Month: May 2009

Sotomayor, Racist?

This might not be the best line of attack:

Unfortunately for her and fortunately for us there are plenty of things that we've even talked about her already. I'm telling you, she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist in any other context … You can still be a racist and have all those things in your background. You can be a racist and have all that stuff in your background.

Putting Tom Tancredo front and center against Sotomayor must be the Obama administration's dream come true. The critique of her seeming preoccupation with her heritage nonetheless seems valid to me, but it's also a little – how does one say this? – 1995. The underlying arguments about affirmative action are still relevant, of course, but their salience seems less potent now. I'm not sure why – perhaps the war and the recession and the debt make the intensity of those fights seem like a luxury of a time of peace and prosperity and fiscal sanity. Perhaps Obama has made racial diversity less threatening to some. I see nothing in her record to disbar her from her seat so far – and one should remain aware that many special interest groups on both sides have a financial interest in stoking polarization whether it's merited or not.

How Bad Was Gitmo?

Jeff Tietz posts part two of teenage detainee and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr's story (read it all):

While he was at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr was beaten to the head, nearly suffocated, threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely, and lunged at by attack dogs while wearing a bag over his head. “Your life is in my hands,” an intelligence officer told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003.

During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. The man spat in Khadr’s face and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria—places where they tortured people the old-fashioned way: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa—Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Forcing The Market

Ted Gayer righteously and rightly attacks biofuels:

Supporters of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) also claimed that it will reduce greenhouse gases. Both Speaker Pelosi and then-President Bush said the bill will help reverse global warming. Indeed, much of the early enthusiasm for biofuels was based on the belief that their use would reduce greenhouse gases. It is true that burning biofuels results in less tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases relative to burning petroleum. Yet this ignores the increase in emissions that results from the production of biofuels, especially the land use changes as farmers convert forest and grassland into cropland for biofuel production. An article published in Science magazine in 2008 found that “corn-based ethanol nearly doubles greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” Another article in Science concluded that crop-based biofuels create a “biofuel carbon debt of 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels.”

Hewitt Award Nominee

"Sotomayor may have changed her views since her college days, though her record obviously indicates consistency, but perhaps what's most striking is that on the issue of diversity, Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl — that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true 'vanguard of societal ideas and changes,'" – Michael Goldfarb, who championed Sarah Palin last fall.

The Rise Of The Datarati

Steven Levy profiles Google's chief economist, Hal Varian. Worth reading:

Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it's all about harnessing supply and demand. "What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices—decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math.

Scoop Culture And The Professors

Felix Salmon, using a Brad DeLong post as a springboard, explains why academics have taken to blogging more easily than many journalists:

“Situating your work and your contribution in the ongoing discussion” is exactly what bloggers do — and it’s something that journalists find very difficult. Being original (the fetishization of the “scoop”, even if it’s only by five minutes) is vastly overpraised in journalism, and journalists as a group tend to imbue everything they do with an incredible amount of secrecy. Try asking a magazine writer what she’s working on: she probably won’t tell you. After all, you might scoop her!

I think Brad’s insight helps explain to a very large extent the reason why academics took to the blogosphere with so much more alacrity than journalists, and why journalists-turned-bloggers can be pretty stingy with links and hat-tips, at least when they’re starting out. And of course it helps explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Bloomberg to bar its reporters from even discussing “media competitors”, let alone linking to them.

Debating A Bud

Freakonomics holds a quorum on decriminalizing pot. Jeffrey A. Miron, director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University’s economics department:

Legalization would benefit the public purse. My research indicates that legalization would save federal and state budgets approximately $13 billion in enforcement costs and allow collection of about $7 billion in tax revenues, assuming marijuana were taxed like alcohol and tobacco. One thing legalization would not do is produce a major increase in marijuana use; existing evidence suggests prohibition has only a modest impact. Alcohol consumption declined moderately but not dramatically during alcohol prohibition, for example.