Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. “How convenient for him,” was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. “He’s a vegetarian.”
Looking at the chart, there are lessons for the environmentalist meat-eater beyond just "eat less meat." Switching from beef to pork cuts that part of your plate's carbon footprint in half, and switching from pork to chicken cuts it in half again. 2% milk, yogurt, and eggs are all pretty guiltless from an environmental standpoint.
All that said, once again the evidence is in: cutting your consumption of meat in general, and red meat in particular, is good for you, your family, and your planet. I can say, too, that I've significantly decreased the amount of meat I eat over the couple of years, especially beef, and it hasn't been nearly as bad as I thought it would be. A bean and cheese burrito, yogurt with blueberries, and an apple isn't a bad lunch!
[Nota bene: George W. Bush is a 21st century president]
Been reading a lot about American presidents lately, and I found this conversation interesting. Ta-Nehisi finds Tom Ricks claiming the worst president of the 20th century was Kennedy.
Ridiculous. It takes a pretty hostile interpreter of events to conclude that the Bay of Pigs, the brainchild of Eisenhower and Dulles launched all of 3 months into the new administration, is all Kennedy's fault, and yet he deserves no credit for the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Civil Rights Act. The former was a moment of national existential peril unequaled by any other in our history; the latter was perhaps the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress during that century.
I have a different one in mind. I'd like to nominate Ronald Reagan as the worst president of the 20th century. We have Reagan to thank for everything from soaring deficits to voodoo economics to a bloated, unsustainable military-industrial complex. His economic policies contributed to the Savings and Loan crisis, and he put arch-Randian Alan Greenspan in charge of the Fed. That's all, of course, during the periods when his administration wasn't busy trying to purge disabled people from the Social Security rolls.
(Greenspan, of course, is the guy who told Clinton he had to gut the social safety net to keep the deficit from torpedoing the economy, then turned around and told George W. Bush to cash in all the money Clinton saved on tax cuts for the wealthy.)
The failed Star Wars Defense System? Reagan. Redistributing the tax burden from the rich to the middle class? Reagan again. Iran-Contra? Still Reagan. Mandatory minimums for minor drug offenses? Here's Ronnie!
Guess who deployed the CIA's Special Activities Division to Afghanistan? Reagan. Guess who was among the mujahadeen they trained?
Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court? That was Reagan, too! He also nominated notorious Nixon yes-man Robert Bork, infamous for being Tricky Dick's lucky number 3, the dude finally unscrupulous enough to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox after both of his predecessors resigned rather than commit such a heinous breach of ethics. We can thank Ted Kennedy -- God rest his soul! -- that the man wasn't further rewarded for his treachery.
That's what I call one hellacious legacy right there.
Why is that every time there's a showdown the Democrats seem eager to cave and give away the store while the Republicans make totally unreasonable demands? Here's why, c/o Kevin Drum: I'm gradually coming around to the idea that the problem with our government doesn't lie with parties or politicians or the media. It's the voters. We have the government we voted for.
Matt Yglesias shows how we're all sucking from the government teat. Next time you hear someone complain about their tax dollars going to welfare, ask them if they take the Earned Income Tax Credit, or the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, or have ever taken a student loan.
That's what these protesters at the South Bend Animal Care and Control Shelter might as well be demanding.
And why is that, you ask? Because these people apparently want the shelter to expand in size and staffing to accommodate holding strays longer than 48 hours. Yeah, sure! I'd love that, too! I'd also love for the school district not to react to recessions by firing 50 teachers. I'd love for the city to use construction services that pay their workers fairly, so there are no strikes and the roads near my house are repaired promptly. I'd love there to be enough cops to keep our neighborhood safe.
Guess what, kids: you get the public services you pay for. You want better? You have to pay for it.
People who work at animal shelters, I'll wager, love animals almost as a rule. If it were up to animal shelter employees, all shelters would be no-kill shelters with huge playpens, ample blankets and beds, TV and radio channels broadcasting the animals they've recently caught, and lots on veterinarians on site to keep everyone healthy and adorable and playful.
But it isn't up to the employees because they don't get enough money for all that stuff. They take the money that's budgeted, stretch it out as far as they can to keep as many animals alive as possible, and then prep the needles and do what they have to do.
You want the shelter to stop killing in 48 hours? Don't stand across the street like an idiot and demand that they make gold nuggets from dog shit. Tell your friends, family, newspaper, and city council that you think the shelter should get more money, and you'd be willing to pay something for that. Lessen the shelter's burden by keeping your fence in good repair, keeping your dogs collared and getting them chipped. Spay and neuter your pets. And for fuck sake, don't wait several days to go retrieve your dog from them!
One member of the protesting group apparently held a sign saying: "Is your pet's life worth more than 48 hours?" You're the one with the pocketbook, taxpayer; you tell me!
