Month: April 2011

Today on the Dish, Obama released his long-form birth certificate, and Andrew wondered why he waited so long and of course, applied the logic to Palin. Trump got smug, Pareene questioned Trump's son's affirmative action, and his ratings slid. Andrew seconded Will Wilkinson on dropping silly restrictions, and birthers would be birthers.

Larison and Juan Cole duked it out over rebels in Libya, Assad's army splintered, and cutting the head off the snake may not be the best idea. Obama hadn't improved Muslim perception of the US, and the morality of war hinges on its success. A reader defended Andrew's rant against the Hunky Jesus contest, and readers piled on the "doctors" at Gitmo. Some Mormons exploited welfare, we explored cash transfers and paying for healthcare, and cops don't like being recorded. Krugman tracked Obama's spending, we went another round on the hell question, and vaccine denials stretched across both aisles. Governments aren't good at measuring progress by software, Alex Tabarrok filtered the gas tax, and money motivates humans, in life and in IQ tests. Johann Hari urged America to get over the royals, we oogled peens on the big screens, and Malcolm Gladwell consumes old media.

Quotes for the day here, here and here, tweet of the day here, dissents of the day here and here, FOTD here, MHB here, and VFYW here.

–Z.P.

A reader differs with the dissenters:

Thank you for your outburst about this event. Liberal and progressive people of faith, such as me and my congregation, have been allies in the struggle for GLBT equality.  They are troubled and offended by events such as the Hunky Jesus Contest. I’m an openly gay pastor in the United Church of Christ.  I have a well-developed sense of humor about religion, including my religion.  And a well-developed sense of humor about being gay.

But lately, making fun of Christians has become a blood sport from the left. 

I do not believe Christianity is at risk as the dominant religion in the US.  And, like you, I am a First Amendment absolutist.  But how, how by anyone's assessment, does the Hunky Jesus Contest on Easter help advance the cause of equality for gay and lesbian people?  It gives people a good laugh, that it does.

In March, I did three radio interviews on our local conservative Christian talk radio program about homosexuality.  Because of my theological and biblical training, I was able to take passages from the Bible and support full inclusion of GLBT persons in the Christian church.  I was the only Christian pastor willing to do these interviews, although there are others in our community who support GLBT inclusion. I didn't try to make a case from the Bible for full civil equality, because full civil equality is based in the Constitution, not the Bible.  My church supports marriage equality because we feel our right to free exercise thereof is impinged by one man/one woman laws.

If theologically liberal and progressive Christians concede the religious side of the debate to the evangelicals and the fundamentalists, equality will come much more slowly.  Religion plays a huge role in the lives of millions of Americans.  Dismissing that role, dismissing those people, is foolish politics as well as mean-spirited, even when people are laughing.

A trader works in the S&P 500 options pit at the Chicago Board Options Exchange on April 27, 2011 in Chicago. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has announced that the key fed funds rate remains unchanged at 0-0.25 percent and stated that it will continue its plan to stimulate the economy with low interest rates and will continue to buy up to $600 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds through the end of June. By Brian Kersey/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

Your post hits close to home for me, a 2010 graduate of a top-five law school. When I enrolled in the heady economic days of 2007, a high paying job at a big law firm in New York was virtually guaranteed for someone like me. By the time I graduated, I'd secured one of those big law jobs, but it wasn't that simple. My law firm, like many other big firms, deferred its entire incoming class for about 18 months. That means that I'm employed by the firm at half salary but I don't actually work there. Instead, I work in a non-profit organization that the firm set me up with for free. So technically I count in those NALP numbers that Paul Campos mentioned, but, like he said, the numbers don't tell the whole story.

The trickle down effects of this are enormous.

First, people like me who thought they could pay back their loans on big firm salaries are paying them back slower. Second, my friends who entered law school knowing they wanted to do public interest work can't find jobs, even at non-profits that pay much lower salaries than firms pay, because people like me are taking all those positions for free.

Do I hate myself a little for stealing his job, when he's the one with altruistic intentions and I'm just in it for the money? Yea, I do. But I did it anyway, because my law school debt is enormous, and the only way to deal with it is to get in with a big law firm so I can pay it off.

But my part of the story isn't the worst part, not by far. I have a friend who is currently applying to law school. She has been offered a nearly-full scholarship from a school ranked around 70 or 75, and also been accepted at a school ranked around 50, with no scholarship. She's going to choose the latter, which is a horrible mistake. She's a smart girl, but her job prospects at high-paying firms coming out of either school are, to be frank, virtually non-existent. If she goes to school for free, she can do whatever she wants after graduating. If she goes to the slightly better school and takes out $100K in loans, she's going to be shackled to them for the rest of her life, since she'll never get a job that allows her to pay it off quick. But the prestige and the fact that she tells herself "I'm different, I'll be top of my class, I'll get hired" is too much for rationality to overcome.

How the hell are we ever going to pay for our kids to go to college, when we'll still be paying off our own educations? If you don't think people my age (I'm 27) are worried about that kind of thing, then you haven't talked to them recently. I think this tension between the idea that "I'm different, I'm better!" and the grim economic realities we're facing is going to be the defining crisis of my generation.

Chris Mooney returns to the question. His verdict:

There’s no evidence here to suggest that vaccine denial (and specifically, believing that childhood vaccines cause autism) is a distinctly left wing or liberal phenomenon. However, I will reiterate that we don’t really have good surveys at this point that are clearly designed to get at this question.

