Month: May 2011

Buzzkill:

A closer look at studies linking increased drinking to decreased mortality rates reveals that non-drinkers may have a higher incidence of heart disease not because they don't drink, but because they're unhealthier to begin with. Abstainers—rare in American society, where over two thirds of adults imbibe—are often what are known as "sick quitters," individuals who stop drinking because they are elderly or already in poor health.

Tyler Cowen calls out Paul Krugman:

Do we take market prices seriously?  Since Treasury rates are still low, low, low, arguably we can infer that the market does not think the Republican stance is so catastrophic.  Paul Krugman does not take a consistent position on the relevance of low rates.  They are allowed to indicate that the U.S. government should spend more, but not allowed to indicate that we should diminish the blame to be leveled at Republicans.  One cannot have it both ways.

Complementing our post last week about test-screened alternate scenes, The Daily What finds a recently unearthed example:

[I]t turns out that [director Alexander] Payne’s original ending followed the novel’s conclusion to a T, but the test audience hated it, so a new denouement was shot. The original epilogue remained unseen for years, until a VHS tape with an early work print of the film somehow ended up at a local flea market, and the “lost” footage was subsequently uploaded to YouTube.

Peter Sciretta says of the switch: "[Y]es, rarely, test screening prompted reshoots can result in a much better film."

Nate Silver outlines scenarios:

If a populist candidate like Sarah Palin won in Iowa and Mr. Romney finished a strong second, that might not be so bad for him: he’d have a good opportunity to recover in New Hampshire, eventually setting up a conservative-versus-moderate “play-off” in the later states. But if Mr. Romney were to be overtaken in Iowa by a candidate like Tim Pawlenty or Mitch Daniels — someone who had a plausible chance of winning in New Hampshire as well — he’d be in a great deal of trouble.

Mudflats weighs in against Green:

The real question he’s asking is – What could Palin have achieved if she had a different personality, if she were not a political opportunist and had actual integrity, if she were qualified, if she knew her stuff, if she were an effective leader, if she knew how to manage people, if she were intellectually curious, if she didn’t quit? The question Green asks is really what Sarah Palin might have achieved if she hadn’t been Sarah Palin. And it’s why “What went wrong?” is a false question. “What went wrong” was Palin being who she is – consistently and predictably opportunistic.

Greg Sargent has got a hold of Panetta's letter to McCain on the intelligence that led to bin Laden. Money quote:

Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting. In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.

The closest Panetta comes to naming torture as a factor was that at least two tortured prisoners lied about the key courier's role. But the general impression is that this was a massive, long, often scrupulous effort in which torture played no critical role and led to false information along the way.

I take Stephen Carter's point that torture can provide glimmers of truth amid a welter of falsehoods. Pragmatically, the argument against it is that its confusing results are less helpful than far, far more reliable old-fashioned Western interrogation techniques. The principled argument against it is that it destroys human freedom, debases the torturers, spreads lies like cancer through any fair judicial system and recruits Jihadists more powerfully than any other factor interrogators have come across.

But to to a thug like Cheney, 9/11 was the excuse to unleash evil against evil. No wonder it ended up a draw.

Another former athlete comes out – a Villanova basketball player. And he's African-American, which, as Don Lemon has noted, makes the process harder. Maybe the dam is breaking in the sports world.

David Frum tells the GOP to proceed with caution on the debt ceiling:

[W]hat this default talk looks like is that the GOP wants a crisis, not a deal. A deal would involve real pain for real voters: Medicare reductions, farm spending reductions, military reductions, and revenue measures. A crisis creates an exciting substitute for such a deal – especially if the GOP can temporarily and delusively convince itself that it can pin the blame for the crisis on President Obama. That will not be true. The whole world will see that the crisis was avoidable, and will see who insisted on forcing it. And however high you imagine the financial and political price – it will be higher.

Felix Salmon explains the Republican refusal to deal by pointing to the polls:

The only thing you need to understand the Republican position on the debt ceiling is this number: 47% of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling, while only 19% support it. Republicans will vote no on this for the same reason that they voted no on TARP — politically speaking, doing so makes all the sense in the world.

A reader reminds me of this classic summary of Gingrich's gesammelte Schriften by Jake Weisberg:

As he flies around like George Jetson in his upside-down module, Gingrich is ever counting. He offers two reasons why we must replace the welfare state, three steps toward success, Four Great Truths of our Generation, five Pillars of Freedom and Progress, seven aspects of committing ourselves to real change, nine zones of invention and creativity, 10 steps toward Renewing American Civilization, 13 Renewing America Strategies, 14 steps to replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society, and 17 key factors in a House victory. These are easier to remember if you sing them.

He's a self-important idiot. There. I said it.

The ultimate scaredy cat: