Month: January 2011

ABC News' John Berman "reports":

While President Obama will be delivering the State of the Union Address to Congress next Tuesday, Sarah Palin will be speaking to a hunting group in Reno, NV. … Anyone who has watched “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” on TLC knows that Palin is an avid hunter who relishes delivering “organic sources of protein” to her family.  The show pictured her shooting a variety of different guns.

Well then no need to talk to actual hunters. Seriously, the laziness of the MSM and its willingness to parrot any piece of propaganda from Palin has become beyond embarrassing.

Will Wilkinson stands up for western individualism:

There are two questions. Are tiger mothers doing their kids a favor? Are they doing society a favor? The answer is maybe and probably no. On the whole, discipline makes life easier and better. On the other hand, who the fuck cares about the piano and violin? If all tiger mothers push the piano, say, the winner-take-all race for piano becomes utterly brutal, and the tiger-mothered pianist will likely get less far in the piano race than a bunny-mothered basoonist. That just seems dumb! Gamble on the flugelhorn!

The Western ethos of hyper-individuation produces less of the sort of hugely inefficient positional pileup (not that there aren’t too many guitarists) that comes from herding everybody onto the same rutted status tracks. It also produces less discipline and thus less virtuosity, but a greater variety of excellence by generating the cultural innovation that opens up new fields of endeavor and new status games. It’s just way better to be the world’s best acrobatic kite-surfer than the third best pianist in Cleveland. Also, the ethos of hyper-individuation is about activity/personality search and matching. It’s better to be happily mediocre at something you love than miserably amazing at something that never quite felt right.

Cord Jefferson extends Santorum's logic on abortion, from his comment that it's "remarkable for a black man [i.e. president Obama] to say, 'we're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"

We assume Santorum is attempting, ham-fistedly, to compare abortion to something like the the three-fifths compromise, in which the government decided that black slaves were subhuman. But by that logic, Obama could be forced like a square peg into the round holes of every struggle. How receptive would we be to an argument that said, as someone of an ethnicity that was once compared to mules, Obama should empathize more with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?

Joe Klein, who agrees with Santorum on almost nothing, nevertheless defends him:

First, you must understand that Santorum truly believes that abortion is murder–at any point after conception, even when the mother's health is at risk (as it was in the case of one of his wife's pregnancies). This is an extreme position, but not an implausible one. If you believe that a fetus is a person, then abortion is the denial of its most basic right–the right to exist. According to Santorum, the only other category of Americans whose civil rights were so severely truncated were slaves. He's right about that. Slaves were considered property; there was also that most odious Constitutional assertion that, in terms of representation, blacks counted as 3/5s of a person. Santorum believes that this history should make the descendants of slaves more sensitive to the civil rights of fetuses. There are a great many members of the black church who would agree with him.

I agree with Joe. Santorum's embrace of very modern – and not traditional – Catholic doctrine on this makes his analogy internally consistent, if a little offensive. Using Obama's race against him, even when doing so to make a valid point, doesn't help much. I'd add, however, that there is an obvious difference in as much as slave-owners did not own those "slaves" within their own bodies. Women do. And the defense of the freedom of that woman to do with her body as she sees fit is far more complicated than ending plantations.

Greg Mankiw is getting a lot of attention for a post on the alleged mythology of Obamacare reducing the deficit:

I have a plan to reduce the budget deficit.  The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion.  The plan will be financed by $3 billion of tax increases.  According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, giving me that $1 billion will reduce the budget deficit by $2 billion.

Clive Crook, in a very helpful post, notes:

This is not up to Mankiw's usual standards.

Reihan admirably faces the need for more cost-cutting and more revenue:

I believe that we will most likely need to increase average tax rates — not marginal tax rates — as well as implement deep spending cuts to address long-run deficits. The trouble with PPACA is that it deployed virtually all of the “low-hanging tax fruit,” i.e., it attached many opaque tax increases that were just confusing or stealthy enough to dull political resistance to significant spending increases rather than employing them to the existing budget shortfall.

Ezra Klein explained a few days ago why the low-hanging fruit argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense:

Republicans don't want the cost controls — they've repeatedly singled them out for attack, and made a very conscious decision to attempt a fiscally irresponsible repeal bill — and liberals don't want them without the coverage expansion. People who talk about these cuts and taxes and projects as "low-hanging fruit" that can be easily plucked by future deficit hawks are sadly misguided. Without coverage hawks (health hawks? life hawks?) in the coalition, you don't have enough votes.

And Chait takes Krauthammer to task for Mankiw's brand of arithmetic. 

The Daily What knows you want it:

What’s that? You’re sick of The Room? You’re tired of Inception mashups? Shut up.

Tom at Federalist Paupers is wondering:

Via Peter Suderman, some 200+ organizations representing half a percent of the total US workforce have successfully applied for waivers to ObamaCare’s mandate for all-bells-and-whistles employee health insurance.  In other words, these companies don’t need to insure their part-time workers like the rest of us do and can continue to use older systems that provide less-than-awesome health insurance for their employees.  Good news for those companies and their part-time employees, who likely would have been laid off otherwise.

As Suderman notes, however, the review process for these waivers is completely opaque; essentially, the Department of Health & Human Services can approve whomever it likes for whatever reason it wants.  Though this may come as a shock, the average of these organizations has nearly 7,000 employees (the median number drops to 643); to one’s further amazement, a great many of them are local unions or otherwise politically-connected.

Hmmm. Perhaps all the waivers so far issued are legitimate – and 0.5 percent is not that big a loophole. Regardless, why is there such an opaque rule-making process whereby the federal government treats various private enterprises unequally? If waivers are to be granted, we need transparency. You know: like Obama promised.

We contain multitudes!

Only a Dish reader:

After watching the Animaniacs on your latest Mental Health Break, I wandered over to YouTube and stumbled onto this clip, where Pinky seems to be channeling a certain former governor.

Dick Cheney:

[Obama's] overall approach to expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government over the private sector – those are all weaknesses, as I look at Barack Obama. And I think he’ll be a one term President.

David Boaz:

I recall the Bush-Cheney administration also came under criticism for “expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government,” and it didn’t prevent him from being reelected.

What simply staggers me is that this cannot be amnesia, merely denial. Cheney famously believed deficits don't matter. Under his watch, federal spending boomed, two wars were put off-budget, a massive new Medicare entitlement was passed with no funding, taxes were slashed regardless of the fiscal impact, and the president declared himself able to capture, detain and torture any individual on the planet. Under Cheney, the sheer power of government – both in size and, more specifically in its authoritarian reach – grew exponentially.

Exum observes that "165 House Republicans voted to completely de-fund USAID as part of austerity measures designed to address the U.S. budget crisis." He notes that these same conservatives oppose cutting the defense budget. The non sequitur:

[T]he money we spend through USAID is part of our national security budget. Some money, such as the money we spent through both the defense and aid budgets in Haiti last year, we spend for mostly altruistic purposes. But the two biggest recipients of U.S. international aid through USAID are Afghanistan and Pakistan. We can have a separate debate about whether or not this money is being well spent, but we cannot have a debate as to why it is being spent: it is quite obviously being spent to advance what are seen to be the national security interests of the United States.