Month: April 2011

PPP parses a disturbing new poll:

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.

Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal. Tells you something about the kinds of folks who like each of those candidates.

Steven Taylor wants the GOP to recognize that a government shutdown will have real-life consequences:

I find it rather frustrating that there seems to be little acknowledgement from the Republican of this issue that a shutdown will actually affect real people.  And I am not even specifically thinking about issues of people receiving services (although that is an issue worthy of consideration as well), but government employees (including deployed troops) who may miss at least one paycheck (if not more, depending on duration). 

Yes, they will eventually be compensated in full (with all of the commensurate inefficiencies entailed in such circumstances) but since most people rely on their paychecks to pay bills on the table right now, deferred payment is going to create any number of headaches for thousands upon thousands of persons whose only crime is working for the federal government (again, including members of the US military who are, in fact, public sector employees).

(Photo: Federal Employees demonstrate outside the Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building on April 7, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. The demonstration organized by the American Federation of Government Employees was held to raise awareness about the impact the proposed 2011 federal budget. If a deal is not reached on the federal budget before the expiration of the stopgap government funding bill at midnight Friday non-essential government services are expected to be shutdown. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Conor Friedersdorf has a theory:

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that "the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views." One is that people who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don't go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they're surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs.

Mozart he isn't:

Tucker, our one and a half year old Schnoodle, plays the piano and sings along at least 3 or 4 times every day. In spite of all of his practicing, he really isn't getting any better at it.

(Hat tip: Balko)

Freddie DeBoer continues to label Paul Ryan's plan unserious:

I'd like to propose one litmus test for whether a Republican proposal represents toughness or seriousness, etc., in the way people mean it does: its orientation towards tax cuts on the wealthy. People keep saying, again and again, that this plan "touches the third rail" by proposing entitlement cuts. No it does not. The third rail for Republicans is raising taxes on the wealthy. And what does the Ryan budget do? It not only doesn't raise taxes on the rich, it cuts them. Among all the talk of shared sacrifice, with all the insistence that we've got to "get tough" and suffer together, on and on, it cuts taxes on the rich.

Agreed entirely. The sacrifices we are about to face because of the last decade of fiscal madness and the worst recession since the 1930s must be shared sacrifices. They must be shared because it's the moral and equitable thing to do, but also because it's the fiscally serious thing to do. And yet no Republican, apart from Mitch Daniels, has yet gone there.

Andrea Jezovit created an interactive graphic tracking the American diet:

Between 1970 and 1980, calorie intake is relatively stable, rising only 1.2 percent. Between 1980 and 1990 consumption jumped 9.6 percent. Then, from 1990 to 2008, the last year with data available, the number of calories rises another 11.4 percent for a grand a total of 2,673 calories available per person–23.3 percent more than consumed in 1970.

(Hat tip: Yglesias)

Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei was arrested last week in China. Melinda Liu writes that it is "too simple to attribute Ai's detention solely to the government's fear of an Arab Spring infecting China," but she points out that "the traditional Tomb-Sweeping Festival, which takes place in early April, signals the beginning of China's political season, when protests are more likely to ignite."  Evan Osnos sees Ai's detention as part of a pattern:

Beijing is in the midst of what I call the Big Chill, an ongoing sweep of Chinese writers, activists, lawyers, and others, which constitutes the most intense crackdown on expression in years.

Tom Jacobs seeks it out:

When done right, scenes of violence slap us out of our general stupor, they make us see things again in strange ways.  … Violence tends to focus the attention (It’s the “purest form of expression,” as Herbert Marcuse once said), even as it unveils something of our vanities.  Violence (which is different from suffering), when represented in fictional form and crosscut with a sense of humor, is in today’s world, perhaps the only way to make us see.  And laughing while we weep, well, that’s a particularly rare experience—and one that ought to make us think about what lies in between.

(The rest of that long scene from Kill Bill here.)

Don Taylor says I've overlooked them. Count me as underwhelmed. Yes, Ryan argues that under his plan revenues will go from 15 percent of GDP to 19 percent of GDP, an admission, as Taylor notes, that he current tax regime simply cannot be sustained. But the 15 percent is historically low because of the recession; and much of the revenue Ryan claims is related to supply-side delusions.

And there's a very obvious way out. Gut as many tax shelters and loopholes that you can, but don't lower rates by the same amount of money you save through reform. Move some to deficit reduction. Many Americans would then see their tax rates decline, while actually increasing revenues. And yet even that is heresy for the Norquists.

Remember last spring? In one television debate performance, Nick Clegg, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats became an instant star, and his party soared in the polls and then took part in government for the first time in decades. A year later, he has been reduced to this:

Even Mrs Khan described the interview as “excruciating,” adding that Mr Clegg “looks very, very sad,” and was: “Pale-faced, pale-eyed and so tired he appears taxidermied.”

Mr Clegg has been a focus of public anger since his party’s U-turn over student tuition fees, with protesters creating effigies of him, and dog excrement posted through his letterbox. Asked by Mrs Khan whether he found this upsetting, he said: "Well look, I'm a human being, I'm not a punch bag – I've of course got feelings."

Discussing the effect on his family, he went on: "What I am doing in my work impacts on them emotionally, because my nine-year-old is starting to sense things and I'm having to explain things. “Like he asks, 'Why are the students angry with you, Papa?'" To get over his “misery” at failing to get the balance between his work and family life right, which he told Mrs Khan left him unable to do his job properly, he said that he went home at night to read novels. He added that he “cries regularly to music”.

(Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty.)