Month: April 2011

Freetown, Sierra Leone, 11 am

Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen endorse letting seniors trade Medicare for cash payments. Ryan Avent isn't onboard:

America is not very good at letting people die on the cheap. Neither is it currently prepared to allow emergency rooms to turn away uninsured patients. The cash and casts plan is a good one right up to the point at which society is unable to tolerate preventable deaths on the sidewalk outside of the hospital for those who took it.

Ezra Klein agrees.

"Block grants are like spinach sliced into fifty-one tiny bits and scattered about a plate by a child who wants to make it look as if he’s eaten some," – Mike Kinsley, in a must-read on Paul Ryan's deficit plan.

R.M. at DiA promotes a new study on the empathy gap with regard to pain and torture:

Participants were asked to evaluate the pain resulting from three interrogation techniques—exposure to cold temperatures, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. Some of the participants made their judgments while experiencing a mild version of the pain associated with those techniques, while others were placed in normal conditions. The results turned out as expected. Those who experienced some of the same discomfort and pain as the interrogation technique were more likely to classify that technique as torture.

Conclusion: policymakers should be waterboarded before debating new interrogation techniques. Or, as the authors put it, "judgments made in a state of pain are more fully informed, and hence more valid, than those made in the absence of pain."

More to the point: Congress should be forced into a stress position for long periods of time, with no toilet breaks. Or covered in water and left in a room air-conditioned to hypothermic levels. Or force-fed. Too much attention is paid to waterboarding, one of the less common torture techniques deployed by the US government under president Bush and vice-president Cheney.

This video of a six-year-old girl getting a pat down has gone viral:

 

The TSA insists that "the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures." Julian Sanchez rolls his eyes:

While I suppose it would be disturbing if individual agents were just improvising groping protocol on the fly (so to speak), the response suggests that TSA thinks our concerns should be assuaged once we’ve been reassured that everything is being done by the book—even if the book is horrifying. But in a sense, that’s the underlying idea behind all security theater: Show people that there’s a Plan, that procedures are in place, whether or not there’s any good evidence that the Plan actually makes us safer.

"Occam never got to Wasilla. If he had, he might have thrown away his razor and grown a beard," – Joe McGinniss.

One MSM source (in Britain, of course) has now aired the story. It would be great if Palin used this opportunity to debunk this for once and for all, with simple, readily available medical records.

Peter Suderman throws ice water on this thought experiment:

[The do-nothing plan] allows the Alternative Minimum Tax, originally designed to tax just 155 ultra-wealthy earners, to eventually hit half the country. And since spending is projected to grow at a much faster rate than the economy, so would taxes. Over the long term, then, government would account for a much, much higher percentage of the overall economy than it ever has before, eventually eating up more than 30 percent of projected gross domestic product.

Good point.

"It's painful when reality intrudes. Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue–and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years," – Joe Klein.

A reader writes:

The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. My wife and I have a lovely seven-year-old adopted son. He’s Hispanic and we're Caucasian, and I only bring that up because he gets asked by other students pretty regularly if he’s adopted. No biggie, but it can be hard for kids to fit in anyway, without having to deal with anything that creates a perception that he's somehow "different".

One thing our son loves to do is get his nails painted when my wife goes to the salon.

He enjoys the time with my wife, and as an extraverted kid he loves chatting it up with the women at the salon – and they love him. Typically, he gets his toenails painted, but sometimes gets his fingernails painted too. Just about a month ago he got his fingernails painted bright neon blue and was so happy to show them off to me when he got home. But he was nervous to go to school that Monday, worrying other kids would make fun of him. In fact, we even had some adults we know point out his painted nails and ask us, "What’s up with that?" My response: "He likes it and I think it looks pretty cool."

And now, to have media running some right-wing farce of a story, a totally media fabricated story (must be a slow news week) over something so ridiculous and simple as a kid painting his nails infuriates me! Who cares at all if someone paints their nails; it is a meaningless personal expression that suggests NOTHING about a child's "gender preferences". It expresses creativity, freedom, lightness of being and self-acceptance. It's not any different than a tattoo or piercing, just a way of decorating one's body.

Another writes:

I had to laugh at the freakout over pink polish on boys.  My son used to ask me to paint his toenails red while I was doing mine.  Since we was home with me most of the time, I never thought much of it and was happy to oblige.  He stopped the red polish shortly after he started kindergarten.  He will be 18 soon and I can assure you, with 100% confidence, that he is a red-blooded heterosexual male. 

Another:

I know so many little boys who like pink. And sparkles/glitter. And painting their nails. And putting on makeup. It's part of being a kid, unless the kids are shamed out of it or prevented from playing freely. I face-painted at a soup kitchen in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and many of the younger boys wanted glitter on their faces, which I happily obliged.

My best friend's son was obsessed with pink, and luckily his parents didn't try to dissuade him … so he got the pink sparkly bike which was in the window of the toy store (the owner of the shop tried to bring out a more "masculine" color). He painted his nails all different colors. We went shopping for pink shoes (a LOT). He wore pink. Sometimes dresses. He was even into fishnets for awhile. His mother wore them when she was pregnant with his younger sister and he liked how they felt when he touched her leg. I gave him a couple of pairs of mine to wear one Thanksgiving. He promptly took off all of his clothes except his t-shirt and put on the fishnets and ran around, liberated. That was his Thanksgiving Dinner outfit. Watching his supposedly liberal, arts-loving relatives try to contain their freak out was hilarious.

He's now nine and is not as into pink. He still wears it occasionally but just as part of his wardrobe. No more fishnets. He outgrew them. He is a more conventional little boy now. I give dress-up things to his sister now. It was interesting, though, during the pink years, to observe and hear about the strong, not always nice messages that people in their community (and this is a progressive suburb of NYC) freely offered to him and his mother – judgmental comments in front of him about how she was raising a transvestite. Who would know that painted toenails were so threatening?

If the male members of Congress would feel free to paint their toenails, wear fishnets, and glitter on their faces, maybe they would be less cross and more productive. My guess is that a few of them probably do already and are ashamed of it. Too bad.

Another:

For my husband's birthday this year, my 6-year-old son and I took him for a pedicure. My husband's feet are truly gross and I was tired of having my own skin scraped by the merest touch of his dried callouses. Being a frugal man, he was determined to get his money's worth and had his toenails painted, as this was part of the pedicure package. The result is in the attached photo.

My husband is still straight, and I think my son probably is too, but I guess I put him at "risk" by bringing him into a nail salon. Maybe the aqua color will save him.