Month: December 2010

It may already exist:

Nature has had millions of years to come up with perfect natural packaging solutions — brilliant designs made from elements as simple as water, sun and nutrients that keep liquids wet, protect cargo during transportation, and prevent mold or insects from getting in. The purpose of our Packaging the Future series is to highlight how we can use nature’s examples to make low-impact designs for better packaging, and so far I’ve focused more on the pipe-dream than the practical. This week is different; banana leaves are a packaging solution that has existed for thousands of years, still exists today, and that could benefit the environment by simply expanding their use to new areas.

(Photo: Madhawa Habarakada, whose slideshow can be viewed here.)

Jacob Sullum summarizes the good news:

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the FDA may not ban electronic cigarettes as an unapproved "drug/device combination." The appeals court agreed with U.S. District Judge Richard Leon that the battery-powered e-cigarettes, which generate a smoke-free vapor containing nicotine derived from tobacco, are properly regulated as tobacco products. That means the FDA may regulate the marketing of e-cigarettes under the authority granted by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act but may not treat them like a pharmaceutical product subject to strict clinical testing requirements (a trick it once tried with conventional cigarettes, only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court). The ruling is a victory not just for the companies that brought it, NJOY and Smoking Everywhere, but for smokers who use their products as replacements for ordinary cigarettes, which are far more hazardous.

 

Larison frames the GOP’s recent behavior:

One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” …Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now.

The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.

Brian Beutler explains the Republicans' dilemma:

How is it that the conservative movement spent two years characterizing Barack Obama as a socialislamokenyan just to the right of Stalin, turning him into a figure so noxious to the GOP base that Republicans only negotiated with him at their peril… and then suddenly, a month after the election, Republican leaders sit down with his administration, and hash out a tax plan and everyone from Olympia Snowe to Mitch McConnell to Paul Ryan walk away celebrating. It doesn't make sense. Yes, the plan is, on the merits, very friendly to Republican interests, and presages an election year tax fight Republicans seem itching to have. But it's still the Obama tax cut compromise.

That's why I think this development could be so portentous.

Yes, yes and yes.

The most powerul aspect of this entire deal is how it has delivered a body-blow to the FNC/Limbaugh/RNC notion that Obama is an enemy and an alien and a threat. Instead, he's now the architect of a deal with that most rightwing of Republicans, Mitch McConnell, a deal that legitimizes Obama on the right with consequences McConnell probably hasn't completely absorbed yet. Maybe this was an inevitable consequence of the GOP assuming some responsibility in running the country. But it has pricked that balloon of demonization that has given much of the right its energy these past two years.

Meep, meep.

Michael Moynihan does his damnedest to resist the conspiracy theories now buzzing around the arrest of Assange:

Before Assange was remanded to custody in the United Kingdom, awaiting a possible extradition to Sweden to face multiple sexual assault charges, his most credulous supporters switched tactics, from attacking the overly broad Swedish conception of rape to suggesting one of his alleged victims moonlights as an American agent; downshifting from Camille Paglia to Three Days of the Condor.

Here’s how an evidence-free, innuendo-filled personal attack on a rape accuser trespasses the mainstream political debate. On his Twitter feed, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (162,000 followers) links to a rambling blog post arguing that Anna Ardin, the Swedish feminist who accused Assange of rape, is an anti-Castro activist with connections to CIA front groups. Elsewhere on the Internet, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, the popular liberal website FireDogLake, Bianca Jagger, and The First Post (a British news website “brought to you by The Week”) all circulated the charges without an ounce of skepticism. 

(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)

A reminder that I'll be in a "Catholic Family Conversation" on homosexuality with Maggie Gallagher tonight at Georgetown University at 8.30 pm. Dish readers most welcome.

The latest Tom Friedman column is just baiting Matt Taibbi. Money quote:

More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?

The answer: violin lessons for the boys! Of course.

Reza Aslan's plea:

Enough stalling. It’s well past time [for Mahmoud Abbas to] to declare [Palestinian] statehood and force a vote of recognition in the United Nations. Obama claims the U.S. will veto any such vote. Let’s call his bluff. Let’s find out if this president is ready to stand utterly alone on the world stage as the sole head of state refusing to recognize the existence of a Palestinian state just so he can appease an ally, Israel, that over the last year has repeatedly gone of out its way to embarrass his administration and stifle his attempts at achieving a two-state solution.

Better still: have the US vote for such a recognition and lay out its own views on boundaries. Enough with being yanked around by an alleged ally that is prepared to do nothing to help the US advance its own global interests, and a great deal to sabotage American strategy.

Howard Gleckman presents the numbers in two ways:

If you assume the Bush-era tax cuts were going to be extended anyway (what wonks like to call the current policy baseline), this deal is a sweet tax cut across the board. But if you compare it to the tax law at the end of the Clinton Administration—that is, if you assume the Bush-era revenue law expires in three weeks (the current law baseline)—this proposal is a big tax cut indeed and one that benefits very high earners much more than others.