Month: July 2010

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, the NAACP leveled the racism charge at the Tea Party, tea-partiers punted on the DOMA ruling, Jesse Jackson played the slavery card over LeBron, and Susanna Ferreira warned us about anticipated violence after the Cup. In Palin coverage, Dave Weigel went after Andrew's take on Trig, Michelle Cottle marveled at her media strategy, Tim Mak downplayed her PAC haul, and readers doubted her ability to maintain a campaign staff.

Weigel, blogging from a remote island in Alaska, covered the NAACP uproar, clarified the record on the New Black Panther case, showed how the GOP is getting aggressive for Byrd's supposedly safe seat, and wished Rand Paul wasn't so boring now. David Frum, our other guest, dwelled on the state of libertarianism, addressed the prisoner problem in America, drew a deeper lesson from the NewsRealBlog row, praised a new pro-Israeli group, noted Limbaugh's new digs, and suggested a website (as did Weigel).

In other coverage, Greenwald dug up more examples of people praising Fadlallah, Andrew Napolitano called for the indictment of Cheney and Bush, and Nick Kristof confessed to constructing a "Western savior" narrative. Pot-blogging here. A reader joined Andrew Sprung in tackling Social Security reform and another sympathized with cops. Ryan Avent undercut the mythologizing of manufacturing, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman claimed the decline of creativity, Dan Ariely explained behavioral economic, Wilkinson shouted a libertarian solution to healthcare, and Patrick talked rhetoric. Some final installments on the monogamy thread here and here.

Cool ad here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. A particularly fun window contest here. 

— C.B.

Redeeming Prisoners

by David Frum

The Hip Hop Republican site takes on a cause that ought to be of huge concern to conservatives: the American prison system. 

In the 1990s, the US achieved amazing success against crime, in large part thanks to a new willingness to send more criminals to jail longer. "Incapacitation" is the technical term  for this strategy, and it worked. But incapacitation occurs at a huge human and financial cost. It's not cheap to lock up millions of people for long periods of years. Sooner or later, most of them do emerge – and what happens to them then? 

Currently, approximately 2 out of every 3 former inmates return’ to prison within three years of release. Helping inmates find and sustain employment immediately after release diminishes their chances of recidivism. Working towards a reduction in recidivism is important because keeping offenders from re-entering the penal system means less crime and less tax dollars (which can be saved and/or reinvested by the tax payer).

Most of the aid that offenders receive are through public funds from the federal government and philanthropic organizations which donate monies to non-profits and state agencies to help defray re-entry costs. Ex-convicts are typically placed into low-wage jobs and often quit due to the patience required for delayed gratification through legal work and/or lack of familial support.

Past experience with rehabilitation programs has been disheartening. In the 1970s, it became conventional wisdom that "nothing works." I'm not going to quibble with the success in public safety achieved by incarceration. But if compassionate conservatism means anything, it should mean support for research and experimentation to discover if maybe after all there is something that might work even a little better than writing off as valueless the lives of 3 million fellow-Americans, disproportionately minority and especially disproportionately black.

Would Hayek Vote For Obamacare?

by Patrick Appel

Will Wilkinson thinks not:

Singapore, I think, has the closest thing to the sort of system Hayek had in mind. Among wealthy countries, it spends the smallest percentage of GDP on health care, and it gets about the best results. You know what that’s called? Efficiency. How do you get it? Competitive markets with freely moving prices under the rule of law! It’s the sort of thing you’re in favor of if you want everybody to have access to really good health care and money to spend on things other than health care.

“Am I A Manufacturer?”

by Patrick Appel

Avent tweeted last week that "something about the word ‘manufacturing’ makes people lose their analytical senses." He expands on that thought:

There is a sense that people seem to have that the making of things is an activity crucial to a modern economy. It’s crucial because a country that can’t make things is vulnerable to trade collapse. It’s crucial because a country that can’t make things is likely to lose its economic edge. It’s crucial because without manufacturing you can’t export. And it’s crucial because manufacturing jobs, everyone knows, are high-paying jobs that provide a good living to people with limited education.

I don’t think too much of this. Economic activity isn’t about satisfying the demand for objects, it’s about satisfying demand, period, and people demand many things that have little to do with assembly lines and smokestacks — hair-cuts, mixed drinks, financial advice, dentistry, and so on. These activities are important. If they weren’t important, people wouldn’t be willing to pay lots of money for them.

Will Legalizing Pot Double Use?

by Patrick Appel

We have no reason to think so:

RAND at least tells the truth in the report about not knowing anything. Which is good. But given how the press loves fresh meat, it appears that they then had to go ahead and give projections that they knew were pulled out of their asses, and that they probably knew would be misused in the press.

African Victims, Foreign Saviors

by Patrick Appel

A couple months back, Texas In Africa asked Nick Kristof why his columns "about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims, and white foreigners as their saviors." Kristof's candid answer:

I do take your point. That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there.

And let me tell you why I do that. The problem that I face — my challenge as a writer — in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I'm writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that's the moment to turn the page. It's very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that. One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.  And so if this is a way I can get people to care about foreign countries, to read about them, ideally, to get a little bit more involved, then I plead guilty.

Texas In Africa is unsatisfied:

In the end, this answer is just another variant of the "good intentions are enough" mindset. It excuses stereotyping in the name of awareness, while assuming that Americans are too parochial to be able to recognize, relate to, and applaud the work of people whose names sound different from ours. It reveals much about Kristof's approach to the people he profiles; as we've discussed here many times before, they're more often characters than people.

Mr. Kristof, I think you can do better.

Silence On The DOMA Ruling

by Chris Bodenner

Some green shoots from the Tea Party movement:

The silence is by design, activists with the loosely affiliated movement said, because it is held together by an exclusive focus on fiscal matters and its avoidance of divisive social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Privately, though, many said they back the decision because it emphasizes the legal philosophy of states' rights…

"I do think it's a state's right," said Phillip Dennis, Texas state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. The group does not take a position on social issues, he said, but personally, "I believe that if the people in Massachusetts want gay people to get married, then they should allow it, just as people in Utah do not support abortion. They should have the right to vote against that." Everett Wilkinson, state director for the Florida Tea Party Patriots, agreed: "On the issue [of gay marriage] itself, we have no stance, but any time a state's rights or powers are encouraged over the federal government, it is a good thing."

I can't believe I find myself praising the Tea Party over the NAACP today.