On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in more than a dozen states in the case of Loving v. Virginia. Today, the highest court in the United States may soon take on the issue of marriage equality for gay and lesbian relationships. Attorneys David Boies and Theodore B. Olson are hoping the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger will further establish marriage as a fundamental right of citizenship. Also featured are John Podesta, President of the Center for American Progress, Cato Institute Chairman Robert A. Levy and Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz.

Watch the full event from which many clips were pulled here and Robert A. Levy’s presentation here.

Last week First Lady Michelle Obama and the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled “Choose​My​Plate​.gov,” an updating of the federal government’s ongoing efforts to lecture us on how to eat. While the idea of nutrition recommendations from Washington, D.C. isn’t itself new, the past couple of years have seen a lurch toward a more coercive approach, especially under the Obama administration, under pressure from a burgeoning “food policy” movement, as I explain in a new Daily Caller op-ed:

All sorts of nannyish and coercive ideas are emerging from that [movement] nowadays: proposals at the FDA to limit salt content in processed foods; mandatory calorie labeling, which poses a significant burden on many smaller food vendors and restaurants; new mandates on food served in local schools; advertising bans; and on a local level efforts to ban things like Happy Meals at McDonald’s. No wonder many parents, local officials and skeptics in Congress are beginning to say: Back off, guv. It’s my plate.

The fact is that the federal government’s dietary advice has changed often through the years—the Washington Post had a great feature on past federal dietary guidelines, under which sweets and even butter held their place as food groups—and that government’s recommendations have regularly proved wrong and even damaging, a point that Steve Malanga elaborates on in this City Journal piece (“Following the government’s nutritional advice can make you fat and sick.”)

Yesterday, C‑SPAN’s Washington Journal had me on opposite Maya Rockeymoore of the group Leadership for Healthy Communities to discuss issues that ranged from the school lunch program to whether Washington should serve as an “arbiter” of contending dietary claims, an idea I didn’t much care for. You can watch here.

From today’s health care news:

• Paul Krugman gets Medicare vouchers all wrong, but at least he begins with the premise that Medicare is a lousy program.
• The invaluable web site Health​News​Re​view​.org dings the World Health Organization for announcing that cell phones may cause cancer without simultaneously releasing the evidence on which they base that conclusion.
• Ryan Lizza thinks RomneyCare’s health insurance Exchange is a “deregulated online marketplace.”

At the Britannica Blog I note Sarah Palin’s misstatement about President Obama’s record on the national debt, and then ask whether that’s the real problem:

Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have both said in recent days that, as Palin put it, ”Look at the debt that has been accumulated in the last two years. It’s more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.” And they’ve both been rapped by journalistic fact-checkers.…

So what’s the real problem here? Is it Bachmann’s and Palin’s exaggeration of Obama’s record on deficits and debt? Or is it President Obama’s unsustainable spending?

That’s the title of my latest Kaiser Health News column. Excerpts:

Obamacare’s number-one idea for improving health care quality and reducing costs is to promote something called “accountable care organizations” in Medicare. That effort is sinking like a stone, because it – like the rest of this sweeping law – is premised on the fatal conceit that government experts can direct the market better than millions of consumers making their own decisions…

The only way to improve quality while reducing costs is to give patients the incentive and the power to say “no” to inefficient providers. The Medicare reforms that passed the House don’t go as far as they should, but they are a good start.

For one thing, they would do a better job of promoting [accountable care organizations]. The House reforms build on Medicare Advantage, which already gives one fifth of Medicare enrollees the freedom to choose their own health plan. Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson says the new law’s ACO program “is not as good as” Medicare Advantage when it comes to promoting accountable care.

And he should know something about that.

Based on this morning’s numbers, I’ve updated my chart showing what the Obama Administration said would happen with the so-called stimulus compared to what actually has happened. As you can see, the unemployment rate is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the White House claimed it would be at this point.

Since I just did an I‑told-you-so post about Greece, I may as well pat myself on the back again (albeit for another completely obvious prediction). Here’s the video I narrated a couple of years ago on the Obama faux stimulus.

Some tidbits from the health care policy world:

• Philip Klein is perhaps too kind to the Obama administration’s latest defense of ObamaCare in “Obama solicitor general: If you don’t like mandate, earn less money.”
• The Obama administration launches a hospital payment reform effort that, rather than promote high-quality, low-cost medical care, will demonstrate once again why Medicare is incapable of such.
• The physicians lobby, having thrown its support behind ObamaCare with the expectation that Congress would jack up Medicare’s physician price controls, is still begging Congress to do so.
• The Obama administration launches a lame effort to reduce medical errors in Medicaid, decades after markets devised far more powerful deterrents.