Month: July 2010

by Patrick Appel

Manzi tallies points in his recent climate change to-and-fro with Bradford Plumer et al. I missed Mike Konczal's contribution until just now. He notes that Nordhaus tried to calculate non-GDP consequences of global warming by comparing how much the population enjoys skiing (which warming will decrease) and camping (which warming will increase):

There’s something kind of oddly endearing to framing the future of how much carbon we are willing to put in the air and how much warming we are willing to experience as a population based on camping versus skiing time surveys from 1981. For this cost-benefit analysis to work, we need to quantify everything, and the moment we step outside the world of the welfare of international industrial production to the world of our bodies and our lives the methods break down.

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews Christopher Nolan's latest:

[I]n this end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precision engineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has always been a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded such technical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken the form of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structural ingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies of the past 25 years. His last movie, The Dark Knight, was also his messiest, with flaws that included a collapsing final act. Yet it, too, perhaps in part thanks to that messiness, found unexpected grandeur and gravity in its subject.

For all its elegant construction, Inception is a film in which nothing feels comparably at stake. (In this it resembles Nolan's The Prestige, another admirably heady tale of perception and reality that never quite found a hearty emotional grip.)

by Dave Weigel

Ta-Nahesi Coates pushes back on my "NAACP tea party resolution backfires" theory:

To the extent that the NAACP has, as Dave says, "failed," it is because the arbiters of facts have ceded ground, and reporters and writers dutifully, and uncritically, dispense the notion that an organization which helped birth modern America has "a long history of…racism." But it also fails because there is very little pushback on this notion from "sensible" liberal writers. (I don't include Dave among them, mind you.) Instead we're getting calls for the president to condemn the NAACP, essentially, for being the NAACP. 

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they're wrong for making it. But they're only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

You know, I don't disagree with this. Coates and I are writing from different places. I don't think the way that the NAACP's resolution was covered was good at all. I don't think any racial issues are covered well, least of all "debates" like this where the press creates a point-counterpoint between Ben Jealous on one end and Mark Williams on the other. It was with that assumption that I said this would "backfire."

In the long run, will it backfire? I don't know. Conservatives who disagree with the NAACP have no tolerance whatsoever for being called racists or supporters of racism. Past NAACP attempts to shift the debate by using tough rhetoric — I am thinking of Julian Bond calling some conservatives the "American Taliban" — are remembered today not as things that shifted the debate, but things that torqued off conservatives and justified their suspicions about the NAACP. This doesn't seem fair to them. How is it fair that bringing up the 2000 election's result reveals them as bitter conspiracy theorists, while Tim Pawlenty intimating that Sen. Al Franken may have been elected by felons is just proof that he's a smart pol looking at 2012? It's not fair. I guess I'm more a defeatist than Coates is.

by Patrick Appel

Noah Millman wonders whether economics should remain the primary focus of Libertarian politics:

I would argue that, over the past thirty years, there has been a vast increase in appreciation of the importance of free markets across the political spectrum. Yes, government spending has spiked way up in the past two years as a consequence of the financial crisis and the recession (TARP, ARRA) – but discretionary non-defense spending is still much lower as a percentage of GDP than it was in 1980. The health care reform passed in this congress reflected a move to the “left” by the country – but it reflected a move to the “right” by the “left” inasmuch as it reflected conservative criticisms of past left-wing health care overhaul plans such as President Clinton’s failed first-term effort.

Socialist parties in Europe preside over efforts to overhaul their welfare states to make them more efficient and responsive. Private sector unionization in the United States continues to drop, down to 7.2 percent in 2009. While very recently there’s been a revival of enthusiasm for regulation (particularly of the financial sector), the overall trend has been of more and more widespread acceptance of basic insights from economics that are part of a libertarian’s stock in trade.

So, yes, libertarians should find a friendlier home in the GOP if their priority is pushing the traditional GOP agenda of low taxes and weaker regulation of the economy. But should this be their priority?

by Dave Weigel

It's just a happy coincidence, I guess, that he publishes this as I get ready to polish off a week of blog posts.

[T]here are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as "a subspecies of goat."

Fortunately, this new system enjoys the services of tens of thousands of fact-checking "citizen journalists" who write "comments." They will read the Uzbekistan story and instantly alert everyone that BARACK OBAMA IS A LIEING PIECE OF CRAP.

I basically like "comments," though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

Buy his new anthology when it comes out in September.

by Dave Weigel

Ed Barnes has the lede of the day, if only by accident: 

The chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party called Thursday for a massive, eleventh-hour investigation into allegations of illegal voting by felons in the state's bitterly contested 2008 Senate election.

OK, somebody help me with this. "Eleventh-hour" means, basically, in the final stages of something. The shot clock is ticking down. The egg timer is about to ring. The video is almost done buffering. And so on. So how do you do an eleventh-hour investigation into something that happened 20 months ago? This is a yoga backbend by a reporter who needs to pretend that the the story he's writing makes sense. I mean, here's Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.)'s comment on a conservative group's report — which everyone admits is flawed and undoubtedly includes false positives.

