Month: December 2011

Chris Christie is currently commanding 26 percent of the vote, New York State Senator Roy J. McDonald is just behind him at 24 percent, and David Frum is in third with 20 percent. Click on their names to see what they were nominated for and cast your vote:

The award definition:

The Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.

The Daily Dish Awards Glossary

Click here to vote for the 2011 Malkin Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Hathos Alert!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Face Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Von Hoffmann Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Yglesias Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Chart Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Mental Health Break Of The Year!

In this latest dispatch from Eli Lake, we read this:

Despite repeated requests going back to 2009, Netanyahu’s government has not agreed to ask the United States for permission or give significant advanced warning of any pending strike.

It's just a useful insight into the contempt the Israeli government has for the government and people of the United States. Israel is prepared to launch a Third World War that would immediately engulf the US and the entire West without so much as a heads-up. That's what Israelis call an "alliance". Which is why they are losing every single ally they once had, and hang on to the US with Christianist apocalypticism and Democratic habit alone.

Alyssa Rosenberg feels that Game Change focuses on the wrong candidate:

The story I’d really like to see out of that book, actually, is the one about John and Elizabeth Edwards, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that he went ahead with the 2008 campaign despite the mess in his personal life. Hubris and denial aren’t emotions that can be fit into rationality, which makes them particularly interesting. What happened behind the scenes in Palin’s brief, dizzying ascent has been done to death. The Edwards’ follies and tragedies are still somewhat inexplicable. And in a country where we’ve only ever had one divorced President, the idea that you could totally escape the expectations Americans have for the private lives of presidential candidates (Clinton, at least, only ever had Chelsea with Hillary) is a kind of magical thinking.

Nancy Scola ponders Wikipedia's annual fundraising drive: 

Wikipedia's expansion most likely will not have a big impact for people in the U.S., where the encyclopedia is widely used. Its expansion plans focus on developing countries like Brazil and India—and if all goes well, in the Middle East. One recent "personal appeal" banner featured Dr. Sengai Podhuvan, a Wikipedia editor in India. "I wrote my PhD on the topic of indigenous games in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu," writes Podhuvan. "Maybe you will never look up one of my articles. But it pleases me that thousands do." There's a good chance that you won't: Most of Podhuvan's edits are in Tamil. But that language is spoken by 75 million people (a fact gleaned from Wikipedia, which directed me through a footnote to an edited linguistics reference book, a transaction that took all of about five seconds).

… to protests with 70,000 participants and scenes like the one above, where AL monitors are confronted with the body of a murdered child. Yet some monitors are preposterously asserting they see "nothing frightening" in Homs. David Kenner guesses at why that might be:

[Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al] Dabi [the head of the monitoring mission] may be the unlikeliest leader of a humanitarian mission the world has ever seen. He is a staunch loyalist of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity for his government's policies in Darfur. And Dabi's own record in the restive Sudanese region, where he stands accused of presiding over the creation of the feared Arab militias known as the "janjaweed," is enough to make any human rights activist blanch.

EA's liveblog is keeping close tabs on updates from the Arab League mission, including some evidence that observers were shot at during an inspection. Elias Muhanna looks [NYT] at how the uprising has transformed the Syrian blogosphere:

This highly polarized response is symptomatic of a broader culture war that has recently emerged among Syria watchers. For the first decade of Assad’s presidency, most Syrian blogs I read were fairly supportive of the regime because of its commitment to the Palestinian cause and its opposition to the United States and Israel. But this year has changed everything.

Here's a protest in Hama:

This man is being rushed to a makeshift opposition hospital after an artillery strike:

And here you can watch Assad thugs shoot directly at protestors documenting their brutality:

"Curses!" says Jamie Kirchick. "Foiled again!":

Paul's number are notably up with Democrats, making up for some slippage with Republicans … [There's] real slippage with "very liberal" voters — a tiny fraction of caucus-goers, at 4 percent. But strong support from moderates and "somewhat" liberal voters, and a bounce with "very conservative" voters, who make up 37 percent of the sample.

I would never suggest that the content of the newsletters are boosting Paul here. Two months ago those "very conservative" voters were ready to nominate Herman Cain. But one week after James Kirchick's Weekly Standard "ahem, remember this?" story kicked off the new wave of Paul stories, it's either a boutique issue that isn't connecting with people, a confusing issue that raises "liberal media bias" hackles with conservatives, or both.

In the week since the scandal emerged, Paul's favorable numbers among Democrats have gone from 59 to 70 percent, and stayed pretty much the same among Republicans and Democrats. So Kirchick's story and our blogospheric debates seem have had one major impact: bolstering Paul's support from the center-left.

(Hat tip: Andrew Exum)

Steve Kornacki thinks media non-coverage made Paul's rise possible:

[T]he virtual press blackout … meant that the newsletters weren’t being mentioned, and that Paul wasn’t facing the intense day-to-day scrutiny that took a toll on other GOP candidates when they enjoyed breakthrough moments this year. It allowed him to present himself to audiences on his own terms and helped him become something of a sympathetic figure. In effect, Paul was able to take advantage of the many  nontraditional means of communicating with voters that now exist without those voters being subjected to screaming mainstream press headlines about Paul controversies and gaffes. How many of the new supporters Paul gained these past few years didn’t know anything about the newsletters until this month?

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 3.43 pm

A reader writes:

Robin Hanson's question answers itself, though he seems not to notice. He asks why we tend not to limit the hours of self-employed, high status, professions. We don't limit the hours of such people because they are 1) highly paid, 2) have a great deal of control over their work schedules, and 3) don't do much in the way of manual labor. Statutory limits help poorly paid people, who have little control over their schedules or conditions of employment, and often engage in physically difficult labor. There are also, of course, safety considerations in some lines of work (pilots, truckers). So it seems like a quite rational system, at least in broad outline.

Another reader adds:

We limit these hours because, historically, owners or bosses would compel workers to do physically demanding and dangerous jobs beyond the point of sanity, where exhaustion and fatigue would endanger workers’ health and lives. Their compulsion was based on the fact that there was a line of guys outside that factory door looking for work, and if you weren’t willing to put in 12 hours a day, the next guy might.

We also limited hours to spread jobs around during the Depression.  Overtime pay was designed to get owners to hire more workers instead of just over-working the ones they had, to spread the work (and hence, the wealth) more widely. But many workers took to overtime as a form of de-facto pay raise.

Finally, some of the workers who we don’t limit, we probably should.  Doctors especially should have work limits, given the fact that study after study shows that fatigue leads to bad decision-making which leads to bad outcomes (ie, death) for patients. But doctors who are in a position to change things came into that position of power under the current regime of crazy training hours, and so see no need to change it. People working for themselves – the financiers and artists and academics – fine, work yourself to death, 16 hour days, 7 days a week, whatever. But people working for other people need some protection, and people who work ON other people should also be limited even if they are not.