Tuesday Afternoon

* The health care bill the president just signed into law includes a 10 percent tax on all indoor tanning sessions starting July 1st, and I say, who uses tanning? Is it dark-skinned people? I don’t think so. I would guess that most tanning sessions are from light-skinned Americans. Why would the President of the United States of America—a man who says he understands racism, a man who has been confronted with racism—why would he sign such a racist law? Why would he agree to do that? Well now I feel the pain of racism. This is a truly exemplary case of what Al Franken calls “kidding on the square.”

* Dahlia Lithwick plays “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?” In just a few short weeks Cuccinelli has turned himself into the hero of conservative cable news shows, but he’s done it with what can be described only as acts of purely aspirational lawyering. When TV pundits or politicians argue about what the Constitution should say, it’s one thing. But when an attorney general does it, it’s another matter entirely. What Cuccinelli is doing transcends legal activism—with which I have no quarrel—and places him squarely in the world of constitutional yearning. That’s a particularly cynical enterprise for someone who preaches fidelity to the law and Constitution as they are written.

* Responses to Robert Samuelson’s morally obscene claim that “Obama’s behavior resembles a highly indebted family’s taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It’s self-indulgent and reckless.” The best is from Ezra Klein:

And before you think this is all about Samuelson, consider that Charles Krauthammer calls coverage “candy.” There’s an absence of empathy here that borders on a clinical disorder…We are a rich, decent society, or so we say. Extending health-care coverage to those who can’t afford it would be worth it even in the absence of cost controls. Health-care insurance is not candy, and it is not an indulgence.

And that’s before you remember that Samuelson supported the Bush tax cuts, which (unlike the Affordable Care Act) perfectly fit his description of an unwise, self-indulgent splurge…

* Perhaps the GOP should have thought its anti-Census rhetoric through: Only 27% of Texas households have returned their census forms, well under the national average.

In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state’s most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent. Most other counties near the bottom of the list are heavily Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border.

Ed O’Keefe says the Census is also particularly concerned about response rates in Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

* Greece-style debt overload (including accounting malfeasance) is happening in California, New York, and elsewhere. Even President Palin’s beloved Alaska is hard hit; when the former governor unexpectedly quit her job halfway through her first term the state’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 70%, making it the most endebted state in the union. That’s just the sort of fiscal conservatism she’ll bring to the White House.

* And it’s funny sometimes how liberal American politicians suddenly figure out how bad their policies are just as soon as they leave office—but mostly it’s just terrible.

Ricky, Steve, and Karl On Superpowers

(via SF Signal)

Some Links for Tuesday

* In the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies have announced new plans to screw sick kids for money. As the Eschaton link notes, strategies to deny coverage to their captive customers are always, necessarily, a huge part of the business model for these companies. This is why they’re so hard to effectively regulate. I sincerely wish we could find the political will for single payer, if only to stop Nicholas Sarkosy’s taunts.

* Job growth in March? That’s not just good news for March, that’s good news for Democrats in November.

* How to repossess an airplane. Via MeFi. Also via MeFi:

* Cuba in the 1930s.
* Back to the Hugos and Blogging the Hugos.
* Scarface as school play. This seemed so much more endearing in Rushmore.
* Change we can believe in: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announces “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

* Will Smith to make two totally unnecessary Independence Day sequels. The title? Of course, it’s ID4-Ever. This is the monster who is ruining Foundation. He must be stopped.

* And the end of independent bookstores. Lots of factors here, of which the iPhone/Droid “barcode scanner” is just the latest. It’s terrible to watch.

Late Night Links With Very Little Context

* James Franco, will you never cease your cruel mockery of my life?

* Pawlenty already going after Romney on health care. This should be fun to watch.

* Via Yglesias, John Holbo has the only critique of bipartisanship you’ll ever need.

* Bernie Sanders doesn’t like the climate bill.

* The Walking Dead will be a series.

* Superman, New Atheist.

* Barack Obama looking at awesome things.

* And, via Tim, this perfectly reasonable report:  A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

Today’s Finest Timewaster

Taberinos.

Monday

* A Joint Terrorism Task Force raided a Christian dominionist militia group in three states last night, allegedly for threats made against Islamic organizations.

* At least 37 people are dead in a Moscow subway attack.

* ‘Obama Recess Appointments Could Help Grad Unions.’

* Burying the lede: this article is nominally about Michael Steele’s attempts to buy himself a plane with RNC money, but check out this body paragraph: Once on the ground, FEC filings suggest, Steele travels in style. A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent [update: the amount is actually $1,946.25] at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

* Reuters reports on junk food addiction.

They also bought healthy foods and devised a diet plan for three groups of rats.

One group ate a balanced healthy diet. Another group received healthy food, but had access to high-calorie food for one hour a day. Rats in the third group were fed healthy meals and given unlimited access to high-calorie foods.

The rats in the third group developed a preference for the high-calorie food, munched on it all day and quickly became obese, Kenny said.

The rats in the experiment had also been trained to expect a minor shock when exposed to a light. But when the rats that had unlimited access to high-calorie food were shown the light, they did not respond to the potential danger, Kenny said. Instead, they continued to eat their snacks.

* And today’s mandatory link: screenwriter apologizes for Battlefield Earth.

Sunday Night

* On the strength of “Plastic Bag” and “Play,” it’s clear that Futurestates is the Twilight Zone of March 2010. Looking forward to having time to watch the rest.