Referring to Minnesota Majority, which conducted the voting study, Pawlenty said: “They seem to have found credible evidence that many felons who are not supposed to be voting actually voted in the Franken-Coleman election. I suspect they favored Al Franken. I don’t know that, but if that turned out to be true, they may have flipped the election.”

They "may have," says the governor who watched a three-stage legal process unfold over eight months and signed the Democratic winner's certificate of election. Come on, this is hackery unbecoming of a potential president of the United States. You don't let an ideological group play games with the rule of law, no matter how much you dislike the fact that the Duluth Answer Man is now a U.S. senator.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I hope the couple who are struggling with their sex life after using the NuVa ring have gotten off of hormone-based birth control altogether. Many women experience a nosedive in desire when they are on that stuff. The real way hormonal forms of birth control work (for many) is by making the woman not want to have sex. Some reading on this.

Another writes:

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the note from the fellow whose wife has pain with intercourse. This is for him or can be posted as a public service announcement. Or neither.

I’m going to guess that his wife has vulvar vestiblitis. I, unfortunately, know a lot about this condition because I was born with it. It can absolutely mess with your head, especially when you discuss with doctors (as I did) and they suggest it’s mental and suggest psychotherapy. At my worst, I thought I was frigid and should let my husband go.

How is this woman trying to recover, I wonder? I hope she’s not just waiting it out and going it alone. Once I got a name for my condition (eleven years after I realized I had a problem), I went on a mission: I researched my guts out, found a doctor who specializes in vulvar pain, read "The V Book" by Elizabeth Stewart, and charted my symptoms. I also found an immensely helpful online support group.

For what it’s worth, I discovered that the pill killed my libido and made everything worse and that my symptoms peaked when my estrogen levels dipped. Use of Estrace, a topical estrogen cream, got me about 80% cured. I’m now at closer to 90% thanks to, of all things, childbirth.

Others have found success with Neurontin, certain types of anti-depressants (for physical, not mental reasons), testosterone cream, biofeedback, capsaicin cream, and others. There's even surgery as a
treatment of last resort.

Maybe this couple are doing/have done all of these things. But in case they haven’t, they should know that there is treatment and information out there, and that physical problems of this nature can lead to mental ones. It's a vicious cycle of misery.

Finally, sympathy goes a long, long way. It would be most helpful if while the wife seeks treatment, the husband takes intercourse off the menu and focuses on other ways of pleasing and being pleased. “Sex” means more than a single act. My gut instinct is that forgoing monogamy is not the solution to this couple's situation: it sounds like what they need is a good doctor and a good couples’ therapist to unpack years of damage.

I know this isn't what the thread is about. But whenever I sense that a secret and shameful medical condition is causing such misery, I start making PSAs.

by Dave Weigel

The heart-achingly moronic "spat" between Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney tells us how. The rundown, if you can stand it:

THURSDAY: Anonymous aides to Mitt Romney tell Mark Halperin that Palin is "not a serious human being" and will be in trouble in a debate where the "answers are more than 15 seconds long."

FRIDAY, 6:47 a.m.: Politico's Andy Barr publishes comments from "a longtime Palin aide," who gets eight paragraphs to unload on Romney and pump up his/her boss: "She’s not a finger-in-the-wind kind of leader."

FRIDAY, 10-something a.m.: Romney's Twitter account (written by him? written by someone else?) friendly-fires on the first aides as "anonymous numbskulls."

How many people were directly quoted in this spat? None, unless you count the Romney Twitter account. Andy Bar hustled in getting those quotes from Mysterious Palin Aide of the Deep, but his talent is wasted when he plays kid who whispers the gossip about the popular kids to the less popular kids. It's stuff like this that informs my dark, dark suspicion that 2012 will be more about nonsense than policy, and that people who think Palin needs to bone up on policy don't get this.

by Patrick Appel

The first reader quoted in this post e-mails again:

I agree that it would be better if the bureaucracy had some incentive to save money, and being allowed to keep saved money, to use for some other need in another year, is vastly better than flushing money near the end of the budget year. When I was in my Master of Public Administration program a few years ago, I learned about how the city of San Diego had taken that approach, and it does work. Whether it works in a time when budgets are tight and people are looking for money that would otherwise be available but isn't due to tax receipts being lower than expected  (this is at the state level, not national, where Congress can just borrow money) remains to be seen.
 
Also, consider your suggestions in the context we all live in.

Many members of Congress, which appropriates money, also argue that the bureaucrats are ruining the country and blame them for problems that Congress creates. Those bureaucrats are there to administer the laws that are passed. Seldom does anyone in Congress or at the state level ever ask 1) does this proposal make sense, 2) is there a better way to do it, and 3) do we still need to do this at all. Instead, decisions about what is funded and to what extent is based more on what the lobbyists and other special interests say they need, with little thought given to how the bureaucracy has to manage the outcome.
 
Finally, do you really think that the Congress would be willing to cede its authority to appropriate funds to a bunch of people they generally refer to as losers? Ronald Reagan did some good things for this country, but using the bureaucracy as a foil and perpetuating the notion that all bureaucrats are lazy and wasteful doesn't make for an environment where they would ask those same people to be part of the solution, I think.