Suicide Bombing At Hospital In Pakistan Kills Dozens →

At least 63 people have died and scores more seriously injured after a bomb was detonated in a hospital in Balochistan province, Pakistan, Monday morning.

The bomb exploded at the gates of the Civil Hospital’s emergency department in Quetta, wounding at least 100 people, local media reported.

Many of those hurt or killed were lawyers or journalists who had gathered at the hospital after prominent lawyer Bilal Anwar Kasti was shot dead earlier on Monday morning and brought to the emergency department.

The Return of the Housing Bubble??????? →

Okay, it's not like the good old days of 2002–2007, but there are some grounds for concern in certain markets. In particular, the Case-Shiller tiered price indexes are showing extraordinary increases in the bottom tier (lowest third of house sale prices) in several markets.

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These numbers should provide serious grounds for caution. This is not a story of a bubble whose collapse will sink the economy and cause a financial crisis, but there is a real possibility that a lot of moderate-income homebuyers may get badly burned if prices turn around. The real estate pushers never care, since they make their money on the turnover, but it won't be a pretty picture for the families affected.

BMI, mortality, weight stigma, science… *sigh* →

You could have said, “Look! It’s actually WORSE to have a really low BMI than to have a somewhat high BMI! You can’t assume someone’s health status based on their weight!”

Or, “Look! This matters so much more for men than for women, and yet who gets more crap for it? Women! How unfair is that?”

Or, “Look! The range of ‘healthy weights’ isn’t where the government says it is! They say 18.5-24.9, but actually the population is better off 20-30!”

In new poll, almost half of Clinton supporters say they have no friends supporting Trump →

There have always been "multiple Americas," but it's worrisome that the various strands of U.S. culture are growing further and further apart. Even if you believe in the "wisdom of the crowds" effect to counteract polarization to some extent, that only works if fractures are moderate.

A new Pew study shows how profoundly polarizing the 2016 election has been for Americans.

The think-tank’s new poll shows that 47% of Clinton supporters and 31% of Trump supporters say they have zero close friends who support the opposing candidate. Trump supporters do seem to have a broader set of friends with opposing views, with 67% saying they have at least a few friends supporting Clinton, compared with just 53% of Clinton backers saying they know a few Trump fans. Here’s the graphic:

How Republican Efforts to Suppress the Vote Backfired Big Time →

What’s striking about this decision is that the Fifth Circuit remains a conservative court with a majority of Republican nominees. Texas’s law was so egregious it couldn’t survive even the circuit court venue most favorable to Republicans. What this indicates is that legislatures like North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin have overreached. In the wake of Crawford, states could probably have continued to get away with more subtle forms of suppression. But omnibus bills that made a mockery of Chief Justice John Roberts’s blithe assertion in Shelby County that racial discrimination in voting was no longer an issue—and that therefore Congress had lost some of its explicit constitutional authority to address it—are another story.

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But this kind of overreach could have even broader consequences. Earlier this year, Anthony Kennedy voted to strike down an abortion regulation for the first time since 1992, presumably reacting to what he perceived as overreach by the Texas legislature. It’s possible that something similar will happen with voting rights. Kennedy seems to be increasingly dubious about the direction the Republican Party has taken, notably on race. In the same week he became the swing vote to strike down Texas’s anti-abortion law, he voted to uphold the state’s university affirmative action program, the first time he had ever found an affirmative action program constitutional.

Perhaps even more importantly, last year Kennedy provided a fifth vote to hold that the Fair Housing Act allows courts to consider disparate impact on racial minorities (as opposed to being limited to intentional discrimination, which is much more difficult to prove). The case suggested that he’s likely to take a dim view of the ambitious vote suppression schemes Republican legislatures keep passing.

Black Lives Matter Coalition Makes Demands as Campaign Heats Up →

More than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have released a series of demands on Monday, including for reparations.

The list of six platform demands is aimed at furthering their goals as the presidential campaign heads into the homestretch.

The release of the six demands comes a few days before the second anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which set off months of protests and led to a national conversation about police killings of blacks.

As part of the effort, the groups are demanding, among other things, reparations for what they say are past and continuing harms to African-Americans, an end to the death penalty, legislation to acknowledge the effects of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and jobs programs.

The Fines and Fees That Keep Former Prisoners Poor →

Increasingly, jurisdictions across the country are assessing hefty court fines and fees, called legal financial obligations (LFOs), on  defendants, requiring them to pay thousands of dollars or face more jail time, according to Alexes Harris, the author of A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions for the Poor. Harris talked to one woman who was a victim of domestic violence and spent eight years in the prison system for shooting the father of her son. She’d been assessed $33,000 in LFOs, but 13 years after her conviction, despite minimum monthly payments she made, interest had brought her debt to $72,000.

Legal financial obligations “reinforce poverty, destabilize community reentry, and relegate impoverished debtors to a lifetime of punishment because their poverty leaves them unable to fulfill expectations of accountability,” Harris writes.  Many people who end up in jail are poor already, and unable to pay even the smallest sanctions. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 57 percent of men ages 27 to 42 earned less than $22,500 a year before they were locked up, suggesting that earnings after would be even lower.

Could a third-party candidate win the U.S. presidency? That’s very unlikely. →

But why must this be the debate? Surely, in some alternate universe, lesser U.S. parties could influence the election significantly. So let’s ask a different question: Do third-party candidates have a chance in 2016?

Political science says no.

Why? The answer lies in what is known among political scientists as Duverger’s Law.

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Here’s how it works. First, when each district gets only one legislative seat (known as a single-member district, which we have in the United States) and, second, when the election’s winner takes that seat, then the system tends to have two dominant parties.

In such a system, all a party needs to win is more votes than the other side. That winner-takes-all nature of single-member districts encourages broad coalitions to form before elections. The odds of a party winning such elections are much higher if only two parties exist, enabling each side to work to bring as many people to its side as possible.

In the United States, that’s writ large in presidential races, because the Electoral College is itself a winner-take-all system: Within each state, the candidate who wins more votes takes all that state’s electoral votes. Even in Nebraska and Maine, where electoral votes are allocated by congressional districts, each individual district is winner-take-all.

So what’s the alternative? In many countries, each district gets many seats, and they are allocated in a way that proportionally matches the votes each party receives. In those systems, there will be many parties. That’s because a party has a much lower threshold for gaining a voice in government.