Month: July 2013

Analyzing new numbers from Pew, Allahpundit finds good reason for Big Brother Republicans such as King and Christie to fear the insurgent libertarian from Kentucky – a “major swing against government surveillance among tea partiers”:

Three years ago, at least a plurality of every ideological segment except moderate Democrats thought the feds didn’t go far enough to protect the country. Three years later, nearly every segment has swung the other way. The only holdouts are moderate Democrats (oddly) and moderate Republicans. More specifically, non-tea-party Republicans tilt 41/43 towards thinking the feds haven’t done enough to protect the country; among tea partiers, the tilt is … 55/31 towards thinking they’ve gone too far in restricting civil liberties, a 35-point(!) swing since 2010. That’s what a battle for the soul of the party looks like — a double-digit spread among the centrist and conservative wings on a key point of national security.

Normally I’d dismiss a turnaround as sharp as that as driven by partisan reaction to the White House. Elect a Democratic president and you’ll see Dems warm to his counterterror program and Republicans sour on it, no matter how much it resembles the last GOP administration’s program. But Pew’s reference point here isn’t an earlier poll taken during the Bush era; it’s 2010, nearly two years into Hopenchange. This shift has happened entirely on Obama’s watch.

Readers join my jaw-dropping reaction to the Clinton camp cutting down Weiner and Abedin:

What’s far worse is that Huma worked as a close, long-time aide for Hillary, so these comments must add to her pain greatly. How dare people compare the great Hillary Clinton to the lowly little staffer Huma? Imagine Huma reading that? After years of being Hillary’s aide, it must be a kick in the face, right at the time when you need your friends the most. Well, you know what this means: Hillary’s running for president.

And as ruthless and self-obsessed as ever. Another reader:

Chutzpah indeed. And then we have the typically Clintonian betrayal of their friends. This whole article from 2010 in the Washington Post is all about how Abedin is Clinton’s right-hand woman. Money quote:

“I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it would [be] Huma,” Clinton said at a pre-wedding celebration for Abedin and Weiner in 2010.

Another:

I hope you are aware that Bill Clinton actually officiated at the wedding of Abedin and Weiner? If that’s not enough to put your jaw through the floorboards … !

Another:

The only thing your post about the Clintons, Huma, Weiner and Maureen Dowd was missing was this vintage paragraph from MoDo’s June 2003 review of Hillary’s memoir:

Bill is bookended in history by Monica’s plea to him in a note: ”I need you right now not as president, but as a man” and Hillary’s explanation of why she stuck with him: ”As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he was not only my husband, he was also my president.” It makes you wonder whether Hillary would have forgiven Bill if he were merely her United States trade representative.

Another dissents:

The story is suspect and thinly sourced and gossipy and even feels fabricated. It’s tabloidy, NYPost sort of fluff junk. You elevated it beyond its credibility and importance.

Another elaborates:

I think you need to chill a bit on this. Lumping Hillary and Bill in with what the press now calls “the Clintonistas” and what you referred to as “the Clinton machine” is very close to a smear.

You linked to a story in the NY Post, which you have called “unreliable” and a “disgrace” and suggested was guilty of “crimes against journalism” in the past. There isn’t a single source identified in that piece that can be verified as being close to Bill or Hillary; “a top state Democrat”?, “another prominent Democrat”? PUH-lease.

This idea of some dark group of Clinton loyalists who are busy conspiring together and worrying about the NY mayoral election is a bit far-fetched. How many people would the NY Post be willing to call “a prominent Hillary Rodham Clinton political operative” if it fits their narrative? I bet there are hundreds who could fit that label over HRC’s 25-year national career.

An even better question: how many of them are working for Christine Quinn right now?

And in the NYT Dowd piece you quote, you inserted the word “Clintonista” in parentheses [ugh], when clearly it was referring to people in Huma Abedin‘s circle of friends commenting about her drawing the wrong lesson from Hillary.

Please think about correcting on the blog.

