by Conor Friedersdorf
If you're willing to sit through a 25 second ad you can watch Glenn Reynolds interview Radley Balko about the criminal justice system. It's good to see Mr. Balko's work getting deserved attention — especially given CNN's refusal to credit him for his work.
by Hanna Rosin
A new Whole Foods opened on the Upper West Side today, the New York Times reports. Some single payer street protesters showed up, who are annoyed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing Obama Care.
The opening of a new Whole Foods store on the Upper West Side on Thursday has been interpreted in various ways. Some people in the neighborhood welcome the wide selection of expensive groceries and organic items that the upscale supermarket chain represents. Others bemoan the continuing gentrification of the neighborhood
The question of Whole Foods and health care is a complicated one that the Dish has addressed before. I think people have often mistaken Mackey as a movement leftie, when he is actually an off-the-grid vegan type, and therefore obviously leary of government intervention. My question about this news item is much more basic: The Upper West Side is not already gentrified?
by Patrick Appel
Leon Wieseltier defends Rahm Emanuel:
Differing with Benjamin Netanyahu does not yet make you a bad Jew. If Emanuel is a self-hating Jew because he believes that Israeli settlement in the West Bank should finally cease, then I, too, am a self-hating Jew. Perhaps you will agree, friends, that this is not very plausible.
by Patrick Appel
NIAC argues against the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act:
The politics of fear is the bread and butter of Iran’s hardliners. But now, President Obama’s outreach to Iran has deprived them of their perennial boogeyman as the divisions in Iran’s political system have cracked open.
Imposing sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, which has widespread support, would only enable the hardliners to once again be able use the specter of a foreign threat to justify domestic repression and consolidate its support.
Imposing broad sanctions on Iran will likely only weaken Iranian civil society and bolster the state’s repressive apparatus – just as it did in Iraq.
by Andrew
Orrin Hatch composed a song to honor his late friend, Senator Kennedy. I know not what else to say:
by Conor Friedersdorf
Adam Serwer capably fisks Andy McCarthy on torture.
by Hanna Rosin
Ann Hulbert writes in DoubleX about how Kennedy's own "good ending" was so different than the model he proposed for prudent health care reform:
When you think about it, the ailing Kennedy’s own end-of-life decisions seem like every American’s ideal, hardly an advertisement for overhauling a system that makes such options possible. First, he got to choose the intensive treatment he wanted—surgery, chemo, and radiation—although his tumor was judged inoperable and lethal, and although he was diagnosed at 76. And then he got to die a dignified death, not trapped in a hospital, but saying farewell to family, friends, and dogs on Cape Cod. No one would dream of begrudging him his “good ending,” as the Times called it; it is inspiring. But perhaps the Senator wouldn’t mind if, as we pay tribute to the valiant close to an impressive career, we also note how much his “prudently aggressive” medical approach must have cost, and how unusually lucky he was in the way it played out.
by Chris Bodenner
Megan says the "hysteria" over protesters bringing assault rifles near the president is "ludicrous":
Numerous people claim to believe that this makes it likely, even certain, that someone will shoot at the president. This is very silly, because the president is not anywhere most of the gun-toting protesters, who have showed up at all sorts of events. It is, I suppose, more plausible to believe that they might take a shot at someone else. But not very plausible: the rate of crime associated with legal gun possession or carrying seems to be very low.
Zengerle counters:
Look, just on a basic level, the Secret Service's capacities aren't infinite: protecting the president is hard enough in normal circumstances; throw in the job of making sure gun-toting protestors don't have a sight line on the president, and the agents' jobs become that much more difficult. Even if the gun-toting protestors whose rights McArdle is defending pose no harm to Obama, keeping a constant eye on them takes up resources–resources the Secret Service might need to thwart people who do mean to do harm to the president.
I, like other free-speech nuts, am appalled by "protest pens." But there should probably be "gun pens." Secret Service doesn't have to worry about signs and street puppets.
by Patrick Appel
Marissa Brostoff speaks with Melvin Konner, "an anthropologist, physician, and the author of Nextbook Press’s The Jewish Body." His take on the CDC possibly recommending circumcision:
I have to say that in the United States, the public health argument is weak compared to the right of people to decide whether to do it or not. There is clear evidence that circumcision reduces HIV in Africa, and I think it’s a good idea to promote male circumcision in Africa, where AIDS is devastating whole countries. But in the United States, there’s not a clear and pressing public-health advantage to circumcise. And the intervention is great. It seems to change sexual pleasure; it certainly changes the appearance of the penis. People in different cultures have different aesthetic values around this. And that doesn’t seem to be considered in the cost-benefit analysis. They’re not thinking about the cultural issues and the sense of imposition that this could have for some people.
Freddie makes a related point but goes on to say that "HIV is most certainly not a pandemic in the Western world," and that the threat to heterosexual non-IV drug users is greatly exaggerated. A third of HIV infections are heterosexual and in certain regions of the country, such as DC, heterosexual transmission is ahead of male to male transmission. African-Americans also have much greater risks. This is not to argue for or against circumcision, I'm agnostic on the issue, but under-emphasizing the risk to certain heterosexuals is a greater sin that exaggerating it. Matt Steinglass also joins the debate:
Men who are circumcised don’t complain about it. There may be some vanishingly small number of guys who are upset about the fact that their parents circumcised them. It’s a weird thing to be upset about. The whole issue of treating this as some kind of mutilation of a rights-endowed human being who should be allowed to decide for himself seems to me like an insane metastasis of the American fixation with individual rights-based ideology. Children are born into families. Those families have cultures and beliefs, and are entitled to make decisions about how their children will be treated, shaped, and raised.
I've never seen any statistics on the number of circumcised men who are upset about having the procedure preformed on them, but judging from the Dish inbox they certainly exist.
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