* Indiana Threatened By Giant Poop Bubbles. Stay safe, Hoosiers.

* The most depressing thing you’ll read tonight: A Harvard undergraduate is sick and tired of all this useless diversity. Americans of color have undoubtedly done some things of note, but their “encounters” and “experiences” are not of paramount importance to a university education. The ethnic studies movement is motivated by an attempt to direct more attention to a topic that deserves no more attention than it already gets, and probably a good deal less. Other similarly useless departments, like Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality serve similar purposes—no one would deny that Macbeth’s wife is an interesting study in the construction of femininity, but such occasional instances of relevance do not justify an entire academic field.

* Game of the night: Splitter.

* And there’s nothing that can go wrong with you that Tetris can’t cure.

Know Thyself

Saturday! 2

* You had me at “worst sci-fi/fantasy covers.”

* You might not like him when he’s angry: Obama flexes his muscles with the first recess appointments of his term. And Kevin Drum points out a nice detail:

This is pretty fascinating. Years ago, after Republicans filibustered a Carter nominee to the NLRB, the two parties made a deal: the board would have three appointees from the president’s party and two from the other party. So after he took office Obama nominated two Democrats and one Republican to fill the NLRB’s three vacant seats and got support from a couple of Republicans on the HELP committee for the entire slate. But when it got to the Senate floor John McCain put a hold on Becker, and his nomination — along with the others — died.

Fast forward today and Obama finally decides to fill the board using recess appointments. But what does he do? He only appoints the two Democrats. This is not what you do if you’re trying to make nice. It’s what you do if you’re playing hardball and you want to send a pointed message to the GOP caucus. You won’t act on my nominees? Fine. I’ll appoint my guys and then leave it up to you to round up 50 votes in the Senate for yours. Have fun.

* No wonder the intensity gap between Republicans and Democrats is starting to close.

* Rachel Maddow takes out full page ad to debunk Scott Brown’s fantasies break my heart.

* Glenn Beck tearing Fox News apart?

* “I want to know what the Vatican knew and when they knew it,” said William McMurry, who is representing alleged abuse victims in the Kentucky case. “Whether it’s letters from bishops or conversations with bishops. I want to know what [the Vatican’s doctrinal office] knew and what they instructed U.S. bishops to do. We’re trying to get what’s never been uncovered before — documents only the Vatican has. That’s the linchpin of liability.” Taibbi had an epic rant on this subject earlier today.

* What if the United States had the population density of Brooklyn, NY? For one, we’d all fit inside New Hampshire.

* Presenting the human hair additive in your food.

* And 10 great medical inventions. Below: the birthing centrifuge.

Saturday!

* As part of my mandate to see any movie having anything to do with time travel, we saw Hot Tub Time Machine last night. It’s essentially a remake of classic 1980s bromance Back to the Future in the more contemporary bromantic mode; the plot of the film hits nearly all the same beats in the same order, all the way down to “Earth Angel” to the fistfight with Biff to the obligatory happy ending. It’s by no means great cinema, but all right, I laughed.

* Krugman: For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.

* Can the effort to repeal the individual mandate in the courts even count on Antonin Scalia’s support?

Reporting from Washington – Lawsuits from 14 states challenging the constitutionality of the new national healthcare law face an uphill battle, largely due to a far-reaching Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that upheld federal restrictions on home-grown marijuana in California.

At issue in that case — just like in the upcoming challenges to the healthcare overhaul — was the reach of the federal government’s power.

Conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy joined a 6-3 ruling that said Congress could regulate marijuana that was neither bought nor sold on the market but rather grown at home legally for sick patients.

They said the Constitution gave Congress nearly unlimited power to regulate the marketplace as part of its authority “to regulate commerce.”

Even “noneconomic local activity” can come under federal regulation if it is “a necessary part of a more general regulation of interstate commerce,” Scalia wrote.

…

But this week, Obama administration lawyers pointed to Scalia’s opinion as supporting the constitutionality of broad federal regulation of health insurance, and most legal experts agreed.

I’m apparently significantly less impressed with Scalia’s intellectual honesty than “most legal experts”; I feel pretty confident he will find a reason to vote however he wants to vote. But take this for what it’s worth.

* Relatedly, Daily Kos has an interesting post today on the backlash against state attorneys general who are using their supposedly independent offices to play partisan games.

* Change we can believe in? ‘Citing “irreversible damage,” EPA nears veto of mountaintop removal permit.’ I’ll be happier once we can finally strike that nears.

* Is Obama finally ready to make some recess appointments?

* No more long nights: 24 has been canceled.

* And nobody puts Baby in a nursing home: Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Gray is 50. This makes me feel ancient.

There Are Communists in the Funhouse

Via Feministe: What to call your period in other countries.

Yesterday’s Headlines Today

Disgraced Pope to be quietly reassigned to another Vatican on the other side of the state.

Proliferation and the Digital

James Cameron produced over 100 versions of Avatar to fit every possible screen and projection configuration imaginable.

Let’s Just Go Ahead and Call This One a Good Week for Obama

BBC: US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have agreed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty after months of negotiations. Of course it’s not total disarmament, but every one of these things we can get rid of is a step in the right direction.

Douchebags of Liberty – 2

“We’re all in favor of the catastrophic care coverage and coverage for children,” [Sen. Scott] Brown told Good Morning America.

We are? Really? Gee, Scott, I wish you’d said something earlier! So much unpleasantness might have been avoided.