Reader discussion here and here.

Aaron Carroll once again compares US out-of-pocket healthcare costs to other wealthy countries. Kevin Drum opines:

Different countries have different cultures and different ways of allocating costs, so a simple chart like this will never be definitive. Still, the only real evidence that high copays produce lower healthcare expenditures is that one Rand study, and it's getting kind of long in the tooth. (It was also a short-term study, had fairly low maximums, and investigated the healthcare world of the 70s, which is quite different from today's.) Done properly, making people pay more for healthcare might be a good idea, but the international evidence doesn't do much to support the notion that it would have a huge impact.

"Here we have a wonderful real-world test: if 'actual knowledge' mattered, the number of people who thought Obama was foreign-born would approach zero by next week — with exceptions for illiterates, the mentally disabled, paranoid schizophrenics, etc. My guess is that the figures will barely change," – James Fallows.

My guess is that they will decline somewhat. Which is something. But we'll check in a week's time.

“China is raping this country,” – Donald Trump.

A reader writes:

The participants of the Hunky Jesus contest aren't having a Mohammad contest on Easter because most of them grew up Christian, in a Christian-majority country. So your whole "Why don't you do this to Muslims?" thing is ridiculous.  Making light of our own experiences with oppression is cathartic, and obviously funny to some, since the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence have been doing this for 30 years, raising awareness and money for HIV/AIDS. I'm a Christian who sees kids – some of them Christian! – having a good time. (Also, a lot of these people are straight, so "some homosexuals" should be "some people.")

Thank god we've moved on from being afraid of our enemies to just living our lives – drugs, sex, offensive jokes and all. I think the Sister said it best at the beginning, "Jesus has a sense of humor," and neither of us knows how hard he was laughing that day.

Another writes:

Get real, Andrew.  The only difference between the Hunky Jesus contest in San Francisco and South Park's depiction of Jesus lies in your own personal taste. 

Whether you can see it or not, the latter is savagely tasteless for the vast majority of religious folks in America. The Hunky Jesus contest provides an outlet for those who, having migrated to the cultural safe haven of San Francisco, can now lampoon the traditional figures imposed upon them growing up.  Regrettably it's not as "high-brow" as South Park, and doesn't quite attract as many bomb threats as you might like.  But it does have cultural relevance.

It may very well empower prejudice against gays.  But that's hardly seems your concern. So where do you draw the line? Gays in Dolores Park can make fun of Jesus, as long as Andrew Sullivan finds it funny or "smart". Otherwise they're lame bigots, spreading prejudice?

Well, yes. As I said in the first post, I would defend the right to present this lame, tired, unfunny piece of dreck. And since we are judging performance art, of course my view is subjective. Another:

Was this contest more offensive than the South Park episode featuring the Virgin Mary spraying blood out of her vagina onto the Pope? If you ever took your lips off Parker and Stone's asses, you'd realize how ridiculous you look comparing a multi-million dollar play and a weekly cable television series to a YouTube video of a couple of drag queens ogling some hot men with beards on Easter.  Apparently it was a revelation to you that a local costume contest doesn't often portray depth and nuance.  Perhaps if it had featured more vaginal blood from the Madonna it wouldn't have offended your tender sensibilities so badly.

I kept waiting to see something in that contest that would have sparked the outrage that obviously compelled you to post the video in the first place.  What was it?  Their declaration that they wanted to "piss off some Christians"?  Is that so much worse than Bill Maher saying religion is a "neurological disorder"?  Maher's constant disdain for religion in general, and Christianity in particular, certainly hasn't kept you from appearing on his show over and over again.

Maybe it was the part with "pain slut Jesus" that set you off.  Again, is that much different than Parker and Stone's torture-porn obsessed, sadomasochist Mel Gibson?  The point of the two depictions is the same: parodying over the top interest in passion plays . Please, elaborate on what has gotten your knickers in such a bunch about this video.  Frankly, I found some of the costumes rather clever (including the winner) and plenty of the guys were hot, which was I'm sure what the organizers were going for.

It was depicting the Passion of Jesus as a sado-masochistic act (which is entirely voluntary rather than the brutal torture Jesus suffered) and the genius wit of depicting "Jesus Fucking Christ" as one dumb homosexual mock-sodomizing the other. Neither of these things is creative, just offensive. And neither of them is even shocking, which can justify some glorious moments of blasphemous humor, such as South Park. And then there's the decision to do this at Easter. Like GaGa pulling Judas out of a hat – and timing it so as to maximize offense.

Again, I would fight to the death, as they say, to defend the free expression rights of these smug liberal bigots. But they remain smug, liberal bigots. Let's see what their attitude would be if a religious right group did a public performance art mocking gay marriages in the Castro – with graphic sex acts meant to ridicule gays. I'm sure they'd try to prosecute them for hate speech. Let's say it took place on gay pride. Somehow I think offense would be taken and the demonstrators labeled immediately as bigots.

If they're bigots, why aren't these Sisters Of Perpetual Self-Indulgence?

Will Wilkinson wants all American citizens to be eligible for the presidency:

The contemporary relevance of a person's place of birth to their fitness to serve as president completely eludes me. That an unsteady infant nation born of civil war might worry about allowing one of England's native sons to become commander in chief seems reasonable enough. But we're well past all that now.

Bernstein thinks we should drop the age requirements too. I favor maximal choice, which is why I also favor abolishing the two-term limit. And hey, if Sarah Palin can run, why not me? We'd have a great debate.