A girl allows a butterfly to be placed on her nose at the Sensational Butterflies exhibition at the Natural History Museum on April 6, 2011 in London, England. The exhibition is divided up into five sensory zones exploring how butterflies see, hear, taste, smell and touch. The display containing hundreds of butterflies runs from April 12 to September 11, 2011. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.
Matt Yglesias notes the malleability of whiteness. Adam Serwer nods:
[O]ne of the problems with a related set of trend stories predicting a browner and more post-racial America is that the definition of whiteness in the U.S. is hardly static, and shifted dramatically less than a century ago when we began to consider Jews, Italians and Irish people white. Before then there was a lot of ethnically charged pseudoscience about the inborn, immutable tendencies of each group that today sounds really idiotic. But the point is, as U.S. gets browner, many of the people who were once considered brown are going to start considering themselves white.
'Tis true. But the white will be a lot more mottled than before. And the ethnic categories seem surprisingly resilient in voting patterns.
Edinburgh, Scotland, 6 am
A reader writes:
Okay, so you printed a reader email inquiring about app love, but you immediately followed it with an unrelated email and never addressed the app situation. Constant struggle indeed. It is necessary to get The Dish in app form, as it is imperative that I be able to absorb Dishness in a non-browser format while I take a crap. Especially in the morning. I can't be alone here, so the regularity of your readership hinges upon this. An update, please.
We've raised the issue with the Daily Beast's tech team. We'll keep you posted. But it's one of our highest priorities.
Robert Greenstein graphs it:
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan would get about two-thirds of its more than $4 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years from programs that serve people of limited means, which violates basic principles of fairness and stands a core principle of President Obama’s fiscal commission on its head.
Agreed. Which is why the Democrats now need to provide a way to get equivalent savings by fairer means. If they could stop politicking and demagoguing, this is a major opportunity to contrast their vision of shared sacrifice with the GOP's. My support for the Ryan plan is highly qualified but still there because he has indeed put a great deal on the table and stood behind it. It would a terrible shame if the Dems didn't match him dollar for dollar with different priorities, rather than sit back and merely throw brickbats at the evil GOP.
"This [Ryan] plan would literally be a death trap for seniors,” – incoming DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
So the response to the "death panels" is a "death trap". Makes you see what Matt Miller was talking about.
(A glossary of Dish awards can be found here. Reader suggestions and nominations in all categories are always welcome.)
A reader writes:
I agree 100% with your principled response. However, given Congress' decree (bipartisan no less) that Gitmo detainees shalt never be transferred to the US for federal trials, the only alternative to military tribunals – indefinite detention – is even MORE unprincipled.
Another writes:
Since the Obama administration is already on record saying that KSM would not be released in the event of an acquittal in a civilian trial, what would be the purpose of going through the exercise? Can you imagine a bigger nightmare scenario than an acquittal of KSM, only to have him returned to military detention?
Another:
You wrote, "Al Qaeda could never destroy our values alone. We did it for them." Reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street". After a presumed alien invasion, a small town is overtaken by fear and paranoia. All the aliens have to do is watch as the town destroys itself.
I've tried to acknowledge the practical bind that Congress has put Obama in. And some kind of trial is better than none – as long as the rules aren't as rigged as they were under Bush and the evidence procured through torture is deemed inadmissable.
A reader writes:
One thing I found noteworthy about the amount of money that the Candie's Foundation paid Bristol for her abstinence promotion: in addition to the Palin spokesperson's blaming the whole thing, naturally, on an "anti-Palin organization that says Trigg [sic] isn't Palin's son", the Palin people gave the statement to E! Online. (Their exclusive story is here.) Not CNN, not some newspaper of record, not even Politico or any kind of actual news-gathering organization. Entertainment Television. I can't think of any better shorthand for how the Palins see their place in the media universe, or of the role that the family actually plays in the culture at large.
Another writes:
Her spokesperson's defense for her $262,500 compensation is, “If you do your research you’ll find that most nonprofits compensate their celebrity spokespeople and Bristol’s no different.” Not exactly.
The important thing to note is that it only takes a little research (by reading the Candie's Foundation Form 990 tax filing) that among all the many celebrity spokespersons for Candie's Foundation, Bristol is the only one that received compensation. The filing lists payments to non-employee contractors that relate to programs as being $262,500 total, which is precisely equal to the amount given to Bristol Palin.
That means two things: (i) Bristol is the only "celebrity" who insisted on compensation (and a huge amount at that); and (ii) The Situation, who did that god-awful PSA with her, did not seek compensation. I'm not sure which of these facts is more surprising, but taken together, they represent a major indictment of Palin.
