things to remember in the budget debate

Ezra Klein lays out what's going on really well. The Republicans have introduced a "budget cutting" plan that raises the deficit, not lowers it, hate the very parts of the Affordable Care Act that install cost controls in our health care spending, and they are largely responsible for the current deficit. That's just the plain truth.

I'm going to add another, one that for me clarifies this debate more than anything else: the Republicans are not trying to balance the budget. They're trying to secure more money for the rich. That's it.

I've come to believe that Bill Clinton's most hard-fought achievement, balancing the budget, was in fact a total failure of vision because the goal itself plays into the Republican party's long term strategy. Republicans care only about converting government revenue into lower taxes for rich people, so any serious tackling of the deficit will only last until the next Republican government, ultimately resulting in just another round of Bush tax cuts.

not crazy enough for the freakshow

Why am I getting the sinking feeling that I'm going to be dedicating a nontrivial amount of time over the next 9-12 months defending Mitt Romney?

Stephanopoulos gets Bachmann to admit the validity of Obama's birth certificate

Watch Stephanopoulos show Michele Bachmann a copy of Obama's birth certificate, saying "so this story's over?" and her resignedly admit: "Yes, it's over." You can tell she saw this coming and was hedging on the birth certificate issue from the start of the interview (clearly George warned her before the interview that he would do this), but she'd been beating this drum earlier this week, so I don't think she is making a conscious attempt to make herself look more mainstream. To me, her body language is showing defeat.

So now the obvious question: Conservatives have been questioning Obama's birth certificate and drawing all manner of dark conclusions for four years. A significant percentage of the country has bought into this rubbish, and the number of dupes is rising.

Why did it take four years for someone in the press to confront Bachmann with a birth certificate that was made freely available by then-Senator Barack Obama early in the '08 campaign and expressly backed by the relevant officials in the state of Hawaii?

texting while talking

Old people think pulling out your smartphone while in conversation is rude, and wonder if young people feel the same way. From what I can tell, teens and twentysomethings do this constantly and show no hint of feeling slighted when others do it. In my opinion, pulling out your smartphone is essentially the same body language as looking at your watch. It's fine when you're standing in line, mostly okay when with a group of people but not participating in a conversation, and gauche when participating in a conversation.

living in the midwest

A former east coaster ruminates on life in the Midwest. Not sure how much I agree, but it's an interesting read for me as I consider the imminent end of our time in Indiana. My experience isn't exactly identical since I came from a different place, but I do remember being surprised at how rural South Bend isn't. Similarly, I had no idea a city could absolutely dwarf the sprawling metropolises of Dallas and Houston the way Chicago does.

This part rang out as absolutely true to me:

I continue to ask myself: What do I want from a hometown?

I want to support public schools without compromising my son's education (which, at least until the current governor wins his war, was a safe assumption). I want to regularly see good live music and movies and art exhibits without wrestling with crowds or competing for tickets. I want at any given time not to be the only lefty in the room; otherwise, life is stressful, especially in this time of no common ground. I want evenings and weekends to be devoted to family time. I want to not worry about money, fashion, or what kind of car I drive. I want to comfortably afford to travel and own a nice home and not feel at all times like we need more space. I want to my son to grow up spending time—not just holidays—with his aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.

Of course there are people in coastal cities who have all of this—tons of them—but it's just easier here.

The greatest advantage of the Midwest, one that truly makes me wonder why it isn't a bigger draw, is that you don't have to choose between functional public schools and cheap real estate. That isn't true in most of the country.

falling for your own propaganda

House Republicans just passed a budget resolution to abolish Medicare. Seriously.

I'm honestly surprised about this. I know that the Republican party has been gunning for Medicare for decades, and I know that it's consistent with many predictions (included my own) that conservatives have been setting themselves up for this kind of catastrophic overreach since Obama's election. Nevertheless, it isn't like Republicans don't know Medicare is hugely popular and that voters punish parties that cut its funding, considering they hammered the Democrats among seniors just 5 short months ago primarily by charging Democrats with cutting Medicare funds. Nor is it likely that House Republicans believe this budget resolution has any chance of surviving the Senate, let alone a guaranteed presidential veto.

Do they really think they can keep this vote from being simplified to "Republicans voted to abolish Medicare?" Either I'm missing something huge, or House Republicans have convinced themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Americans don't like Medicare.

say it ain't so, John

Jane Curtin on the "incredibly misogynistic" environment at Saturday Night Live: "[John Belushi] felt as if it were his duty to sabotage pieces that were written by women."

Video at the link.

Tuesday errands

Heading to Walgreens for some chewing gum, a pack of smokes, and a pap smear. Thanks Fox and Friends!

the legacy of Malcolm X

A wonderful article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in both style and substance. An example paragraph about black Americans experimenting with self-examination in the wake of Malcolm:

Conscious sects sprang up--some praising the creator sky god Damballah, some spouting Hebrew, and still others talking in Akan. Consciousness was inchoate and unorthodox--it made my father a vegetarian, but never moved him to wear dreadlocks or adopt an African name. What united us all was the hope of rebirth, of a serum to cure generational shame. What united us was our champion, who delivered us from self-hatred, who delivered my mother from burning lye, who was slaughtered high up in Harlem so that colored people could color themselves anew.

a quick clarification on Michael Floyd

Before the oncoming pile-on of Notre Dame for letting Michael Floyd off on probation for a DUI, I'd like to point out one very important fact: the punishment meted out to Floyd (probation, counseling, community service) is consistent with the punishment recommended by the student handbook for a first-time DUI to the letter.

at least someone's willing to fight

Nancy Pelosi's perpetually low approval ratings are a constant reminder that I'm well outside of the American mainstream. I found her to be an extremely effective Speaker of the House. She was generally honest about her opinions and intentions, including being unapologetically liberal, but wasn't a blowhard yelling into the mic on MSNBC. She was known neither for Harry Reid's cowering gunshy-ness nor Barbara Boxer's gavel-waving bravado. She let the opposition talk and put their bills up for votes, but in the end she always passed what she wanted and torpedoed what she didn't. Note for comparison the speakers on either side of her: Dennis Hastert, a Delay puppet with a flagrantly undemocratic "majority of the majority" policy, and John Boehner, a dissembler who's already lost control of the chamber not even three months on the job.

I'd also like to point to this story about her leadership during Bush's war on Social Security:

When Bush announced his Social Security plan last year, Pelosi told House Democrats they could never beat him in a straight-ahead, policy-against-policy debate because he had the megaphone of the presidency and was just coming off re-election. So the Democrats would thunderously attack Bush and argue there was no Social Security crisis and therefore no need for them to put out their own proposal. Some members were leery, concerned that Pelosi would make the Democrats look like the Party of No. As the spring of 2005 wore on, some pestered her every week, asking when they were going to release a rival plan. "Never. Is never good enough for you?" Pelosi defiantly said to one member. When Florida Democrat Robert Wexler publicly suggested raising Social Security taxes as the solution, Pelosi immediately chewed him out over the phone. Only one other Democrat signed on to his plan.

She was, of course, absolutely right and almost unique among Washington Democrats in understanding this very simple point.

People bitch about how Democrats don't have any backbone, but that Italian grandmother running the House Democrats is f**king iron. I'd take Pelosi over any other clown in Congress right now, and I'm starting to think I prefer her to Obama as well.

some helpful information

One keg of beer is 15 1/2 gallons. After careful scientific examination from these fine people, that translates to:

141 red plastic cups
6 1/2 cases of canned beer
165 cans of beer

Happy party planning!

Republicans vs. Medicare

I'm in a pretty low place right now as far as my belief in the judgment of American voters goes. Nevertheless, there's a more hopeful voice in my mind arguing that the privatization of Medicare in Ryan's budget is an insane overreach that's going to cost Republicans dearly in the next election. It's just hard to see how their advocates will be able to sustain any coherent argument that they're doing anything other than abolishing one of the two most popular programs in the government.

Of course, in order for that to happen, someone has to fight them on it.

Limitless

[Duh, spoiler alert]

The movie irritated me for a lot of reasons. It continues a trend I've noticed with surprising frequency lately, which is for films to set up a morality tale or tragic hero, and then fail to pull the trigger on them in the climax, instead spinning some wildly improbable sequence that saves the protagonist at the clutch moment and completely undercuts the rest of the story. This is a story about cheating, right? About performance-enhancing drugs?

