Category Archives: Short Notes

A weekly feature that collects interesting links and adds a paragraph or two of content.

Supreme Panic and other short notes

April 2, 2012 – 8:08 am

Should ObamaCare supporters panic? That was the big debate on the legal blogs after the Supreme Court’s five conservative judges asked a bunch of skeptical questions during oral arguments. Jeffrey Toobin says panic, Steve Kornacki says not to.

So far I’m siding with Kornacki. For years legal specialists have been writing that you can’t predict how judges will vote by listening to their questions, so I’m surprised so many of them think they can this time.

Asssuming that the pessimists are right, though, the Court could be headed for a Brown v Board of Education-scale ruling: If they limit the Commerce Clause, all kinds of previous rulings (including ones written by the five conservative judges) come up for review. If they decide that the Medicaid expansion is an illegal coercion of the states by the federal government, the whole federal/state relationship changes.

Two points are worth making here: First, a partisan Supreme Court is a dubious asset politically, and striking down ObamaCare would seal the impression that this Court is Republican. If ObamaCare is struck down, we’re back to worrying about the 50 million uninsured, and Republicans continue to have no plan for covering them.

Second, this is another reminder that institutions are neither good nor bad, liberal or conservative, they’re just institutional. For decades, liberals relied on the Supreme Court to limit the damage done by conservative state legislatures, and many of us got it into our heads that a powerful Supreme Court was good. On the flip side, many of us have it in our heads that global institutions like the WTO are bad because they are dominated by corporate interests. Well, maybe the WTO is also just an institution. We need to figure out how to make it work for us rather than against us, the way conservatives have done with the Court.

While we’re talking about the Court and ObamaCare, a number of liberals are making their usual mistake when they answer what has become known as the Broccoli Argument: If Congress can make us buy health insurance, can it make us buy broccoli?

There are literal legal answers to this question – BTW, the literal answer is “no” – involving the limitations of the Commerce Clause, but they miss the point. Don’t make them unless you’re trying to convince a lawyer. Politically, Akhil Reed Amar has the better answer:

The broccoli argument is like something they said when we were debating the income tax: If they can tax me, they can tax me at 100 percent! And yes, they can. But they won’t. Because you could vote them out of office. They have the power to do all sorts of ridiculous things that they won’t do because you’d vote them out of office.

I think that’s called “democracy”.

About that Santorum “bullshit” incident. I don’t really care what words the guy uses, but imagine the outcry if Obama lost his composure like that. Think of all the lies that have been told about Obama – about his citizenship, his religion, his loyalty to the United States, and a hundred other issues that Rick Santorum never has to worry about. And yet he never snaps.

While we’re on that theme: Imagine the outcry if it’s 2007 and Nancy Pelosi says the Bush generals are lying about what they need. But Paul Ryan apologizes and its all OK now.

In an April Fools’ Day op-ed, David Javerbaum introduces the “quantum theory of Mitt Romney“.

Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance

But Mitt is the first “quantum candidate”, and is governed by different rules.

In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative … The act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

There’s more.

Salon’s Michael Lind explains how the rich took over airport security, getting their own faster lines. He then makes this modest proposal:

Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way.

David Wong of Cracked.com follows up his viral 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying with an almost equally worthy 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women.

It amazes me how misunderstood hate crime laws are, even by people who ought to know better — like NYT editor Bill Keller:

In most cases, hate crime laws take offenses that would carry more modest sentences — assault, vandalism — and ratchet up the penalty two or three times because we know, or think we know, what evil disposition lurked in the offender’s mind. Then we pat ourselves on the back. As if none of us, pure and righteous citizens, ever entertained a racist thought or laughed at a homophobic slur.

Bill: It doesn’t take a genius to understand that painting “Bob loves Mary” on an underpass is a less serious crime than painting swastikas on a Jewish elementary school.

One additional point I left out of my summary of Glenn Greenwald’s With Liberty and Justice for Some: With all the discussion of ways to cut government spending, how come nobody ever proposes that we stop locking up non-violent criminals for long prison terms? Other countries don’t, and it seems to work for them.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes

March 26, 2012 – 1:00 pm

Buried deep in an insight-filled exchange between Grist‘s David Roberts and The Roost‘s Wen Stephenson about media coverage of climate change is this brilliant analogy:

It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit.

Both are long-term threats whose short-term symptoms don’t seem that serious. But they’re covered very differently.

Mainstream journalists routinely tell us that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit will lead to disaster. They don’t worry about sounding like activists or alarmists. When a newsmaker warns about the consequences of the deficit, journalists don’t hunt up some fringe economist to give an opposing view. Further, journalists will bring the deficit into a story even when the sources don’t. If a politician is proposing something related to taxing or spending, a common question is “What would that do to the deficit?”

None of that happens when mainstream journalists cover climate change. Roberts sums up:

the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.

Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy

When action on climate change is blocked, it’s typically reported as a defeat for “environmentalists” — a special interest group. But when action to cut the deficit fails, it’s a blow to our grandchildren.

Roberts’ analogy provides a very simple way to explain what we should be demanding from the media: Cover climate change the way you cover the deficit. It’s not impossible or impractical or a violation of journalistic ethics. They’re already doing it on a different issue.

Today’s wishful thinking: Maybe outright lying by politicians will become less acceptable. I’m not talking about the lies everybody tells about their inner process (like “I don’t pay attention to the polls”), I mean checkable black-is-white lies about history and the state of the world. Maybe the media will start calling attention to these lies and make them counterproductive.