(Image via Palingates)
David Frum isn't a fan of Paul Ryan's budget:
The real message of the Ryan plan is: Upper-income tax cuts now; spending cuts for the poor now; more deficits now; spending cuts for middle-income people much later; spending cuts for today’s elderly, never.
Jobs first, deficit later is actually the right timing of priorities. But the upper-income tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 markedly failed to translate into higher incomes for ordinary Americans. The Ryan plan offers no reason to hope that another round of the same medicine will deliver better results.
I agree with David that the biggest flaw is the refusal to add new taxation to the proposal. Worse, it actually wants to reduce tax revenues. And, as Krugman has pointed out, the cuts in discretionary spending are completely implausible. The defense cuts are also far too small. All this is true – and should be countered by the Dems and Obama. As for the cruelty argument, the truth is: the past fiscal recklessness makes some cruelty a mathematical necessity. I'm all in favor of Obama's cost-controls in the health reform I'd keep. But I have no confidence that they can alone stop us from heading off a cliff at some point.
And we simply cannot tax our way out of this (although we can raise taxes as part of a broader, fairer package). The math doesn't work. And since entitlements have to be reduced or we go belly-up, future seniors, i.e. my generation and below, will have to get less care and spend more of their own money on it than they do now.
When you have an entitlement to a service that has been transformed in scope, ambition and expense since Medicare was started, and when individuals have become used to open-ended medical care, your costs are going to sky-rocket until the entire economy is devoted to healthcare. There's no way out but rationing – either by making seniors pay much more for their healthcare or denying them much more than basic care. At least Ryan is more honest about this than Obama.
Matt Miller, as so often, has a sane take. And it's a pox on both parties:
The bottom line is that there remains a huge void in the debate. President Obama punted on long-term debt and deficits, while pretending that his modest new investments in areas such as education are enough to “win the future.” They’re not, though he plainly hopes they’re enough to win him reelection. Now, speaking for his party, Paul Ryan has offered a plan that stiffs the poor, gives fresh breaks to the wealthy, shortchanges needed public investment, yet still adds trillions in new debt and doesn’t balance the budget for decades because Republicans won’t come clean on taxes. As if to punctuate the lunacy, our fearless leaders may now let the government shut down to boot!
As Peggy Lee once sang, “Is that all there is?” America desperately needs a third choice if we’re ever to get serious about national renewal.
Will Obama triangulate and a get a decent deal on this? Or are the Republicans incapable of compromise? All this remains to be seen. The one indisputable fact is that the GOP has now come clean about the real sacrifices we have to make to get back to balance. The tragedy is that they want to do this almost entirely on the backs of the neediest. Some of that is necessary. But morally and politically, I think the rich, including current seniors, have to sacrifice much more.
I’ve been scanning through the emails as usual and detect an unusual fury about even considering the virtues of the Ryan plan. The ad hominems have been much nastier than usual. A sample of the in-tray:
Why exactly should the onus be on Obama and the Democrats to provide a plan that impacts the budget in the same when it is clear that Ryan’s proposal is a fairy tale based on assumptions that are way off-base? Here’s a way in which Democrats wanted to impact the budget in the same way: Not extending the Bush tax cuts. Unfortunately, not enough of them thought that way. Ryan wants to extend these tax cuts and then some. Then he wants to pay for those cuts on the backs of the poor and sick. YOUR MOVE OBAMA!!! Why again should he respond in kind to this childish drivel?
Unfortunately returning to Clinton era tax rates would not solve the problem we face, although they’d clearly help and Obama could now make that case as a way to soften the impact on the needy of Ryan’s proposals. Another:
Reading your blog these past few weeks, all I can think about is the fact that you were able to take a month off when you got really sick, yet you cheerlead the GOP’s efforts to take healthcare away from vulnerable Americans.
Several readers have also accused me of being a Republican party hack and someone whose friends all work on Wall Street.
I don’t have any friends who work on Wall Street and somehow I don’t think the GOP would think of me as their mouthpiece. And look: I’ve written what I would change in the Ryan proposal. I would not abolish Obamacare, but would want to accelerate its cost-control experiments. I don’t buy the rosy projections of growth and unemployment. I think a reasonable deal would be to reform taxes in a way that both reduces rates but increases general revenue, and use that money to make subsidies for elderly patients more generous. I’d like a gas tax too (fat chance, I know).
And I’d welcome a Democratic vision of how to reach fiscal balance and a surplus over time. There is none. And no, Obama’s budget doesn’t do this. If the Dems want to raise taxes to pay for all the current entitlements in the future, then they need to tell us precisely how high taxes are going to have to go. Until the Democrats show us a path to a balanced budget according to their values, credit must go to Ryan for breaking the paradigm of never mentioning the sacrifices that we have to make if we are not to become Greece or Portugal in due course.
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