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.

I quit, because my boss only cared about quantity, not quality, and now this video has 8,532,328 views in 4 days.

Videographer dances her parting words to her boss, Via Metafilter, where people don't all appreciate the humor of her going after virality when she resented the boss's pursuit of virality. And:

I don't get it. I love a viral video as much as the next person, but neither the original nor the response was amusing or cute or interesting. She didn't do anything fantastically rebellious, or dish dirt, or anything. She just danced around the office a little -- we've all done that.

There's also the problem of appropriating someone else's music. And someone complains about her title for the video — "An Interpretive Dance For My Boss Set To Kanye West's Gone" — when "that is not interpretive dance/that is just bopping around."

Here's the above-referenced response from the company.

(Actually, the whole thing seems like a "subversive"-type ad for the company. Is it really that cute? And what's Kanye West going to do about it?)

ADDED: I've removed the embedded video, partly out of respect for Kanye West, but also because I've become convinced of what I was previously merely skeptical was the case: This is viral advertising.

"So many people here, people that I otherwise respect, have written so much cloaked or naked vituperation about gay people..."

"... and our effect on civilization, that what little sympathy I had for your 'feelings' has long evaporated."

At this point in my life I'm finished with the lot of you, the plantation master so-called "liberals" who are less distinguishable from Fascists every day, and the so-called small-government "conservatives", who have such little faith in their God and the eternal and sacred institution of marriage that they bray for the State to enshrine their doctrine in secular law, and scream "Apocalypse!" when it doesn't happen.

Writes Palladian, in last night's café, where the whimpers of the losers of the DOMA case continued, along with slurpy wound-licking over my calling them losers — which is what they were, having lost in that case — and advising them not to whine over the more-or-less false perception that they'd been called bigots.

Sometimes, I get discouraged about the way people can't or won't read. It's not just the skimming and leaping to assumptions that you know what is being said, it's normal-speed reading of concision, and the failure to stop and see humor and wordplay. The post that people continued to get outraged over — which explained the extent to which the Supreme Court called gay-marriage opponents "bigots" — ended:

You took the opportunity to oppress when it was there, and now that it's gone, you want to say you are oppressed. Man up, losers. You lost. And you deserved to lose. Now, stop acting like losers. If you can. (I bet you can't!)

The losing was the losing of the case. I gave advice not to cry about it. You're a former victor, since you won when DOMA was passed into law. Many years later, those oppressed by DOMA ousted the oppressor. You need to get some perspective on how laughable your sadness over your loss looks to those who were saddened by the oppression you enjoyed all those years. But I've interacted with you and communicated with you over this issue since 2004, when this blog started. I didn't intend to write a legal or a political blog at all, but this issue had intrigued me for a long time. I have been patient in these conversations — over 400 of them. And now, what is obviously to me the good side has won in Windsor. I refrained from gloating over this important victory. But I saw all this whining and crying about being called a "bigot," and I wanted to tell you that this did not look good, that you needed to find a way to a positive, productive future that would contain this right going forward.

I said "stop acting like losers." I didn't say that you were losers in every aspect of your being. "Man up, losers," referred to losing this case, and "man up" is a sarcastic allusion to homophobia — on the off chance that some of you might think gay men are unmanly — and to the fact that we are in a turnabout in which the former losers have become the victors. There were winners and losers in that case, and the losers need to decide how they want to deal with it. I said "stop acting like losers." That implies that there is a sort of person who is an all-around loser. I didn't say you were one of them. My locution was: Don't be like them.

That was good advice, and it was intended to be a slap in the face. Wake up!



I had a premonition as soon as I wrote that line that you wouldn't snap out of it, that you would continue the crying that I find laughable. That's why I said "If you can. (I bet you can't!)"

I was right.

And I anticipate another round of crying over how terribly mean I have been to you.

The Russians hang onto Snowden.

Or Snowden melts into Russia.

Mr. Snowden has not been seen publicly or photographed since his reported arrival in Moscow on Sunday afternoon from Hong Kong, and passengers on that flight interviewed at the airport could not confirm that he was on board.

The information about Snowden doesn't want to be free.

Maybe the U.S. got him.

The situation remained a confounding and undoubtedly infuriating one for American officials, who have charged Mr. Snowden with illegally disclosing classified documents about American surveillance programs.

Undoubtedly?

I doubt everything.

"I would urge [the Russians] to live by the standards of the law,” [Secretary of State John] Kerry said.

Enigmatically.

“US bullying Russia for Snowden’s rendition is counterproductive. No self-respecting state would accept such unlawful demands,” [Wikileaks] wrote. The use of “rendition” was an explicit reference to the way the United States has handled terrorism suspects....