This pollyanna-ish thought is motivated by NPR’s new journalistic ethics handbook, which emphasizes truth over balance.

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen sees this as a rejection of he-said/she-said coverage, where opposing true and false statements are presented without comment.

AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe thinks she has found an example of the new policy: On February 27, NPR ran a Mitt Romney quote and then corrected the part of it that was false. Maybe that practice will catch on with other journalists.

Correcting lies is a good first step. Ultimately, I’d like to hear journalists objectively report “That guy just lied to us” as Rachel Maddow does here:

The Romney Etch-a-Sketch gaffe just underlines what I wrote about him last week:

his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Lauren Zuniga’s poem for the Oklahoma legislators is painful to listen to, but that’s what’s so good about it.

Oklahoma is one of many states passing laws whose main purpose seems to be to humiliate and cause anguish to women who want an abortion. Zuniga strips away all the facades and reacts to the spiteful intention behind the law.

While we’re talking about transvaginal ultrasounds, have you ever wondered how doctors feel about the state using them as tools of humiliation against their patients? This one doesn’t like it, and even thinks some civil disobedience is in order:

When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Zuninga’s poem is an example of the Left getting more aggressive on social issues, a trend I hope catches on. For the longest time we’ve been passive. Unless “family values” types took crystal meth with gay prostitutes, we’ve mostly not challenged their claims to be well-intentioned moral people, motivated by conscience and authentic religious conviction.

It’s time for that to stop. That’s why Fred Clark’s recent article The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal is so important: He points out the suspicious timing of the evangelical revelation that a newly-fertilized ovum has a soul.

They haven’t always believed that. They started believing it after Roe v Wade, and it became undebatable in evangelical circles after abortion became the center of a right-wing political movement.

In other words, this isn’t a political view motivated by theological conviction. The theology was invented to support a political movement already in progress.

Two weeks ago (in the weekly challenge) I proposed that the Left go on offense on women’s issues by pushing the Equal Rights Amendment again. I wasn’t the only one to think of that.

The American public has basically the same view on abortions that it has on guns: There are too many of them, but if my family ever decides that we need one, I don’t want the government telling us we can’t have it.

So whether the public is pro or anti depends on how the question is phrased. This poll bears that out on abortion: In every religious group, large numbers of people who disapprove of abortion still want it to be available.

abortion poll

If you’re not watching Cara Santa Maria’s videos on Huffington Post, you’re not just missing good coverage of science and society, you’re missing a hot chick with glasses whose tag line is “Talk nerdy to me.” I mean, I like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but …

Here she tells us about a new state law to return Tennessee to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you’ve ever wondered about those “Proof Jesus Never Existed” ads that show up in the back of magazines or pop up on the internet, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler: He concludes Jesus existed.

I don’t expect President Obama to raise the Romney dog-on-the-roof issue explicitly. I just think we’ll see a lot of pictures like this:

If a prospective employer asks you to give them your Facebook password, what other morally dubious demands will they make?

And why would an employer trust applicants who are willing to violate FaceBook’s rules and compromise their friends’ privacy like that?

A week ago Friday, the Daily Show had one of its best episodes ever. The opening monologue was funny as usual, but the next two segments were John Oliver’s amazing take-down of our defunding of UNESCO. It culminates with Oliver in Africa (really — not via green-screen) explaining to cute African children why Israel-Palestine politics means they can’t have an education.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Jim Crow Returns

March 19, 2012 – 12:13 pm

A fascinating new analysis technique has added weight to the claim that voter-ID laws are functioning as “Jim Crow 2.0“.

In state after state, the Republican governors elected in 2010 have been pushing voter-ID laws that follow the ALEC template. The Brennan Center for Justice has been on this issue for a long time, pointing out how these laws erect unfair barriers to voting by the young, the old, minorities, and many women (particularly those recently married or divorced, who might not have ID in their current names) — all constituencies that tend to vote Democratic.

Ostensibly, these laws are intended to prevent the voter fraud that allegedly alters elections through the high-risk/low-reward process pictured below:

Lately, judges and the Justice Department have been agreeing with the Brennan Center that disenfranchising marginal voters is not just an unfortunate side-effect, but is the true intention behind these laws.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks had been virtually disenfranchised in many southern states. The Act dismantled the Jim Crow laws that enforced that disenfranchisement, and gave the Justice Department veto-power over any new laws in Jim Crow states that would affect the voting rights of minorities (rather than letting the laws take effect and requiring disenfranchised voters to sue). The Justice Department has used that power to invalidate voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.

The Texas law is particularly egregious. ColorLines reports:

Texas has no driver’s license offices in almost a third of the state’s counties. Meanwhile, close to 15 percent of Hispanic Texans living in counties without driver’s license offices don’t have ID. A little less than a quarter of driver’s license offices have extended hours, which would make it tough for many working voters to find a place and time to acquire the IDs.

Now Texas has struck back: Its lawsuit claims the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, because southern states aren’t being treated the same as northern states. The Supreme Court is probably going to have to decide this.

When they do, I hope they take a hard look at the work of LeoT on Daily Kos. LeoT examines the historical frequency-of-use of terms like election fraud, vote fraud, and voter fraud. (Don’t you just love the Google tools that make this possible?)

