Month: May 2011

The moral argument is bolstered by a financial one:

The Independent Democratic Conference … released a report [pdf] showing that New York State stands to generate some $391 million in increased economic activity, revenue, and savings during the three years after it is made law.

Using conservative estimates, the report estimated that 21,309 gay and lesbian couples from New York would get married within the first three years. It also estimates that 3,308 couples from surrounding states that do not have marriage equality would travel to New York to get married, as would 41,907 non-New York gay and lesbian couples who would travel to New York for a “destination wedding.”

This influx would be a boon to New York's wedding and tourism industries, which has been hard hit by the current economic downturn. It would also result in increased revenue for New York State through increased sales tax collections, and help for municipalities in increased collections from marriage license fees, local sales tax, and, in New York City, a hotel occupancy tax.

(Hat tip: Laura Nahmias)

A new report (pdf) on the Massachusetts healthcare system has the WSJ crowing about the failures of Romneycare. One complaint is about longer wait times to see primary care doctors. Jonathan Cohn checks the data:

I’ve … heard plenty of anecdotes about long waits in Massachusetts, so I’m not dismissing the possibility reform has exacerbated the crowding problem. But my strong hunch is that the real story in Massachusetts is an old one that’s plagued the entire country for some time now: We don’t have nearly enough primary care providers. As Nancy Turnbull, a longtime state official who now lectures at Harvard, told the Boston Globe after last year’s ER report, “I don’t think the increase has anything to do with health care reform. It’s much more reflective of [primary care] access problems.’’

Speaking of Romney, he’s scheduled to give a speech this Thursday on how he will repeal and replace Obamacare. Greg Sargent expects it won’t accomplish much.

A reader writes:

Someone should point Chomsky to the tape Bin Laden released in December 2001, when he says: "[W]e calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all."

Another writes:

I agree that Chomsky's use of the word "uncontroversially" is at best wrong-headed; you always have to watch out for people who use words/phrases like "it's a proven fact." But if he had phrased it as "Bush's actions wreaked more havoc than Bin Laden's," do you think that would be fair?

The motives of the two men couldn't be more different. Bin Laden's goal was to kill as many people as he could and Bush wanted to stop an imminent attack on America/remove a tyrant from power/build a democracy in the Arab world. While the dead and wounded in Iraq were not "goals" of the administration, they did occur. The Iraq War cost more American lives than 9/11 did and untold thousands of Iraqi lives. Bush's intentions may have been good, but as the old adage goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Hitch attacked Chomsky's lastest effort by associating Chomsky with 9/11 trutherism and 9/11 apologism:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' " Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.

Freddie deBoer sides with Chomsky:

Here is Chomsky refuting 9/11 conspiracy theories in about the least vague terms imaginable. You might consider the entire book that Chomsky published about 9/11 for repeated and consistent denials of the morality of killing innocent civilians on 9/11. This stuff isn't hard to find. Hitchens writes, "It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax." If this is his admission that Chomsky is not a Truther, it's as weird and awkwardly constructed as I can imagine, which I guess is the point. He then says "However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court." It's remarkable? I find it demonstrably unremarkable, considering that, well, the mass of evidence against bin Laden has never been formally presented in a legal setting– the way we answer questions of crime and legality, or we did, when we were the society of our ideals.

Will Herberg's 1967 rant against hippies, published in National Review, spearheaded some of the hippie caricatures that continue to this day:

The corporate mental life of the hippies would seem to be rather vacuous. They do show some talent for organization (after all, they’re all Americans, aren’t they?), but the thinking they do, if indeed thinking it can be called, is more like orgiastic love-spluttering than coherent thought. Unlike the more pretentious beatniks of yore, they do not claim to be producing a new and esoteric kind of poetry or music; they just want to be left alone to wallow in their “love-ins” and their nature “happenings.”

In the context of the last decade, I have to say that some of these utopian dreamers are a pleasant relief to defenses of torture, surveillance and constant war. And today's hippies have internalized the 1960s and moved beyond them. We have close to majority support for marijuana legalization, for example. And even hippie-hatred has entered an ironic era. Think of Cartman. He channels our discomfort and also makes a joke out of it:

(Hat tip: Alex Seitz-Wald; image via Chait)

A reader writes:

The best part of this story was about Don Shipley, the retired SEAL who fact-checked Moats service record:

There was a time when it was easy for people such as Moats to get away with lying about their military service. The Internet has changed all of that, Shipley said.