I’m sorry but I’ve been around Washington for quite a while and the sudden flurry of anonymous Clinton friends suddenly trashing Huma and pounding Weiner is not a vast Clintonista conspiracy, but it is classic Clincestuous spin. Another reader:

Do you think that, if Hillary runs in 2016, her female supporters will overlook her complicity with her husband’s lies and her own lies from Bill’s presidency because they want to shatter the glass ceiling? Will they see any irony in what the Clintons are doing now to try to force Weiner to pull out (har har) and will that factor into how they cast their vote in a potential primary or general election? Probably everyone will forget about this chutzpah by the time a campaign rolls around in 2015.

I think we ought to have a woman President, just as we ought to a have Latino, Asian, Native American, or gay, etc. President. I just don’t ever want the Clintons back in power. Kind of like the Bushes, can’t they go away and leave us alone?

They won’t, because this is what they have always lived for.

A reader with Type-2 diabetes joins the one with Type 1 to divorce the disease from obesity:

Your dissenting reader with the Type-1 diabetic child tells a compelling story, but the implicit conclusion you reach is all wrong. No, we shouldn’t let people with Type 1 off the “diabetes=obesity” hook. We should throw away the hook!

For one thing, the mechanism of diabetes causation is not well understood, so we simply cannot say that obesity causes Type-2 diabetes at all. The two are strongly correlated, but research strongly hints at a cluster of shared causes, rather than a straightforward chain of get fat -> stay fat for X time -> develop the diabetes you’ve earned by being fat, you obese loser that is so widely assumed, including by most press accounts.

For another thing, not everyone who develops Type-2 diabetes is or was ever overweight, or has a family history of obesity or diabetes. I know – I was diagnosed with Type 2 at age 36. I’ve never had a body-mass index over 24, and for most of my life I’ve been skinny as a string bean, as are most of the men in my diabetes-free family tree.

The first thing my doctor did after my diagnosis was pack me off to a so-you’ve-got-diabetes class at the local hospital. The class, like just every online and print resource I could find, focused its advice not on managing glucose intake and natural insulin function, but on weight loss. But I didn’t need to lose weight!

I’m 6’0″, and was down to 150. My doctor wanted me to try to gain 10 pounds! In the meantime, I was asking a question that confounded every doctor, dietitian, and American Diabetes Association hotline expert I talked to: What should I eat for breakfast? If I needed to lose weight, they had answers. If I was on insulin, they had answers. But if I was at an appropriate weight, and just wanted to find a plate of foods that my weakened insulin system could handle without unhealthy blood-glucose spikes, breakfast was a stumper. Our cultural faith in the diabetes=obesity myth runs so deep that the medical and diabetes-research professions cannot even answer the question, “What should a diabetic eat for breakfast, if he’s not fat?”

Now for the good news: I’ve managed my diabetes with diet changes, exercise, and minimal medication. I’ve kept my A1C well below 7, often below 6, since my diagnosis. The keys seemed to be significantly reducing, but also more evenly distributing, my carbohydrate intake. Chiefly, no liquid carbs (except wine and beer, because, come on). No soda, minimal juice, no sugar or flavored syrups in coffee. (Advice to your non-diabetic readers: Stop drinking sugar. Don’t go soft like Bloomberg and reduce your serving size; just don’t drink anything with sugar or corn syrup on the ingredient list.)

Yes, I miss the great big glasses of orange juice that used to start my day, and the tall glass of milk with supper, and the heaping plates of pasta too. But I’m healthier and fitter than ever before, except for, you know, diabetes. The problem is, I had to figure this out by myself, because I didn’t fit the assumed paradigm of diabetes=obesity. Riding in the annual diabetes fundraiser bike event Tour de Cure, I’ve met many people who, like me, had to figure out treatment plans themselves because their problem was having diabetes, not being fat.

