Month: March 2012

That's how Romney describes next week's primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. Scott Galupo notes that Mitt's "Southern problem" is not necessarily about the South: 

Republican presidential candidates obviously don't win general elections by winning Dixie alone. They win in swing states like Ohio. And they win in swing states like Ohio by turning out Southern-type voters who live in Ohio—evangelicals and Reagan Democrats. … Romney's "Southern problem" therefore isn't that he's in danger of losing Southern states; it's that he's not reaching those demographic chunks of non-Southern states that most resemble the South.

The pushback against Invisible Childern's #Kony2012 campaign has been enormous, often featuring the above photo (by Glenna Gordon) of the organization's founders. Elizabeth Dickinson critiques the video:

[I]n recent years, the LRA has fractured hugely—in response to international efforts to go after Kony. In incredibly violent starts and stops, the group now rears its head in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Southern Sudan, and the Central African Republic. It actually hardly exists in Uganda anymore. Having been chased out by that country’s military, it has sought the more lawless terrain nearby. In the no man’s borderlands and the depths of the jungle, it continues to mete out victims. But it is not, by most analyses, a centralized organization anymore, or one that any leader’s removal could stop. We passed that point at least a decade ago. There are also a host of other problems with the facts in the video—including the number of children soldiers that the organization cites. (Responding to these critiques, the charity says it is only relying on UN figures.)

Mark Kersten thinks Invisible Children's implicit solution – stepped up US military involvement targeted at Joseph Kony personally – will only make matters worse:

In this context, it is worthwhile remembering that massive regional military solutions (Operations Iron Fist and Lightning Thunder most recently), with support from the US, have thus far failed to dismantle or "stop" the LRA. These failures have created serious and legitimate doubts that the ‘LRA question’ is one that can be resolved by military means. Incredibly, there is no mention in the film or the campaign that northern Ugandans are currently enjoying the longest period of peace since the conflict began in 1986. 

Ishaan Tharoor questions the video's framing:

It’d be churlish to rebuke Invisible Children for wanting to help those afflicted overseas, while moving tens of thousands of previously apathetic Americans (at least to hit the re-tweet button) at home. But there’s a thin, perilous line between the organization’s brand of righteousness and simple self-aggrandizement. The film makes little mention of ongoing activism by people in northern Uganda. I’m not the only one to feel a bit queasy about the film’s perhaps unintended, yet inescapable white man’s burden complex, with filmmaker-cum-protagonist Jason Russell framing the horrors wrought by Kony and the need to stop him through an overly precious discussion with his blonde, cherub-cheeked toddler son.

Katie J.M. Baker rounds up more backlash.

The NYT reports that genome sequencing is getting much cheaper. Ezra Klein thinks this "means that an individual mandate — or something much like it — is inevitable":

Eventually, genomic testing will be a powerful predictor of future illness. And it raises the potential that young people will get themselves tested and then purchase insurance based off the result. So those with a clean genomic result might go for a cheap catastrophic plan, while those with a high risk of developing pricey illnesses will opt for more comprehensive insurance. The result would be, in insurance terms, an “adverse-selection death spiral,” as the healthy opt out of expensive insurance, the sick opt into it, and premiums spin out of control.

Razib Kahn looks on the bright side:

Today correlation between cancer and location is the stuff of class-action lawsuits. But this sort of correlational science is often weak tea, and will seem pathetic in comparison to what is to come. Biological information technology will hyper-charge correlational science. From the cloud one can extract out patterns of elevated cancer risk, conditional on genetics, location, and lifestyle. Correlations of particular genomic features with purchasing habits will naturally fall out of the information stream. Data will reveal your risk based on exactly where you live, while controlling for genetic background. Currently medical trials runs into thousands of individuals, with coarse assessments of confounding variables. The new information cloud will increase the sample size to millions, and instead of self-reports it will be able to track confounds in real time!

Dahlia Lithwick reviews Dale Carpenter's Flagrant Conduct, which takes a fresh look at Lawrence v. Texas. Although arrested for having sex, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner actually weren't being physical; Garner's jealous boyfriend called the police because he thought Garner was flirting with Lawrence:

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.

Barry Deutsch distills the larger point:

For me, the fact that Lawrence and Garner hadn’t actually been having sex when they were arrested perfectly illustrates the real meaning of anti-sodomy laws. The cops didn’t really witness any sex going on, but they did recognize that the men were gay, and that was reason enough for the cops to arrest the men. This is sodomy laws at their most pure: It’s not about stopping sex, it’s about criminalizing existing while homosexual.

(Map of states which still have sodomy laws on the books from Tim Murphy. Following Lawrence the laws became unenforceable, but Murphy sees them as an attempt to "send a message that homosexuality is officially condemned by the government.")

Seth Masket summarizes a new paper he co-authored [pdf] on the topic:

We conducted thousands of simulations and found that, in the majority of simulations, Democrats retained at least 25 additional seats if they had all voted against ACA. That's enough for them to have held the majority…The solid line [in the above chart] represents voters in the districts of Democratic House members who voted against ACA; the dotted line represents those in the districts of ACA supporters. That one yes vote had an enormous effect on voters, causing them to perceive their representative as being substantially further to the left. And as numerous studies have shown, being ideologically extreme tends to reduce one's vote share.

Chait counters. Brendan Nyhan, another of the paper's authors, adds:

[N]one of this is to say that Democrats should have declined to pursue health care reform, which was arguably their party's top policy priority after the 2008 election. Parties are frequently willing to pay an electoral penalty to enact their preferred policy agenda. What our analysis shows, however, is that the costs of passing the legislation were significant.

Paul Waldman puts Romney's small donor problem in context:

[M]oney raised by the Romney super PACs will be less influential than money raised by the campaigns. He will no doubt be able to find plenty of big donors who will give his super PAC a million bucks or so each. When a donor does that, the million bucks gets spent on TV ads and mailers, which is all well and good. But it doesn't support volunteers (no one is volunteering for a super PAC) who make phone calls and knock on doors, and multiple studies by political scientists in recent years have demonstrated that personal contact is far more persuasive than things like TV ads.

Ah, Dish readers. There is a precedent for grown men kissing, if not sucking, a child's penis (mutilated under Islamic as well as Jewish tradition). And in this case, it meant an initial conviction of gross sexual assault – which was then overturned. An Afghani immigrant repeatedly kissed his son's wingwang, and took photos of such:

Kargar's witnesses, all relatively recent emigrants from Afghanistan, testified that kissing a son's penis is common in Afghanistan, that it is done to show love for the child, and that it is the same whether the penis is kissed or entirely put into the mouth because there are no sexual feelings involved.

Israeli children in Purim costumes read the Esther scrolls at a synagogue in the Israeli town of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv on March 7, 2012. The carnival-like Purim holiday is celebrated starting the evening of March 7 with parades and costume parties to commemorate the deliverance of the Jewish people from a plot to exterminate them in the ancient Persian empire 2,500 years ago, as recorded in the Biblical Book of Esther. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.

For one young male infant, the procedure was literally fatal:

The cause of death of the 2-week-old boy, who died at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn on Sept. 28, was Type 1 herpes, caused by “ritual circumcision with oral suction,” according to the medical examiner’s office … The procedure occurs during the circumcision ritual of the bris, as the practitioner, or mohel, removes the foreskin of the penis and then sucks the blood from the wound to clean it.

To clean it? This must be the only example of an orthodox religion's approval of cock-sucking, no?