Month: January 2011

Weigel profiles Herman Kain, a Tea Party favorite and 2012 GOP long-shot. Larison grimaces at Kain's hawkishness abroad:

This has to be discouraging to anyone who might have hoped that a Tea Party-aligned possible presidential contender would bring anything new or remarkable to the substance of the primary debates for the next cycle.

Cain wasn’t kidding when he told The Atlantic‘s Josh Green that when it came to “our conservative beliefs and values, Sarah Palin and I are probably identical.” The trouble is that Cain is very sharp and much, much more policy-oriented than Palin, or many of the other 2012 contenders for that matter. While many of his foreign policy arguments may be awful, he will be able to articulate and defend them more ably than most of the other candidates. If they all run, Cain, Rick Santorum and John Bolton are going to be falling over one another to claim the mantle of most unelectable hawk during the primary debates. 

A reader writes:

It is true that PTSD has wide prevalence. But PTSD as a disorder is really a consequence of its designation as such in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the same manual that once classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.  As the attached paper (PDF) from a recent Psychiatric Annals suggests, PTSD my not be a disorder at all but rather a set of normal responses to traumatic events.  Indeed, the mere fact of these responses being classified as disorder might be deleterious to recovery.

Howard Gleckman focuses on the ACA's most unpopular provision – the healthcare mandate:

In some ways, the mandate represents the worst of all policy worlds. Americans hate it because they can’t stand the idea of being made to get coverage or pay a tax. On the other hand, the initial levy is so low—only $95-a-year—it isn’t much of an incentive to buy insurance. The penalty is supposed to gradually increase to as much as $695 or 2.5 percent of taxable income, but Congress could well bow to the inevitable pressure to block the –let’s all say it together– “job-killing health tax increase.”  

In this environment, both pols and policy analysts are looking for more palatable—and possibly more effective– alternatives to the mandate. And there may be some.

He proceeds to list them.

Robin Handson insists that digital brains are possible:

Human brains were not designed by humans, but they were designed. Evolution has imposed huge selection pressures on brains over millions of years, to perform very particular functions. Yes, humans use more math that does natural selection to assist them. But we should expect brain emulation to be feasible because brains function to process signals, and the decoupling of signal dimensions from other system dimensions is central to achieving the function of a signal processor. The weather is not a designed signal processor, so it does not achieve such decoupling.

Tim Lee fortifies his earlier criticism.

Robert Mackey profiles one of the most fascinating characters at the center of the coup:

Less than two weeks ago, Slim Amamou, a Tunisian blogger and activist, was using his @slim404 Twitter feed to let friends know that the police had been to his house. Later the same day, after he was arrested, the 33-year-old computer programmer managed to turn his phone on and log on to Google Latitude to broadcast his location: inside the country’s feared ministry of the interior. On Tuesday, five days after he announced his release from custody on Twitter, and one day after he used the same tool to say that he had accepted an offer to join Tunisia’s new transitional government, Mr. Amamou’s status update on the social network said simply: “in a ministerial meeting.”

The pace of Mr. Amamou’s sudden transformation from dissident prisoner to secretary of state for youth and sports has been matched by the speed of the backlash against his decision to serve in government alongside senior members of the old regime.

Matt Steinglass wants America to follow the Dutch example:

Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there's one thing government has going for it, it's the ability to make anything unfashionable. This insight into government's jujitsu-like capability to render the cool uncool should be more obvious to conservatives than to liberals. And yet, in America, the very people who are most distrustful of government's ability to do anything right are the ones who are steadfastly opposed to letting the government use its secret power of deadly uncoolness to fight drug abuse. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity.

Tunis, Tunisia, 6 pm

Today on the Dish, Andrew urged Obama to call the GOP's bluff on spending, and Pawlenty pandered to the far right to Andrew's dismay. The Big Lie parroted by the right seeped into American opinion, and Andrew saw a secular hope in Apple's vision of the future. Freddie de Boer charged the blogosphere with being anti-leftist, Ryan Avent questioned de Boer's union love, and the GOP needed the middle but still didn't want to take the civil route. Nate Silver showed Douthat the stats on Palin's pull, and Andrew couldn't imagine Frum's Huckabee victory. Journalists fabricated turning points for narratives, and Herman Cain could add a touch of crazy to 2012.

Jennifer Rubin got trounced for giving neocons credit for Tunisia, while Scoblete defended her. Josef Joffe pinned Tunisia's revolution on being rich, Scott Lucas chronicled the new government's concessions, and the immolation trend in Egypt was getting out of control.

Andrew Cohen parsed the rocky road ahead for DOMA, Ezra Klein previewed the real showdown in healthcare revisions, and PTSD spread to civilian professionals. Loughner's ideology didn't fully square up with Nietzsche's, Jim Sleeper compared him to 1993's Colin Ferguson, and Gabrielle Giffords' husband kept grace alive. Sedentary screen time kills us, Gary Sick questioned the Stuxnet worm, the Twittering machine shrieked, and cigarettes got cropped from stamps. The police state lived, the enthusiasm gap evaporated, and Ike's last bested JFK's first speech. Julia Sherman traced the international hair trade, marriage evolved, and America reinvented herself. Irin Carmon defended casual sex, karate slippers used to get you into the club, and LBJ talked about his junk.

Chart of the day here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and the VFYW contest winner #33 here.

–Z.P.

Portugal's drug decriminalization experiment largely looks like a success:

[T]here’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized — indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

Drum has further questions:

One of the big questions in drug policy is just how elastic the demand for illegal drugs is. It makes sense that if you lower the price of marijuana or cocaine, use will go up, and that lowered price can be in the form of either actual dollars or reduced risk of being fined or arrested. But as always, the question is: how much? If decriminalization increases drug use by a few percent, that's not bad — especially considering the massive downsides of the war on drugs. But if it doubles or triples drug use, the consequences are more severe. The more data we have on this, the better.