But the truth is I wanted Eddie Morra, the protagonist, to die for reasons beyond simply fulfilling an anti-drug morality tale. Eddie isn't a sympathetic character; he's a narcissistic asshole who uses everyone he knows but never gives anything back. The beginning of the film establishes that he's supporting his failing writer lifestyle mainly by using his girlfriend as a "maid" and a "bank." When he gets his hands on NZT, his miracle drug, instead of trying to better humankind or repay all the people he's been leeching on for the last 20 years or even just furthering his art form by becoming a great writer, he tosses aside all that writer-ly philosophizing for the lifestyle of How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson. He takes out a loan from a Russian shark and makes a boatload of cash on it, yet doesn't bother to repay the loan for reasons that are left unexplained. He meets his ex-wife, "the one that got away," only to discover that NZT destroyed her life. While he commiserates with her at a diner for all of 10 minutes, he never lifts a finger to help her despite already being stupidly rich by this point. She exists only to warn him of the hazards of the drug, apparently.

Instead, he uses his newfound super-smarts to charm his way back into his girlfriend's heart, but continues to engage in 18 hour benders complete with disappearing for entire nights and nailing multitudes of underwear models on the side. Funny story: one of those models ends up dead in his hotel room that night, and he has no memory of the night's events since fugue is apparently a side effect of the drug. He wonders if he killed her, the cops believe he did, and indeed he may well have, but that little incident is never resolved either way. Over the rest of the movie, he leaves a trail of corpses including his own two bodyguards, puts his girlfriend in mortal danger and forces her to take NZT, and almost certainly destroys the career of the guy at the day-trading agency who stuck his neck out to get him an interview with the head of the company.

In the end, he pays for none of these transgressions and feels no regrets. He's even running for Senate and still enjoying his money, his girlfriend, and some residual enhancement from his NZT-popping days. How lovely for him.

veggie burgers

It's cool to see that veggie burgers are finally coming into their own, at least in NYC restaurants. As someone who does a lot of cooking out in the summer for people with varying diets, I've always found veggie burgers frustrating. Smart dogs are a perfectly fine substitute for the run o' the mill frankfurter, since hot dogs rely so heavily on strong condiments to deliver their flavor. I have several flashy recipes handy for making the vegetarians feel at home when I make more "serious" entrees, like brisket or pork tenderloin. When I go ethnic, there's always a variety of delicious vegetarian entrees at my disposal.

But veggie burgers, sigh. I have yet to find a veggie burger recipe that compares at all favorably to even the most boring, store-bought beef patty, certainly none that can be prepared economically and in a timely fashion. There are one or two palatable premade options availabe, but that means having fresh, homemade, juicy burgers for the meat eaters and the same frozen, manufactured patties for the vegetarians that they've eaten a hundred times. A grill may work magic with beef, but it's helpless against the mighty mediocrity of the Gardenburger.

I've been thinking about what my next grill project should be this summer after mostly successful forays into brisket, fajitas, and ribs. Perhaps I should consider veggie burger options. I'm intrigued by one of the burgers in the article that's basically a wide, thin felafel. Portabellas make a great sandwich, but I make the same stock version of them every time. I've never really experimented with them specifically as a burger filler. Potato pancake? Hmm, an interesting beginning...

Other ideas?

EDIT: Fixed the link and formatting weirdness. My bad.

balls

In other news, apparently the Serious People on the TV and internet have decided that the gender of Obama's advisors is relevant to discussion of his handling of the Libya situation. This is because our media is run by high school students.

Libya

I'm of two minds about our new incursion against Qaddafi, personally. One sympathizes with the rebels and would absolutely love to see a monster like Qaddafi driven from power. Furthermore, Clinton (I believe) claims that what really struck Obama about the no-fly zone was the opportunity to reorient American foreign policy in the Middle East to take more account of human rights abuses and take a step away from CIA-backed client states and toward support of democratic reform. That end, I think, is unimpeachable.

The problem, however, is in the means. First and foremost, as I've said for years, I believe peace is underrated in America. There is a general lack of recognition of the costs of war and of the difficulty of leashing "dogs of war" already loosed.

More specific to this situation, I have little confidence either that the limits of our intrusion were sufficiently spelled out, or that all the likely outcomes were considered. Can we be confident that our military will leave once "Qaddafi stops firing on his own people" even if it becomes clear that he will stay in power? If he is toppled and replaced by another dictator? Can we prevent this spectacle from providing autocrats in Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere the cover they need to fire on their own protesters?

If nothing else, Libya has given us an opportunity to discuss a particular problem with our status as the "world's police." On Saturday night the BBC was talking with an American pundit about the degree to which this was truly an international coalition vs. just another American intervention. He answered with an interesting point: to an extent every multi-partner intervention is an American-led one, not because America is more meddlesome or bellicose than other nations (though we might be) but because we have the only military force on the planet with the necessary infrastructure to manage a full-scale aerial and maritime force of any real size.

That is an astonishing statement. This was a war that Europe, and to some degree the Arab League, wanted, that Sarkozy went to the mat for. It has official UN sanction. In fact, most of the air "sorties" are now supposedly conducted by non-US actors according to NPR this morning. Even in this Europe-"led" UN humanitarian effort, however, they had to rely on our navy to control logistics and our planes to do some initial bombing while they got their ducks in a row. Yet neither the United Nations nor the "first world" have to contribute a single euro, yen, or loony to the upkeep of the obscenely oversized military apparatus that's busting the American budget and hardening our people to the sight of violence and suffering. Nor can we forget the disproportionate cost in blood that the United States also pays.

Those who believe that down the path of world military supremacy lies madness, that waging an arms race with the entire world is a fool's game, would do well to remember that if they ever succeed, it will be not with the support of the developed world, but over its protests.

"heh, yeah that's cra...wait wtf?"

That's going to be your reaction to this story, I guarantee it.

whites flying in, whites flying out

TNC's doing a nice series on Detroit and white flight.

Probably not a profound thought, but talking with Sap the other day, I was stricken by the catch-22 we're stuck in when it comes to buying a house. Being white, educated middle class (barely) people, if we buy in the city, we're immediately guilty of participating in gentrification. If we buy in the suburbs, we're participating in white flight.

war is always the answer

Josh Marshall:

I sit at my desk every morning listening to the sounds of cable television in the air. Now a lot of it is about Libya. And I'm just blown away by the constant, almost unanimous chorus in favor of some sort of active, military involvement in the country. At this moment, I'm listening to some person say that it just doesn't make sense -- that it's inconsistent -- for the President to announce that it is our national policy that Qaddafi should leave and yet not take military steps to make that happen. I've also heard numerous voices arguing that we 'didn't act' in the Balkans and then didn't act in Rwanda and that we should not make the same mistake today.

This is a wildly different standard for military action than we've ever heard before, even in an era where our interventions have become much more frequent and when they've often been wise and necessary.

"Wise and necessary?" Really? Even if we allow that the "era" he's describing covers the entire post-WWII period, I can think of the following military engagements off the top of my head:
Korea
Cuba (Bay of Pigs)
Vietnam
Lebanon
Granada
Nicaragua (Iran-Contra)
Panama
Iraq
Somalia
Haiti
Bosnia
Kosovo
Afghanistan
Iraq

How many of those were "wise and necessary?" Half? I very much doubt it.

That, by the way, is 14 wars over 60 years, roughly one war every 4.2 years, and a nearly constant state of war since the Carter Administration.

I offer that quibble about a post I otherwise very much agree with because I think it shows the level to which even Josh Marshall has internalized the ever-present drumbeat of war in the United States press. I call it "ever-present" because, frankly, it is. It seems like very time any attention is given to any kind of crisis in another country, an army of pro-war talking heads takes to the airwaves with the same message:

"Of course nobody "wants" war, but this time it's our moral imperative! We can't just leave them on their own! Their leader is a madman! History has taught us that we should always go to war in this situation! Dulce et decorum est! Cry havoc! For Gondor!"

