Month: July 2010

The supporter of a presidency that claimed unlimited power to detain anyone, including citizens, without trial, and torture them until they gave the government the answers they wanted, is now posing as a tea-partier! Yes, the defender of total executive power and abrogation of habeas corpus and sliming those lawyers wh defend terror suspects … now presents himself as a latter-day John Adams. Look: you can't see these people lack chutzpah. And a man in an administration that increased spending during a boom more swiftly than any administration since LBJ also has no problem with attacking Barack Obama for the expense of a stimulus package and a bank bailout that saved us from the Second Great Depression. Being a Republican apparatchik means never having to remember, explain, apologize or take responsibility for anything.

He then praises the British Tories' austerity budget – and on this we can agree. But a quarter of the deficit reduction came from taxes. Which taxes would Thiessen raise? And what spending – on such a massive scale – would he actually cut?

We do not know. Because the point of his columns is not to propose anything. It is to find some way, any way, to attack the new president grappling with the enormous problems bequeathed to him by the man Thiessen worked for. Why? That's his job – and always has been his job. He's a partisan propagandist, a protege of Helms and Cheney. Why he is regarded as a journalist by the WaPo – and Dave Weigel isn't – is beyond me.

Sam Biddle, a recent Philosophy grad, continues to describe his NYC job search:

I am not entirely sure what networking is, and I’m not sure anyone else is either. I am somewhat sure that I am not doing it. I’ve been given the gist of it before. I know that it’s all about meeting the right people, and making new contacts, and following up and other italicized things. L___ takes it upon himself now and then to explain it to me—frustrated, exasperated—how one can turn a stranger into an employer. L___, who graduated with me, has a very good job, and is in a constant state of networking. He networks on the toilet. He networks during acid rain storms. Were the Nazis invading Manhattan he would network to the bitter end, and might even extract himself from the ensuing occupation with a few deft emails.

Hale Stewart searches for a cause:

Productivity is still increasing. This means businesses are still getting more and more out of their existing workforce. Because of high unemployment, there is the added benefit of lower wages/salaries. From a business owner’s perspective, this is a win/win scenario.

Bernstein tries his best to convince Sharron Angle to get some new material:

No one is going to vote against Barack Obama in 2012 because he voted "present" in the Illinois Legislature, before he served in the United States Senator for four years, and before he served as President of the United States of America. No one is going to vote against Barack Obama for re-election because he doesn't have the experience to be president.  Really.  Trust me on this one: it's not going to be a winning argument. 

Will Wilkinson plays devil’s advocate and argues against birthright citizenship. Abolishing it is unlikely to happen – it would require a constitutional amendment – but the EU’s immigration experiment is still worth highlighting:

The EU’s shortcomings, from bureaucratic micromanagement to a floundering common currency, have obscured its great practical and moral triumph: the dramatic expansion of European mobility rights and the inspiring integration of the continent’s labor markets. When Britain opened its labor markets to Polish workers in 2004, the gap in average income between the two countries was about as big as that between the United States and Mexico. But per capita GDP in Poland has improved markedly since then, hastening the day when Poland provides a robust market for British goods – and possibly British labor, too. Similarly, by 2012, Romanians and Bulgarians, who are on average poorer than Mexicans, will be able to live and work in rich countries such as France, Germany, and Britain. It’s worth noting, however, that not a single EU country has a birthright citizenship rule like that in the U.S.

Yglesias is a bit confused as to why Wilkinson believes ending birthright citizenship will increase immigration. Will clarifies:

My guess is many Americans would have less of an objection to the presence of Mexican immigrants, authorized or unauthorized, on American soil if that presence did not tend to create so many new citizens and thereby so many new claims. Right-wingers constantly say they wouldn’t mind higher levels of immigration if it wasn’t for the welfare state. Some of these people are just rationalizing their xenophobia, but I think most of them mean it. I’m just taking the logic of that claim seriously, and I think the experience of other countries shows that there’s something to it.

Elsewhere on the immigration front, Balko applauds Jeb Bush and Robert Putnam’s “debunking the myth that there’s something uniquely threatening to American culture from Hispanic immigrants.”

From Reihan's nuanced take: 

Family forms have always been diverse, Ozzie-and-Harriet was always an imperfect portrait of family life for many if not most Americans. Yet the fact that the balance is shifting even further away from two-parent households is going to stretch public resources to the limit.

E.D. Kain is more upbeat.

Brendan Koerner profiles AA:

As dependence grows, alcoholics also lose the ability to properly regulate their behavior. This regulation is the responsibility of the prefrontal cortex, which is charged with keeping the rest of the brain apprised of the consequences of harmful actions. But mind-altering substances slowly rob the cortex of so-called synaptic plasticity, which makes it harder for neurons to communicate with one another. When this happens, alcoholics become less likely to stop drinking, since their prefrontal cortex cannot effectively warn of the dangers of bad habits. This is why even though some people may be fully cognizant of the problems that result from drinking, they don't do anything to avoid them.

Jonah Lehrer takes a second look at the neurological mechanisms at play.

The NAACP endorsed California’s marijuana legalization bill last week. A report on marijuana arrests among minorities explains their rationale:

Young blacks and Latinos use marijuana at lower rates than young whites. So why are police in California arresting young blacks and Latinos at higher rates than young whites, and at greater numbers than their percentages of the population? Based on our studies of policing in New York and other cities, we do not think the arrests are mostly a result of personal bias or racism on the part of individual patrol officers and their immediate supervisors. Rather, this is a system-wide phenomenon, occurring in every county and nearly every police department in California and elsewhere. Police departments deploy most patrol and narcotics police to certain neighborhoods, usually designated “high crime.” These are disproportionately low-income, and disproportionately African-American and Latino neighborhoods.

It is in these neighborhoods where the police make most patrols, and where they stop and search the most vehicles and individuals, looking for “contraband” of any type in order to make an arrest. The item that young people in any neighborhood are most likely to possess, which can get them arrested, is a small amount of marijuana. In short, the arrests are racially biased mainly because the police are systematically “fishing” for arrests in only some neighborhoods, and methodically searching only some “fish.” This produces what has been termed “racism without racists.”

Scott Morgan opines:

Our marijuana laws have never, and will never, be enforced fairly. The brutality of modern drug enforcement reaches every community, but if young white men were given criminal records and subjected to profiling and police harassment at the same rates as people of color, the criminal justice system would quickly come to a crashing halt. The drug war was built on a foundation of fundamental unfairness, and mitigating its catastrophic impact on communities of color requires measures far more drastic than telling police for the millionth time that there’s more to their job than searching young black men all day and night.

(Photo: A woman wears a Marijuana hair slide during a rally in support of the International Day for the Liberation of Marijuana, in Mexico City, on May 8, 2010. By Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images.)

A Professor of Cancer Biology writes:

I would say that it's OK to pray for Hitch as long as you don't tell him. To tell him you are praying would be malicious. The STEP trial established that intercessionary prayer per se was ineffective either positively or negatively as long as the patients don't know about it. However, patients who know that they are being prayed for do measurably worse than the unprayed or ignorant of prayer.

Savannah, Georgia, 9.47 am