blame for this, as I accused the other day on Bloggingheads (where Bob Wright didn't seem to get why I what I was saying or why):

"I guess no one actually watches these clips, since not one comment refers to anything we said."

"Am I wasting my time doing this kind of thing?" say I, in the comments to a post embedding a clip from a Bloggingheads episode I did with Bob Wright. I thought it was a pretty juicy segment, with lots of topics you'd be interested in hearing us talk about, but the comments — maybe because they are the earliest comments — don't riff on what we said and in some cases present ideas as if they were not in the video when they are.

Am I wasting my time doing Bloggingheads?
	Yes. It takes too long to watch/there's no transcript/I don't like your interlocutor(s).
	Yes. These things are okay, but writing posts on Althouse is much better.
	Maybe, if you don't enjoy them, but I appreciate them at least a bit.
	No. These clips add variety and dimension to the Althouse blog.
	No. I don't like to watch, but I love that you give those BHTV guys a dose of Althouse.
pollcode.com free polls

"Should a five-year-old have a gun?/Why Ann doesn't like to take positions on policy questions/Gun deaths are declining, but what about spree killings?..."

"Chris Christie: Can a fat man win the presidency?/Howard Kurtz, Jason Collins, Tina Brown, and honesty/Benghazi: scandal or hype?" — those are the basic topics, as framed by the Bloggingheads enterprise, as I talk for 70+ minutes with Bob Wright.

Here's the whole thing:



I'll pull out some choice bits in a little while.

"What's left to say about affirmative action?" Glenn Loury asks John McWhorter...

... on the occasion of the imminent Supreme Court opinion on the subject. Loury identifies himself as a former opponent of affirmative action who is now a defender. McWhorter says he's never had any problem with putting a "thumb on the scale" in order to get "a certain proportion" of diversity, but he objects to redefining "what qualifications are."

"As corporate rather than government actors, the Deciders aren’t formally bound by the First Amendment."

"But to protect the best qualities of the Internet, they need to summon the First Amendment principle that the only speech that can be banned is that which threatens to provoke imminent violence, an ideal articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. It’s time, in other words, for some American free-speech imperialism if the Web is to remain open and free in twenty-first century."

This is a big subject for me, something I've argued with Bob Wright about, notably in this March 2011 post: "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

ADDED: Here's a clip from March 2011:

"People like the idea of truth. That's one of the things that they believe, that they love truth."

"But they don't really love truth. It's not this unconditional love."

Rand Paul made being against the drones... cool.

Why Buddhism? Why truth? Why children?

I challenge Bob Wright about the way Westerners indulge in Buddhism and a few other things:

"See? He wants you to like him, people."

At the Vape Café..

... you can e-everything you want.

(Screencatch from this.)

Underneath the appearance of racial equality...

... is something unrecognizable:

"I haven't been a black conservative since 1995..."

Glenn Loury talks about people he's known for 40 years who won't say hello, who won't look him in the eye because he USED TO BE a black conservative. USED TO BE! John McWhorter talks about those who think "it would be wrong to even print my name. They think of me as Satan. And that's just how it's been."



Much later in the diavlog, Loury and McWhorter weigh in on the affirmative action case that's pending in the Supreme Court. "Would you think it was a good thing if the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences as we knew them?" McWhorter takes the "not nuanced" position that racial preferences should be proclaimed "obsolete." (Loury disagrees.)