And we usually go to war when this happens, which is all the time (or apparently every 4.2 years). Not only do we usually go to war, but after we go, people are shocked to find out that:

1. our soldiers are not, in fact, bulletproof ninja superheroes, and tend to die or get horribly injured when people shoot them. Also, they're not robots: being shot at and seeing people blown to bits and/or splattered all over the pavement often screws them up psychologically


2. all that shit we outfit them with and all those warplanes and missiles and tanks and subs cost a boatload of cash


3. all those freedom bombs we drop on the other country kill an absolute shit-ton of innocent people


4. the "happily ever after" story we go in there gunning for never seems to work out


5. it's much, much harder to end a war than begin one because politicians and really suck at avoiding the "sunk costs" fallacy. No matter how bad things look, they always think they can make up for it if they just up the ante [again].

And yet there's nary a pro-peace talking head to be seen, ever. I'm afraid, contra Josh, now is decidedly not different from the norm.

returning to "the South"

Very interesting post from TNC on the sizable and increasing immigration of blacks back to the South and how it is and is not a mirror image of the Great Migration.

Also interesting is the response from readers to some of the places named. Apparently there was some dispute as to whether eastern Maryland counts as "the South," and Matt Yglesias questioned the southern bonafides of Miami, and the inclusion of Texas as a "historic African American population center."

Any attempt to define the boundaries of an area steeped in mythology and wrapped up in political/historical baggage is almost inevitably going to prove difficult. I remember very recently being part of a discussion of "the West" that quickly ran aground when someone asked what states qualify. Is it just the west coast and Rocky Mountain states? What about New Mexico? What about Texas, which is a "southern" state but is nevertheless wrapped up in all the mythology of the West? What about the Great Plains states west of Iowa and Missouri? Surely they aren't "Midwest," right?

Similarly goes the problem of classing states as within or outside of "the South." Is the South essentially the states that had not abolished slavery by 1860? If so, we'd have to include Delaware, and possibly Missouri. Here's one that starts a lot of arguments: is it the states of the old Confederacy? That would exclude Maryland and muddy the cases of Kentucky and Missouri, two states with conflicted populations that enjoyed representation in both the Union and Confederate Congresses.

Is it a question divorced from history, and more about current tendencies in politics, food, sports, accent, and religion? This is the basis by which people vote Florida out of the Confederacy and question the southern pedigree of places like Research Triangle, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia (and by "northern Virginia" we of course mean "most of Virginia"). But hold on: if we're talking about areas full of socially conservative evangelicals who eat a lot of BBQ, watch football, and say "y'all," not only must we include Missouri, but also Oklahoma! And probably Kansas! And New Mexico! And maybe southern Ohio and Pennsyltucky!

I also question whether a place stops being "southern" just because it undergoes cultural and demographic shifts, even significant ones. Miami may have seen a major influx of New Yorkers and Cubans and Midwestern snow bunnies, but are they not allowed to be southern? What, a group of people can move to New York and within a generation or two be "New Yorkers," but they're forever black-balled from the southern club? What about all the people in Miami who are the descendants of slaves and slaveholders? Did they stop being Southern when their Yankee neighbors moved in?

And if the majority of Chicago's south side came during the Great Migration, does that mean the south now includes that part of Chicago?

the death of the arcade

A fun little blog post on the reasons behind the disappearance of the penny arcade. The thesis:

It all came down to the quarter [video game expert Mark] Cerny said. Arcade games had to squeeze enough money out of people to be worthwhile for arcade owners and game makers. But they also had to deliver enough play time to make it worth while for gamers to drop in their money. ... What remains today, Cerny says, is Japan as the single shelter for arcade gaming. And that boils down to their 100 Yen coin.

Of course, not everyone agrees, pointing to consoles, the internet, the existence of the coin loony in Canada (and yet, no more arcades), and LAN parties.

I was a huge video game fanatic from the late Atari through the early N64 years, and I have my own theory to add to the mix: console/pc technology eventually allowed home games to do things you can't do in the arcade model, and those new, irreplicable functionalities became ubiquitous in video games.

Consider, for instance, the first Nintendo. When it released with Super Mario Bros., there was also an arcade version of that game with slightly better graphics, as had happened with Galaga and Pac Man on the Atari. Same thing with ExciteBike and other sports games. I suspect this was an intentional arrangement so video game makers could keep both revenue streams going, and it was the model for a long time.

Then Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. These games were distinct from their predecessors in that they used methods of saving and recalling progress to allow a player to navigate a huge map incrementally over time. These two games felt bigger and more immersive than anything else that had yet come out, and they became two of the biggest selling, most popular franchises in the history of video games.

And the arcade was utterly locked out.

You may remember, then, that the arcade adapted, focusing on the things it could offer, specifically having lots of people in one place and having the space and equipment to house elaborate setups. Thus, arcades around the country stocked up on competitive fighting games (Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat), 4 person cooperative short adventure games (The Simpsons, X-Men), and simulators (Cruisin' USA). Meanwhile, they ceded the market for long-form adventure games and the nascent roleplaying (Final Fantasy) genre to consoles and the strategy genre (Command and Conquer) to pcs. It looked from my perspective like arcades had survived and were doing fine.

Then 64-bit systems started coming out, and it became apparent that the gap in graphics quality between arcade games and home games disappeared, and may even have inverted. Gran Tourismo was probably a more beautiful game than any arcade racing game. Golden Eye could match any arcade shooter.

Then came the advent of internet gaming. People could log into sites like Blizzard's battle.net on their computers, and then even on consoles, to play with or against other people. This new model meant that not only could people play 4 players splitting one screen like at the arcade, but one could play with any number of other players online, all having their own full screen. Competitive gamers found they could get more satisfaction from online first person shooters like Halo than from Tekken-style combat games, and the people who like 4 player cooperative play really liked the new Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs like World of Warcraft, which supports 5, 10, 25, and even 40 person cooperative play.

Thus gamers, the kind of the people who would go somewhere to blow $10 in a sitting over a couple of hours on video games, got hooked on game styles you can't replicate in an arcade setting. Look at the games people are playing now, Wow and Rifts and Call of Duty: Black Ops and Kill Zone and Dragon Age 2 and Just Dance 2. Only the last one could be feasibly rendered in an arcade setting, and you'd have to use a mat rather than the Wii controller. Also, you'd have to dance in public.

Alternatively, one could point to Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies, but you can buy those games for less than $5 on your smart phone. Who would pay to play them in an arcade?

we make great pets

An interesting pair of studies out recently on pets. In one via Discovery News, cats are found to be surprisingly good at reading, and manipulating, their owners:

The study is the first to show in detail that the dynamics underlying cat-human relationships are nearly identical to human-only bonds, with cats sometimes even becoming a furry "child" in nurturing homes.

"Food is often used as a token of affection, and the ways that cats and humans relate to food are similar in nature to the interactions seen between the human caregiver and the pre-verbal infant," co-author Jon Day, a Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition researcher, told Discovery News. "Both cat and human infant are, at least in part, in control of when and what they are fed!"

For the study, led by Kurt Kotrschal of the Konrad Lorenz Research Station and the University of Vienna, the researchers videotaped and later analyzed interactions between 41 cats and their owners over lengthy four-part periods. Each and every behavior of both the cat and owner was noted. Owner and cat personalities were also assessed in a separate test. For the cat assessment, the authors placed a stuffed owl toy with large glass eyes on a floor so the feline would encounter it by surprise.

The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other's behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

Then, in a separate study, researchers found that drug-sniffing dogs are not nearly as effective as believed. Often what the dogs are actually responding to is the subtle social cues of their masters. In fact, according to the study, dogs are more likely to get a false positive because of the owner's hunch even than because of the scent of sausage furtively left on a mark!

It is amazing how well we have molded cats and dogs for human companionship. On the other hand, it may be even more interesting how they have molded us. Take this article, for example:

Dogs, cats, cows and other domesticated animals played a key role in human evolution, according to a theory being published by paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University.

The uniquely human habit of taking in and employing animals -- even competitors like wolves -- spurred on human tool-making and language, which have both driven humanity's success, Shipman says.
...
Dogs, for instance, might have have been selectively taken in by humans who shared genes for more compassion. Those humans then prospered -- a.k.a. reproduced -- with the dogs' help in hunting and securing their homes.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to researchers yet, dogs and cats also reduce their humans' blood pressure, and do so even more effectively than blood pressure medication.

