Chait considers it a real possibility. Bernstein predicts that a shutdown would backfire, at least for the pols:
[W]hile a government shutdown, especially an early confrontation over the debt limit, would likely be a disaster for House Republicans, it stands to be a big winner for Fox News, conservative talk radio hosts, and anyone who makes money from getting grass roots Republicans angry enough to buy books, visit web sites, and give money to conservative causes.
New Zealand cannabis activists pushed "a shopping cart full of burning marijuana into the central police station foyer." Scott Morgan isn't amused:
Burning cannabis in public isn’t going to placate people who don't want to smell pot in public places. Acting angry and crazy isn't going help us persuade anyone that we're nice normal people. It doesn’t work that way.
This principle applies not only to zealots playing outrageous pot pranks at the police station. It applies all the time, anywhere and everywhere that the debate over marijuana laws is taking place. If we want to win, we have to earn the respect and trust of people who might otherwise think we all belong behind bars. We have to relate to them, which means any protest idea that seems hilarious to a group of pissed off potheads is probably a terrible plan for changing minds about marijuana laws. And in this case, also a rather ridiculous waste of perfectly good pot.
Kornacki pushes back against his nomination.
"Sarah Palin’s Alaska shares the network’s schedule with shows like Ton of Love (“go inside the lives of three morbidly obese couples”) and The Man With Half a Body (“meet . . . Kenny whose body ends at his waist and who walks on his hands”). Would John Adams feel comfortable exhibiting his children next to Toddlers and Tiaras, which follows families on their quest for “sparkly crowns, big titles, and lots of cash”? Would Abe Lincoln look diminished if he shared a marquee with I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant? Would William Jefferson Clinton feel at home next to Sister Wives, which explores “the complex daily life of a polygamist family”? Okay, bad example on that last one," – Matt Labash, TWS.
It's an acute and funny piece. But it also advances two untruths/smears on two Palin critics: Joe McGinniss and yours truly. Labash reduces McGinniss, whose career in journalism is as fearless as it has been long-lasting, to what he calls a "finger-sniffer." The urban dictionary describes a finger-sniffer as
Someone (usually male) who keeps sniffing their fingers, often as a result of having them up their arse, round their cock or in their ears.
So Labash is perpetuating a smear that somehow McGinniss' moving in next door was because he wanted to snoop on the Palin girls, i.e. because could be a sexual predator toward children. This is so vile and bizarre an accusation that only Palin could make it – because she needs to dramatize (absurdly) the extent of her alleged victimization by demonizing those few in the press seeking to get to the truth about her. She has zero evidence of McGinniss even looking in their general direction – while she fantasizes about drilling a snoop hole to investigate him.
The other untruth is that I have "advance[d] conspiracy theories that she is not the biological mother of Trig." I would ask Labash to explain what conspiracy theory I have advanced. Who have I claimed is the real mother of Trig? How have I argued such a conspiracy took place? Who was in on it? There are no answers to this question because I have never advanced a single such theory. Indeed, I spent a great deal of effort not to.
All I have aired is my honest skepticism – shared by more in Washington than you would believe from the public record – about her ludicrously tall story about her seventh pregnancy and fifth delivery. All I have asked for – since the weekend Palin was unveiled by McCain – is a simple and readily available medical record that could end this legitimate line of inquiry for good and all. The Anchorage Daily News attempted to clear this up as well, to no avail and an email meltdown from Palin. Palin has offered none, despite having claimed in public to have released the birth certificate. No one should feel sorry for a public figure asked merely to substantiate a story that is, on its face, incredible. One should only feel contempt for journalists who have collectively refused to ask, been too afraid to inquire, and declined to investigate further.
(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty.)
Coyotes have been let loose in the Chicago area to see how they fare in urban settings:
With human urban areas continually encroaching on wildlife habitats, this becomes an important field of study. Last year, Chicago Breaking News reports, a coyote had taken up residence in a park in Chicago and had to be removed after becoming accustomed to people’s handouts. And there has already been coyote roadkill in Chicago.
Chicago officials say the coyotes are intended to keep the rodent population in check, but Treehugger isn't buying it:
As far as a coyote being released on purpose to eat up rodents… well, that’s probably more a tactic to keep city residents calm about their furry neighbors. Instead, the animals-as-pest-control is likely more a happy side effect of letting the coyotes do their thing to find out more about them.
