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A few weeks ago I blogged about whether Obamacare is entrenched, and discussed how another unpopular Medicaid Catastrophic Care entitlement was repealed.

A bit in today’s Times on how Republicans can pivot their attack now that millions have signed up for it addresses that question.

The enrollment figures may be well short of what the Obama administration had hoped for. But the fact that a significant number of Americans are now benefiting from the program is resulting in a subtle shift among Republicans.

“It’s no longer just a piece of paper that you can repeal and it goes away,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and a Tea Party favorite. “There’s something there. We have to recognize that reality. We have to deal with the people that are currently covered under Obamacare.”

And that underscores a central fact of American politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act during the Depression: Once a benefit has been bestowed, it is nearly impossible to take it away.

This is absolutely true. Any alternative to Obamacare could not scale back the entitlements already bestowed, such as bans on pre-existing condition discrimination. Also, no way we kick 26-year old pajama boy off of his parent’s plans. And a host of other benefits have to remain. So what to do from there?

The article suggests that many Republicans will be cooking up plans over the next year to offer as alternative as Obamacare continues to roll out, and perhaps, unravel.

Has anyone seen this picture before? I follow these things closely, and I don’t recall this pic. It seems that RBG is wearing a very festive, almost rainbow colored neck doily?

The Houston Chronicle has the report:

A Katy man who was allegedly playing the “knockout game” has been charged with a federal hate crime in an attack that left an elderly black man hospitalized for days.

Conrad Barrett, 27, is scheduled to appear in court today to face charges that violated the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act when he targeted a black man in an attack on Nov. 24, 2013, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Court documents say Barrett recorded himself on his cell phone making racial slurs and saying he intended perform a “knockout” attack. He allegedly said “the plan was to see if I were to hit a black person, would it be nationally televised.”

He then recorded the attack, which left the 79-year-old victim with his jaw broken in two places.

Federal officials describe the knockout game as “an assault where someone aims to knockout an unsuspecting victim with just one punch.”

“Suspected crimes of this nature will simply not be tolerated,” says Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuals from the Civil Rights Division of the FBI. “Hate crimes tear the fabric of entire communities.”

I should note that a constitutional challenge to the Hate Crimes Act is currently awaiting decision in the 5th Circuit. I blogged about this case earlier.

As an author, I would love to know how people read my book. Which parts do they like? Which parts do they skim over? Which parts are rough to understand? Which parts are so good they linger over them, and maybe reread it. Which parts do they find so engaging they will tell their friend about it. If only there was some way to capture this date. What am I talking about? Of course this data can be captured. Because data!

The Times has a report on how several companies are offering readers access to free digital books, and in exchange, they are tracking reading behaviors, with the goal of telling authors how people receive their works. The goal is to actually write better books, backed by data.

A wave of start-ups is using technology to answer these questions — and help writers give readers more of what they want. The companies get reading data from subscribers who, for a flat monthly fee, buy access to an array of titles, which they can read on a variety of devices. The idea is to do for books what Netflix did for movies and Spotify for music.

“We’re going to be pretty open about sharing this data so people can use it to publish better books,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive.

Quinn Loftis, a writer of young adult paranormal romances who lives in western Arkansas, interacts extensively with her fans on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, YouTube, Flickr and her own website. These efforts at community, most of which did not exist a decade ago, have already given the 33-year-old a six-figure annual income. But having actual data about how her books are being read would take her market research to the ultimate level.

“What writer would pass up the opportunity to peer into the reader’s mind?” she asked.

What can we learn?

The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.

At Oyster, a top book is “What Women Want,” promoted as a work that “brings you inside a woman’s head so you can learn how to blow her mind.” Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Cycles of American History” blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.

Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone.

Thomas Bruce of Cornell LII fame is working on what I think is the first LegalTech App for Google Glass. In short, it allows you to look at a law posted on a sign, and the app will find the legal citation, and pull up the text of the statute. That’s pretty cool.

Here is how Tom describes it:

We have a tool called Citationer that extracts citations from documents, and it has a Tesseract-based OCR component that we use with image-based PDFs.  Turns out that it’ll work with any image format, and Wayne had built that capacity out a bit, in the expectation that people would want to use it with document images sent from phones.  And, as it turns out, from Glass.

So Wayne and Sara and I took two days out of the office to see if we could whack something together that would let you take a picture with Glass and send it off to a server-based application that would send you back a link or links to anything cited in the image.  The result, almost entirely Wayne’s work,  was an app called “Signtater”.  It works well with documents and some signage, and it raises a lot of questions.

Very cool.

H/T Legal Informatics Blog