Month: September 2010

Is this really a wise use of tax dollars?

Catherine Rampell summarizes a new study:

Incarceration reduces former inmates’ earnings by 40 percent when compared to demographically similar counterparts who have not been imprisoned, according to a new report from Pew’s Economic Policy Group and the Pew Center on the States. The report estimates that after being released, former inmates typically work nine fewer weeks a year, and their annual earnings drop  to $23,500 from $39,100. Not surprisingly, given the stigmatizing effect that a criminal record can have on a job applicant’s resume, former inmates enjoy less income mobility than counterparts who did not serve time.

A positive sign that the US may at some point join the ranks of most civilized nations in not forcing American citizens to choose between their country and the person they love. I fear, however, that the Democrats, as usual, will sacrifice the gays for some other goal in any legislative compromise. We are, for that party, increasingly two things: a source of money and a bargaining chip with Republicans.

Today on the Dish, Andrew fisked both parties on the looming fiscal crisis. Larison countered him and called it political poison. Andrew needled Goldblog on Israeli settlements, rejected Cowen's predictions of a backlash against marriage equality and marijuana, and slammed Jonah Goldberg on education reform.

Immigration reform might actually include gay men and women, Rob Tisinai pulverized NOM on Prop 8, McWhorter urged Long to come out, and Dan Savage's project could teach a lesson to school officials. Ben Adler and Ramesh Ponnuru debated the GOP's Pledge to reference each bill's Constitutional justification and Obama couldn't convince Massie on his assasination program. DeMint might fill the Palin vacuum, conspiracy theorists established their own "fact checks," and Larison critiqued Limbaugh on mass American culture. Matt Steinglass argued for raising the recruitment age for war, pot legalization could save the budget, and a stable of today's thinkers reacted to the question of what future generations will condemn us for.  

Colbert made Catholics proud, atheists schooled everyone on religious history, and Michael Klarman argued that we as a country, moreso than the Constitution, determine the world we live in. Wetlands are endangered, and even the VFYW was subject to history's cruel lessons. Readers corrected the record on booing Palin, and on the first Hispanic quarterback.

We played with model-morphosis, secretive texting endangered lives, and Don Draper's sexy shoulders signaled the end of men. Hewitt award here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here, and Dissent of the Day here.

–Z.P.

Over the weekend, Kwame Anthony Appiah asked what "future generations [will]  condemn us for." He suggested industrialized meat production, treatment of the elderly, the prison system and abuse of the environment. I'd add reparative therapy for homosexuals; and the torture regime conducted under the administration of Bush and Cheney. Douthat adds another: "that a century or so hence, breakthroughs in laboratory-created meat substitutes will have put an end to the killing of animals in general" and that this change will make "present belief in the moral acceptability of meat-eating seem hopelessly barbaric":

Note, though, that I’m envisioning a technological leap as the catalyst for this shift.

… The cotton gin launched a thousand pro-slavery polemics. The birth control pill convinced millions of people that the old moral consensus on sex and marriage was outdated and even absurd. The idea of legal abortion became more popular as the procedure itself became safer — but then opposition to abortion stiffened as medical science gave us a clearer picture of life growing in the womb. The moral arguments for vegetarianism and veganism have gained ground in the contemporary West because subsisting on those diets is easier for modern Westerners than for many earlier peoples.

Wilkinson's crystal ball is a bit foggier:

My suspicion is that most of us would be quite surprised by the things our grandchildren will condemn us for, and that the more our predictions amount to praise for our current, farseeing moral enlightenment, the more sceptical we ought to be.

Tyler Cowen suggests "an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion." Electro-convulsive therapy comes to mind.

(Photo: Inside barren, restrictive gestation crates, pregnant pigs are unable to turn around—or even move more than a step or two. For nearly four months, they languish in these cruel enclosures. Pigs have the same intelligence and emotional development as dogs. From the Humane Society Of The US.)

In its Pledge to America, the GOP notes, "We will require each bill moving through Congress to include a clause citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified." The passage makes Ben Adler of Newsweek uncomfortable:

Not so harmless, however, is the promise to require every bill to be certified as constitutional before it is voted on. We have a mechanism for assessing the constitutionality of legislation, which is the independent judiciary. An extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress is dangerous even as a mere suggestion, and it constitutes an encroachment on the judiciary.

Ramesh Ponnuru cries foul:

There's nothing — nothing in the Constitution, nothing in Marbury v. Madison, nothing even in Cooper v. Aaron — that suggests that congressmen cannot consider the constitutionality of laws while voting on them. That they can do so, which one would have hoped would be a banal idea, does not even challenge judicial supremacy: The courts can still be the final arbiter of constitutionality. The Pledge provision in question is "extraconstitutional" only in the trivial sense that the Constitution neither requires nor forbids it. And the provision is better understood as a spur to congressional self-restraint than as a "limit" on congressional power.

A reader writes:

This "It Gets Better" video is from the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.  It features members talking about their experiences growing up in high school and how life got better for them afterward.  At the end of the video, the Chorus sings "Irish Blessing" in honor and memory of those LGBT teenagers who left us far too soon in the hope that in the future people will live.

A group video from the Castro here.

Massie is unpersuaded by Obama's defense of his assassination program:

It's true that many more people would be jumping up and down if this sort of thing were happening under President George W Bush. Indeed, you can make an argument that Obama's actions are worse than Bush's since a) he wasn't charged with cobbling together a security framework in the confused, panicked aftermath of 9/11 and b) he actually, you know, once campaigned against quite a lot of this stuff. 

But a single American al Qaeda terrorist in a foreign country actively waging war against us seems to me to be a pretty isolated example. And Obama always said he would fight a war against al Qaeda more ruthlessly than Bush. As he has. I agree that invoking state secrets so comprehensively as to prevent any scrutiny of this is a step way too far. But I do believe we are at war; and that killing those who wish to kill us before they can do so is not the equivalent of "assassination". My concern has always been with the power to detain without due process and torture, not the regrettable necessity of killing the enemy in a hot and dangerous war.

It’s getting choppy out there for the ever-more-extremist GOP. In Alaska, the Palin candidate is getting a run for his money from write-in Lisa Murkowski. Money quote:

“It looks like Alaska Democrats may be planning to do some strategic voting. Nearly four in ten Democratic likely voters say they plan to write in Murkowski’s name. That’s an indication that a lot of Democrats are more interested in defeating Miller than they are in electing a member of their own party.”

Palin-loathing is growing in her own state. Meanwhile, this is not exactly going to help the GOP with the Latino or the Tea Party vote:

Gloria Allred claims when [Whitman’s] housekeeper was hired 9 years ago through an agency, Whitman never asked if she was in the U.S. legally. And, during her employment, Santillan told Whitman she couldn’t travel to Mexico. And, Allred said, Whitman found out Santillan’s Social Security number didn’t match her name, but Whitman did nothing… That all changed, Allred says, when Whitman launched her campaign for Governor, realizing having an illegal alien on board was a liability … and fired her. Santillan says Whitman treated her “like a piece of garbage” by letting her go.

Even Malkin can’t defend this one:

Heckuva job, California Pubbies!

Meanwhile, two leading Republicans, DeMint and Coburn, essentially filibuster a National Women’s History Museum. How do you manage to offend Latinos, Tea-Partiers and women? In one news cycle?