All the terms have similar usage patterns except voter fraud. The term was virtually unknown until around 1960, then mysteriously in 1965 its usage began a steady increase, uncorrelated with the other election-fraud terms, until now it gets more usage that vote fraud.

LeoT interprets:

“voter fraud” … increased in usage 15,000% (150x) between 1965 and 2008, while “election fraud” increased 250% (2.5x) in the same period. Apparently, “voter fraud” didn’t matter until you weren’t allowed to disenfranchise minority voters.

Conclusion: The voter fraud issue has been manufactured to justify Jim Crow 2.0.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Walking Back Mr. Daisey and other short notes

March 19, 2012 – 12:07 pm

As part of a longer article on manufacturing a couple months ago, I linked to This American Life’s episode on Mike Daisey, whose one-man show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steven Jobs” told about worker abuse at the FoxConn plants in China that make iPhones and iPads.

Well, This America Life just retracted that episode. They did an entire new episode explaining what’s wrong with the old one.

Retractions are always tricky, because a listener’s reflex reaction is to forget the whole thing. Never mind. It wasn’t true. That’s not really appropriate here, because (as Ira Glass says in the new episode):

We did factcheck the story before we put it on the radio. But in factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about Apple and about its supplier Foxconn, which makes this stuff, were true. That stuff is true. It’s been corroborated by independent investigations by other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself in its own audit reports.

But what’s not true is what Mike said about his own trip to China.

In other words, Mike Daisey fictionalized the story by putting himself in the middle of it.

As best as we can tell, Mike’s monologue in reality is a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed first hand. He pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads.

And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.

So the facts you think you know about how iPhones are made — those are true. What’s false is the emotional heft of the story, the stuff that made you pay attention and take it seriously.

In Daisey’s defense, he got into this position in small steps. Fictionalization is a perfectly acceptable technique of theater, which is his monologue’s intended medium. If you understood that the actor Mike Daisey was playing a character “Mike Daisey” who dramatized what the author Mike Daisey had learned in his research — then you weren’t fooled at all.

Where Daisey went wrong was that he stayed in character when interviewed by This American Life, and let himself be presented to TAL’s audience as if he also were a journalist, and as if his story met TAL’s usual journalistic standards.

To their credit, TAL went the extra mile to correct all that. If only all journalists would do the same.

I always have a tough time deciding whether to call your attention to the crazy proposals in state legislatures. The 50 states have hundreds of legislators apiece, so there’s always some lunatic thing on the docket somewhere. Most of them amount to nothing, but you could be pointlessly outraged by them 24/7 if you wanted.

Right now, for example, bills under consideration in Arizona and Kansas would protect a doctor who intentionally lies to a pregnant woman about birth defects in her fetus. Why would a doctor do that? To prevent an abortion, of course.

So the misled woman (and possibly her husband) ends up on the hook to care for the child into the indefinite future, possibly at the cost of millions of dollars. She may or may not find this to be a rewarding life, but whatever else she had hoped to do in this incarnation is over now.

Under current law, she might get some help by suing the doctor who lied to her. But not if this bill passes.

Why do these proposals deserve your attention? Because a similar law is already on the books in Oklahoma (where I assume loco-weed sprouts through every crack in the sidewalk). That fact elevates it above the everyday-insanity level.

Watch this and explain to me why Pat Robertson is known as a family-values guy.

If your conservative relatives are telling you that ObamaCare’s cost estimate has doubled since Congress passed the ACA, they’re repeating what Fox News is telling them. Jonathan Cohn explains how they’re being misled.

Another baseless rumor that is circulating in those multiply-forwarded conservative emails: Muslims are exempt from the ACA’s insurance mandate. Nope.

So the money supply is way up and inflation is no big deal. How long does that have to stay true before Stockholm revokes Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize?

A Goldman Sachs exec blew the whistle on his way out the door. Greg Smith wrote an op-ed: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs in Wednesday’s NYT. His point: Goldman has lost its moral compass, and is now exploiting its clients rather than trying to make money for them.

Several people have pointed out that me-and-the-client-against-the-world wasn’t much of a moral compass to begin with. Dan Denzer parodied:

When I joined the Sith, the mission was all about bringing peace and order to the galaxy.

Robert Reich argues that loss of moral fiber isn’t why investment-bank behavior changed. It changed because government stopped looking over bankers’ shoulders.

While we’re on Robert Reich’s blog, his post on public vs. private morality nails something important.

Republicans have morality upside down. … America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.

There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.

Rick Santorum’s statements about euthanasia in the Netherlands were way off. But when a Dutch journalist raised the issue with a campaign spokesman, he got no contrition whatsoever, just a repeated statement that Santorum is “a strong pro-life person”. Steve Benen sums up on MaddowBlog:

Santorum being ” a strong pro-life person” apparently gives him license to make up nonsense about the Netherlands.

Even though I’m an avid Kindle-user, I have fond memories of physical encyclopedias, from the World Book my parents bought when I was in second grade to the Britannica that was the first big purchase my wife and I made together.

Yeah, we reclaimed shelf space eons ago by giving those volumes away, and I contribute each year to the Wikimedia Foundation (and consider it a good deal in light of how much I use Wikipedia). But I felt a pang of nostalgic regret when I heard that Britannica will no longer publish a print edition. Kids of the future will never have the experience of sitting behind a stack of books taller than they are.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, however, is doing a happy-dance on Britannica’s grave. He even makes a certain amount of sense, the way unsentimental people usually do.