I don’t see much evidence that the focus on treating obesity is actually helping people who are both fat and diabetic, but I do see evidence that this focus harms those with diabetes for whom weight is not also a crisis. Yes, people, especially kids, with Type-1 diabetes are the primary victims of the diabetes=obesity myth, but so to are a good number of adults with Type 2. So don’t just exempt the kiddos from the stigma. End the overall stigma of diabetes=obesity=you earned it.

A reader writes:

The comment from your reader who was a butch little girl broke my heart a little. I have an8 year old who is a little gender-queer, but not trans, and probably not gay, and he had a terrible time at school this year.  My son is an awesome kid – sweet, smart, and funny. He is both one of the butchest boys I know and one of the most gender-queer. He truly has no regard for gendered clothing, shows, or interests. He loves karate and superheroes and video games and Spongebob and Star Wars: Clone Wars. He also loves sparkly, brightly colored clothing and nail polish and hair color and My Little Ponies and Tinker Bell. He has been both Samurai Jack for Halloween and a fairy. He plays with girls and boys.

This year, I allowed him to paint his nails black and orange just before Halloween.  I didn’t think anything about it. It was the week before Halloween! His second grade classmates taunted him for it and called him a girl. One of them punched him in the balls. None of the boys would play with him any more. Only one girl would play with him.  My son has a rebellious streak and decided to respond by bringing “girl books” to school and wearing pink shirts and more fingernail polish. The bullying continued. Despite an anti-bullying policy, the school’s main intervention was to advise us to get him to tone down the gender non-conformity.  We did, but I can’t help but think that the message that my son got was that gender bullying is okay and that it was somehow his fault if someone bullies him for being a nonconformist.

We’re transferring schools this year. I can’t take it and my son shouldn’t have to.

Another:

I’m now a 60-year-old gay man, partnered for almost 25 years and living a reasonably happy life. When I was little, I was a mama’s boy and definitely not considered a typical boy.

I played with dolls, like to dress up and loved doing whatever Mom was doing. In my baby book, Mom even recorded my atypical personality at the age of three, “Ricke is still a little girl at heart.” I knew that I was different from my other little male friends, but it didn’t seem to make much difference until about 3rd grade. It was then that I began to be bullied at school for being a sissy. Feeling miserable and lonely, I began to pray nightly that God would change me into a girl during the night and that I’d wake up feeling that everything in my life would be OK. That was the only solution that came to my young mind back in the 1950s. I knew nothing about homosexuality and on my own, couldn’t see any other way for me to fit in.

Well, that obviously didn’t happen. In high school I began to understand that I was gay and by college fully accepted it and began to live my life. I grew up to be a man who can take care of himself. Thanks to Mom, I can cook, bake, iron, sew, knit, hang wallpaper, paint a room or an entire house, and in general do what needs to be done. But it does make me wonder about the current trend toward diagnosing transsexualism in young children. I certainly don’t feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body now.

Another:

I am really appreciating all of the posts you’ve had in the last year or so on trans experiences.  I don’t recall there being so many in the past, and your uptick coincides with my own son’s transition (from Laura to Lucas). I’ve also become acquainted with a young woman at our church who has a young son who is a “princess boy.”  She is very supportive, but her ex-husband is So Very Not.  I’ve been passing on all of your posts to her and they have been very helpful.  So thank you on behalf of both of us, plus the many other family members and friends who have also found various of your posts so enlightening.

David Graeber explains the origin of “please” and “thank you”:

The English “please” is short for “if you please,” “if it pleases you to do this” — it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). Its literal meaning is “you are under no obligation to do this.” “Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!” This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word “please,” you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.

In English, “thank you” derives from “think” …

[I]t originally meant, “I will remember what you did for me” — which is usually not true either — but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English “much obliged” — it actually does means “I am in your debt.” The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor”s power — since a debtor is, after all, a criminal. Saying “you’re welcome,” or “it’s nothing” (French de rien, Spanish de nada) — the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true — is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying “my pleasure” — you are saying, “No, actually, it’s a credit, not a debit — you did me a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!”