NFL lockout

A very nice writeup here of some helpful facts about the lockout, such as what the sticking points are and what will happen to the players, the draft, etc. if the lockout happens.

Charlie Sheen's a winner. Also, a hitter.

I don't know if Sheen's televised meltdown is the product of a bender or just an act. I don't know if he means the things he's saying. I don't know if this means he's through with TV, or TV's through with him, or if he'll be bigger than ever this time next year.

What I do know, and what's been lost in all the hubbub, and what we all need to remember before we become half-ironic fans of Charlie Sheen, is that he's a serial abuser of women:

In 1990, he accidentally shot his fiancée at the time, the actress Kelly Preston, in the arm. (The engagement ended soon after.) In 1994 he was sued by a college student who alleged that he struck her in the head after she declined to have sex with him. (The case was settled out of court.) Two years later, a sex film actress, Brittany Ashland, said she had been thrown to the floor of Mr. Sheen’s Los Angeles house during a fight. (He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.)

In 2006, his wife at the time, the actress Denise Richards, filed a restraining order against him, saying Mr. Sheen had shoved and threatened to kill her. In December 2009, Mr. Sheen’s third wife, Brooke Mueller, a real-estate executive, called 911 after Mr. Sheen held a knife to her throat. (He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.) Last October, another actress in sex films, Capri Anderson, locked herself in a Plaza Hotel bathroom after Mr. Sheen went on a rampage. (Ms. Anderson filed a criminal complaint but no arrest was made.) And on Tuesday, Ms. Mueller requested a temporary restraining order against her former husband, alleging that he had threatened to cut her head off, “put it in a box and send it to your mom.” (The order was granted, and the couple’s twin sons were quickly removed from his home.)

So no, I won't be putting him on my Twitter feed, thanks.

McDonald's oatmeal

A surprisingly lively internet discussion has arisen from NYT food columnist (and author of the virtually comprehensive reference book How to Cook Everything) Mark Bittman's latest article on McDonald's new offering of oatmeal. Bittman, whose column is called "The Minimalist," is unimpressed:

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice.
...
The aspect one cannot argue is nutrition: Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

Several people from my side of the aisle have surprisingly taken aim at Bittman's characterization of the nutritional issue, most notably Adam Serwer, who points out that at 290 calories McDonald's oatmeal isn't actually that bad on its own.

Here's McDonald's nutritional information chart. I'll point out that the oatmeal also has 5g of fiber. It would cost 5 points on the old Weight Watchers system, for those of you familiar with it. I find it useful because it considers calories, fat content, and fiber. 5 points for breakfast isn't bad. It's less than the whole wheat English muffin, egg, and tablespoon or 2 of cheese I normally have for breakfast (6.5 points).

Of course, the real nutritional threat of McDonald's oatmeal isn't what's in the oatmeal, but rather what's on the rest of the menu. Bittman is pretty close to the mark: in order to get the oatmeal, you have to get in line at McDonald's and then stare at a menu covered in salty, sugary, fatty decadence while listening to a parade of people ordering said decadence, at which point many people will succumb to the temptation of sausage gravy biscuits and fried hash brown disks and hammy eggs Benedict muffins and egg-filled, cheesy, bacon pancakewiches and whatever else they offer.

There's a reason every diet begins with cleaning out your kitchen and every "stop smoking" strategy involves no longer hanging out with your smoking friends. Willpower is not an infinite resource, and if you're faced with the choice your brain is hard-wired to prefer over and over again, you will not make the right decision 100% of the time. And of course, every bad choice makes it much more likely that you'll make that choice again.

from first responders to welfare queens

Ohio police and firefighters are learning a hard lesson this week about the loyalty of the Republican party toward its non-upper-crust supporters.

There's a reason your union predecessors sided with the Democrats, guys. The Republicans may love getting your votes, but there's no room for you at their table. It's the bosses' party, the party of the powerful and no one else. They've never made a secret of it, and you won't get any table scraps because you were their useful idiot.

What, you think your union is different to them? You think they give a shit about you because you protect their homes?

It's interesting how race has warped so many electoral dynamics in this country. Minorities and police, in particular, consider themselves at odds politically. And yet, viewed through an economic lens, it's clear that the Republican party is almost as implacably hostile to public, unionized employees like police as they are to black people and immigrants.

EDIT: Having slept on it, I don't actually think that last paragraph is true.

Mitch Daniels on drugs

Paul Waldman nails Mitch Daniels for his breathtaking hypocrisy on drug laws. It's certainly eye-opening to learn that as an undergraduate at Princeton Daniels was popped for possession of enough pot to fill two shoeboxes, along with LSD and prescription drugs.

Daniels got off with a $350 fine, which as Waldman notes is impossibly merciful by today's standards. If someone else were to do the same thing in Indiana, according to the Clark County prosecutor's website they would be charged with a class D felony, a crime punishable by 1/2 to 3 years incarceration and up to a $10,000 fine. That's just for the weed; we haven't even touched upon the acid or the pills.

We've talked about empathy before on this site. There's another side to empathy, though, there's what happens when you turn that empathetic eye back toward oneself; we might call it "awareness of privilege." Daniels recognizes that he made a bad decision and that it could have profoundly curtailed his future career prospects, but he doesn't seem to understand why he didn't have it worse. There's no consideration here of the role of his race, background, and port of call (i.e, Princeton University) in the incredible leniency with which he was treated, not to mention the privilege of having sown his wild oats before the days of mandatory minimums and enhanced drug penalties that his own party ushered in.

But, of course, Daniels enjoys all manner of privilege in other ways as well. He never had to worry about his career plans being derailed by pregnancy. He never had to attend a struggling inner city school or live in a neighborhood reduced to chaos by the drug trade. His parents could afford one of the finest universities in the country. Nobody assumes that he got into Princeton because of Affirmative Action, or that Eli Lilly was just filling a racial/gender quota.

Former Texas governor Ann Richards once quipped that George Bush "was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." The quote was so devastating in part because it's widely applicable to his entire party.

fun with numbers: Wisconsin edition

This guy does the honors for me:


I will add one small contribution to this conversation, though. In general, income taxes are withheld from each paycheck so no one has to pay it all at once. That means every adult's contribution wouldn't actually be $32 in one fell swoop; it would actually be $2.66 per month.

calling out kids

When I was a teenager, I was very religious. I also came from a place that held a very high regard for "chivalry." Partially because of these things, I held views and made decisions I would not hold or make today.

I don't like that Salon published this story. I read Salon, but I'm always aware that their articles are generally intended as grist for the liberal mill. They're intended to incite liberals and point out conservative idiocy/hypocrisy.

Not that I'm striking some faux-centrist "above it all" pose. I'm liberal. I read Salon because I like those stories!

In this case, though, the person whose words are put under the microscope for scrutiny and, ultimately, ridicule is a 16 year old boy of Pentecostal upbringing having to deal with a situation none of his peers in the state have ever had to deal with before (and, we should mention, with his pastor elbowing his way into the story with his medieval views about touching women in "familiar ways"). Sure, he made a decision I would not make, and made it based on moral/religious premises with which I strongly disagree. Nevertheless, he's 16 years old. He's just a kid. Does he deserve to be strung up by a nationally read magazine for failing to completely re-examine his beliefs and those of his parents, his home, and his church, with his pastor and Lord knows who else whispering nonsense about women in his ear the whole time, all before his 17th birthday? How many of us are ok with being held to account for our teenage beliefs and choices?

That being said, it sucks for the girl that she's not being allowed to prove herself and participate in the tournament she qualified for fair and square. You want to write that story? Cool, but make it about her.

party like it's 1955

Karen finds some examples of lessons from actual abstinence-only sex ed lectures. They're eye-opening.




I expected to hear misrepresentations of data on condom effectiveness, and claims that abortion makes you crazy. I did not expect to hear stories about how making suggestions to boys makes girls unattractive, or an explanation of how boys carry their books so as not to look gay. I think one of the less discussed problems with these programs is the stuff that's not directly related to sex, but rather to gender roles and aptitudes. Girls can't analyze things without their emotions getting in the way? It's boys who seek accomplishment and adulation, while girls really only care about relationships? What does that even have to do with abstinence?