Ever seen a skypunch before?

Rush Limbaugh and most of the rest of conservative talk-radio is broadcast by Clear Channel Communications. Know who owns Clear Channel? Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (1)

Answering the Rhetoric of the Rich and other short notes

March 12, 2012 – 6:47 am

This is how upside-down things have gotten: Cracked.com is now a leading source of common sense. Last week Cracked editor David Wong concentrated a giant dose of sense into 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.

I particularly liked the take-down of “I never got a job from a poor person.”

If you are working at a Toyota factory, your paycheck doesn’t come from under the mattress of the owner of the company. That money came from lots and lots of regular Joes who bought Toyota cars. The guys in suits are just middlemen between the supply and the demand. … It’s the same for somebody working at Walmart, or a grocery store, or a liquor store. You didn’t get your job from a poor person, but collectively their money made it happen.

As for “Stop asking for handouts! I never got help from anybody!”, Wong gives a foul-mouthed defense of the same point Ben Franklin made more politely in this week’s Sift quote.

The entire concept of owning anything, be it a hunk of land or a house or a fucking sandwich, exists purely because other people pay other armed men to protect it. Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won’t buy you a bucket of farts.

So when I say “We’re all in this together,” I’m not stating a philosophy. I’m stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn’t have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this — all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access — was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people.

So what actually happens if college students’ birth control pills aren’t covered by insurance? A study that looked at the results of a temporary price increase in 2007 showed a variety of effects that don’t completely validate anybody’s position: Women had less sex, but when they did have sex, they resorted to cheaper, less effective forms of birth control, like the morning-after contraceptives that the Catholic Church considers “abortion pills”. The rate of accidental (post-abortion-pill) pregnancy stayed about the same.

Follow-up on the Rush Limbaugh mess that I covered last week:

  • The pressure on advertisers has really worked. During Limbaugh’s Thursday show, WABC in New York broadcast 77 public service announcements, 7 ads from companies that were in the process of withdrawing their advertising, two ads from continuing advertisers, and five minutes of dead air.
  • Nobody liked Limbaugh’s apology. Slate’s “Dear Prudence” column used it as an example of how not to apologize. Even Don Imus dissed it.
  • Rush hasn’t changed his behavior. Thursday he responded to a female writer’s satirical WaPo column about him by complaining about her “b-i-itchy opinion“. Over the last half century, white people have had to learn how to disagree with black people without calling them “niggers”. (It’s not that hard, once you catch on.) Limbaugh still hasn’t learned the comparable lesson about women. You don’t have to trot out bitch, slut, and whore just because one of them said something you don’t like.
  • Conservative-in-exile David Frum explained why the liberals-are-just-as-bad excuses don’t cut it.
  • The rest of the right wing is still hounding Sandra Fluke. Laura Ingraham calls her “a willing pawn in the process to subvert the truth” and (based on nothing) Bill O’Reilly conspiratorially claims she is being “run out of the White House” and Eric Bolling calls her “a plant”. As far as I can tell, no one on the Right is addressing the substance of Fluke’s testimony, which is that limiting access to contraception at Georgetown has harmed women’s health, sometimes because of conditions (like ovarian cysts) not caused by sex or pregnancy.

This musical response to Limbaugh comes from Reformed Whores:

A longer article on this topic has gotten crowded out of the Sift two weeks in a row now, so I’ll just post the link and hope to comment on it later: Worker abuse isn’t just a problem in Shenzhen, as I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave makes clear.

Jessica Winters’ column in Time addressed the question “Are Women People?“. The answer seems doubtful.

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway.

One way to avoid appeal to the Supreme Court is to base your case on your state constitution. A Wisconsin state judge issued an injunction blocking Governor Walker’s vote-suppressing photo-ID law. He notes that the right to vote is guaranteed by the Wisconsin constitution.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Indiana’s voter-ID law did not violate the U.S. constitution.

Here’s the Nile at night, as seen from the international space station somewhere over (I think) Sudan. Enjoy.

TPM’s Josh Marshall calls attention to Rick Santorum’s increasing unpopularity. His downturn began right about the time he dissed JFK and called President Obama “a snob” for wanting people to go to college.

One possible long-term solution to the energy problem is to burn a plentiful-but-dirty fossil fuel like coal, but avoid global warming by injecting the CO-2 into the ground. An experiment in Iceland makes that seem a little less like a fairy tale. Here’s now it works:

Waste carbon dioxide is first separated from steam and then dissolved in water, forming carbonic acid. The solution is then pumped 550 yards underground into a basalt formation, where the acidity leaches elements like calcium and magnesium from the surrounding rocks. Over time, the solution flows through the basalt formation and these elements recombine to form minerals like limestone.

But while we’re talking about ejecting fluids deep into the ground, we need to remember that sometimes it doesn’t work out. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources is now claiming that brine injected into the ground by frackers accidentally caused 12 earthquakes.

Jonathan Chait’s “2012 or Never” explains the desperation of the Republican electorate and its unwillingness to accept half a loaf and fight for the rest later. When your party is based on the white majority and your social message falls flat among young voters, it’s now or never.

In polling, if you control the question, you control the answer.

Hullabaloo’s David Atkins is a liberal who thinks President Obama has compromised with Republicans too much and cut programs he should have protected. A Bloomberg poll asked whether he approved or disapproved of Obama’s negotiations with Republicans on the budget and his handling of the deficit.

