Month: May 2012

R. Daniel Keleman thinks the European adaptations to the Euro crisis have successfully stabilized the situation:

Greece's exit from the eurozone would be a catastrophe for Greece and a trauma for Europe, but it would not change the fundamentals of the post-2008 eurozone governance regime, which will still be based on stronger fiscal surveillance, more robust enforcement procedures, more vigilant bond markets, and a more activist central bank. With such a system in place, and with their commitment to fiscal discipline established, EU leaders will now face the slow, difficult tasks of adjustment and structural reform. And those burdens must be shared by all. It is understandable that Germany and the ECB initially demanded austerity as the condition for bailouts, but this one-sided approach has driven peripheral economies deeper into recession. Moving forward, austerity, wage reductions, and structural reform on the periphery must be coupled with public spending and wage increases in Germany, which will boost demand. There will be no quick fix, but the eurozone will recover, slowly but surely.

(Photo: A boy sits on a fence in front of poster depicting the official ball of EURO-2012 in Kievon May 11, 2012. By Sergei Supinsky/AFP/GettyImages.)

Andrew Rotherham is unconcerned by the growth of student loans:

What should worry us more than the national student debt load — which is still not well understood because the data are so murky — is the likelihood that particular categories of students are getting a bad deal. Students at for-profit schools, for instance, are incurring more debt and in many cases getting little or no value for their money.

These students tend to come from low-income families and returning military veterans and are the most likely of all college students — public, private, four-year, two-year — to default on their loans and torpedo their credit scores in the process. As a country, we need to do a better job of informing prospective students before they take on large debt loads at a certain school that other good — not to mention less costly — options are available.

Probably:

The size of the impact of spreading bad genes becomes much larger if you are the father of 50 children rather than 2. Concerns of depleting or polluting the gene pool are fairly irrelevant (since relatively few children are produced by donor sperm compared to the normal method, and it is not clear that the gene pool itself holds any moral value). But there is a predictable individual impact on the children that will result. The disbenefit is mainly theirs.

Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, 8.30 am

Josh Barro's guess at its cause:

Only a handful of states have legalized gay marriage, but among upscale people in New York and Washington, opposition to gay marriage is now impolite. And expressing opposition in such a setting is exhausting. I’m not talking about "the Georgetown cocktail party circuit." I’m talking about Republicans politicians’ own wives and children, their young staffers, and even in a lot of cases, their donors. How many Republican members of Congress have children like Meghan McCain, who are reproaching them at home when they go out and talk about how terrible gay marriage is? I bet it’s a lot.

He gets 39,000 viewers in the 25 – 54 years old demographic. Maddow gets 315,000 and Hannity gets 334,000. Ouch.

A reader counters Michael Marder:

If anyone is silly enough to think that plants can suffer the way we animals can, then that person had better eat plants and nothing but plants. We have to feed an animal about ten calories of plant food to produce one calorie of animal food. Animals are calorie factories in reverse. We can save the lives of about 90% of the plants we now kill if we don't waste them by feeding them to animals first.

Another points out:

There's a huge difference in the morality eating plants and animals. First, most of the plant food that people eat are created by the plants with the intention that they be consumed.

Fruits, vegetables, legumes, seeds, nuts – these are created by the plant to entice animals (and people) to consume them in order to spread the seeds so that the next generation of plants can live on. Although we don't quite sow the seeds in the way other animals do (by passing them through the gut) we do accomplish the same thing: consume the fruit, plant the seeds, and perpetuate the species.

Second, for many plants, fruiting is the end of their life cycle. When you harvest wheat or tomatoes, those plants are essentially dead at that point, having expended all of their energy fruiting and not robust enough to survive the winter. It's not like animals which are cut down in their prime.

Third, many plants don't die at all. Vines, fruit and nut trees, pineapple plants – these are all cared for and nurtured through many successive harvests. Eating something like lettuce is equivalent to eating a chicken: you're killing the plant in its prime to consume it. But overall, the vast majority of plant consumption has nowhere near the ethical dilemma caused by eating meat.

Another takes Marder's stance to its logical extreme:

Our bodies automatically slaughter millions of bacteria on a daily basis without us eating one thing. You could go on a hunger strike and still be on an endless murderous rampage. If you really object to all this wanton killing and want true and complete moral purity, suicide is your only option.

Taegan has the money quote:

"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

"As the Times puts it so delicately today, [the Ricketts Super-PAC] plans to "respond to charges" of race-baiting — which will arise because the whole campaign is, you know, race-baiting — by "hiring as a spokesman an 'extremely literate conservative African-American' who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a 'metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.'"

Let's see. They need a black mouthpiece to race-bait and fag-bait the president. Move over, Larry Elder; we're ready for your close-up, Mr. Cain," – Charlie Pierce, Esquire.

A belated Dish tribute to Adam Yauch and the rest of his boys: