Anti-vaxxers take aim at Mississippi

Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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Important contraception case hearing today

The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a very important case involving Obamacare, religion, and contraception. This case does not challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare itself, although the religious groups bringing the suit and its conservative backers had hoped it would. After the Supreme Court twice ruled earlier upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, it turned down efforts to turn this into a third attempt.
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The “Rule of Three”

In watching Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next that I reviewed here, I was struck by a segment that he had on the role of women in Iceland. In 1980, that became the first country to democratically elect a woman as president of a republic (though not the first country to elect a woman as an executive head of state which happened in Sri Lanka when it elected a female prime minister twenty years earlier) and she went on to serve four consecutive terms. Every major political party in Iceland now requires a minimum of 40% of women members.
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Reactions to the Supreme Court nominee

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court. Garland seems to be a well-respected jurist, by all accounts not particularly ideological in any clearly identifiable way but instead someone who will bring a proper degree of thoughtfulness to the weighty matters the court deals with.
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Candidate favorability by gender

Jon Schwarz discusses the differences between how men and women view the remaining candidates. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz all have net unfavorability ratings among both men and women. There seems to be no gender difference with Cruz in that men and women dislike him equally but women dislike Trump a lot more than men do, while men dislike Clinton a lot more than women do.
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Why does the establishment hate Trump so much?

Another day, another plan to stop Donald Trump is reported in the news, along with criticisms of such moves. I have stopped paying much attention to these reports as they have become so numerous as Trump continues to inexorably increase his lead among delegates for the nomination. This is mainly because these plots never address the crucial end-game: If they do manage to stop Trump, then who becomes the nominee and how do they prevent Trump’s supporters from revolting at what would essentially be a coup by party insiders against them?
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John Kasich is no moderate

Schadenfruede is not generally an honorable emotion. It seems wrong to rejoice in the tears of others. But in some cases, the guilt is removed and one can rejoice openly and gleefully and one of the pleasures of the Republican primary race is seeing the hopes and ambitions of one awful candidate after another being dashed. The pleasure would be even sweeter if the remaining candidates were not as bad or even worse.
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Good riddance to the Republican’s Obama

There was always something phony about Marco Rubio. He had the ingratiating smile of a person who tried hard to make you like him and yet that very effort on his part was what turned you off, like the person who keeps wanting to be friends with you and yet the more he or she tries, the less you want to. He also had some of the most extreme positions on issues and a steely-eyed certainty in his own rightness and the support of god for them even when they were utterly abhorrent. I am truly glad to see him get the boot.
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