The Choosing the Best course series, from which the knight story was pulled, claims to have already been taught to over 3 million kids. Speaking of, I looked around a bit for some confirmation that these came from actual curricula as opposed to some puritanical teacher speaking off the cuff, and I found the knight story referenced both in the company website's list of revisions, and also in the Waxman Report on abstinence education. The Waxman Report is very skimmable and similarly damning. I recommend a read.

don't become a teacher

That's the lesson from this article in the South Bend Tribune today. Take a look at it. It's a marvelous case study in choosing facts to make your audience jump to conclusions.

I guess it's always important to remember that journalists call their pieces "stories," as in narratives that conform to literary structure and tropes.

What the "story" is just begging us to take away from it, of course, is that Carol Wallace is an overpaid buffoon who doesn't give a hoot about the well-being of her students. No need for nuance when we're talking about the Tea Party's welfare queens!

Am I seriously supposed to believe that a 35 year veteran of the South Bend School Corporation with no prior suspensions actually tried to make two of her students fight, and then up and pimp slapped one of them for apparently no reason? The story is patently ludicrous.

I'll tell you what really struck me about this article, though: it mentioned her salary. I've never seen that before in a "teacher gone bad" story, and it's never been my impression that newspapers routinely report the salaries of their subjects. It also happens to be completely irrelevant, not to mention a breach of Ms. Wallace's privacy!

Anything to get more clicks from the teabaggers, I guess.

Of course, her salary is notable, though not for the reasons Kim Kilbride apparently believes. Carol Wallace makes $61k/year. She has a master's degree, has been with the same employer for 35 years, and works long hours while still bringing lots of work home with her. Her work is not only physically taxing, as she probably stands most of the day between 8am and 3pm, but dangerous seeing as she works in one of South Bend's "troubled" high schools dealing, as we see here, with belligerent adolescents.

Is there any other job requiring that much education, demanding that much of the worker, and compensating so little? She has about as much schooling as an attorney, the workload of a business executive, and a job similar in danger and environment to a prison guard. And after 35 years she makes $61k. The only comparable job I can think of, interestingly, is that of a public defender, a profession similarly -- though not equally -- reviled.

indirect language and relationships

Love these.

what happens when you let the internet vote

An amusing turn of events in Fort Wayne:

"you can't explain that"

And a hilarious new meme is born.

Forget You

I lost interest in the Grammys a few years ago when our resident pop culture-immersed friends skipped town, but this is admittedly pretty cool:

Cee Lo Green, Gwyneth Paltrow- Fck You (Live Grammy Awards)
Uploaded by wonderful-life1989. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Clearly, without question the best song I heard last year.

Super Bowl notes

Great game. Lots of great Super Bowls lately, in fact. It's nice to see the old Midwestern guard of the NFL in the big game, a couple of the teams we've seen so many pictures of from the '40's and '50's, grinding out rugby-style football in the snow.

Adding to some of the conversations around the TV:

*One sports writer apparently tweeted that the first fumble of Super Bowl XLV came from Christina Aguilera. Heh.

*Before coming to Green Bay in 2006, Charles Woodson played for the Raiders. He was even part of the team that played Tampa Bay in the Super Bowl.

*Woodson's injury was more than a dislocated shoulder. He broke his collarbone.

*We weren't the only ones noticing the uncanny resemblance.

*Aaron Rodgers' stats: 24 of 39, 304 yards, 3 TD, 0 Int, and that's considering 4 of those incomplete passes were beautiful throws dropped by receivers. How stupid good are those stats? Stupid enough, apparently, to give him the highest playoff passer rating in NFL history. The previous record holder? Former Green Bay QB Bart Starr.

People are talking about "the torch has been passed" now that Rodgers has his ring. Rather than Rodgers getting a monkey off his back, I think this was bigger for the legacy of Brett Favre. Now Packer Nation can safely say It Was All For The Best and maybe start the process of forgiving Favre for going over to the Dark Side.

*The Chrysler commercial: we heard it again this morning as NPR was discussing it. I've decided now that I didn't like it. I think it was effective in the sense that people are talking about it and still remember what it was advertising. I admit that. I also liked a lot about what they were selling. I liked the hard-scrabble city fighting to pull itself up thing. I liked the contrasts of gritty/refined, Eminem driving a luxury car and ice dancers in parks with smokestacks in the background.

Still, at the end of the day the commercial made the same mistake as previous Detroit ad campaigns: the message was "buy our cars because it's your patriotic duty" rather than "buy our cars because they're awesome."

*The meme. The picture:

American actors not "manly" enough for superhero roles?

So says this article, echoing sentiments I've heard elsewhere lately. What garbage.

First of all, since when have superhero movies relied on "manly men" for their stars? Was Christopher Reeve oozing with machismo? Michael Keaton? And while we're at it, would anyone describe Ryan Reynolds and Andrew Garfield as "manly?" Though comic books themselves tend to "roid up" everyone in them, superheroes aren't necessarily "manly" types. See Spiderman, for example, who's a nerdy college student by day. Superman's alter ego has to pass for a mousy reporter, and Superman himself conforms to a World War II era vision of masculinity that's quite different from our own.

Meanwhile, two of the most "manly" superhero leads I can think of off the top of my head are Punisher and Hellboy. That's Thomas Jane (Baltimore, MD), and Ron Perlman (NYC). Perhaps one could add Wild West-style comic book hero Jonah Hex to the list, and thus Josh Brolin (Los Angeles, CA). Yes, Wolverine should be included as well, but there are plenty of Americans here holding their own against Hugh Jackman.

It's not like there aren't still a shitload of Yanks playing leading/manly superhero roles. Possibly the biggest superhero movies of the last 10 years this side of The Dark Knight was Iron Man. That's Robert Downey, Jr. (NYC). Then there's the last three Spiderman movies (Tobey Maguire -- Santa Monica, CA), Ghost Rider (Nicholas Cage -- Long Beach, CA), Kick Ass (Nick Cage again), Blade: Trinity (Wesley Snipes -- Orlando, FL), the Fantastic Four movies (Chris Evans -- Sudbury, MA, Michael Chiklis -- Lowell, MA, and Doug Jones -- Indianapolis, IN), and the list goes on.

One could perhaps make the case that Brits and Australians are still overrepresented in superhero movies, but that's because they are so in all movies. Remember all the talk about the Australian invasion of Hollywood a few years back with Eric Bana, Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, etc.? The British, meanwhile, have always done pretty well for themselves in Hollywood. Canadians, too.

best sign in Egypt

Heh. As I write this Mubarak's getting his walking papers from the Egyptian people.

It drives home a good point: this isn't about the US, what government we want, or what we should do about it. It's their protest, their government, their dictator. I hope for democracy for their sake, and I think they deserve a better, more accountable form of government, but it's up to Egypt to decide who will rule, and in what form.

getting white and angry in middle America

Because my Facebook wall is covered in idiocy again in light of today's meteorological event, I will break with tradition for a moment to posit an analogy:

Claiming that a snowstorm disproves climate change is like claiming the obituaries page disproves overpopulation.

Trust me, your snide comment about Al Gore doesn't make you look clever.

Tunis, Cairo, and beyond

I guess the most important thing to remember right now is that we don't know what government is going to emerge from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Some are hopeful that this is some sort of Arab Enlightenment, the beginnings of new democracy in Muslim North Africa. Others are worried that militant Islamists will have an opening.

Maybe it's simplistic, but I tend to believe dictators are always worth overthrowing. The possibility of democracy is worth the risk of Islamist takeover.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this "news" segment today, needing a moment to rant. One sympathizes.

In general I'm done worrying about Sarah Palin unless and until she becomes a serious contender for anything important. I feel sometimes like she could come down with a serious case of dementia tomorrow and nothing would change. She could say in an interview, for instance, that Barack Obama's arms treaty with the Galactic Empire robs us of the right to shield ourselves from the Eye of Mordor. The people who still support her right now would find the headspace to fit the new Palinism into their worldview, the rest of us would think she's a blithering idiot, and the press corps would ask the president to respond to her "remarks." There is just nothing Sarah Palin can say that will make her supporters question her competence, and the rest of us have similarly made up our minds about her.

Chewbacca and R2D2: secret Rebel agents?

Submitting this thesis to the readership. In essence, a close reading of Stars Wars episode IV: A New Hope while relying on the veracity of episodes I-III (i.e., the new ones) reveals two secret Rebel agents relying on patsy front men to sell their cover: R2-D2 and Chewbacca.

is abortion "like slavery?"