1) There has been a dramatic expansion of health insurance, reducing the uninsurance rate by 60-70%.
2) No change in wait times for general an internal medicine practitioners have been observed.
3) The share of the population with a usual source of care, receiving preventative care, and receiving dental care all rose.
4) The rate of utilization of emergency care fell modestly.
5) There has been a 40% decline in uncompensated care.
6) The proportion of the population with employer-sponsored health insurance increased by 0.6%.
7) The rate of employer offers of coverage grew from 70% to 76%.
8) Mandate compliance has been very high: 98% compliance in reporting via tax filings of obtaining coverage or paying penalties.
9) The administrative costs of health reform have been low. Overall implementation costs have been close to expectations.
10) Premiums have fallen dramatically in the non-group market.
11) Though group premiums have risen, they have not increased faster than one would expect from increases in other states in the region.
Just a little reality check. Looks like in general it's been a net positive for Massachusetts. Gotta love that coverage and number of people receiving preventive care rose without increasing wait times for GPs.
So if the government hands you a "voucher" that's good for a certain amount of money's worth of private goods, isn't that pretty much the dictionary definition of rationing?
In an earlier post, I mentioned that, though I'm trying to figure out how Republicans view the world, to get on the same wavelength, I have a lot of trouble with it. I have a lot of Republican friends and have talked with them a lot about their beliefs, but some tendencies I find inscrutable even if predictable.
The recent House decision to slash WIC funding is an example of the limits of my ability to empathize with the Republican mindset. I just don't understand the urge to cut funding from poor children in a recession. I don't get how anyone looking to cut the size of government looks at that line in the budget and thinks anything other than "obviously we can't cut that now, and if we ever do, we'd better cut everything else we want first."
Ezra Klein points out that the Veterans' Health Administration is now getting the best marks of any health care system in the United States. Now chew on this:
The thing about the Veteran’s Administration’s health-care system? It’s socialized. Not single payer. Not heavily centralized. Socialized. As in, it employs the doctors and nurses. Owns the hospitals. And though I think there’s some good reason to believe its spending growth is somewhat understated — it benefits heavily from medical trainees, for instance — accounting for that difference still means a remarkable recent performance.
As iWatch News' Peter Stone reports, Bayh has signed on with one of the most corporate-friendly, anti-environment shops in all of Washington, DC: the US Chamber of Commerce. According to an internal memo penned by Chamber president Tom Donohue, Bayh, along with former Bush White House chief of staff Andy Card, are now part of the Chamber's anti-regulation messaging team, doing "speeches, events, and media appearances at local venues."
The Chamber's hiring of Bayh, a big name in Washington circles, will only help its efforts to delay or kill new regulatory legislation in Congress. Indeed, Donohue's memo touts how the Chamber has filed legal briefs to challenge the validity of President Obama's health care reform bill; successfully delayed a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule on giving shareholders a say on corporate directors; unveiled plans to undermine the clout of the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and delayed a rule forcing companies to disclose when they use conflict minerals from the Congo in their products. Bayh and Card, the memo says, will help the Chamber push this pro-corporate agenda in Washington and beyond.
Ezra Klein asks why on earth Senate Republicans voted en masse for the Ryan budget not two days after it cost their party a normally safe seat and despite knowing that it will never become law. His hypotheses:
1) They thought the pollsters were wrong and the plan either wasn’t unpopular or wouldn’t be unpopular once they explained it.
2) They were less worried — at least at that moment — about what would be unpopular with the electorate and more worried about what would be unpopular with the base.
3) They really believed in the Ryan budget, and were willing to lose seats, and perhaps even the majority, over it.
4) They believed that the details would matters less than their conviction. That is to say, being seen as “making hard choices” would be more popular than the choices themselves would be unpopular.
5) It fit the individual needs of key actors at a particular moment in time: Boehner needed to support something bold and conservative, Cantor needed to be pushing something more conservative than Boehner seemed comfortable with, Tea Party politicians needed to show they weren’t getting sucked into Washington dealmaking, Ryan needed to make good on his promises to take on entitlements, etc.
All good ideas, I think, though I think the true mixture of motives involves some of these more than others. I think the first part of 3 is true, for instance, but I do not believe the Republicans think it will cost seats. In fact, I'm starting to think a combination of 1 and the first part of 3 may be the key.
The worldview of the Republican party, and in particular the psychology of Republican politicians, is something very foreign to me, but I think I'm starting to get some aspects of it. I'm coming to the conclusion that class affects the Republican worldview much more than I've thought before, and may in fact be the primary hermeneutic by which Republicans create their ideology and take stances.
