Month: March 2012

Despite a recent study finding that congressional supporters of healthcare reform paid a price for their votes, Jonathan Bernstein doubts that Obamacare will noticeably hurt Obama in November:

[T]he study found that healthcare hurt Democrats by making people think they were more liberal than they otherwise would have thought. So the question is: To what extent has ACA changed people’s opinions about Barack Obama? My guess is that whatever the answer to that might be, it’s a lot less than the extent to which it changed people’s views of their Member of Congress because it has to compete with so much other information.

As part of my Lenten penance regimen, I'll be live-blogging the results tonight at 8 pm onwards. I genuinely have no idea what to expect. Which is why this could be extremely interesting.

Again my key criteria: Romney's evangelical vote. But I think it's clear how he can win them back in the fall: Obama-hatred and Israel. Gd knows what the Super-PACS will do with a, ahem "Muslim" on one ticket and a Mormon on the other.

The fresh heir of Downton Abbey:

The deepening and darkening Murdoch mess in Britain is now threatening to entangle the prime minister. More from Mike Giglio on the increasing seriousness of the charges here. Money quote:

Significantly, the arrests are not in relation to the illegal hacking of voicemails or payments to public officials, but to obstructing justice … Court documents released last month allege a so-called “email deletion policy” at News International, discussed by at least one unnamed senior executive, in which “hundreds of thousands of emails, on nine separate occasions, were destroyed,” according to the documents.

Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice carries more serious legal implications than phone hacking. Tom Watson, the M.P. leading the campaign against Murdoch in Parliament, responded to news of the email deletion policy last month by tweeting, “the game is up @rupertmurdoch.”

Tom Nichols pinpoints the problem with the Russian president's blatant attempts to silence dissenters after the rigged election: 

Putin and his coterie just don’t get it about information technology in the 21st century. Going after bloggers, or punk bands, or almost anyone under 50 in Russia means risking a serious coast-to-coast blowup in an hour. To this day, that who [sic] concept seem to befuddle the Russian President. Putin put out some slick commercials, to be sure. And if this were 1992 instead of 2012, that would have been great. But everything goes viral in this age; I’d never heard of…erm, Pussy Riot until last week, and now I’ve seen their videos. Busting them and putting them in people like that in jail creates brushfires, it doesn’t extinguish them.

"The thought of giving a piece of our land to others is horrible. To those who talk about two states for two people I say: Sure, many states for many peoples, but not in in the Land of Israel. The Land of Israel is not intended to be a state for another people …" – Rabbi Haim Druckman, new recipient of one of the highest honors in Israel, the Israel Prize.

Previous recipients have included S. Y. Agnon, Golda Meir, Martin Buber, Naomi Shemer, Yad Vashem,  and the Israeli Philharmonic. This is not the Israel some people think they know.

Update: a reader notes that Druckman has also been accused of covering up child-abuse.

 

Ezra Klein imagined a future where cheap genome testing destroys the health insurance market. Razib Khan, an expert on such matters, counters:

The idea that personal genomics might render insurance irrelevant makes some logical sense. The only problem is that it oversells the science of prediction in biology, and underestimates the role of randomness in disease outcomes. … Yes, a non-trivial minority of people will find out that they have a high risk of developing a given disease early on enough in adulthood that the acturial tables imply that they’re uninsurable. But even those with “clean” results should probably still purchase some insurance plan to protect against ‘tail risk’. People who don’t smoke do get lung cancer, and people without a family history of heart disease and cancer do get heart disease and cancer.

Eventually anyone can see propaganda for what it is.

How hard is to to support the institutional hierarchy of the Catholic church these days? This hard:

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group SNAP, [Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests]: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.

Donohue is a thug. But he is for the hierarchy what Hannity is for the GOP base. And the line about "altar boys"? Sometimes, you realize that for some Catholics, nothing has changed since the revelation of the mass rape of children, altar boys often a prime target.

Paul Waldman asks when Obama's full radicalism will be unleashed:

I'm not talking about Affordable Care Act-type radicalism. I mean the real radicalism. The Weather Underground radicalism. The Black Panther radicalism. The dismantling of capitalism, the closing of the Defense Department, the demotion of white people to second-class citizenship. When is that going to come? Can they give us the litany of Obama policies that represent the realization of the visions of the 60's radicals who supposedly control his mind across the decades?