"During the 2012 campaign, I, like every liberal writer whose job it is to comment on politics every day, wrote many unkind things about Mitt Romney."

"Much of the time I found him more sad than despicable; politicians who nearly reach the pinnacle of their profession while being manifestly awful at politics are a rare and curious breed."

Writes Paul Waldman at The American Prospect in a post titled "New Documentary Threatens to Make You Like Mitt Romney."

Here's the trailer:

"I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes."

"You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical."

"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson talks about sin and logic. The line before the one quoted above is more graphic (and I didn't want to put it in the post title): "It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus."

I note the ambiguity in what Robertson says about logic and sin. At first, I thought he meant that when he thinks about anatomy, the vagina makes more sense as a place to put a penis, if one has undertaken the reasoning task of determining the most desirable orifice. But there's nothing logical about that. There are unexamined premises: 1. that the penis be inserted somewhere, and 2. that the place should be the most desirable place. Even assuming those 2 premises, there's the obvious problem of the subjectivity of what is desirable, and Robertson admits that by saying "to me" and "I'm just thinking." In this interpretation, the word "logical" is effectively jocose.

Then, I saw an alternate meaning: The prefatory clause "But hey, sin" gives meaning to the repeated phrase "It's not logical." Sin is not logical. What impels us toward sin and what constitutes sin? These are not matters for logic. Perhaps we could reason logically about what sin is, but Robertson's approach is to accept the traditional Christian beliefs and this faith is not acquired through logic. In this interpretation, there's no logic in defining sin, and, too, there's no logic in a person's feelings that draw him into doing things that fit that definition of sin.

Of course, Robertson is getting criticism for these remarks, which are called "anti-gay," but he's rejecting all of what is traditionally understood in the Christian religion as sin, including adultery and fornication. In the process, he talks about his own natural sexual orientation and seems perhaps to concede that it's easy for him to avoid one sin that he knows other people feel drawn toward. But overall, his effort is to call people into traditional religion and to save them from what he believes is sin. Myself, I support gay rights, but I do not like the simple portrayal of traditional religionists as mean or bigoted (even though I do understand that it may be the most effective way to defeat them politically).

NYT/CBS poll finds only 1/3 of Americans think the ACA will improve the health care system.

The full numbers won't come out until later today, so there aren't specific percentages at the squib just published at the NYT, and there isn't even a rough fraction to suggest how many of the rest thought things would get worse and how many took the neutral middle position. The headline is "Broad Skepticism on Health Care Law," and I'm just going to guess that the negative group is more than 1/3. Here's some teasing text:

Among all adults, nearly half think the law will not affect them at all, while among uninsured adults, just over one-quarter say that. And while a nearly 4 in 10 plurality of uninsured Americans think the health care law will hurt them personally, they are twice as likely as the general public to say the law will help them.

You can't figure out from that what either group said about thinking that the law would help them. I'll be interested to see how low those numbers are. It could be as high as 6 out of 10 and 3 out of 10 or much lower — 2 out of 10 and 1 out of 10 or worse. [ADDED: If 4 in 10 is indeed a "plurality," then 3 out of 10 for the uninsured think the law will help. You can figure that out. And that would mean that 1.5 out of 10 in the "general public" think it will help them. I guess the "general public" includes this uninsured, so the numbers of already-insured who think it will help them must be less that 1.5. I am relying on precision in the NYT language.]

The promise was that vast majorities of Americans would be helped, including nearly everyone with inadequate or no insurance, and that nearly all of the rest would remain [at worst] in a neutral position, keeping what they had if they liked it. So we are experiencing a monumental reversal of expectations. It's hard to fathom how crushed people feel, both in having the huge promise so badly broken and in having so much upheaval with such an effect on one's personal finances and physical well-being.

This is so different from other huge events in American politics. One political party chose to cause this great disruption. It's not like a terrorist attack or a war that demands that we change. It was chosen, and it was chosen with no decent understanding of how difficult a disruption it would be.

I think back to something Michelle Obama said in early 2008, which seemed ominous to some even then:

Barack Obama... is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Maybe it's true that Barack has successfully prevented us from getting back to our lives as usual, our lives that many of us liked and wanted to keep. And it's true that he demanded that we shed our cynicism, and that was only the most ironic of the many way that he inspired our cynicism.

Conservative activist Larry Klayman — the victor the recent NSA case — tongue-lashes CNN's Don Lemon and Jeffrey Toobin.

The clip, below doesn't show the whole interaction, but the text at Politico does:

Klayman’s appearance Tuesday night on CNN was preceded by a profile of him that included a quotation from a former George W. Bush staffer saying his lawsuits were about “fighting for himself and his own, in my opinion, delusions of grandeur.”

When Klayman was brought into the conversation, he came out firing.

“I think it is important to note that you’re a big supporter of Obama,” Klayman said to Lemon. “That you have favored him in every respect. You have to try to do a hit piece to diminish a very important decision.... I’ve watched you for many years. You’re an ultra-leftist and you’re a big supporter of Obama.”

