Month: February 2011

A man waves to a friend from a bus after arriving in Ras Jdir, Tunisia from Libya on February 24, 2011. As fighting continues in and around the Libyan capital of Tripoli, thousands of guest workers and citizens are fleeing to Tunisia to escape the violence. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Timothy Kincaid explains what would likely happen:

The House of Representatives has a small window in which to decide whether to defend DOMA in court. Should they fail to do so, then in March the courts will be presented with a motion for summary judgment (a request for a trial-less determination) which argues that DOMA Section 3 is unconstitutional, and in response the DOJ will say, “I got nothing.”

Presented with only one side, it is extremely probable that the judges will find for the plaintiffs and order the federal government to recognize their marriages. This could be limited to specific circumstances for individual plaintiffs or applied broadly against the United States and applicable to all same-sex marriages. However, without appeal to the US Supreme Court, then these decisions will only apply to same-sex married couples in Second Circuit states (Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York).

Michael Magan argues for more food aid to North Korea:

Today, a North Korean child can expect to be up to 7 inches shorter than his/her South Korean counterpart and 20 pounds lighter by adulthood. 

Mitch Earleywine says the US is falling behind:

The U.S. has been at the forefront of scientific research in many areas, but not always with cannabis. In fact, federal obstruction of research has made the U.S. lag far behind many countries in the field of cannabinoid medicine. The THC molecule and the cannabinoid receptor were first identified in Israel. Links between cannabinoids and Alzheimer’s were established in Spain. Work on THC’s inhibition of atherosclerosis appeared in Switzerland. We certainly do interesting work on this topic in the U.S., too, but I think we’ve fallen down dreadfully in the study of medical marijuana in real live people. What’s the best strain for headache? Nausea? Insomnia? We don’t know. 

Despite American ingenuity and a huge underground market with thousands of strains, anyone who wants to give cannabis to people in a U.S. laboratory is essentially stuck with the one type available through the National Institute of Drug Abuse. We’re only now learning the import of cannabidiol and the host of cannabinoids other than THC, in part because of the quick jump to the study of a synthetic version that developed out of fear of stems and leaves.

 

After acknowledging that some conservatives support the revolutions in the Middle East, Beinart emphasizes that "the people with the biggest megaphones on the American right—people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich—are not preaching democratic idealism":

If one listens to Glenn Beck talk about Muslims today and reads James Burnham, William F. Buckley, Jeane Kirkpatrick, or Irving Kristol’s essays on Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans during the Cold War, one theme becomes strikingly clear: In their marrow, conservatives believe that culture matters, and many suspect that the only culture capable of sustaining liberal democracy is the Western kind. The conservatives who don’t believe that are an intriguing, and in some ways admirable, bunch, but they were, and are, the exception that proves the rule. 

Larison counters:

[C]ulture matters a great deal, and that is something that is so fundamentally true that it shouldn’t be a serious disagreement regardless of political views. I think it’s fair to say that highly Westernized nations are capable of sustaining liberal democracy regardless of their earlier cultures. It isn’t necessarily the case that nations have to jettison their attachments to their earlier, traditional cultures to sustain liberal democracy, but significant Westernization has typically preceded the successful establishment of liberal democratic government. It is also not certain that significant Westernization is sufficient to make a nation capable of sustaining liberal democracy. In addition to habits and attitudes, institutions are vitally important, and those can be the most difficult to build in a way that is suitable to the existing constitution of a country. It isn’t an insult to other nations to emphasize how difficult finding the appropriate political structures for a given country can be, and it doesn’t follow that it is America’s responsibility to promote the creation of those structures in other countries even if they will be sustainable and enduring.

(Photo: A Libyan protestor with a Libyan flag painted on her forehead, participates in a protest rally against Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi in front of the Libyan embassy in Kuala Lumpur on February 23, 2011. By Saeed Khan/Getty Images)

Ken Sherrill counters those, like Adam Ozimek, who worry about public sector unions impeding education reform:

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country. Let’s keep it that way.

Scott Lemieux adds:

This isn’t to say that the lack of collective bargaining explains these poor outcomes, of course, but it is true that the evidence that breaking teacher’s unions improves educational outcomes is somewhere between “exceptionally weak” and “non-existent.”

Matt Steinglass nods.

David Link has a must-read. Money quote:

I think the administration is trying to get the first rulings on DOMA focused on (a) Section 3 and (b) how it applies to states that have already adopted full marriage rights. Section 3 just applies to the federal government, and says it can only recognize opposite sex marriages. Courts generally shouldn’t reach out for issues — and particularly constitutional issues — that go further than are required to actually decide the particular case before them. So a court, and particularly the Supreme Court, could heed the government’s lead, and decide only those two issues — Is Section 3 constitutional with respect to the federal government as it applies to a couple who are legally married under a state’s law?

Manzi parries Ezra Klein over Wisconsin public sector worker pay. Reihan refines his position:

[T]he problem with public sector compensation is that there is often very little clarity in terms of whether or not taxpayers are getting a good deal. One of the big reasons right-wingers are so hot for merit pay, based on my limited experience, is that they’re generally pretty comfortable with the idea of at least some public workers making much more than they are making now, provided other workers who’d be willing to work for less because they’re not likely to attract better offers are either paid less or fired. 

Megan agrees:

I agree with Manzi that this still doesn't really tell us whether state workers are overpaid, underpaid, or just-right-paid.  I suspect that the answer is probably "both"–adjusting for worker quality, the median government worker is probably overpaid, while in skilled specialties, salaries are probably not attracting as much of the top-flight talent as we'd ideally like.  (This is why I have been advocating, futilely, that we make it possible to pay SEC employees multiples of what the President of the United States makes.)  But as Manzi, who does this stuff for a living, will undoubtedly tell you, setting compensation is a really hard problem that no one's got a very good handle on.  So that's just a suspicion, based on my experience of state bureaucracies, and my best guess at the incentive effects of the current structure. 

Michael Scherer watches the right paint Obama as friendly to Qaddafi:

"GADDAFI: OBAMA IS A FRIEND," reads the banner headline on his [Drudge's] website right now. The link goes to a year-old interview Gaddafi gave with a London-based newspaper, in which the Libyan autocrat said of the U.S. President, "He is someone I consider a friend. He knows he is a son of Africa. Regardless of his African belonging, he is of Arab Sudanese descent, or of Muslim descent. He is a man whose policy should be supported, and he should be assisted in implementing it in any way possible, since he is now leaning towards peace."

So Drudge is now taking Qaddafi's insane ramblings at face value? Scherer helpfully deconstructs the interview. He concludes that it "appears to have been a public relations ploy, an attempt by the self-described 'king of kings' to associate himself with the popular American president" and according "to secret State Department cables, it did not describe a friendship that actually existed."

Drudge isn't alone. A blogger at Malkin's place picks up a loony World Net Daily article suggesting that Qaddafi, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama are all in cahoots.