Of course, my first instinct was to answer a resounding no to both questions. But I hesitated and reconsidered. … I knew that any disapproval answers for the President’s approach to the deficit and negotiating with Republicans would be interpreted by lazy researchers and a lazy press to mean that I had felt that the President was too partisan in his approach, and not concerned enough with closing the deficit. So I swallowed hard and said that I approved.

This clip displays a lot of what I like about Cenk Uygur’s show “The Young Turks” on Current TV. Cenk denounces what Cameron says, defends Cameron’s right to say it, and then makes the excellent point that the Bible says a lot of things, and people choose which parts to emphasize:

So it’s not just an argument between religious people and non-religious people. It’s an argument about people who have CHOSEN to find hate in the Bible.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, I link to an article explaining why the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts diverged politically.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Rush’s Apology and other short notes

March 5, 2012 – 1:03 pm

You already know the basic story: Republicans didn’t let Georgetown student Sandra Fluke testify at their committee hearing on religious liberty vs. reproductive rights, resulting in that famous all-men-at-the-table photo.

So Democrats held their own hearing where Fluke did testify. Rush Limbaugh responded by attacking her for several days as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and suggesting that she post sex videos on the Internet.

She’s having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs. That’s what she’s saying.

Other members of the conservative media defended Rush against the backlash. Mona Charen, for example wrote:

When the producer asked: “What do you make of Rush Limbaugh’s comments?” I said that his choice of words was crude but that I certainly understood and sympathized with the point he was making.

Mitt Romney missed his chance to have a Sister Souljah moment. “It’s not the language I would have used,” he said. To which Maureen Dowd replied: “Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?”

Eventually, Rush started losing advertisers. Money talks, so Rush issued an apology of sorts:

I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

So Rush and everybody else on the Right agrees that “slut” is an over-reaction to Fluke’s testimony, but they stand by “the point he was making”.

You’ve probably heard all that. But this point isn’t getting nearly enough attention: Rush’s attack on Fluke was fundamentally false from end to end. She was not talking about her sex life. She was not asking for a government subsidy. (Georgetown’s health plan is paid for by the students.) She was exposing the negative impact of Georgetown’s policy on the health of its female students.

This controversy isn’t about using bad words, it’s about telling vicious lies to silence an opponent’s legitimate point. Rush has not apologized for that or even admitted doing it. That’s what the conservative media is defending and Republican politicians won’t denounce.

Watch Fluke’s opening statement and see if you can find any connection between what she said and what Limbaugh said about her.

Rick Santorum’s recent attack on JFK was not only inaccurate and politically odd (how does dissing the first Catholic president rally the Catholic votes Santorum needs?), it was yet another example of the fuzzy thinking that surrounds the corporate personhood issue. Santorum seems unable to distinguish religious institutions from religious people.

Here’s what Kennedy said in his famous 1960 campaign speech to a conference of Baptist ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote

In other words, the Church and the State are separate institutions. Having authority in one does not give you authority in the other.

But this is how Santorum explained why reading Kennedy’s speech makes him “want to throw up”:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In other words, he interprets Kennedy’s words to mean that the Church and the State must consist of different people; if you’re active in the Church you must be passive in the State, and vice versa.

But the conflict that nauseates Santorum goes away once you understand that institutions are not people. Individuals can be active in both religion and in politics, and we can still maintain Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between the institution of the Church and the institution of the State.

The Santorums reinforce all the worst stereotypes about homeschooling parents. But they aren’t all like that, as this first-person account by Stumblegoat makes clear.

Things everybody should understand about the price of gas:

  • America may have plenty of untapped natural gas and coal, but that’s not going to do you any good if your car runs on gasoline.
  • The price of gasoline depends on the price of oil.
  • Oil is a world market.
  • Gas prices were low when Obama became president because a worldwide recession had depressed demand.
  • New oil production in America will change the world price of oil exactly as much (or as little) as new production in Nigeria or Kuwait or anyplace else.
  • American oil production has gone up since Obama took office, reversing a long-term downward trend.
  • No conceivable increase in American oil production will make a sizable dent in the world market.
  • Anything that took Iran’s oil off the market (like a war) would make oil prices skyrocket.

Therefore: “Drill, baby, drill” is not an answer to the high price of gas, but reaching some kind of peaceful settlement with Iran would help.

The global-warming deniers who published a letter in the WSJ made their argument look serious by quoting the research of Yale economist William Nordhaus. Now Nordhaus explains why they’re wrong.

Last week the NYT talked about why young mothers aren’t married. This week the Atlantic examines why young adults aren’t buying houses.

Derek Thompson reviews a lot of reasons, but finally comes around to the one that makes sense to me: We don’t live in a long-term-planning world any more. The whole idea of a 30-year mortgage sounds absurd in an era where nobody has the faintest idea what their life will be like in ten years.

Kevin Drum has an interesting graph. If you break the federal budget up into Medicare, Social Security, and Everything Else, then graph it as a percentage of GDP, Everything Else is lower than it was 50 years ago and is still decreasing. Remember that the next time somebody starts talking about “out-of-control government spending”.

We don’t have a generalized spending problem. We’ve got an aging population and healthcare costs that are increasing too fast. Solve that and everything else falls into place.

