Month: April 2009

Apologies again. Typepad's new platform seems to be the culprit. It also contains no option for blockquoting, believe it or not, one of the most common features on all blogs. The feature existed in the last iteration (does any blogging platform not provide a blockquote option?) – but the geniuses at Typepad actually removed this basic feature, while adding countless new bugs and glitches, as part of an "upgrade". I'd say that the new Typepad has added around 20 minutes of extra work a day and doubled the likelihood of human error.

Tyler Cowen goes there:

If you take the heterosexual couples who engage in the practice which is sometimes “associated” with male gay marriage, I predict those couples will favor legal gay marriage to an astonishingly high degree.  Their marriage is already “affiliated” with that practice, and so the notion of legally married gay men (and the practices which go along with that) does not constitute an extra and unwanted affiliation for their marriage ideal.

My related 2003 article is here.

The Banks have passed Geithner's stress tests. Yves Smith doesn't buy it:

We said from the beginning the stress tests were a complete sham. Just look at the numbers. 200 examiners for 19 banks? When Citi nearly went under in the early 1990s, it took 160 examiners to go over its US commercial real estate portfolio (and even then then the bodies were deployed against dodgy deals in Texas and the Southwest). This is a garbage in, garbage out exercise. The banks used their own risk models to make the assessment, for instance, the very same risk models that caused this mess. And there was no examination of the underlying loan files.

Maybe the debate will turn again:

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a signed photo of Saddam Hussein by US marines after the former Iraqi leader was shown their movie in prison. During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan.

For the three Dish readers who are unaware of South Park’s Saddam, a little flavor (Saddam is consigned to live for ever in Heaven surrounded by Mormons) is after the jump:

"Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, or lesbian," – Bayard Rustin, close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, 1986.

Did I to remove and stigmatize key members of families and ensure that they will never have access to the same rights as their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers.

Remember: civil marriage for gay couples is not some kind of liberal special right. It requires no concession from anyone else; it requires no individual recognition from anyone who disapproves; it coerces no one; it taxes no one; it spends nothing; it takes not an iota from the rights and dignity of heterosexual marriages, which gave birth to gay people and give many of us our sense of morality and duty and civility. If the right is concerned about religious freedom, please reach out to those of us who favor civil equality and free speech and help protect both. But no, this is not what they are interested in, preferring to construct ads in which actors pretend to be people allegedly persecuted by gays for being Christians. Really, this is pure animus at this point – a decision to define a political movement by the people it excludes and the families it despises.

The next generation sees this most clearly, although plenty of fair-minded older folk see the cruelty and obtuseness involved here. What we have seen on the right since their devastating and deserved loss last November is a worsening of their bitterness, a calcification of their ideas, a poisoning of their discourse.

May they enjoy the fruits of their anger; and may the rest of us be saved from its logical conclusion.

I was scarfing a Five Guys burger yesterday late in the afternoon – good times – when I glanced over the op-ed page of the Washington Post. I read this piece by Michael Gerson, chuckled and scoffed a little and then went on my merry way to the gym. But it’s the kind of piece whose layers of flim-flam and chutzpah take time to impress themselves on the mind. 

Here’s the premise, a premise which, despite its rank untruth, will, if I know anything about how these people work, be repeated again and again and again. Drum roll:

Who has been the most polarizing new president of recent times? Richard Nixon? Ronald Reagan? George W. Bush? No, that honor belongs to President Barack Obama.

Now we know the poll they’re referring to. It’s Pew’s poll. Over to Nate Silver:

[M]easurements of the partisan split in support for the President, as Pew Research has done here (they found a record partisan split in Obama’s approval ratings, with 88 percent of Democrats but just 27 percent of Republicans approving of Obama’s performance) are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. This is because partisan identification is at least somewhat fluid. The Republicans, in particular, have lost quite a bit of support over the past several years; those persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened — and very conservative — lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten.

When you look at it this way, you discover what is really going on. Nate again:

Obama and Bush had roughly the same level of support among members of their own party (88 percent for Obama, 87 percent for Bush) and roughly the same level of support among unaffiliated voters (57 percent for Obama, 56 for Bush). Bush, however, had more support from the opposition party (36 percent of Democrats versus 27 percent of Republicans). And yet Obama, not Bush, had the higher overall approval rating, because Democrats are a significantly larger constituency than Republicans.

The key to judging whether a president is polarizing is how the middle, or Independents, are seeing him. The reason is simple. A president might be as open to engagement as possible, but if his opposition is determined to destroy and demonize him from Day One, he can’t do much about that. But independents give a better sense of whether the president is forcing the center to divide into two poles. So here’s Obama’s current independent support:

Compare that with the Democrats and Republicans. The polarization being touted by Rove and Wehner and Gerson and the rest of the Bush left-overs is almost entirely a function of Obama’s astonishing popularity among Dems, buoyancy among Independents (whose approval rating is very close to the national average), and extremely polarized and shrinking pool of Republicans. To interpret that as Obama’s fault, rather than a function of GOP extremism and disaffection, whipped up by Fox and Drudge and Pajamas and the rest of that machine, is, well, Rovian. But it is a reminder of what alone can keep the Bush-Rove GOP alive: the same old, ancient culture war debate that Obama offers us a chance to move past. They will do all they can to keep dividing this country until they see some signs of progress for their operation. That’s all they’ve got.

Marc believes that the government can convict most high value detainees without evidence obtained from torture:

Reporters with better sources than I might want to see if they can figure out (a) the number of detainees the DOJ believes were tortured and b) of those who were tortured, those for whom the government has little other evidence. I suspect that there are very few HVTs who fit into both categories. Of course, if the government's not confident it can try these folks, what will become of them?  I'm not sure the Obama administration knows at this point.