Ahem.

Part one showed that Americans spend far more on healthcare than other rich nations. Part two provides reasons why:

Hat tip: Frakt

Columbia Journalism Review has a new report out on the business side of online journalism:

For decades, there has been a connection between the journalism that news organizations provide and the advertisements that generate most of their revenue. Whether it’s a glossy spread that runs before the table of contents in a fashion magazine, or the anchorman’s “more after this message” assurance on the local Eyewitness News, ads and content have always been closely linked in the stream that appears before the consumer. That linkage is breaking down, and news organizations are scrambling to re- place it with something else.

Felix Salmon parses the reports, and favors media relationships (like local papers and Yahoo) that can greatly expand a site's advertizer reach. He also weighs in on the Dish's move to the Beast and what it means for bloggers building their own personal brands:

People who like Andrew Sullivan also like James Fallows, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or other Atlantic bloggers Andrew linked to on a pretty regular basis; they also followed his links to magazine articles and turned out to be pretty appreciative of the rest of the material on theatlantic.com. So while Sullivan did have a very large number of unique visitors, it’s wrong to say that he took them with him when he left. Yes, most of them now read him at the Daily Beast. But that doesn’t mean that all or even most of them have left The Atlantic.

It's win-win, as far as unique visitors are concerned, I'm happy to say, although it's probably a little premature to make any grand inferences yet. Give it six months and see how it sorts out. From our point of view, it seems we have lost almost no one in the move, largely because our bookmark rate is over 80 percent. And, as I've noted, it's good to see the Atlantic's unique visitors stay stable.

But it's worth noting that, according to Quantcast, the Beast's traffic in terms of page views is now 39 million a month, compared with the Atlantic's 15 million. The month before the Dish moved, it was 27 million pageviews for the Beast vs 21 million for the Atlantic. The gap in pageviews between the two sites has gone in one month from 6 million to 24 million. Since ads are sold on pageviews, that has got to mean something long-term. Quite what I don't really know.

Max Rodenbeck raises the possibility:

Earlier last year he had blamed the West for global warming, blasted Pakistan’s efforts at relief following deadly floods, and railed against cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad—five years after the images first provoked Muslim protest. …

Back in 2001 the calm, saintly, bearded visage with the wide eyes, the slender fingers caressing a Kalashnikov, and the combat jacket worn over a long white robe had seemed to some the epitome of jihadist cool. … Ten years later, such heroic posturing looks rather dated to a younger Arab generation that—in places like Tunis, Cairo, Muscat, and even Riyadh—is highly urbanized, increasingly sophisticated about the ways of the world, and impatient for gains in the here and now.

Imaginationland is a powerful thing.

A reader plugs a music video that is racing through the interwebs:

The Lonely Island teams up with Michael Bolton to record "Jack Sparrow".  The writers of Office Space may have to revisit their designation of Bolton as "a no-talent ass clown"; he's genuinely hilarious in this video.  (caution: language NSFW)

Sweet. And I'll watch anything with Andy Samberg in it.

Yes, he's for expanding West Bank settlements, about the worst thing you could back if you want to advance US interests in the Middle East. If you want to hasten the Apocalypse, on the other hand, I'm sure Netanyahu and Khamenei will be all too willing to help. Then, er, there's this:

Huckabee has joked that he "answers" to "two Janets." One is his wife, Janet Huckabee. The other is Janet Porter, the onetime co-chair of Huckabee's Faith and Values Coalition. And Porter, the former governor has said, is his "prophetic voice." But that voice has said some weird things over the years: Porter has maintained that Obama represents an "inhumane, sick, and sinister evil," and she has warned that Democrats want to throw Christians in jail merely for practicing their faith. She's attributed Haiti's high poverty rate to the fact that the country is "dedicated to Satan," and she suggested that gay marriage caused Noah's Flood. And there's this: In a 2009 column for conservative news site WorldNetDaily, Porter asserted that President Barack Obama is a Soviet secret agent, groomed since birth to destroy the United States from within.

This lunatic is in the top tier of Republican candidates for 2012. Here's hoping he prefers a nice big Florida home and a niche on Fox.