I see TNC is getting entangled in Rick Santorum's new rhetorical IED:

"Well if that person, human life is not a person, then, I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'We are going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"

Conservatives really like this comparison because it seems like an ironclad way to hoist liberals with their own petard, and I see various ones have already given this comparison their endorsement.

Personally, I still think arguments made by analogy are almost always specious. People usually move from "X is" to "X is like" because they only want you to see this one detail here, not all those inconvenient ones over there.

For example, Coates points out the problems with the "abortion is like slavery" thesis by pointing out that slaves were considered people, just unequal people, and moreover that they were themselves one of the primary agents in their own abolition. It totally glosses over the long struggle of black people escaping slavery and becoming abolitionists, pamphleteering, preaching, and helping other slaves escape bondage via the underground railroad. Thus the "pro-life as abolitionist" model is that of altruistic white men condescending to lift up and extend their own privilege to some helpless, voiceless other, which is understandably offensive to others, not to mention "bad history" as Coates argues.

In this way, Rick Santorum interestingly steps into the same puddle as Hillary Clinton back in '08 when we were all forced to litigate the degree to which Lyndon Johnson (and by extension white America) can or should claim responsibility for the Civil Rights Act. African Americans are very sensitive to this subject because white people tend to understate the role of black people in their own emancipation.

That is all, of course, aside from the more obvious critique that if you decide personhood begins at conception, you're still "deciding who are people and who are not people," and it's not just a matter of setting the start date earlier. If "personhood" includes, say, "the right to make your own medical decisions," there is the wee matter of the mass of flesh surrounding the fetus.

There's yet another wrinkle in Santorum's logic that I thought worth mentioning. Despite the reductionist description of the president as "a black man," Barack Obama is not the descendant of American slaves. There isn't anything in his heritage that would make this issue more acute for him than for Santorum.

"impeachment"

Yeah, people get it wrong all the time, I know. I still would not have expected such a foul-up here, and then a failure from the "editor" to recognize the mistake.

This is all separate from the issue of Joe Lieberman's nauseating sanctimony during the whole Lewinsky scandal. Contra Brooks, it was not one of his finer moments.

Nor does it pertain to David Brooks' perplexing failure to recognize that Joe Lieberman is one of the most vindictive egomaniacs in the entire Senate, changing positions on a dime solely to obstruct the people that he thinks didn't adequately champion his re-election bid in '06. His support of the Medicare buy-in compromise last year, and then blindsiding Reid by reneging on that support just as it was reaching the tipping point in the Senate, comes to mind as one of the most egregious examples.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

the internet catches up with Paula Deen

Paula Deen publishes a recipe for English peas on the Food Network website which, as far as I can tell, is just heating 2 cans of peas in a 1/2 stick of butter. 3 years later, it finally goes viral, and the comments section is something special.

My favorites so far:

I tried it but I thought it might be missing something..... oh yeah, it's a trailer park.

If my can of peas has small Spanish translations under the English text, will they still work for this recipe?

The English peas turned out just great with a little help from my new friend Annette, and went perfectly with Boiled Hot Dog on Hot Dog Bun, in particular, and she's promised to walk me through that one soon. She suggested I work up to it with one of Chef Deen's intermediate recipes first, though, like Opened Bag of Chips Adjacent to Opened Can of Dip.

If these were truly English peas, the recipe would have included making sure that you overcook them till mushy and all "pop" is gone from them. But I liked this recipe anyway. Although I didn't have any canned peas, so I dug through my freezer for frozen ones. Finding none, and with my butter already melted, I decided to slice up some bananas lengthwise and cook them in the butter, but it needed a little smidge of something, so I dumped half a cup of dark brown sugar in there, which was absolutely lovely, but simply not showy enough, so I tossed in some banana liqueur and a splash of rum. Of course, since I cook on a gas stove, I probably shouldn't have shook the pan so vigorously because the rum lit on fire and the whole dish burned until all the rum cooked off. But I spooned it over some vanilla bean ice cream and called it good. It was good. Will try Paula's recipe again in the future (with my modifications, of course!

Which half of the 1/2 stick of butter should I melt?

This reminds me of when I used to eat with my Aunt and Uncle back in my home town. She'd open a can of k'luth, which is Bachi for peas. Some times we wouldn't know what we would get because we lost our translator droid during the previous harvest.

I took helpful tips from one of the reviewers and I had something that came out exactly like Bananas Foster! Yum!!

House votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act!

O no!!

As I read one person say, perhaps now they'll move to repeal the president and the Senate.

Perhaps they should repeal the 2006 and 2008 elections, and the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt. Or they could bypass the whole need to repeal the health care law by just voting to abolish sickness and death.

I wonder if they'll hold a vote to officially designate Democrats as the party that's ugly and stupid and smells funny. I bet Dan Boren (D-OK) would vote for it. Maybe they can attach a rider that disowns San Francisco and Massachusetts.

In all seriousness, though, in a way it's the perfect way to usher in the Republican congress. The Democrats ran the most productive House in ages, and one that dealt seriously with substantive issues. Like the results or not, they tackled difficult questions on health care, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, economic stimulus, and other major issues. Their first big splash legislation was the Lily Ledbetter Act, which made a tiny modification to an existing law but with huge implications, stating that the 180 grace period for filing a lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act resets with each discriminatory action.

The Republican congress, on the other hand, purports to make a massive, sweeping change in the lives of the people, repealing the ability of college graduates to stay on their parents' insurance, allowing insurance companies to begin dropping you from their coverage if you get sick, re-establishing the Medicare donut hole, and repealing tax credits for small businesses that contribute to employee health insurance, all while increasing the debt by $500 billion over the next 10 years. In reality, however, the vote does nothing. Political theater utterly lacking in substance. It really is the perfect foil for the Democrats and President Obama, who have enacted real reforms over the last two years, but are pathologically, infuriatingly* incapable of scoring political points.

*Yes, infuriatingly (and no, I don't care if that's not really a word). It isn't a compliment to say Democrats are incapable of scoring political points. Not scoring points is how we got a Republican House in the first place. The Affordable Care Act's popularity sank as low as it did because Democrats were completely unwilling to defend it. What, was it supposed to speak for itself? Where were all Democrats insisting that the CBO says it cuts the deficit? Where were all the accusations that Republicans want to reopen the donut hole? That they're in the pocket of the insurance industry? That they care about shareholders more than voters? That they're anti-retirement? That they want to work Granny to death? Where were the rallies in front of those Wal-Mart parking lots where poor people are getting root canals right there on the pavement like refugees?

John Boehner doesn't care about sick people!

perceived vs. actual threats

An interesting point via Grist. I've noticed last year there was some discussion "out there" about the topsy-turvy way people -- and parents in particular -- perceive danger. This sentence illustrates it well:

...the five things most likely to cause injury to children up to age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are: car accidents, homicide (usually at the hands of someone they know), child abuse, suicide or drowning. And what are the five things that parents are most worried about (according to surveys by the Mayo Clinic)? Kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers and drugs.

Of those, of course, car accidents far outstrip everything else, accounting for some 30% of teen fatalities. Those fatalities, by the way, occur more frequently in rural/exurban areas than urban/inner suburban ones, as shown by this map from the CDC website and this UVA study cited in the Grist article.

Ironically, parents often react to illusory danger by subjecting their kids to actual danger, e.g., driving their kids around to prevent them from walking and public transportation, or escaping the hordes of drug pushers, terrorists, and shifty strangers of the cities by moving to the gun-ridden, car-centric, condom-eschewing exurbs.

Our relatively new parental culture of keeping kids in sight at all times must be hell on single parents. My mother let me walk home from school every day at least partly because she had little choice, what with school letting out fully two hours before her job. I suspect being a "latchkey" kid fostered in me a sense of the outside world as a safely navigable place, which perhaps ultimately led to my independence in junior high and willingness to take long road trips in high school and college. It may even have had a hand in my choice to go to Ireland alone for my junior year rather than the group study abroad programs that everyone else joined. It's still the best decision I ever made, and those trips to Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, New Orleans, and Durango are some of my fondest memories.