Panel of "distinguished historians" convened to find a President who had a worse Year 5 than Obama.

It's a history emergency over at Politico, where they've called out the experts to cast a better light on Obama than the light that's shining on him here in the present, where there are actual emergencies and the deficiencies of the experts convened to deal with them are glaringly obvious. But in the field of history, nothing occurs to expose the glitches and utter screwups. It's all already occurred and all that's left is to interpret what seems to have happened.

AND: I love the prominence of FDR and Ronald Reagan in this distinguished opinion-manufacturing. It's as if the experts know that their role in this history emergency is to boost Obama, and with that understanding, they find a way to say not only that there are Presidents with worse 5th years, but that having a wretched 5th year is the very mark of a great presidency.

"Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity."

"It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA."

In planning a new neighborhood, a developer includes some form of food production — a farm, community garden, orchard, livestock operation, edible park — that is meant to draw in new buyers, increase values and stitch neighbors together.

What about the noises and the smell?!

"How George W. Bush Evolved From the Uncoolest Person on the Planet to Bona Fide Hipster Icon."

A Vanity Fair article by Juli Weiner:

But if you are younger than 24, you might not have attended anti-Bush rallies in high school and in college. You might not have pinned “SHRUB” buttons to your tote bag, and might not even remember Bush as a war-lovin’, vowel-droppin’, faux-folksy, ostentatiously religious Connecticut cowboy. This is because Bush has, quietly and wholly, ingeniously refashioned himself into an Internet-friendly, cat-loving, ironic-hat-wearing painter-cum-Instagram savant. Lately, George W. Bush is a hipster icon, and the Internet, unofficial Fourth Estate of the youth of America, is totally buying it.

Rush Limbaugh was going on about it today.

By the way, folks, this Vanity Fair piece on Bush is really snarky. It's as snarky as anything else ever was about Bush. But the comments by readers to the Vanity Fair piece are really positive. I'll tell you, the media, it's under the radar right now, but the media is livid about this.... And they are frosted. They are livid.....

At the Brathaus Truckstop...

... you don't have to stop for long.

"We really didn't care for a PR pitch about how the administration is trying to salvage its internal health care tech nightmare."

Said an unnamed tech company CEO about a meeting with Obama that was supposed to be about the problem of government surveillance. 

'He basically hijacked the meeting,' the executive said. 'We all told the White House that we were only there to talk about what the NSA was up to and how it affects us.'

The biggest Pinocchios of 2013.

WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has a top 10 biggest lies list.

President Obama ended up with three of the most misleading claims of the year. But, despite the urging of some readers, his statement that “I didn’t set a red line” on Syria is not among them. We had looked closely at that claim and had determined that, in context, it was a bungled talking point, so that statement actually earned no rating.

Second term Obama is like second term Bush.

Ron Fournier makes 9 points of comparison.

And a new poll at WaPo says:

Obama ends his fifth year in office with lower approval ratings than almost all other recent two-term presidents. At this point in 2005, for example, former president George W. Bush was at 47 percent positive, 52 percent negative. All other post-World War II presidents were at or above 50 percent at this point in their second terms, except Richard M. Nixon, whose fifth year ended in 1973 with an approval rating of 29 percent because of the Watergate scandal that later brought impeachment and his resignation.

I find the headline there painfully funny: "Obama suffers most from year of turmoil, poll finds." It's always all about Obama! Even the suffering. Poor Obama. What about all the people who are suffering as the malfunctioning Obamacare machine cranks into action? I know, the point is that he's doing the worst in the poll, but phrasing it like that — Obama suffers most — is absurd. And I assume they mean to help Obama, to inspire sympathy for him. It's patronizing to him, and it's unsympathetic to everyone else who is suffering.

Head injuries and suicide: It's not just for football anymore.

Now, playing baseball "with abandon" is connected (in the NYT) to suicide.

“There is no way to say [Ryan Freel's] neurodegenerative disease was the cause of his death or the tumultuous 10 years prior to his death,” said Dr. Bob Stern, a neurology and neurosurgery professor and a co-founder of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy....

The B.U. Center’s examination of athletes has focused on football, and research published earlier this year indicated that of 35 deceased players whose brain matter was inspected, all but one showed signs of C.T.E. Several were suicide victims. One of the most prominent players, Dave Duerson, had attained the third stage of C.T.E.

Stern said he was initially skeptical that a baseball player would develop the disease. Then he learned during the investigation not only about Freel’s history of collisions with outfield walls and other players but that his first of several concussions unrelated to sports may have occurred at age 2....

“I don’t think baseball is going to become a high-risk activity for C.T.E.,” he said. “I don’t think parents should immediately say: ‘That does it. My kid should not play Little League.’ ... [But] we need to pay better attention to our brains. Try to take the head out of these activities."

Will parents overreact and take their kids out of sports? That would be stupid. I assume sports also alleviate depression and some of those sedentary kids, plunging their brains into computers and televisions, descend into suicide. The message is only: Don't get your head knocked hard.

The drug consumption rooms of Denmark...

"... where adults with serious addictions can bring their illegal drugs and take them, legally, under the watchful eye of a nurse."

Inside, to the left, behind a huge window, is cluster of smokers with improvised pipes, enveloped in haze. To the right is a long, stainless steel table where several people sit, injecting themselves with heroin, cocaine or both. Some finish and leave quietly. A few slump over the table, asleep. One man gets up and paces frantically back and forth, swearing and shouting. In the middle of it all, sits a nurse in street clothes, calmly taking in the scene.

Every day, these nurses witness up to 800 injections.

"Doctors Save Severed Hand By Sewing to Man's Ankle."

Photo of the arrangement at the link.

Doctors, opted to graft the hand to Wei's ankle to prevent it from dying while they worked on his other extensive injuries. The doctors told Rex Features: “His injury was severe. Besides ripping injuries, his arm was also flattened. We had to clear and treat his injuries before taking on the hand reattachment surgery.”

"I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen..."

"... for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval... Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."

Wrote Federal District Judge Richard J. Leon, a Bush appointee, in a case brought by Larry Klayman, a conservative activist, who is seeking to represent a class of all Americans.

Similar legal challenges to the N.S.A. program, including by the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, are at earlier stages in the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an unusual challenge to the program by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had sought to bypass lower courts.

ADDED: Orin Kerr has some sharp analysis:

Judge Leon’s first and most fundamental move is to distinguish Smith v. Maryland, the 1979 case ruling that the Fourth Amendment does not protect numbers dialed from a telephone. I found Judge Leon’s argument on this point not only unpersuasive, but quite plainly so. I realize that a district court judge can’t just announce that he thinks a Supreme Court decision was wrongly decided. But there are plausible ways to write an opinion distinguishing Smith and implausible ways to do so, and Judge Leon’s opinion struck me as a surprisingly weak effort.

Read the rest at the link.

Amazon.

If you're enjoying this blog, please think of it when you have some on-line shopping to do and enter Amazon through The Althouse Portal.

Thanks to all who've done this already. It's nicely encouraging as I begin the last month of the 10th year of blogging every single day.

"National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States..."

"... in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency."

So the message is: If you take enough, you can get away with it simply by giving it back.

This is a variation on the big lie ("a lie so 'colossal' that no one would believe that someone 'could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'").  Go big enough, and you can get away with what the small time liars/cheats/thieves/monsters must pay for.

Or what was it Donald Trump — I think it was Donald Trump — said? The bank turns down people who ask for small loans, but if you ask for a yoooge enough loan, they don't say no. Can't find the precise thing I'm looking for, but I did find:

"As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big."

Back to Snowden. I thought when he first took it on the lam, he said that there were copies distributed to various persons for safekeeping, so that if he were killed, it would all come out. How is the NSA to know whether all those copies are called back?

ADDED: Meade, reading this out loud, helping me proofread, said: "'a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence'.... how about the audacity?"

I'm irritated for a second by his discontinuity and say "It's a quote," as if I think Meade is offering me writing advice and there's a better word than "impudence," and then I realize that Meade is gesturing at Obama — "Audacity of Hope" — and the colossal Lie-of-the-Year lie that Obama told.

"You do realize that's a Hitler quote?" I ask, unnecessarily.

"The best argument for putting inequality on the back burner is the depressed state of the economy."

Concedes Krugman. "Isn’t it more important to restore economic growth than to worry about how the gains from growth are distributed?"

Of course, his answer is: "No." Or, to be precise (and to capture the Krugman condescension): "Well, no."

"All the apple-cheeked babies, captured for eternity in Creamsicle onesies three sizes too big, are nearly grown."

That's the first sentence of what?

The incredibly long and abstruse Sports Illustrated article about Peyton Manning, from which I was unable to extract the reasoning for choosing him as Sportsman of the Year (other than, looking at the sidebar of other possibilities, the lack of anyone more compelling).

When the hell did sportswriting turn into that sort of thing? Babies. Onesies. Should a man even use the word "onesies"? Creamsicle? Come on, people.

But if we're going to talk about football, let's talk about the Green Bay Packers humiliating the Dallas Cowboys last night. Wasn't that a highly emotive experience?

"It took me everything not to cry," McCarthy said..... "I was drained. I don't think people realize what professional athletes put into a contest. Just to see the emotion of guys... what we overcame. I don't have the words. My vocabulary's stuck right now. It was incredible."

Mars needs women. Women have the words. We're more verbal. We can say "onesies" and "babies" and "Creamsicle" and more. But I'll just say "the emotion of guys"... I love that. And... go, Packers, and good for you, Peyton Manning.

"But there is a reason Ayn Rand is considered a gateway drug to the right and [Adam] Smith isn’t..."

"... the 'greed is good' ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both [The Daily Caller's Matt] Lewis and [Andrew] Sullivan consider Smith the fons et origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally."

Mytheos Holt, writing in The American Conservative, would like you to pay more attention to Bernard Mandeville and "The Fable of the Bees."