The traditional theory said that the poor were less ethical than the rich. In “My Fair Lady“, Pickering asks Eliza’s father “Have you no morals, man?” and Mr. Doolittle replies: “No, no, I can’t afford ’em, gov’ner. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

But a new study indicates the exact opposite:

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Santorum’s Education Commissars and other short notes

February 20, 2012 – 9:50 am

Lots of news shows have replayed the Rick Santorum clip where he says that contraception is “not OK” and endorses various other medieval notions about sex.

If you watch the whole interview, though, sex isn’t the half of what’s alarming. Check out 26:30, where he says:

Just like we have certifying organizations that accredit a college, we’ll have certifying organizations that will accredit conservative professors. If you are to be eligible for federal funds, you’ll have to provide an equal number of conservative professors as liberal professors, so that we have some balance when our children come to school, and they’re not in the process of being indoctrinated by the academy, which is exactly what they are right now.

Think about that: He wants the federal government to enforce a system in which professors at private or state universities are hired for their political views. “Certifying organizations”, i.e. political commissars, would decide who is conservative enough to provide appropriate “balance” to the professors that the commissars decide are liberal.

Whatever you think about academic bias in the current system — I think business schools, economics departments, and fundamentalist institutions like Liberty University are biased to the Right — it doesn’t have federal commissars. That would be new.

Picture Santorum’s system in operation. Would an accredited conservative professor be afraid to teach or publish anything that might jeopardize his rating? And what is liberal or conservative? Is it “liberal” for a climate scientist to look at the data and conclude that global warming is happening? What about evolution? Keynesian economics? A history of religion class that treats Christianity the same as Islam or Animism? Anthropology courses that see nothing special in our culture’s sexual mores?

The scariest thing is that Santorum had just said:

We’re going to repeal all sorts of regulations … that inject the federal government into the area of education.

He doesn’t see the contradiction.

Fundamentally, what’s dangerous about Santorum — and this shows up across a range of issues — is his self-centeredness. He can’t picture his own view as one among many, or think in terms of principles that apply equally to himself and to those he disagrees with.

I know Chris Hayes’ weekend show Up is supposed to be amazing, but was anybody else freaked out to discover that the Ferengi Grand Nagus is a socialist?

A recent decision by the Montana Supreme Court may bring the unlimited-corporate-campaign-contribution principle back to the Supreme Court. Liberals probably don’t have the votes to overturn the Citizens United decision, but they should be able to make Justice Kennedy — the Court’s swing vote and the majority opinion’s author — squirm. Justice Ginsberg writes:

Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United, … make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’

Friday’s NYT highlighted this statistic: More than half of women under 30 who give birth are unmarried. Overall, 41% of children are born to unmarried mothers. Both numbers have been rising steadily for a long time.

The article suggests a number of explanations: As well-paid working-class jobs vanish, fewer men can play the traditional bread-winner role. As women’s economic opportunities increase, they need a man less. Women whose parents divorced no longer trust men or marriage. Government safety-net programs relieve men of the responsibility to take care of their children. For everyone involved — mother, father, and child — the stigma of illegitimacy has diminished.

But it seems to me that we have a blind spot about one of the most important reasons, one the article doesn’t mention: Increasingly, we live in an economy of short-term arrangements. A job is not a career. Factories move. Companies re-organize. Employers commit to nothing beyond (if you’re lucky) a few weeks of severance.

This is especially true for people in their 20s. Even with a college degree, and even if you are making decent money right now, you string together a series of short-term jobs and hope for the best. This short-term thinking is bound to show up in non-economic life as well.

Put yourself in the shoes of an unmarried young woman who might become pregnant and might already be living with the father. In past generations, marrying the man would increase her child’s economic security. But today, doesn’t it just add another person’s uncertainties to the picture?

Big week in same-sex marriage: Washington passed it into law and Maryland is on the verge. The New Jersey legislature passed it, but Gov. Christie vetoed.

The chairman of Garden State Equality explained: “[Christie] won’t veto the bill because he’s anti-gay. He’ll veto the bill because the 2016 South Carolina presidential primary electorate is anti-gay.”

On the West Coast and in the Northeast, I think we’ve reached a tipping point. The question is no longer why you allow same-sex marriage, it’s why you don’t.

The new blog Confessions of a Thinking Woman gets off to a good start by reposting the author’s viral Facebook piece: Grievances against the GOP from a (former?) Republican Woman.

Columbia Journalism Review spells out how conservative media disciplines conservative politicians, pushing them far to the right of the electorate. As David Frum put it: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

You may have heard the right-wing talking point that the Occupy movement is somehow committing or condoning rapes. This comes from an Andrew Breitbart list of 17 (actually 14 when you remove duplicates and one story from overseas) incidents in which Occupy and some form of sexual assault are mentioned in the same news story.

Keith Olbermann goes through the list one by one, demonstrating that in none of the incidents is an Occupy demonstrator a suspect in the crime. When Occupy protesters are involved at all, they are the victims of the assault.

The rumor that Israel was about to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities has been going around since the Bush administration. Foreign Policy’s Robert Haddick claims it’s serious this time.

How much entitlement spending supports able-bodied working-age people without jobs? Less than a tenth.

RIP, John Fairfax: Gambler, pirate, jaguar hunter, rogue explorer. At 13 he ran away from home to live in the jungle like Tarzan. As an adult, he crossed the Atlantic and Pacific in a rowboat just to prove it could be done. I guess I don’t envy the inner process that drives a guy to live like that, but I’ll bet my obituary won’t be nearly so interesting.