Standards of law... must interpret...

Russia had seemed intent on allowing Mr. Snowden to transit through Moscow but at the highest levels of the Russian government, officials seemed to be pulling a page from a cold war playbook, coyly denying any knowledge about Mr. Snowden.

The Russians, the NYT openly doubts.

“Over all, we have no information about him,” Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, told Reuters early on Monday.

The pesky Peskov.

Mr. Kerry said that it was ironic that Mr. Snowden may have been seeking the cooperation of China and Russian [sic] in his flight, given their positions in restricting Internet freedom.  

Ironic ≈ verrry innnterrresting.

It was unclear how Mr. Snowden spent his time at the airport or precisely where. 

Who knows what sorts of VIP rooms they have at the Moscow airport?

The departure of the flight to Havana from Moscow came after an all-night vigil by journalists who were posted outside a hotel in the transit zone of the airport where Mr. Snowden was apparently staying. But on Monday morning, hotel staff members said that no one named Snowden was staying there.

Disappeared... despite the vigil by journalists... at a hotel that was near the airport.

Russian news services had reported that Mr. Snowden would take a Monday afternoon flight to Cuba, prompting a late rush for tickets from the horde of journalists gathered at the airport. 

Hey, journalists, stampede this way! Vigil at the hotel, stampede to the airport. It's like they're teenage girls trying to catch a glimpse of The Beatles.

As long as John Kerry brought up irony... it's ironic that the Snowden emerged to tell us about the nefarious, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and abusive surveillance powers of the United States, and the country can't find one man who made himself conspicuous.

"Egypt appoints member of terror group that once massacred tourists to run tourism region."

WaPo article which I found because it was #6 on a Buzzfeed list of "100% Picture-Perfect Ironic Photos."

AND: As long as we're over here on Buzzfeed: "23 Pictures That Prove Society Is Doomed." (But it's not the terrorism.)

UPDATE: "Islamist governor of Egypt's Luxor quits after uproar."

"It turns out that the Gov't has no privacy either. So the joke is on them as much as it is on us."

Writes Richard Dolan in the comments to yesterday's post "Greenwald Says ‘There’s A Lot More Coming,’ Argues NSA Revelations Don’t Harm Security." Dolan continues (the boldface is mine):

The Gov't needs a giant bureaucracy to run its NSA and other 'data mining' projects, just as the State Dept and the IRS need giant bureaucracies to perform their functions. As recent events show, those Gov't agencies can't assure that their own secrets, their own attempts at controlling information, will succeed. Given the size of these bureaucracies, it seems quite unlikely that they possibly could.

In all the talk about how the citizenry is at the mercy of the Gov't's abuse of power, it pays to stop and note that the Gov't is also at the mercy of its own agents' abuse of their power -- the power to disclose, leak, or turn on the Man. So long as there is a market for the kinds of leaked information we are seeing -- not just the NSA stuff, but the State Dept report about shutting down investigations that CBS surfaced, to use just today's example -- these leaks will continue.

A comparison that comes to mind is the (failed) War on Drugs -- the market for illegal drugs doomed that War even before it got going, just as the market for illicitly leaked information will doom the Gov't's attempt to keep its own secrets 'private.' The difference is that the drug market relies on the usual profit motive, all payable in cash. The 'leaks' market has different incentives for the leakers and the leakees -- the leakees have the more traditional incentive since these stories add to a reporter's (or blogger's) reputation, and may even garner a Pulitzer. For the leaker, the incentives are different -- Snowden's were apparently a personal political morality that impelled him to act, as were Manning's -- and not so easily measured. But they are just as real.

Even as we have moved into electronic media and the government can look at us there, the government has become dependent on huge numbers of computer specialists. Who are these guys? Snowden is one of them, but there are masses of them, and they must be trusted to get to the material the government can now get to because millions of computer users have yielded to the charms of the internet. There are the masses of computers users — ordinary people doing social media — but there are the computer specialists — and most of us aren't that familiar with these people whose lives are about computers at the technical and not the social level.

What do you know about their thought patterns? Is there a geek syndrome? Are there notions of altruism and libertarianism that seem to resonate in the American tradition but are really something new and different in ways that we won't understand until it's far too late? Is it far too late?

Is "real" sarcasm or is "real" real?

The latest food article in the NYT stimulate, in me, a hunger for an understanding of "real" — not like some what-is-reality? philosophy/stoner college student, but as a connoisseur of language and humor. In 2 different articles, the modifier "real" is appended to a noun, first "milk" and then "vegetables."