If Mom made that choice to start letting me walk home from school today, she'd probably be reported to Child Protective Services.

bipartisanship, a dish best served cold

It's been quite a lame duck session, has it not? What was supposed to be a legislative winding down of the 111th Congress saw the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ratification of the New START Treaty, and a tax cut package no one seems to know what to make of, as well as serious pushes of a 9/11 worker health bill and the DREAM Act.

What's been most interesting about it has been the sudden flood of Republican "yea" votes in the Senate, where none have been seen in years it seems. The usual suspects who've flirted with bipartisanship in the last few years -- i.e., the three New England Republicans not named "Judd Gregg" -- finally started following through, and even Gregg himself put his country first on START. We also saw a few one-offs from erstwhile party men like Bob Corker.

And then there are the Democrats' new best friends, Republicans who voted for several Democratic initiatives who've never cottoned to anything with the slightest whiff of donkey before. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Dick Lugar (R-IN) voted for the DREAM Act and the START Treaty. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Arlen Specter (?-PA) voted for all three. Yeah, that's right: the DREAM Act, a bill laying out a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, got votes from a Utah Republican and an Alaska Republican.

Lugar's harder to figure out (he's quite old, and may be headed for retirement), but Murkowski, Specter* and Bennett share a particular something in common: they were both primaried this year and lost. It's interesting to see that Senators are normally this petty, and it isn't just a particular personality who radically changes his voting patterns to get revenge on party leadership after such an event. Not sure, however, if it's comforting or disheartening.

*I suppose technically Specter lost the Democratic primary, but he was only in that party because he'd been driven out of the GOP by Senator-elect (ugh) Pat Toomey.

the difference between President Obama and President McCain

Next time you want to say Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, is just another moderate Republican president, remember this moment. Remember this reaction to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell from the man whose biggest weakness in the 2008 Republican primary was that he was too liberal.

guilty of some crimes, innocent of others

When considering the moral consequences of a news story, when distinguishing the faces from the heels, it helps to learn to distinguish relevant facts from irrelevant ones. For instance, there's no inherent contradiction in Roman Polanski being both a brilliant filmmaker and a child rapist.

This is important when looking at all this Wikileaks stuff, too. If you take my view, Julian Assange is providing an important service by keeping a website for whistleblowers to publish their material. Whistleblowers keep the government honest, as their presence is a major incentive not to cut corners or allow corruption to set in. Plus, of course, the act of whistleblowing is often the only method by which corruption is rooted out and stopped once it has taken root, and the only way to ensure someone is held accountable. Nothing disinfects like air and light.

[A side note: whistleblowers often give up much more than just their careers for their country and their integrity. Bradley Manning's mind is currently being destroyed by extended solitary confinement in Quantico (8 months and counting) for his contribution to Wikileaks.]

It is perfectly possible, however, that a man on this crusade against the invisible, unelected, secretive powers that rule our world also raped two women. The accusers have gone public, and the charges are serious:

The first complainant, a Miss A, said she was the victim of "unlawful coercion" on the night of 14 August in Stockholm. The court heard Assange was alleged to have "forcefully" held her arms and used his bodyweight to hold her down. The second charge alleged he "sexually molested" her by having sex without using a condom, when it was her "express wish" that one should be used.

A third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on 18 August.

A fourth charge, relating to a Miss W, alleged that on 17 August, he "improperly exploited" the fact she was asleep to have sex with her without a condom.

Is it possible that this was all a multi-government conspiracy to shut down Wikileaks? Uh, I guess it's theoretically possible, but which is more likely?

• Three different governments conspired to convince two of Assange's ex-lovers to concoct false rape stories in order to provide the pretense to arrest him, throw him in Gitmo and shut down his website


• the dude raped two women, and also happens to run a famous whistleblower clearing house website

C'mon, seriously.

compromise wins

I don't normally care much for his work, but Steve Kornacki at Salon nails this one:

As part of the deal, expiring unemployment benefits for millions of Americans will be extended for 13 months. Just as important, there is now a real prospect that the Senate will act on repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and ratification of the START treaty before this month's lame duck session ends. Is extending tax cuts for the richest Americans (and blowing another hole in the deficit in the process) a steep price to pay for all of this? Absolutely. But that's politics: Obama took the best deal he could possibly get...

...Note that the deal also includes a reduction in the Social Security payroll tax and an expansion of the earned income tax credit and the college tuition tax credit. This is on top of the extension in unemployment benefits. These measures have one thing in common: They are stimulative in nature.

McConnell and Kyl, being the odious, nihilistic saboteurs that they are, held the entire lame duck session hostage over rich people's tax cuts. Among the things held hostage? Unemployment insurance, meaning that if Obama played chicken with the Republicans and they didn't blink, millions of people could have had their last monetary lifelines cut just in time for Christmas. Obama could not let that happen.

Was there really a chance the GOP would have let unemployment insurance expire? Well, Republicans did just get elected partly on angst over entitlement spending. Besides, Republicans and conservatives are ideologically unfriendly toward such generosity in the first place. You tell me.

And besides, what's the endgame there? The Republicans could always just let the lame duck session end and then bludgeon the Democrats over letting everyone's tax cuts expire. Then when the new Congress convenes, pass the tax cuts all over again and dare the Democrats and Obama to vote against them. Democrats get hammered several times on the same issue and get nothing in return. No unemployment insurance, no additional stimulus, no START treaty, no DADT repeal, nothing.

By admitting Republicans have the upper hand and compromising on tax cuts, however, Obama was able to extract a fair amount of stimulus out of the deal and broke the logjam for potential work on DADT and the START treaty. I'm not a fan of tax cuts as stimulus, but when the choices are stimulus via tax cuts and nothing at all, you take what you can get. If either of the other things passes, so much the better.

Furthermore, Obama kept the tax cuts from becoming permanent. Will relitigating the issue in 2 years just mean Obama loses again? Maybe, and yes a 1 or 3 year extension would have been better politically, but at least there's a chance sanity could win out next time.

the Wetzel Plan, 2010 edition

We do it every year here, highlight Yahoo! columnist Dan Wetzel's plan for a 16 game playoff in college football like the one played in division II. It gives automatic seeds to all 11 division one conferences, with 5 at-large bids that would normally be chosen by a panel of experts a la the NCAA basketball tourney (for the purposes of illustration, Wetzel goes with highest seed). Each game is played on the higher seed's home field, with the championship game on neutral ground. This year:

It's something, isn't it? In the first round, we're looking at Michigan St. at Arkansas, VA Tech at Ohio State, and LSU at Oklahoma, and it just picks up from there. TCU would face off with the winner of VA Tech-Ohio St., Oregon would get the winner of Oklahoma-LSU, and we'd get a potential Michigan St. at Auburn matchup.

One of these days, hopefully.

Close the Washington Monument

Here, here.

courts and banks as partners in crime

A very helpful article here from Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on the mortgage-backed securities crisis, the foreclosure crisis that it spawned, and how banks are getting out from under their own bad decisions by fraudulently kicking homeowners out on the street, and all with the help of the judicial system.

There are several truths coming out of this story that I think most people have a hard time coming to grips with. The first is that, as I and others have said before, Americans have been trained since It's a Wonderful Life to think of bankers as accountants when we should be looking at them as used car salesmen. They're not trying to protect your interests, and their bottom line no longer depends on your prosperity. Remember for a moment that banks are also credit card companies and tell me they're not just trying to get you on the hook for as much as possible.

The second is that nearly every case of foreclosure in the United States now happens because the judge allowed the bank to commit fraud. Banks so completely f**ked the normal system of titles and paper trails with the whole mortgage-backed securities debacle that they can't prove which mortgages they own, and rather than try to untangle that Gordian knot of securities, they just forge the paper trail. If the judges were to insist on proper paperwork, two things would happen:

1. There would be no more foreclosures


2. All the big banks would fail. All of them.

TSA admits it punishes people who opt out of body scanners

Amazing. From Consumer Traveler:

TSA officials commenting for the article, “added that checkpoint requirements for passengers departing from the United States haven’t changed since the underwear bomber incident last December.” That suggested pat-downs were still the same as they had always been.

However, when meeting with privacy officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and TSA later that month, I was told unofficially that there were two standards of pat-downs. One for the normal situation where passengers are going through metal detectors and a different pat-down for those who refuse to go through the whole-body scanners.