I got to this point by starting from the principle that people are motivated primarily by self-interest and emotion. For all our arguments and complicated rationales, the vast majority of the time people choose their political stances according to fear, resentment, anger, compassion, and loyalty. And almost nobody is aware of this fact.
Our emotional investment in politics, usually grounded primarily in self-interest, combines then with our natural, well-established psychological tendency to take special notice of things that corroborate our views and not notice things that don't. Add in people's natural desire to avoid conflict and thus associate most often with people who agree with them, and we can see how all this leads inevitably to the acceptance of false or inconsistent ideas as absolutely true. Now let's throw in a media that views politics as sport, and that intentionally avoids any attempt to address the substance of complicated political issues for fear of taking one side (more specifically, of being forced to admit that the left is right on any subject).
Now throw in the particular plight of Republicans politicians, who are rich and white almost to a man, and overwhelmingly male. Their most important backers are all rich, white men, and their main intraparty opposition (i.e., the teabaggers) are rich, white men. Being powerful, they are surrounded by coteries of yes-men and sycophants.
In this light, it becomes clear and unsurprising that Republican politicians would come to the conclusion that what's best for the rich is always best for everyone. This explains why even the most seemingly conscientious Republican believes the only thing better than cutting taxes on the rich during boom years is cutting taxes on the rich during bust years. It explains why the answer to every problem is "cut taxes on the rich and gut social programs." It explains why every term of Republican dominance is marked by the attempt to destroy either Social Security or Medicare, no matter how popular the two become. It explains why conservatives cannot separate cutting the deficit from cutting the size of government. And it perhaps explains why Republicans can, in the process of creating a budget with the sole and specific intent to cut the deficit, cut taxes on the rich and not see any inconsistency there.
I'm coming around to the belief that Republican politicians vote for Ryancare because it fits their ideological, emotional, and cynical predispositions so perfectly that they have convinced themselves that its premises are intellectually unassailable. If it is unpopular, it is only because its genius hasn't had time to sink in yet.
1. Again, I remain baffled by the Ryan budget, and in particular by the gratuitous destruction of Medicare written into it. What the hell were the House Republicans thinking?
Then again, I guess we should remember that the Village idiots in Washington are still convinced that the Ryan deficit reduction plan was "gutsy" and "adult" even though it doesn't even lower the deficit. This is perhaps a lesson more in the incredible classism of the Washington cocktail circuit than anything else. They're the only people in the country who appear entirely unbothered by a plan to replace Medicare with vouchers that won't even cover the cost of insurance.
It also exposes a curious blind spot among even conscientious conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. How do you look at a deficit plan like the Ryan one, one with exactly zero options for revenue growth, one that includes a tax cut for rich people, and that boots the elderly into the private insurance system with nothing but an inadequate and slowly depreciating voucher, one that's composed almost entirely of longstanding right wing boilerplate, and come to the conclusion that it's "adult" and "serious?" How can one as concerned as Sullivan is with critical introspection be so blind to such obvious fraud in pursuit of class warfare?
2. I want to take a few moments to ground the various narratives regarding this race in a little reality. The Democrats are contending that they won a "heavily Republican" district that the GOP has held since 1960. NY-26 is an R+6 district, meaning they generally vote about 6 points more for Republican presidential candidates than Democratic ones. That's hardly a bellwether district, but still a pretty moderate conservative edge compared to what many of us think of when we think "Republican district." For reference, it has the same partisan rating as MI-3 (Grand Rapids). IN-2 (South Bend) is only an R+2. TX-19 (Lubbock and Abilene) is R+26.
I will also point out that the district had a Democratic representative from '93 to '03, so the line about "the Republicans holding it since the '60's" just isn't true.
3. My other major point is that it's easy to overstate the predictive power of special elections. Pete Session (R-TX) is right when he says, “If special elections were an early-warning system, they sure failed to alert the Democrats of the political tsunami that flooded their ranks in 2010,” though that's not exactly what Republicans were saying after the Scott Brown victory. Every district has its idiosyncrasies and local issues even when larger national debates subsume the race.
Of more interest to those looking for a better Democratic year is the generic congressional ballot, which flipped back to the Democrats last week after being solidly Republican for the last two years:
The generic ballot's predictive value is similarly limited, but it's at least a more accurate sampling of national opinion than a single House election.
It's entirely possible that the Democrats will have a good year in 2012, and certainly better than the last one. We're still a year and a half out, though, and these elections turn pretty quickly on current economic and political trends. Until we have a better sense of what the economy is going to look like in October 2012, and how that economy is going to be reported, I don't think there's much point in forecasting.
That being said, there is one race that's much closer: the GOP presidential primary. Nate Silver has already demonstrated that Republican presidential candidates leading 6 months out from the primaries usually win (though, interestingly, not Democratic ones). Polls currently show Mitt Romney with a significant lead over everyone but Mike Huckabee, who isn't running. I know, it's hard to imagine Mitt Romney winning, but it's not really any easier to see Gingrich, Pawlenty, Huntsman, Paul, Cain, or Santorum winning, either. The Republicans have to nominate somebody!