This speaks for itself:

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Culture Wars Rise with the Economy and other short notes

February 13, 2012 – 12:17 pm

A simple reason why Rick Santorum and the culture wars are on the upswing in Republican primaries: As the economy improves, the rationale of the Romney campaign falls apart. Social issues were supposed to stay on the sidelines so that Mitt the Financial Wizard could pound Obama the Economic Failure.

Salon’s Alex Parene asks: “Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report?”

Not at all, Alex.

Purple cow? No. Purple squirrel? Here.

The difference between liberal nonsense and conservative nonsense is that liberals let the audience in on the joke.

It looks like another surge of global-warming denial is building. A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal printed a letter from 16 scientists and engineers saying “There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.” They compared global warming to Lysenkoism and presented a picture of scientific community heavy-handedly enforcing a rigid dogma.

If you look at the list of signers, most of them have no connection to climate science, so their opinion is no more significant than mine or any other educated person’s. Skeptical Science finds them “worth noting for their lack of noteworthiness”. Only two have “published climate research in the past three decades” while 7 have received funding from the fossil fuel industry. Skeptical Science also debunks the letter’s claims, and includes a wonderful graph explaining how an energy-industry flack can make a warming trend look like a cooling trend.

At the same time, the WSJ refused to print a letter from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences defending the scientific process and claiming:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

Forbes called the WSJ’s actions “remarkable editorial bias“, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, now that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Some of the same misinformation appeared simultaneously in a British tabloid, from which it migrated to the Washington Times and other right-wing publications. Kevin Drum debunks.

New re-election plan: Surround Obama with kids and gadgets, and he’s irresistible.

James Fallows writes an insightful analysis of what we’ve learned about Obama during his first term.

When I wrote last week’s article on Komen and Planned Parenthood, it wasn’t clear yet whether Komen had really reversed itself or the right-wingers inside Komen had just stepped back until public outrage faded a little. “[Karen] Handel is still on the job, after all.”

Not any more. Tuesday morning Handel resigned. So maybe Komen is serious about de-politicizing itself and getting back to its mission.

The anti-public-employee jihad that is getting Wisconsin’s Scott Walker recalled has spread to Utah and Arizona.

Just for the cuteness of it: Video of a wolf pup playing with a bear cub.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Scary Guys Named Saul and other short notes

February 6, 2012 – 12:48 pm

Last week I linked to Bill Mahr’s rant about the Republican aggrandizement and demonization of Saul Alinsky. (“The centerpiece of this campaign,” Newt Gingrich said in a televised debate, “is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.”) Tuesday, Media Matters explained why most of what is said about him is pure fantasy.

But as I explained in Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right, the real Saul Alinsky doesn’t matter. To rally an audience that believes in the Devil’s dark conspiracy against all that is Good, you only have to identify his agents and trace their connections. It goes without saying that they are united in seeking all manner of Evil; no evidence is necessary.

If you want to see this technique in action, watch any Glenn Beck chalkboard presentation. Beck loves to identify left-wing “leaders” that most liberals have never heard of, like Frances Fox Piven. In Beck’s world, the Left is like some enormous system of Masonry, where you won’t be told who the real masterminds are until you get initiated into the 33rd level.

One reason Saul Alinsky fits so snugly into this demonic role is his name, which sounds both Jewish and foreign, like Trotsky. This might explain why Gingrich’s pitch worked in South Carolina but fell flat in Florida, where guys named Saul don’t seem all that scary.

Via the Other 98%, this historical analysis:

After “I’m not concerned about the very poor” I was planning to collect the various Mitt Romney gaffes, but Zoltan already did.

To be fairer to Mitt than President Obama’s critics typically are, the headlines Mitt makes are usually worse than what he was trying to say — even though what he meant was bad enough.

  • “Corporations are people, my friend” had nothing to do with corporate personhood. He was just claiming that corporate profits ultimately get distributed to people. The fact that it’s mainly to rich people like himself isn’t a problem for Mitt, and even with that proviso I’m not convinced. Apple is sitting on $100 billion, for example, and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to either distribute it.
  • “I like being able to fire people” was about being able to change health insurance companies rather than being stuck in government monopoly. A fair point, except that (1) Like RomneyCare, ObamaCare isn’t organized as a government monopoly. Most people will continue to choose among private insurance plans. (2) Would Mitt raise a finger to stop health insurance companies merging into a private monopoly? (3) Saying “fire people” with a smile indicates that Mitt identifies mainly with the powerful.
  • “I’m not concerned about the very poor” was a clumsy way of repeating Gingrich’s food stamps vs. paychecks point: the lazy poor get enough government help already. Either guy would be more convincing if his policies didn’t sum up to cutting taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the poor. And I’m still waiting for anybody to explain why supply-side economics didn’t create jobs during the eight years when Bush tried it. I like Joan Walsh’s response: “The safety net is not a hammock.”

On the other hand, commenting on all discussions of inequality with “I think it’s about envy” is just as bad in context as you would have imagined from the headline.

Fox News really shouldn’t mess with the Muppets.

Atlantic’s Elizabeth Wurtzel makes it into this week’s short notes on the strength of good writing. As an unmarried person who seems wistful but not very hopeful about marriage, Wurtzel sees Newt Gingrich’s marital history as an island of reality in the plastic world of too-perfect political marriages.