With this latest announcement, TSA admits that it has been clandestinely punishing passengers for refusing to go through the invasive whole-body scans with an even more intrusive aggressive pat-down and that soon those more invasive pat-down will creep from airport to airport.

What does "more invasive" mean? At some airports, this. It also comes with verbal abuse from TSA agents, as recounted by Jeffrey Goldberg during his own encounter.

Welcome to George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman's America.

coverage for me but not for thee

Great story from Politico about an anti-health care bill freshman congressman demanding his government health care now that he's in congress. The real juicy part:

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange...

“Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.

I and many liberals have often found it striking how conservatives of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing the gravity of other people's problems until they are forced to deal with them personally. This is, I think, why conservatives reacted so loudly to President Obama's employment of the word "empathy" when describing the traits he wanted in a Supreme Court justice. It's a word liberals have been bludgeoning them with for generations to the point that it's become dog-whistle for "not a conservative hypocrite." It's the liberal retort to the conservative "bleeding heart" jab.

Maddow vs. Stewart on the news

It's actually pretty rare for us to be treated with an interview between two brilliant people who are neither ideological/tribal cohorts nor opposites. This is a real treat; I think Jon Stewart has a lot of insights about media and politics that he can't really articulate in a direct way on his own show, and Rachel Maddow is best interviewer on television. To adapt a quote from Steve Earle, "and I'll stand on Bill Moyers' coffee table and say that."

Thanksgiving tips from NYC chefs

Cool article from the Times. Carving the bird beforehand to keep from drying out the breast? I can't believe that never occurred to me! There are some awesome-sounding recipes with the articles, too.

interesting math

Anyone else find it interesting that the presidential commission charged solely with tackling the budget deficit recommended tax cuts for the wealthy?

extending the smoking ban

From the South Bend Tribune:

On Tuesday, County Council member Mike Kruk, D-District E, introduced a proposal to expand the countywide smoking ban to include bars and restaurants.

Currently, both types of establishments are exempt from the ban under certain conditions.
...
In addition to bars and restaurants, the proposal would also ban smoking in private clubs and tobacco bars, and eliminate smoking rooms at places of business.

It would continue to exempt private residences, retail tobacco stores, designated hotel and motel rooms and outdoor areas at workplaces.

Smoking bans are interesting politically because they cut across lots of traditional ideological and tribal lines. It's also a place where I think reasonable people can disagree, and where an honest discussion has to account for tradeoffs.

Is a smoking ban an infringement on people's personal liberty? Yes!

Do smoking bans save lives and improve public health? Yes!

I've sometimes wondered just how united restaurant and bar owners are on smoking bans. As vocal as bar and restaurant owners are about not wanting to drive the smokers away from their businesses, in my experience it's much more common for nonsmokers to refuse to patronize a place than smokers. You have to figure there are some owners who privately hope for the chance to finally tell people not to light up without having to take the blame for the decision.

Walk Like an American

A really interesting post from James Fallows on the apparently idiosyncratic American gait. I remember experiencing something similar in Ireland where I several times was pegged as an American the second I walked in the door despite being of 100% English and Irish stock, wearing only clothes from Irish department stores and having yet to utter a single word.

What really strikes me about the article is not that it pegs the American gait as unique but that it pegs it as black. Note this bit from one of the quotes:

Carl Jung said that white Americans walk like Negroes, talk like Negroes and laugh like Negroes. Now Carl Jung was from Switzerland, where they make the real white people.

Not sure what to say about that. I like the thought, though.

pot legalization

I was pretty shocked to read this from Josh Marshall this morning:

...I just don't know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it's that I'm getting into my 40s. And maybe I'm a hypocrite. I of course know people who smoke grass. And I don't have any problem with it. Decriminalized? Yes, I think probably so. But that's not the same as legalization. It's very different actually. And let me be clear that I think our drug laws are catastrophic. They create endemic violence first in our major cities and now along the borders and it's led to generations of Americans rotting in prison. The whole war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster. And the fact that people can't use marijuana for clear medical reasons is crazy. But do I think it should be like alcohol? Anyone over 18 or 21 can buy it?

Ok, I get that pot legalization may not be something Marshall has thought much about, but this stikes me as shockingly misplaced priorities from someone who's usually a pretty clear thinker.

Andrew Sullivan takes him to task:

How to rationalize the irrational? From the post cited, I'd say Reason One is: I'm older. Reason two: er, see Reason one. What Josh seems to be saying is that he wants pot de facto legal but closeted. But like most closets, this one requires a shame that simply isn't there any more - and has not been for decades now. And any illegality is bound to end up hurting the poor and minorities to a disproportionate extent. It's not unenforced. It's enforced brutally upon hundreds of thousands of people. It's okay to sit there mulling how uncomfortable fully legal pot makes you, as long as none of your friends is thrown into jail, or forever barred from employment, or fired for no reason related to work performance. Josh's view reminds me of the argument of those who backed sodomy laws but didn't want them aggressively enforced. They didn't want to throw people in jail, but they wanted the stigma to remain. Yes, stigma. For one kind of pleasure (being stoned) as opposed to another (being drunk).

Never thought I'd be agreeing with Sullivan over Marshall, but he's absolutely spot-on here.

Atrios used to make fun of people who want abortion to be illegal but aren't willing to carry the logic over to saying someone should actually go to jail or anything over it. As he put it, what they really want is for the state to officially deem abortion "icky." I think Marshall is falling into the same trap here.

At the end of the day, either pot is contraband or it isn't. Contra Marshall, there is no magical middle ground, no official federal designation of "ickiness." It will either be bought in a convenience store and marketed by Philip Morris, or it will be bought on the street and will continue to serve as the golden goose for every cartel in Mexico and the cause of thousands of murders every year across Central America and the southwestern United States. Being caught using it either will appear on your rap sheet, forever branding you a drug user and giving every employer an excuse not to hire you, or it won't.

Decriminalization is a cop out; it doesn't change anything.

The consensus is in

Brian Kelly couldn't make them a championship football team in 8 games, therefore Notre Dame is DOOMED FOREVER. DOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Also, the peanut gallery in the South Bend Tribune, a real think tank of football coaching wisdom, are now confident that Kelly will be fired. This year.

What's funny is that, when Kelly was hired, the consensus in the Tribune and in the wider world of sports punditry was that it would take him several years to build a good team in South Bend. He's implemented a very different offensive scheme, despite Michael Rosenberg's moronic assertion that Weis and Kelly have the same "philosophical approach" because they're both "passing coaches." He'd have to get his kind of recruits in there. He has to change the program's culture, shift it away from players playing for a ticket to the NFL, away from lax conditioning and defeatism.

It may be true that the sun has forever set on Notre Dame as an elite football program, that there are now insurmountable structural barriers in BCS football separating the big state schools from everyone else. If that's true, though, we'll know at the end of Kelly's term, not the beginning.

that's some nerve

Evan Bayh, fresh off of abdicating his Senate seat in the middle of a Republican wave year and keeping his $10 million warchest so the Dems can't use it to keep the seat, writes an op-ed lecturing Democrats on why they lost. Apparently the Democrats lost because they didn't govern according to the lesser Bayh's personal political stances. Surprise!

I just love rhetorical games like this:

Exit polls in 2008 showed that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as liberals, 32 percent as conservatives and 44 percent as moderates. An electorate that is 76 percent moderate to conservative was not crying out for a move to the left.

Really? What about an electorate that is 66 percent moderate to liberal?

Goodnight, Russ, and good luck

The silver lining of a Republican wave year is that a lot of bad Democrats lose their seats. Though we need the senate seats, I'm not even a little bit sorry that blue dogs like Brad Ellsworth and Blanche Lincoln are losing their jobs all over the country. I've predicted since last year that my own blue dog congressman would get ousted tomorrow, and I'm standing by that prediction with horror at the prospect of Congressman Walorski, but no love lost for ol' Joe.

There is, however, one Democrat whose impending electoral demise I will be mourning bitterly on Wednesday. That voters who have known him for 18 years would ditch him now for being "a Washington insider" drives home just what poor judges of character voters can be. He's one of perhaps 2 people I would have voted for in the 2008 primaries over Barack Obama. You've done amazing work these last 18 years, Russ Feingold. Godspeed.