Month: May 2011

Huckabee's new "educational" videos, which purport to teach history to children, are simply bizarre:

Pareene provides details:

If you order "The Reagan Revolution" now, for just $9.95, you'll also receive "The History Exploerer Shoulder Sack" (a $15 value!) and "The History Explorer Quick Focus Binoculars" (a $26 value!) — free! (Also, if you order now, you will automatically be signed up to purchase all future videos in the series, "for just $11.95 plus $3.95 s/h billed conveniently to your credit card.") …

[I]t really looks like Mike Huckabee is not running for president, because I don't think presidents need such bizarre moneymaking schemes? He's like a male evangelical Lucy Ricardo, this guy.

Huckabee is scheduled to announce whether he is running or not tomorrow. Henry Ed Rollins suspects he isn't.

Jon Hamilton tracks the progress of electrocorticography, or ECoG, electrodes on the surface of the brain which can detect electrical signals:

In one recent experiment, researchers were able to use ECoG to determine the word a person was imagining. "This is both very exciting and somewhat frightening at the same time," says Gerwin Schalk, a researcher who studies ECoG at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center in Albany. "It really goes pretty close to what people used to call mind reading."

So perhaps it's not surprising that Schalk's research is funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army.

Would-be terror suspects Ahmed Ferhani (PICTURED), 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, (NOT PICTURED) stand before a judge during their arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court May 12, 2011 in New York City. The men allegedly attempted to buy guns and grenades and considered a synagogue terror attack in a sting operated by the NYPD. By Louis Lanzano-Pool/Getty Images.

Brendan Nyhan's guess:

First, the birth certificate's release was an unusually definitive debunking that became a major news event, so there was saturation coverage of some very strong corrective information. Second, no prominent elites on the right contested the validity of the birth certificate, which meant that coverage of its release was almost entirely one-sided. Finally, it's possible that support for the myth was soft because poll respondents didn't really believe it but were using poll questions about Obama's religion and place of birth as a way to express disapproval (as some commentators and pollsters have argued).

Andrew Cohen jests (kind of):

I think the government should should charge everyone who wants to see the photo a set price — say, $100 –  and then use the proceeds to help fund the ongoing war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq or wherever else American troops are in harm's way fighting the war on terror. Or maybe fund scholarships for the child survivors and victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on America. Or maybe do better by our brave military families struggling to get by. Better yet, each person could select from one of those options when forking over their Benjamin. No checks, please, and a service charge for all credit card orders. And if you want to contribute to paying off the national debt, that is cool, too.

(Image: Osama bin Laden by the great Ralph Steadman for Britain's atheist magazine, the New Humanist.)

Tyler Cowen notes that it is "harder to make a mandate work when a) health care costs are high, and b) income inequality is high." His worry:

Circa 2080, imagine a world with two classes, the very rich and the fairly poor.  The very rich pay thirty percent of their $1 million a year incomes on health care.  The fairly poor earn $100,000 a year.  How are we supposed to roughly equalize health care consumption?  Does it make sense to give the fairly poor 3/4 of their real income ($300,000 out of a total of $100,000 cash plus $300,000 health care benefits) in the form of health care benefits?  And could we enforce that with a mandate + subsidy?  Probably not.

The Dish is looking for two interns to help with editorial content, assist with remedial tasks, and work on larger projects.

Interns will be full time (37.5 hours a week) and will be paid an hourly wage of $10.25. The position, unlike many internships, includes benefits (my bleeding heart insistence) and are a year-long commitment. Applicants must be in DC or willing to move to DC. We are hoping to hire interns within the next month or two. Start dates are semi-flexible.

We've wanted our own exclusive interns for years and now we are at the Beast, we can have them. We're looking for extremely hard workers, web-obsessives and Dishheads, who already understand what we do here. I should add that Zoe, Chris and Patrick all started as Atlantic interns with some of their duties for the Dish, and became full-time staffers because of the amazing work they produced. We're also looking for individuals who can challenge me and my assumptions and find stuff online that we might have missed.

To apply, please e-mail a (max 500-word) cover letter explaining why you want to work for the Dish and a resumé to Dish.Intern@newsweekdailybeast.com. The cut off for applications is midnight.

So much symbolism packed into this clip of a citizen-journalist in Yemen:

Jay Cost says Romney's "basic political problem is that he comes from the Northeastern wing of the party":

[A] candidate aligned with the Northeastern, moderate wing of the party has not won a nomination since 1960, and there is no reason to expect that to change, barring some kind of once-in-a-century realignment of the two political parties. Northeastern Republicans are now junior partners in the party coalition. They cannot deliver their own states anymore, as the Democrats dominate them all except New Hampshire and Pennsylvania; meanwhile, conservatives in the Midwest, South, and West can deliver their states, and so they now basically run the show.

Frum asks when Pawlenty will have to defend it:

A question for Tim Pawlenty at the next Republican debate. “When you became governor in 2003, Minnesota had under 395,000 citizens without health insurance. In 2008, the last year before the recession struck, Minnesota had 446,000 citizens without health insurance. Do you regard that as an important failure of your administration? If not, why not?”

Ezra Klein compares uninsurance rates in candidates' home states using the above graph. Jonathan Chait sees what Frum is getting at:

The obvious point is that a failure to impose government regulations and subsidies onto the health care system can never be viewed as a liability by conservatives — and certainly not a liability remotely on par with Romney's — regardless of real-world consequences. In the conservative movement, a more free market system is ipso facto superior.