1. "Pots and Pans, but Little Pain/Making Lunch With Michael Pollan and Michael Moss," written by Emily Weinstein, has the Pollan (author of books like "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") and Moss (author of "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us") wandering judgmentally through the kind of crowded grocery store that people in NYC call a "supermarket."

Mr. Moss and Mr. Pollan considered the mozzarella choices, skipping the pre-shredded kind in favor of a cheese that advertised itself as a product of Amish country and that cost the same as the more generic ball beside it.

“Real milk, no hormones, no antibiotics,” Mr. Pollan said, reading aloud from the label. “I love the term ‘real milk.’ I wonder if we can get fake milk anywhere here.”

2. "The Frankfurter Diaries," by Mark Bittman was about Bittman eating a hot dog. (Somehow, when I clicked on the link, I was hoping for something about Felix Frankfurter, even though I know Bittman is a food writer. I love his cookbook, "How to Cook Everything."). Bittman — like Pollan and Moss in the grocery store — comes across as an elitist out of his normal environment. He's on "a drive to the Jersey Shore" and looking for something to eat at a parkway restaurant.

My first inclination was Burger King; [a friend who largely shares my weaknesses and prejudices] pronounced it “poison.”

O.K., but what wasn’t? Where was the real food? It didn’t exist....

I’m well aware that we’re light-years away from a rest area without any junk food. It might be nice, however, if there were one offering a vegetable wrap or a big fat falafel sandwich with real vegetables. Would you not think there’s a market for that?

#1 is the distanced, humorous way to use "real" to express lofty/prissy/elitist attitudes about food. #2 is the colloquial, earnest way to use "real" to express longing for a better world. I wonder if Bittman really thinks rest-stop falafel would be any good. Even in decent ethnic restaurants with nicely deep-fried falafel, I've only encountered shredded iceberg lettuce, there for the crunch, not for any wholesome goodness. But Bittman's vision of great falafel at the rest stop goes perfectly — like  lettuce on deep-fried bean-mush — with his non-humorous deployment of the adjective "real."

There's no right and wrong here. Myself, I'd use "real" both ways. I'm just interested in the word "real," which has been big in the Baby Boomer era (and Bittman, Pollan, and Moss are all, like me, Boomers). Be real. Get real. It's been real. He's a real nowhere man. I got to laugh halfways off my heels/I got to know, babe, will you surround me?/So I can know if I’m really real.

According to the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest meaning of "real" — now obsolete — connects to the words "regal" and "royal." In reference to a thing, it means: "befitting a monarch; sumptuous, fine, beautiful, noble, excellent." If we're hearing elitism in those NYT quotes, it resonates with the history of the language. That makes me want to quote Bob Dylan again:

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

But the familiar meaning of "real" — actually existing — is also old. "Free from nonsense, affectation, or pretence; genuine" — a meaning that Pollan's sarcasm presumes not to exist — goes back at least to 1747. And look at this quote from "House of Seven Gables" (1851): "Phoebe's presence made a home about her... She was real!" It's like Nathaniel Hawthorne was a Boomer.

The OED has separate entries for a few familiar phrases, notably, "it's been real," which it defines as: "'it's been memorable,' 'it's been an experience'; used as a farewell, with varying degrees of sincerity or irony, and sometimes simply as a formulaic phrase." See! With varying degrees of sincerity or irony. The phrase was first encountered (by the OED) in Wright Morris's 1954 novel "Huge Season": "He stepped forward and bowed to Lou Baker, took her hand, kissed it. 'Doll, it's been real.'"

There's no food-related entry for "real" in the OED, but there is a drink one: "real coffee n. coffee made from ground coffee beans, as opposed either to a substitute or (now esp.) to instant coffee." That goes back to the 19th century:

1877   H. Ruede Jrnl. 13 June in Sod-house Days (1937) 99   Most people out here don't drink real coffee, because it is too expensive... So rye coffee is used a great deal—parched brown or black according to whether the users like a strong or mild drink.

Finally — and say what you will about Pollan, Moss, and Bittman — there's a separate OED entry from "real man" — "a man who fulfils traditional expectations of masculinity in his behaviour, attitudes, or appearance; a virile or masculine man." That goes back to 1872:

1872   Titusville (Pennsylvania) Morning Herald 23 Sept.,   But society is full of shams shoddy and tinsel. The real man puts on no airs at all....
1926   Times-Signal (Zanesville, Ohio) (Electronic text) 17 Oct.,   It's out here in the lonely places that you get the real-man type. There's nothing sissy about it.

That was some earnest "real," back then. Pop forward to the 80s, for some classic Boomer "real" sarcasm:

1982   B. Feirstein Real Men don't eat Quiche ii. 13   In the past, it was easy to be a Real Man. All you had to do was abuse women, steal land from Indians, and find some place to dump the toxic waste.

That's enough for now. Kisses. It's been real.

To all those UW students who ran wild 2 years ago protesting Scott Walker.

"Gov. Scott Walker plans to ask the Legislature to freeze tuition in the University of Wisconsin System in light of reports of $650 million in reserves."

After all this talk of "dark-skinned" suspects, it seems the Boston bombers were Caucasian.

Literally.

"Why Elitists Hate" the Brad Paisley/LL Cool J song "Accidental Racist."

According to novelist Will Shetterly (one of six commentators on the much-maligned recording):

The song’s first sin is it’s earnest. There’s no irony to please hipsters.

Its second sin is it’s about members of the U.S.’s racially and regionally divided working class, a southern white Lynyrd Skynyrd fan in a Confederate battle flag T-shirt and a northern black rapper in a do-rag, gold chains and sagging pants. This song wasn’t made for, by or about people who consider themselves the cultural elite, and elitists hate the idea of being irrelevant, especially in a discussion of an issue as important as race.

Its third sin is featuring a rap artist. Many elitists hate rap as much as they hate country, though they don’t like to admit it for fear of appearing racially insensitive....

Its last sin is its title -- "Accidental Racist" -- which reminds academic race theorists of a pet term, “unintentional racism,” the racism practiced by people who don’t realize they’re racist. The song is about the opposite phenomenon, the assumptions of people who see racism where it isn’t present because they misunderstand the symbols of a different culture....

"Possible Stylish Owners: People who shop at Orvis, Dads with Barbour jackets that faintly smell of gunpowder."

"For men who wear hunting jackets for real, actual hunting, and use shooting patches to cushion the blowback from the butt of their Winchester rifles, this is their unironic dog..."

#8 on the list of "Most Stylish Dog Breeds."

Ah, but what kind of style are you talking about?

Note that German Shepherd is not on the list, the "Possible Stylish Owner" that we're talking about 3 posts down is not identified as possibly stylish on this possibly authoritative list.

"The swing vote is in (so stop kissing up)."

Writes Dana Milbank, in a slight twist of the usual lazy journalist approach to covering the Supreme Court: Inform readers that Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote, pull his statements/questions out the transcript, and riff about them — What's he thinking? Who knows? Could go either way — and let him know — subtly or unsubtly — how much you'll love him if he does what you want and how he risks his social and historical standing if he does not.

There's an issue of "standing" in both same-sex marriage cases. Standing — the legal doctrine — has to do with whether the party seeking access to the judicial process has a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to the opposing party and likely to be redressed if he happens to prevail on the legal issue. But the real issue of standing — these journalists make me think — is Justice Kennedy's standing within the elite crowd of politics, academia, and journalism.

Milbank's riff is: He can already tell. 

Early in the oral argument [in Windsor], the conservatives — Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts (a silent Clarence Thomas can be assumed to be their tacit tagalong) — explored the idea that the case might be disposed of on the technical grounds that no injury had been proved, a technique that would avoid a ruling calling DOMA unconstitutional.

But Kennedy was having none of it. “It seems to me there’s injury here,” he said.

The swing vote had swung....

Kennedy left little doubt about what he thinks the answer is. When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued that DOMA violated the notion of equal protection under the law, Kennedy cut him off. “You are insisting that we get to a very fundamental question about equal protection,” he said, “but we don’t do that unless we assume the law is valid otherwise to begin with.”

And if Kennedy doesn’t assume something, nobody can assume it.

The usual sucking up is not needed.

It's embarrassing to the Court that it is talked about this way, and — ironically — it makes it harder for the Court to find new/bigger individual rights that ordinary people can believe really came out of a dutiful judicial analysis of the law. That unwittingly bolsters the argument for leaving this issue in the arena of majoritarian politics.

"If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

Justice Scalia is out and about, antagonizing — antoninonizing — students, this time at Princeton, with "a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd.'"

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Then he deadpanned: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded."

[The student] said afterward that he was not persuaded by Scalia's answer. He said he believes Scalia's writings tend to "dehumanize" gays.

Actually, he's humanizing you by crediting you with the capacity to comprehend rhetoric and engage in an on-the-fly verbal interchange. But it is easier to dehumanize your adversary. Afterwards.

What do they teach you at Princeton?

ADDED: Jaltcoh has 3 thoughts about this.

AND: David Lat reminds us about what Judge Posner said about horse meat: "a state is permitted, within reason, to express disgust..."