Month: April 2012

This is an astonishing story, and has a strange similarity to our View From Your Window contest. A young Indian boy fell asleep on a train journey, lost his brother, took another train to find him and became completely lost at five on the streets of Calcutta. He was eventually taken into an orphanage, but eventually used Google Earth to trace his fateful train journey as a child, to get images that might bring back memories of the past, and to find his mother. He couldn't remember the name of his town, or his family. But images worked:

"It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, 'Does this match?' And when you say, 'No', you keep on going and going and going … When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."

He and his mother were numb when they met each other again. His brother? His body had been found on the railroad tracks.

His jaw dropping at an NRA conference, Weigel notes that the "the total defeat and withdrawal of Democrats on guns has affected NRA rhetoric not at all." That counts for Republican lobbies and Democratic or liberal moderation on almost any issue. When Republicanism is close to theology, then reality becomes less important. Even inaction by Obama is seen as some kind of cover for a totalitarian take-over in 2013. Kornacki wonders if ignoring gun-control has done Democrats any good:

The case for national Democrats sticking with a hands-off approach to gun control is that it makes it possible to score victories in state-level races in pro-gun states. Think of Jon Tester winning a Montana Senate seat in 2006. But the party’s experience at the presidential level – and the hostility toward Obama that the NRA continues to exhibit – suggests that national Democrats may not be fooling anyone.

For all their efforts, they’ve failed to win over gun owners for the last decade, and there’s no reason to think they’re about to. If Obama and the national party were to embrace gun control anew, would it really affect pro-gun Democrats like Tester? They’d be swimming against the same tide they’re already swimming against.

On the other hand, many young gun owners aren't buying the NRA's spin:

To [younger gun owners], the NRA is just a bunch of gray beards fighting imaginary battles. Young gun owners didn't live through the 1970s—when the gun-control movement really did push for civilian disarmament—and they see government efforts to take away other things people love, like drugs, to be a joke.

Read Rubin’s blog, Right Turn, here. Recent Dish links featuring Rubin here, here and here. Video archive here.

The most recent recession compared (pdf) to the Great Depression and international financial crises:

Calculated Risk captions:

Although the 2007 recession is much worse than any other post-war recession, the employment impact was much less than during the Depression. Note the second dip during the Depression – that was in 1937 and the result of austerity measures.

Will Wilkinson is cutting back on blogging to pursue a creative writing MFA:

I think the most important thing I took away from all that time with my nose in happiness research and behavioral econ is that we overestimate the value of what we already have and so underestimate the upside of taking a chance, leaving something behind, and making a big change. Most of us end up where we are through a sort of drift.

Good for Will. I've sometimes wondered whether I should try writing fiction. When I first wrote it was all short stories and poetry.

I have no idea what that would look like, given Mitt Romney's primary stands on immigration (to the right of almost everyone, including Gingrich and Perry). But it strikes me as something that will rile the base. How they react will be very instructive about the chances of Republican unity this summer and fall.

Medical tourism could be the key to lowering the cost of care in America:

As the economist Dean Baker has argued, making it easier for foreign doctors who met standardized requirements to practice in the U.S. would hold down costs and improve service. In addition to exporting patients, we could import doctors. Politically speaking, of course, this all seems improbable, because the medical industry is a powerful lobby and uninterested in competition. But the reality is that, unless we find some other way to rein in health-care costs, the logic of free trade in medicine is going to become harder to resist.

I'm not sure how much of the US's fantastic inefficiency in the delivery of healthcare is driven by doctors' remuneration.

(Chart from the IFHP (pdf))

Few things do more injury to the public image of Catholicism in this country than Bill Donohue’s creepy, regular explosions of dyspepsia. This was an instant classic:

Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.

No: don’t try to follow the logic. This is about some kind of stigma that should attach to non-biological children. It comes out of the anti-gay-marriage argument that children deserve a mother and a father, and that the most “natural” form of this is biological. I think stigmatizing anyone who is doing their best to bring up a child is pretty repulsive, but dividing children into adopted and biological ones is just plain perversely cruel. I am not alone in this view:

The League’s sentiments were roundly and promptly condemned by a long list of conservative, Republican and traditionalist commentators, including RNC communications director Sean Spicer (“The @CatholicLeague should be encouraging adoption, not demeaning the parents who are blessed to raise these children”); blogger Elizabeth Scalia; The American Conservative contributing editor Michael Brendan Dougherty; and Michael Potemra at National Review (“thuggishness…hateful”).

Wally Olson notes Donohue’s influential backers among the traditionalist wing of Catholicism.

"It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother. That was a really defining moment, and I loved it" – Ann Romney, obviously distraught from last week's controversy.

Say this for a staycation: it helps if it's in April in Washington DC. The pollen descends like microscopic yellow snow, but the leaves have that new-born baby freshness when lit through by new sunlight. I made a vow: no reading. I didn't succeed entirely: I had to do taxes, answer urgent emails, and I exempted poetry. So I listened to music, watched the full, extended Blu-Ray of The Lord of the Rings, prayed, went to the Phillips Collection, rode my bike as long as my sniveling nose would allow me, and slept. I've long had trouble pacing myself, and so when I crash or relax after a long period of work, I tend to go down pretty hard. There's nothing like sleeping for ten hours one night and then taking a two-hour nap the next day. Sometimes, I wonder if I prefer sleeping to being awake.

But it was good to go a week without following the news. Santorum dropped out and Hilary Rosen said something stupid, and that was about it. But reading the Dish, the team really did find and engage in a whole world of things out of but also beyond the news. After twelve years, it's great to know that I can drop out and this blogazine purrs on. Patrick, Chris, Zoe, Maisie and Zack have my deepest gratitude.