Month: April 2011

Obama released it this morning. Dave Weigel explains its importance and predicts the future:

Does this end "birtherism?" I don't think it will. Surely more forgery gurus will tumble out of the woodwork and quibble with the kerning. This document includes the name of Obama's hospital and attending physician, but it doesn't include a footprint, and even though no Hawaii birth certificates like this included that, it'll be a reed for birthers to hang on to.

Does it end the "questions" about Obama? No. I'd expect the focus to shift now to Obama's college records and writings — as Donald Trump has already been shifting them, by asserting that Obama must have gotten into Columbia via affirmative action to make up for what, he speculates, were bad grades.

Chris Lee sees an uptick of male nudity in movies:

Male genitals (or, to use the now popular Hollywood vernacular, “peens”) are cropping up across the cultural grid, on cable shows like Starz’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand and HBO’s Game of Thrones, and in blue-chip Broadway fare like Equus, where Daniel Radcliffe showed he’s more than just Harry Potter. Over the years, A-list actors like Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, and Ewan McGregor have also played the full-monty card to establish their dramatic bona fides, but the full-frontal shots were fleeting. Now nude guys get much more hang time.

The Beast provides a NSFW media gallery.

Alex Massie thinks "this Canadian Conservative hit on Michael Ignatieff is great." What Canadian populism sounds like:

Yglesias ponders the impact of attack ads in multi-party systems:

The interesting thing is that in a multi-party system it's difficult for the party behind an attack ad like this to reap all the benefits. This makes Ignatieff and the Liberals look terrible, but depending on your ex ante political preferences thinking worse of Ignatieff could turn you into a voter for the separatist Bloc Québécois or the social democratic NDP rather than the center-right Conservatives.

Joshua Tucker looks for research on the subject and comes up empty.

Timothy B Lee challenges Tyler Cowen's thesis. Lee argues that we are not in the middle of an economic stagnation but that we've gotten worse at measuring progress:

Every time the software industry displaces a special purpose device, our standard of living improves but measured GDP falls. If what you care about is government revenue, this point might not matter much—it’s hard to tax something if no one’s paying for it. But the real lesson here may not be that the American economy is stagnating, but rather that the government is bad at measuring improvements in our standard of living that come from the software industry.

It's not just for preventing ticket bribery, as this disturbing incident shows:

Las Vegas-based videographer Mitchell Crooks was beaten and falsely arrested by Las Vegas police officer Derek Colling while filming a burglary arrest taking place across the street from his house. The entire sorry affair was recorded by Crooks’ brand new, $3,500 camera, which kept rolling throughout the arrest. Shortly after the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Crooks’ story, the Clark County district attorney’s office dropped the “battery on a police officer” and “obstruction of justice” charges Colling brought against him. …

According to ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein, “it’s perfectly legal to film officers as long as it does not interfere in their investigation.” Concerning Colling’s trespassing claims, Lichtenstein points out that a trespassing complaint can only be made by a property owner. “Even if the officer didn’t think he lived there, that doesn’t mean he didn’t have permission to be there,” Lichtenstein told the Review-Journal.

Balko notes some "strange history" in the case:

Crooks is also the man who videotaped the 2002 police beating of Inglewood, California teen Donovan Jackson. The officers in that case were suspended, fired, criminally charged (but not convicted), then later sued for racial discrimination, and were awarded $2.4 million in damages.

Juan Cole defends his use of the term:

I call them “Free Libya forces” because that is what they call themselves, on Benghazi radio. The Benghazi Transitional National Council has been recognized as the legitimate government of Libya by France, Italy and Qatar, with more governments near to taking this step. They are not mere ‘rebels’ any more.

Larison demurs:

Prof. Cole is free to use whatever language he likes in his commentary, but one of the reasons I have a hard time reading his commentary on the Libyan war is that he feels compelled to lace it with so many terms that sound as if they came straight out of a propaganda ministry or, in this case, from the propaganda broadcasts of the Libyan rebels. It shouldn’t have to be said, but rebel is not a pejorative or insulting designation. It is a description of their current status.

Max Read captions the above video:

Chrissy Lee Polis, the 22-year-old transgender woman who was the subject of a video-recorded beating in a Baltimore-area McDonald's last week, spoke out for the first time in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

Ta-Nehisi is reminded of his upbringing:

Having caught one in my own time, having lived as a child who structured his day around violence, I can tell you that it's scary how quickly violence becomes normal to you. So much so that when I talk about my own victimhood I tend to couch it in euphemisms like,  "Yeah, I caught one on Liberty" as opposed to what actually happened "I got my head stomped by six dudes, while a bunch of adults walked past and did nothing." (Liberty is a major street, by the way.)

While the welfare rolls among mainstream Mormons in Utah are tiny, the same cannot be said for the fundamentalist Mormons of Colorado City, Arizona. A reader points to the following passage in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven:

In 2002, seventy-eight percent of the town’s residents living on the Arizona side received food stamps. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid.

… To avoid prosecution [for polygamy], typically men in Colorado City will legally marry only the first of their wives; subsequent wives, although “spiritually married,” to their husband by Uncle Rulon, thus remain single mothers in the eyes of the state. This has the added benefit of allowing the enormous families in town to qualify for welfare and other forms of government assistance. Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.

A new British paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of cash transfers. Among the findings:

There is robust evidence from numerous countries that cash transfers have leveraged sizeable gains in access to health and education services…However, transfers have had less success in improving final outcomes in health or education.  Cash transfers can help the poor overcome demand-side (cost) barriers to schooling or healthcare, but they cannot resolve supply-side problems with service delivery (e.g. teacher performance or the training of public health professionals). Cash transfers therefore need to be complemented by ongoing sectoral strategies to improve service quality.

Laura Freschi hopes the paper will add nuance to the cash transfers debate.

Today on the Dish, Andrew rejected Sam Harris' defense of torture in the name of humanity, expressed disgust for the "doctors" at Gitmo, and defended his cognitive biases against Palin, and asked his critics to own up to theirs. Andrew pushed back against bullies in the gay rights movement, and glimpsed the onset of the Chinese century due to our inability to accept the urgency of the debt crisis. Trump lowered the standards for the GOP pool, Ron Paul brought integrity to the debate, and contra Wick Allison, Andrew still preferred Obama to the horror of a McCain presidency. Haley Barbour concluded his invisible primary, Syria's army fired on its people, and China animal rights activists persevered.

Niall Ferguson explained China's interest in the copper market, Conor Friedersdorf was unnerved by bidding for dates, and Andrew lobbied for a federal lottery to fund "heritage" programs. Paul Campos questioned law school employment numbers, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo turned our assumptions about hunger on their head, and we contemplated living with violence. Readers defended corporate speak, schooled us on the gas tax, and debated Mormonism with Andrew. We skimmed through Tina Brown's royal wedding primer, Brits protested for marriage equality, and a widower had to sell his home. We heralded beard wars, wedding wars, and hampster judges. Andrew dismissed the Hunky Jesus contest, Americans despised Congress, and Canadian populists attacked.

Malkin award here, Yglesias award here, quote for the day here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest winner #47 here.

–Z.P.