So Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently said this in an interview with Emily Bazelon:

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Ginsburg is saying that her perception of the situation in 1980 is that there was a lot of concern on the right about Bell Curve-style dysgenics and that, therefore, insofar as folks were willing to tolerate legal abortion at all they would welcome Medicaid-funded abortions for poor people. But she was wrong. Jonah Goldberg decides, however, to read this as Ginsburg making the case for eugenics and then writes an LA Times column denouncing her and wondering if fellow liberal fascist Sonia Sotomayor is also hatching a eugenicist plot.

Now this all comes to me via Isaac Chotiner who remarks:

This leads to a more interesting topic. I had a drink with a conservative writer in Washington a while back who rolled his eyes at the mention of Goldberg’s book. My drinking buddy stated that he and many other conservatives believed ‘Liberal Fascism’ was rather amusing and ridiculous. I was heartened–behind Goldberg’s back, after all, even staunch right-wingers thought his thesis was a joke. But then it occured to me that the joke might be on the rest of us. Goldberg is a rather clever guy, and so I chalk up his decision to write ‘Liberal Fascism’ to purely financial motives. This column is just more evidence for my thesis. Again, Goldberg is not stupid; what are the odds that he happened to (grossly) misread a column in a manner that perfectly fits with the argument of his book? Hell, maybe he will even sell a few more copies today. Throwing away one’s credibility might be short-sighted or sad, but who says it is not profitable?

I think this is dead wrong. Goldberg is stupid.

My understanding from my own off-the-record chats with conservative writers is that Liberal Fascism was published for pecuniary reasons. Goldberg’s editor, in other words, understood that this was the sort of red meat the rubes would eat up. But the gossip I’ve heard has it that he was then taken aback to discover that Goldberg didn’t see the project that way. He’s sufficiently vainglorious, out of touch, and egomaniacal that he really does think of the book as a “very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” and genuinely takes offense at the fact that people are grappling with his scholarship.

Recall his indignant huff that his book “isn’t like any Ann Coulter book.” It is! And just like some of Coulter’s work, it’s sold a lot of copies. But he really sees himself as embarked upon a more ambitious project than that of base-whipping provocateur.

The House of Representatives is now prepared to unveil their health reform legislation with markup taking place tomorrow and Thursday. It’s a good bill (more on that later) but it’s worth also giving a tip of the cap in the direction of the House process. The chairs and members of the three relevant committees did a great mitzvah by putting egos aside, forming a unified “tri-committee” bill writing process, largely shutting up about their internal negotiations, and getting down to the job of writing a bill that fits the parameters Americans voted for in November. I appreciate that the Senate has its own idiotic self-imposed supermajority requirement to deal with, but it would be nice to see the same discipline and seriousness of purpose from Senators at the committee stage.

So what’s in the bill?

Well, there’s a fairly strong public plan. It needs to be financially self-supporting and nobody will be forced to accept its reimbursement rates, but it will be open to anyone with access to the Health Insurance Exchange will model its payments on Medicare and they say the default assumption will be that anyone who serves Medicare clients will also take Public Plan clients.

Speaking of which, there’s a Health Insurance Exchange which will be national in scope, though states will be able to opt-out if they can meet some state guidelines. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It’s basically designed for employees of very small businesses, but there’s the possibility of larger businesses entering the exchange via mutual agreement between the employer in question and the Commissioner governing the exchange. Clearly how that cashes out will have a lot to do with how the discretionary authority is used.

Minimum benefits are defined in a slightly circular way as equivalent to the prevailing employer-based coverage in the area.

About half the cost is paid for via entitlement savings—$500 billion over ten years will be saved from Medicare and Medicaid. The other half is paid for via a surtax on rich people. The bill prudently calls for the level of the tax to be adjusted depending on whether or not the bill actually costs what it’s projected to cost.

The CBO sees a net cost of $1 trillion to the non-revenue portions of the bill. The intention is to have the revenue portions cover the cost of the non-revenue portions, but we’ll have to wait and see for that part of the analysis to get done.

Via Dana Goldstein, Ariel Boone earns a link by doing the work to put this chart together illustrating the earnings gap between men and women in the Obama White House. Total employment is split almost 50-50 between men and women, but the women are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-level positions:

This is pretty much the same pattern you see everywhere, so not incredibly shocking. On the other hand, partisan politics has a distinct gender skew; about half of people are women, but well more than half of Democrats are women and in general women have more progressive views than men. Failing to locate talented women and promote them to positions of office and authority leaves progressives drawing from a relatively small talent pool given that numerically our “side” is preponderantly female.

Mark Blumenthal has a useful piece up at National Journal separating fact from fiction with regard to Barack Obama’s poll numbers:

The bottom line is that Obama remains quite popular, but his popularity is shrinking and as best one can tell the culprit is the bad economy. I think this underscores the fact that if Democratic legislative leaders are serious about reforming health care they’ll want to get as much as possible of the work done before leaving on their August recess. The unemployment rate is almost certain to be higher in four or five months than it is today and that’s very likely to weaken Obama’s ability to be an effective advocate. Conversely, the smart Republican play is to keep trying to convince Max Baucus that they’re one more week of work away from a bipartisan bill and then keep yanking the football away.

If there’s an “Obama plan” on the table in August, a lot of Republican members will be hearing mostly good things about it from their constituents. If it takes until October, they may hear different things.

Guggenheim Museum (cc photo by Ernst Moeksis)

Michael O’Hare thinks there should be more of a singles scene at museums:

In fact, I wonder that museums haven’t become a favored place for educated young people to meet strangers : you’re assured that anyone there is enough like you to be worth at least some schmoose, it’s safe, and all the stuff in the previous paragraph. As a former museologist, I always watch the visitors as much as the displays and I see surprisingly little of this. I bet the typical single museum visitor in his or her twenties would be more amenable to chatting with a stranger than the strangers seem to fear: try it! If you go alone to a bar and come up empty, you’ve wasted the evening and hurt your liver. If you go alone to a museum and don’t meet anyone, you still meet Vermeer or a real gigantotherium. The principle is analogous to Edith Stokey’s recipe for how to never ever wait in line: carry a book!

I think there are two practical hurdles here. One is that a relatively large proportion of people in your average museum are visiting from out of town. The other is that it’s simply a coordination issue—because this sort of thing isn’t normally done, people looking to meet people aren’t necessarily out at the museum, and advances would be “weird” relative to them being made in another context.

But consider this issue raised by Julian Sanchez:

We’re at most a few years off from broad adoption of augmented reality applications in widely-used smartphones, which will have all of us radiating reams of data to anyone in our physical proximity who actually cares. Your Facebook profile will dog you like one of those floating Sims icons. You won’t just know what the girl sitting across the coffee shop is blasting on her iPod, you’ll be able to listen in. All the tech is actually here already, if not in quite the fancy form it’s implemented at the link above. All it would take is for someone to integrate the location-sensitive functions of an app like Loopt into the apps for Facebook or Last.fm, and you’ve got a point-and-profile system. The real question is whether people actually want to signal that much in the physical context. Some of us are chary of giving every stranger in ping-shot a pretext for striking up a conversation.

Of course the answer to Julian’s worry here would presumably be that you could use some kind of setting to signal implicitly or explicitly that you’re not interested in strangers talking to you. And the same feature could transform the dating scene; people not interested in amorous advances could broadcast this fact to the audiences, while those who are interested could also broadcast that. This, in turn, could change the dynamics at places like museums that aren’t customary places to meet people.

And of course it could have a really transformative impact on infidelity and ways to snoop around and see if your partner is cheating on you.