Month: April 2011

Yglesias mocks a New Jersey neighborhood for being upset about solar panels "marring their previously prestine utility polls." Kevin Drum adds he's "perpetually astonished by the level of NIMBYism pretty much everywhere":

I mean, objecting to a toxic waste dump or something, that I get. But people who live in 100% built environments are remarkably resistant to even the most innocuous changes in that built environment, let alone things that might potentially have a minor but real impact. It's just a huge battle every time.

Reason makes a the case for letting Walmart set up shop in DC and NYC:

A Syrian speaks to the Guardian about his detention following a protest that he wasn't even a part of:

We were put in a room and beaten from 4pm to 4am. Can you imagine? For 12 hours without sleep. … The whole experience is built around humiliation. We were blindfolded. We were shouted at. We were only allowed to the toilet once a day, for three seconds. We had to strip down to our underwear and someone would stand outside the door counting. If you didn't finish within three seconds you were beaten. I often didn't go; I was too worried. We were given water and food, but you don't want to drink when you can't go to the toilet.

We were taken out of the cell to be beaten and I was interrogated several times. One time they took us to a room with an electric chair. I said no, this is too much, not this.

(Hat tip: Heather Horn)

Bradford Plumer outlines various strategies. He has low expectations:

In theory, it’s possible to imagine some sort of sweeping compromise where Democrats agree to a tar-sands pipeline (and maybe some drilling) as a short-term fix and Republicans agree to repeal oil tax breaks and put more money into ways to reduce our dependence on oil—better fuel-efficiency, faster electric-car deployment, mass-transit, the works—so that gas prices become less, not more of a problem over time. But does anyone think that will actually happen?

Derek Thompson created the above "editorial pie chart" to help think about the price of oil:

The price of a barrel has increased from $85 to $110 — a 30% bump — in just five months. To find out why, I spoke with several energy experts across Washington to build myself a kind of editorial pie chart. I'm calling it an editorial pie chart because it is based on the experts' opinion rather than a measured impact, but I think it's a useful way to illustrate the relative importance of each factor.

Every now and again, the combination is astounding:

Brendan Nyhan doesn't expect the Obama birth certificate to have much effect:

The best hope for killing this myth — or any similar one — is to create a bipartisan consensus that it is false. If conservative elites speak out aggressively against it, Republicans who are distrustful of Obama and the mainstream media might change their minds. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely — the political incentives to pander to birthers are still too strong (as Donald Trump has recently demonstrated).

But Fox has been pretty good these past few days. Nonetheless, Mark Blumenthal backs this up with data:

Nyhan's expectation is consistent with an overnight national poll conducted on Wednesday by the firm SurveyUSA. Their poll (which combined automated calls to landlines and live interviewer calls to cell phones) finds 19 percent of adults, and 33 percent of Republicans, still believe Obama was definitely or probably born outside the United States. About half as many — 10 percent of adults and 18 percent of Republicans — tell SurveyUSA that they are "sure the birth certificate newly released by the White House is a forgery."

Let's follow Fallows' lead and wait for a week to assess this. But even this overnight poll shows a drop from 45 percent of Republicans to 33 percent. The 18 percent are hopeless.

"UPDATE: Very sorry guys – the Guardian has pulled the article AGAIN, now for the second time even with the reworded version which you can read below (the rewording was done because the Guardian had requested it). We will see what happens next…keep the fingers crossed that everything will turn out to be fine. The communication with the Guardian is very friendly and open. +++ UPDATE APRIL 29: The Guardian is still checking with their lawyers whether they can put the article back up again. +++ UPDATE 2, APRIL 29: Matt Seaton, editor at the Guardian, just told us: "Got legal clearance; no further changes called for. Article is back on site," – Kathleen Baker, explaining the process of how her column on the Trig story came to be published in the Guardian.

It passed the very strict libel law test in Britain. The US press, of course, will never allow such a story exploring the issue to appear in their pages or on their websites. The contrast between the Guardian and the Huffington Post is particularly striking. Britain's Daily Mail has published a full page story on the question. The Sunday Times of London published my piece laying out some facts and narratives a while back.

Meanwhile, the WaPo honors Donald Trump. The First Amendment is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Meet six-year old, Asher Bradshaw:

One of my favorite places on earth is Venice Beach's relatively new skatepark. What I love is not just the sheer physical grace of the structure, but the spontaneous, unspoken, human order it upholds. Somehow, no one ever pushes in line, everyone is welcome, there is no hierarchy among the grizzled boomer skate-rats and the ten-year-olds. And much of it happens in silence. It's a Hayekian's dream (yep, nerd/poseur alert).

And then there's the almost universal affect of the skaters. With almost never a smile, the skaters wait in line, and an easy-going, furrowed cool permeates the concrete playground – interspersed with some occasional silent fist-bumps or a shout that a loose board is in the zone. Pure beauty.

And by the miracle of the web, it is available all the time, with this live-feed video stream. Enjoy.

A reader points to a recent Wired article on the latest efforts in birth control for men:

The procedure is known by the clunky acronym RISUG (for reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), but it is in fact quite elegant: The substance that Das injected was a nontoxic polymer that forms a coating on the inside of the vas. As sperm flow past, they are chemically incapacitated, rendering them unable to fertilize an egg. If the research pans out, RISUG would represent the biggest advance in male birth control since a clever Polish entrepreneur dipped a phallic mold into liquid rubber and invented the modern condom.

P.J. Crowley questions the Obama Non-Doctrine:

Having publicly called for Gaddafi’s departure, the administration is hesitating to do the same with Assad. It shouldn’t. … The administration’s caution with Syria is certainly due in part to the uncertainty that what follows Assad would be better. But if that were the criteria guiding us, we would have stuck with Hosni Mubarak. Another factor is the absence of the strong regional support that crystallized around Libya. Again, if that is a precondition, the Arab Spring will end in Tripoli or Sana’a, depending on which leader holds out the longest.

While Assad has kept the border with Israel quiet, every other action he has taken, most particularly his alliances with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, undermine the overarching U.S. objective in the region: comprehensive peace in the Middle East.