Nov
5
2025

We Demand Better Sob Stories

Obese woman testifying in favor of expansion of food stamp program.

Hans Bader uses the above image to illustrate what should be good news: America finally stops getting fatter. And his caption, duplicated above, may strike some as—ouch!— uncharitable. But it's accurate. Google Lens tracks down the original, as publicized by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Many comments on Senator Amy's tweet are similarly, um, insensitive.

Amy seems to have a knack for "sob stories" that feature people who, sorry, just aren't that sympathetic Just a couple weeks ago. she drew attention to a couple who were saddened by those "skyrocketing" Obamacare premiums; as it turned out, they were early retirees living on a six-figure yearly pension.

It's probably mean of me, but from here on out, when politicians attempt to pluck our heartstrings by highlighting the dire straits of ostensibly sympathetic recipients of government subsidies, I want those stories to be accompanied by an independently-audited review of those recipients' financial situations and spending patterns. Maybe an inventory of their refrigerators, kitchen shelves, and medicine cabinets too. As a mostly-libertarian, I don't begrudge these folks' lifestyle choices, but I'd maybe like to not finance them.

But back to Hans Bader's article, it's actually pretty good news:

America is one of the ten fattest countries in the world, but it has stopped getting fatter, due to weight loss drugs.

“Gallup polling finds that self-reported obesity in the US has been falling since 2022, an encouraging finding that is broadly consistent with CDC data showing a small recent dip in measured obesity rates,” notes The Doomslayer.

If you follow that first link, by the way, it turns out we're barely in the top 10, and only when you look at men. Throw in women, and we're down at #19.

And, whoa, they are really porky in American Samoa! Felecia would fit right in.

Also of note:

  • "Immunity Syndrome" would be a pretty good Star Trek episode title. Oh, wait, it was.

    But it's also the headline on Kevin D. Williamson's latest observations (archive.today link) on President Donald J. Trump.

    More or less open corruption in the White House. Pardons for sale. Wanton murder on the high seas. Using the Justice Department as a political hit squad.

    Chief Justice John Roberts’ creation, ex nihilo, of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution looks dumber every day.

    The 2024 immunity case, Trump v. United States, was an attempt to deal with a tricky bit of constitutional engineering: We have a separation of powers among the branches, so that none is subordinate to the others in the performance of its constitutional role. That implies that certain laws passed by Congress directed at the president could be unconstitutional. For example, if Congress passed a law making it a crime for the president to pardon a member of his Cabinet, the president would be able to go to court and have an indictment on the charge thrown out because the law would be plainly unconstitutional: The Constitution gives the president wide pardon powers and does not empower Congress to restrict them. The president would be “immune” from prosecution under that law only in the sense that any other American is immune from prosecution under an unconstitutional law.

    KDW is not a fan. And he's not wrong.

  • And worse… Trump has seemingly lit a fire under Democrat voters across the country to turn out in an off-year election. Let's check out what Jeff Maurer has to say: My Hot Election Take Is That We Probably Didn’t Learn Much.

    The most click-worthy headline I could publish right now is probably “NEW YORK SUCCUMBS TO MARXISM!!!” Of course, since there are more Beltway Dweebs in my audience than there are sex criminals at a Roblox tournament, “SPANBERGER, SHERRILL PROVE BENEFITS OF MODERATION” probably would have done well, too. Frankly, any version of “EVENTS VALIDATE YOUR PREFERRED NARRATIVE” would work, because that’s what most modern political commentary is: Shading reality to fit your audience’s worldview so that they subscribe. Which reminds me…

    [Jeff's "subscribe" button elided]

    Commentators of all stripes have an incentive to pretend that election night was a game-changer. Socialists and Trumpists will agree that Mamdani’s win means that the Marxist revolution has arrived, the former so that they can have a parade and the latter so that they can use that parade as a pretext to nullify the Bill of Rights. Moderates will point out that Spanberger and Sherrill won while running campaigns that were moderate, practical, sensible, shrewd, and other words that mean “designed to convince suburbanites that their administration won’t be some goddamned woke freak show.” Cable news will lead with “HUGE NEWS TONIGHT” because it’s bad TV to start a broadcast with “Kind of a boring day today — I’d watch a Malcolm in the Middle rerun if I were you.” As for political scientists, these results will lead to new iterations of the single most common political science paper, which is one that should be called: “Please Don’t Cancel My Funding! I Have a Family and No Other Skills, I Promise to Publish Splashy (And Probably P-Hacked) Results That Might Get Traction on Twitter, Oh God Please Don’t Cut Me off I Don’t Want to Work at the Amazon Store: A Meta-Analysis of the 2025 Elections.”

    Here's my "preferred narrative", Jeff: We'd be in a lot better shape if my fellow GOP primary voters had gone for Nikki Haley last year instead.

  • I'd like to hear what my friends at Reason have to say. But for now, we'll go with Bob Zubrin at National Review, who is not a fan of Trump’s Bizarre Pick for Surgeon General: Casey Means and Psychedelic Therapy. (archive.today link)

    President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, will soon appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings. The nomination, first made on May 7, has come under some question. While Means graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine, she later dropped out of her residency program. However, the reasons senators should be skeptical of this nomination are more substantial.

    A friend of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has recommended her to Trump as a “fantastic” candidate, Means is an advocate and practitioner of the use of illegal psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and ecstasy, for medical purposes. Her brother, Calley Means, is a Trump administration health adviser and investor in biopharmaceutical start-up companies. In 2024, the two co-wrote a book titled Good Energy, making the case for “psychedelic therapy.”

    According to the Means, in the book, “Strong scientific evidence suggests that this psychedelic therapy can be one of the most meaningful experiences of life for some people, as they have been for me.” Referring to her use of psychedelics as “plant medicine,” Means says she took magic mushrooms in 2021, after she was inspired by “an internal voice that whispered: it’s time to prepare.” Soon, she says, “I felt myself as part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls of millions of mothers and babies before me from the beginning of life. . . . Psilocybin can be a doorway to a different reality that is free from the limiting beliefs of my ego, feelings, and personal history.”

    I'm not quite as anti-psychedelic as Bob, but the "internal voice" and the "infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls" might be kind of a deal-breaker for me. (Casey, how did you know that series was actually infinite?) Still, I'll keep my eye open for what Reason has to say. Jacob Sullum, are you listening?

  • In a hole, he kept digging. Also at National Review, Rich Lowry is aghast: Tucker Carlson Outdoes Himself. (archive.today link)

    Nick Fuentes hit the jackpot.

    The white-nationalist influencer made it on the Tucker Carlson Show, the nation’s foremost vehicle for laundering noxious ideas into the conservative mainstream.

    Fuentes is a Holocaust denier and self-avowed racist whose goal is to remake the right in his image.

    Carlson, who prides himself on asking the supposedly telling questions when it comes to promoting any number of conspiracy theories, couldn’t really bring himself to ask any of Fuentes. Instead, he gave the 27-year-old Nazi sympathizer a tongue bath and said at one point of the Fuentes ideological project, “I guess you won.”

    It was bad enough when Carlson was shaking his pom-poms for Putin. What's next? "You know, the Khmer Rouge really didn't deserve their bad press back in the Seventies."

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Last Modified 2025-11-05 3:59 PM EST