Marriage is like Churchill’s description of democracy: the worst relationship, except for all the others. Men hate monogamy, women are pretty wayward too, being alone is absolutely awful, no one can imagine spending the rest of their lives trying to decide how to spend Saturday night after about age 36, kids seem logical, no one will love us when we’re old, we all need reunion dates, and of course, 50 years down the road, even discounting the ten or so years (hopefully not in tandem, but maybe) that were awful and that we spent making and canceling an appointment with a family lawyer almost every day at times, looking back, we had a life, and it meant something. Even though…. Even though there was a lot of even though. From the outside that looks like a happy marriage, and even happiness.

Onion News Network reports the heart-breaking story of Caitlin, a “brain dead” adolescent. Completely unresponsive to her parents, she could do little more than roll her eyes and type texts into her phone. While making the difficult decision to euthanize her, her mother says, “We just keep reminding ourselves that the real Caitlin is already gone.”

Who really writes your laws? When a Florida representative proposed a bill written by the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council, she forgot to remove the ALEC mission statement.

If government can force abortion-seeking women to get an unnecessary ultrasound, why can’t it force men seeking Viagra to get a rectal exam?

I knew I’d seen these candidates somewhere before:

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

The Return of Death Panels and other short notes

January 30, 2012 – 12:49 pm

Recently this topic showed up on my church’s email discussion list, so I know it’s making the rounds: An anonymous “brain surgeon” called into Mark Levin’s radio show in November, claiming to have seen a unpublished document from HHS describing “what the Obama health care plan would be for advanced neurosurgery for patients over 70.” He said:

Basically what the document stated was that if you were over 70 and you’d come into an emergency room and you’re on government supported health care, that you’d get “comfort care”.

When Levin responds “So Sarah Palin was right. We’re going to have these death panels, aren’t we?” the caller says “Oh, absolutely.”

Tuesday morning, Mariefla on Daily Kos went looking for details after she heard an outraged doctor raise the issue in a hospital staff meeting. She found this letter on the web site of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. The AANS notes “factual inaccuracies” and says the caller was not a neurosurgeon, they are not aware of any such document, and the AANS conference in which the caller supposedly saw this document never happened. They’ve asked Levin to remove the podcast from his web site, which he hasn’t.

HHS unequivocally told rumor-investigating Snopes.com: “No such document exists and no such presentation took place.”

It’s unsettling to realize how easy this kind of fraud is. Anybody can call into a radio show claiming to be anything and to have seen anything. (“I’m a retired Air Force captain and I used to work at Area 51 with the wrecked alien spaceships.”) If their story supports somebody’s propaganda, a well-oiled machine sends it rocketing around the country.

Alejandrina Cabrera was running for City Council in the Arizona border town of San Luis when her ability to speak English became an issue — not a political issue, a legal issue. The mayor filed a lawsuit remove her from the ballot.

The Enabling Act that set up Arizona’s government in 1910 says:

ability to read, write, speak, and understand the English language sufficiently well to conduct the duties of the office without the aid of an interpreter shall be a necessary qualification for all state officers and members of the state legislature.

And Arizona voters declared English the official language in in 2006. However, 90% of San Luis residents speak mainly Spanish. Cabrera is running to represent them, even though she speaks only “survival level English” according to a linguistics professor appointed by a Yuma county judge to test her. Wednesday, the judge ordered her name removed from the ballot.

Reader comments on the various news stories fall into two camps: Those supporting the lawsuit go on to indict local high schools for allowing her to graduate with such poor command of English, while those opposing it want the voters, not the courts, to judge candidates’ qualifications for office.

Fox News psychologist/consultant Keith Ablow explains to us why Newt Gingrich’s infidelities will make him “a strong president“. Steven Colbert observes: “Somebody without Dr. Ablow’s psychiatric insight might misdiagnose Newt as a sociopathic pussyhound.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I can’t predict how practical the Hiriko electric car will be, but it’s got an off-the-scale cute factor. If I were 3 feet tall, I’d really want this half-size prototype.

Until this week, I’ve been having trouble explaining exactly what bugs me about Mitt Romney’s corporate-raider career at Bain Capital. Sure, it looks bad to walk away with a pile of money from deals that leave so many other people unemployed or otherwise holding the bag, but wasn’t he serving the overall cause of efficiency? Doesn’t the profit come from re-purposing assets to more productive uses?

Then a Chris Hayes tweet pointed me to this 1988 paper co-authored by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Starting with the idea that a corporation is a “nexus of contracts, some implicit, between shareholders and stakeholders”, the paper argues that hostile corporate takeovers are profitable because the new owners can renege on the corporation’s implicit commitments to workers, suppliers, retirees, and the surrounding community. The process is “wealth redistributing, not wealth creating”.

It goes on to argue that corporations’ ability to make trustworthy implicit commitments has real economic value. But corporate raids destroyed that trust for all corporations, because now all parties know that managers who try to keep such commitments when they become unprofitable are likely to be raided and replaced.

So Romney’s profit at Bain comes not just from efficiency, but also from selling the social capital of the entire corporate system.

Romney bristles whenever anyone mentions the 99% and the 1%. That’s “dividing America,” he says.

Privileged classes always blame social divisions on the people who call attention to them, rather than the people who cause them and benefit from them. The Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings are honored after they are safely dead, but while they are alive they are denounced as troublemakers. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is his response to those who accused him of creating “tension” between the races.

So, did dead people really vote in South Carolina? No.

And finally, because I never get tired of listening to Elizabeth Warren:
Vodpod videos no longer available.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)