(Photo by Flickrite Matt Knoth)
Kevin Patterson compares global obesity and diabetes rates:
Afghans die through causes that are widely considered avoidable—war being chief among those, but also tuberculosis, complications of childbirth, measles, meningococcus and polio. This fact is revealed conclusively by the life expectancy in Afghanistan, the lowest in the world: thirty-nine. Westerners are made ill by diseases the Afghans avoid—even among the very elderly, traditional peoples do not suffer cardiovascular disease—while the Afghans perish from diseases we are too rich to tolerate.
Patterson blames Western obesity on urbanization:
For all its magnificent and extensive wilderness, 87 percent of the [Canadian] population lives in a community with at least ten thousand neighbours. Afghans are at the other end: less than 12 percent live in cities. No lattes, no internet, no phone, no pool. And no XXXL elastic stretch pants. After wealth and death rates, the biggest difference between Afghanistan and Canada—and the hallmark of the world’s creeping homogeneity—is urbanization.
As she coos over them on TLC and anthropomorphizes them for the Tea Party, she tends not to remind people that as governor, she backed a bill called the "Active Management – Airborne Shooting" that allowed for aerial shooting of the bears for the first time in Alaska's history. (Mercifully the bill died in the state senate.) The text is here. One of her cronies also introduced snaring of black bears west of Anchorage. The new regulation was described by the Alaska chapter of the Back-Country Hunters and Anglers Club as follows:
The plan calls for the killing of 900-1400 black bears over a 3-5 year period. Any licensed resident hunter over the age of 16 can participate after obtaining a free control area permit. There is no limit on the amount of bears a hunter can take, and hunters can take any black bear, including a sow with cubs, or cubs. Up to four bait stations will be allowed, as well as same-day airborne land-and-shoot "hunting." It will also be legal to sell the tanned hide of a black bear taken in this control area.
The Hunters and Anglers were appalled (and grizzlies were inevitably killed by mistake under the Palin-backed plan):
Many hunters feel that this kind of controversial plan simply won't effectively increase bear harvests in an area where we've had liberalized seaons and bag limits for years. Programs like this only serve to degrade the public perception of hunting and hunters.
At the same time, of course, Palin was championing the grizzly as the state symbol on the quarter. Palin's full and disgusting record of culling and killing bears and wolves is elaborated here in Audubon magazine. Money quote:
On March 10 (2007) the board granted permission to private hunters and trappers, including supervised children as young as 10, to use wire loops to snare Unit 16 black bears and grizzlies by the feet. The lucky bears get shot before they starve. For the first time ever hunters may transport themselves and their equipment by helicopter. And they may now shoot Unit 16 bears over bait, such as rotten hot dogs and rancid bacon fat (“garbaging for bears,” as the practice has been called)—even in summer, when sows are nursing cubs. The lucky cubs get shot along with their mothers.
The board was stacked with Palinites including a close personal friend. When you see her posing as an environmentalist and nature-lover, remember the truth. Very few Alaska governors have been as brutal in their treatment of grizzlies as Palin.
In this as in almost everything, she is a liar and a phony.
Bobby Ghosh reports on the influx of Middle Easterners to the Motor City:
The four-county region of southeastern Michigan has a population of at least 200,000 of Middle Eastern origin; some estimates put that number far higher. … For Detroit, a city in critical condition, this new blood could make a difference. The impact is twofold: a desperately needed infusion of new citizens at a time when an exodus has drained metro Detroit of its middle class, both white and black; and an economic boost from a culture that likes to start new businesses. The Arab-American community in metro Detroit produces as much as $7.7 billion annually in salaries and earnings, according to a 2007 Wayne State University study. (That amounts to more than twice Detroit's annual budget.)
Joshua Keating reads through two recent studies and concludes that countries colonized by the British are better off than those colonized by the French.
A reader writes:
Call me a bit old fashioned, but I don't think any social grouping that does not involve children can be called a family.
But everyone is part of a family, in that everyone is a child with parents and other relatives somewhere. Until they have children of their own, that is their family – their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws … as far down the list of relatives as you want to go. But a couple – married or not, gay or straight – is not itself a family. The pair is part of a family – actually a part of two families, both their own parent's family and their partner's family as an in-law.
Wherever there are children being raised, there is a family, and it doesn't matter how unusual the configuration is. I'm still not sure if beagles count, though.
Another writes:
I wonder if anyone else out there would be more likely to consider the childless couples (regardless of the gender mix) a family if they were known to have pets? My husband and I were a couple for four years, but it wasn't until we got our dog that I started thinking of us as a family.
The Dish 