Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel

Today is the 75th anniversary of prohibition’s repeal. Radley Balko celebrates:

Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives’ grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably.

It did reduce overall consumption of alcohol in the U.S., but that reduction came largely among those who consumed alcohol responsibly. The actual harm caused by alcohol abuse was made worse, thanks to the economics of prohibitions.

Black market alcohol was of dubious origin, unregulated by market forces. The price premium that attaches to banned substances made the alcohol that made it to consumers more potent and more dangerous. And, of course, organized crime rose and flourished thanks to the new market created by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.

By Patrick Appel

I’ll do my best to keep some semblance of normalcy around here while Andrew gets much deserved rest. I’m always working behind the scenes reading, writing, researching, and arguing with Andrew. On any given day I work on twenty to thirty of the posts you read. I will be manning the inbox; please continue to send window views, dissents, corrections, tangents, rants, and thinly veiled threats to the regular account.

I’m taking a few days off the grid, for my long-delayed post-election coma. My trusty colleague at the Dish, Patrick Appel, will be filling in. Patrick already contributes so much to the Dish, acting as an extra pair of eyes and ears and often, more sober judgment than I sometimes exhibit (yes, the Dish has often intense internal debate – especially over Down Syndrome babies). He really is a core pillar of this website and as the last year has gone by, I cannot imagine doing it without him. He’ll be joined by Chris Bodenner, a Dish alum, and constant emailer of tips and Youtubes and news stories. They’re both what is now becoming a slowly growing graduated class of alums of the blog. It’s been on of the greatest of many pleasure at the Atlantic: a community of sorts, building this site into the best it can be.

I’ll be back by next weekend. I figure a gnome with a Nazi salute is a suitable send-off.

James Joyner proposes yet another alternative to DC statehood:

The remaining part of DC was donated by Maryland.  Give it back to them, minus a carve-out for the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, and Mall…If Maryland won’t have DC back, simply count DC residents as part of Maryland for the purposes of U.S. Senate representation and allow them to vote for Maryland’s two Senators.  Give them a House seat that’s counted as a “Maryland” seat but whose boundaries are fixed and excepted from the Baker v. Carr rule of equal size.  (This may require a Constitutional amendment but strikes me as within the spirit of the Constitution, since representation would still remain with states.)

James Joyner has a round-up of responses to the debate Ezra and I have been having over nationalized health-care.

A reader writes:

As a woman who is the mother of 2 grown kids, I know what emotions can be involved. Palin was 43 or 44 when she had Trig.   Her children were almost grown up and she was going places in her career.  She gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be.  Guilt.

Guilt and denial do things.  She was obviously in denial for a long time, maybe she, and I stress maybe, she toyed with the thought of aborting or hoped to miscarry.  That alone would make the guilt unbearable for her being a religious far right person. Women who go into denial over pregnancy have been known to even diet to keep from showing for as long as possible.   Older women are no different from teenagers in some respects.  The emotions are the same.  And Palin is somewhat immature anyway. The mind does strange things when traumatized and this can be with an unwanted pregnancy.

She is enjoying her freedom as she is less tied now to small children and beginning a new life in her career and verging on the national scene and coming into her own. Being in your 40s is a great time for women who are seeing their careers blossom and their children no longer in so much need and getting older. I am no fan of Palin’s. I think she is an idiot. Have since the beginning. But, as a woman, I can see why she may have behaved so strange. I did notice during the campaign that she seemed to not want to be saddled with the baby and had other hold him alot more. She is still in denial somewhat.

Many news stories said so and I linked to them. Here’s an article very skeptical of the claim.

A reader writes:

I have lived and worked in the US and the UK. In the summer of 1999, I disappointed a work client by deciding against a planned move from the UK to the US.  I had my visa in place, I had scoped out housing and childcare.  In the end, I didn’t think it was worth the trouble of moving my family, with a young son and a baby daughter, thousands of miles away from friends and relatives.

A few months later, my 4-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia.

Had I moved to Chicago, the three-year chemotherapy nightmare would have been accentuated by constant worries about insurance.  My job was a good one; I would have been covered as long as I kept working.  But the company was an IT startup, and in fact did downsize after a while. Like to bet your kid’s health on staying in work? Staying in the UK I found other clients, cut my hours right back, and intermittently stopped working altogether, to care for my family. He got three years of world-class treatment, without any question of payment.  Many years later, he continues to be very well, and I continue to believe that we dodged a bullet by staying in the UK.

“It’s not that you don’t want to earn as much money as you can — it is your obligation, of course — but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday’s game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in,” – Barry Diller.