This strange episode in New York involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn is probably going to make headlines over and over again for the next few years. During this time, can we maybe refrain from calling it a "sex scandal?" Despite the urge European (ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd to a lesser degree American) journalists will feel to make this about French electoral politics, this isn't run of the mill philandering. The man stands accused of raping a hotel cleaning lady.
Interesting article in Salon. She laments the structure of both the regular and accelerating English classes she describes, but I'm not sure I agree. I'm thinking in particular of this passage:
As for the students who did make it to more accelerated English courses, their recollections are a little less disheartening, but only a little. They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually "Romeo and Juliet," sometimes "Macbeth." They read "Catcher in the Rye" or "Huck Finn," "The Sound and the Fury," a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece.
This describes my honors English classes in high school to a T. We read MacBeth, Huck Finn, the Sound and the Fury, and some Melville and Hardy (among other things, of course), then, yes, the discussions and small groups, the essay, and the next book.
And you know what? It worked. I fell completely in love with those books, and with fiction in general. Between my junior year in high school and moving to South Bend six years later, I probably watched less than four hours of television, and filled a bookshelf or two with the "classic" books that make jaded English grad students roll their eyes. I also apparently absorbed enough grammar from seeing the masters do it to string coherent sentences together in college. Admittedly, I probably could not have told you what a direct object or perfect tense was until I began taking Latin, but I didn't need to because I knew what "looked right." Grammar had become intuitive.
This description of regular courses sounds much less helpful, admittedly:
Those who didn't make it onto the honors or A.P. track hardly mention writing or reading at all. They talk about giving oral presentations and keeping reading journals evaluated with a big, meaningless check. They reveal putting on skits, reenacting some scene in a novel or play whose title they can't recall. One student recounts a month of junior English class in which she and her classmates produced digital short film adaptations of the trial in "The Scarlet Letter."
"Sounds fun," I say to this student, a girl who would not know how to summarize a source or correct a sentence fragment if her life depended on it.
I go back and forth on whether this increasing emphasis in pedagogy on "making learning fun!" has been a helpful corrective to centuries of schoolmarm-ey villainy or ultimately done more harm than good. The classics taskmaster in me rolls his eyes at these pointless attempts to make kids enjoy something they're going to be graded on and that still requires being in school. Learning is work, kids. Deal.
On the other hand, teaching five sections of high school grammar and composition, grading hundreds of papers and homework assignments every week and having to drag the students kick and screaming along with you every class, sounds like the kind of godawful teaching load that burns out even the most enthusiastic teacher.
Great article from The Nation on dysfunction in higher education, much better than the many less-than-realistic diagnoses offered by the likes of Hacker et al. over the last couple of years.
Students, particularly at state universities, have noticed some of the symptoms for a long time now: graduate students and adjuncts teaching many of their classes, run-down classroom buildings flanked by immaculate, brand new athletic facilities, and a constant carousel of university presidents using the gig to add a feather to their cap and moving on after two years, among other things.
This article, unlike many of the books written on the subject, also deals substantively with issue of adjunct professors. I maintain that is not just a symptom of poor leadership for a university to load up on "academic lettuce pickers" and treat them the way universities do rather than hiring proper faculty for their lower level courses (or, hey, promoting their long-time adjuncts), nor is it merely bad policy; it's unjust, and Deresiewicz is right to fault everyone from university presidents to tenured and tenure-track professors for allowing the exploitation of current and former students.
Much as I hate to say, college football is a parasite to the system as well, leeching countless millions of dollars just on the head coach's salary, nevermind the truckloads of cash spent on assistant coaches, facilities, stadiums, and bowl games (yes, schools usually end up losing money on bowl games even despite the payout from the bowl).
It's interesting that many of the structural problems facing colleges right now are echoed in their football teams: mercenary executives with astronomical salaries seeking success according to a laughably flawed ranking system, and doing so on the backs of overworked, virtually uncompensated kids, whose scholarships can be stripped from them with little to no warning and on no account of their own performance, and the majority of whom will never get the opportunity to make a living wage plying their trade.
While bin Laden's death is sucking all the air out of the room stateside, it's worth taking note that the Scottish National Party just took an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament, clearing the way for a referendum to leave the UK. Alex Salmond, SNP leader, has already promised such a referendum within the next five years.
Meanwhile, in England in a stunning reversal of political trends elsewhere in Europe, the right-wing anti-immigration British National Party was utterly crushed in the midst of a massive debt scandal, losing 7 of its 11 seats (so far!) and likely dooming it as a national party. Good riddance.
