Month: May 2012

Meta-Washington

Marc Ambinder is leaving DC for LA. He lists what he's learned about the city. Number six:

The politico-media culture is obsessed with The Meta-Narrative, as if Baudrillard is enjoying a neo-American reconnaissance. When something happens, it is often much easier to place it into the context of a metaphor that captures something simpler to understand, often by applying a level of analysis that takes the thing out of its real context and Meta-izeses it. When Rush Limbaugh says something, the debate often turns on the people who have written about what he said; their motives and judgments are questioned more than his; somehow it becomes more important to ask "Why David Axelrod isn't slamming Bill Maher for calling Sarah Palin the C-word" than it is to keep Limbaugh's original action under a microscope.

Worse: some think this is actually more sophisticated than taking a stand on the core issues. Paul Waldman focuses on Marc's observation that politicians and "the media haven't developed the vocabulary to explain how positions evolve." That's because of the convention that somehow changing one's mind is a function of weakness rather than strength. See Bush v Kerry. And the entire Bush administration.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"My responsibility is to make judgments about hard, complex issues that I believe to be right. Simply looking at the status quo and suggesting that the tax code is sacrosanct and can never change, and that decisions made in the ’80s and ’90s can never change, is absurd. The tax code is weighted toward the ultra-wealthy and ultra-wealthy corporations, and has created an offshore aristocracy of people who can afford to hire an army of accountants and lawyers. This shifts the tax burden to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and others. I don’t want to see taxes go up on any hardworking American. We need a simpler, fairer tax code," – Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), on why he refused to renew his commitment to the Norquist pledge.

Why Are Baby Names So Different In The Red States?

One major reason:

Women in red states tend to have their first children earlier than women in blue states. A 23-year-old mom is more likely to come up with something out of the ordinary than one who is 33.

The fastest rising names nationwide?

Briella, which jumped 394 spots, to No. 497. Briella Calafiore stars in "Jerseylicious," a reality TV show about battling stylists at a beauty salon in Green Brook, N.J. She's also in a spinoff called "Glam Fairy." Brantley was the fastest rising name for boys, jumping 416 spots to No. 320. Brantley Gilbert is a singer who had a No. 1 country hit called "Country Must Be Country Wide".

[Apologies for the original "so unique."] Update from a reader:

There is a little girl in my son's kindergarten class named "Sounique", pronounced "so unique".  So when I saw your apology for the "so unique", I thought for a moment that you were talking about a child's name.

The First Gay President?

Scott Shackford takes issue with my cover-essay's thesis:

[Andrew Sullivan] concludes that Obama "learned" to be black the same way that gays "learn" to be gay, thus explaining the attention-grabbing headline. But even the idea of "learning to be gay" is getting old-fashioned, and it’s a little odd for Sullivan to be invoking it given his blog's periodic chafing at the gay establishment. In his need to make Obama "one of us," he has nearly gone collectivist. The gay community, to the extent one exists, has fractured and diversified significantly since the days of Harvey Milk, and we’re all the better for it.

Yes, mercifully, learning "how to be gay" is increasingly old-fashioned, and many of us worked hard to expand the range of experiences and opinions and lifestyles than can be included within a gay community, including being connected to our straight families and friends, serving in the military or voting Republican. But Obama is almost exactly my own age, and in my own generation, and I felt and feel a resonance with his description of his own grappling with identity in his youth in the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot speak for all gay people; but I can speak to my own experience and suggest common themes. And if my own experience were completely an outlier, marriage equality would have remained a quixotic intellectual game for a few gay conservatives.

But there is, of course, an aspect to this that is timeless, and that is the fact the vast majority of gay kids grow up in straight families.

And they understand marriage long before they understand sex. And that breach between their identity and their parental models of authority is deeply wounding. The possibility of civil marriage – of being equal with your own parents and siblings – targets this wound, and does more than anything else to salve it. This experience is not limited to conservative Catholic kids, although they should not be dismissed either. It has been close to universal. It is becoming less so, with incalculable social consequences, because of the change in consciousness marriage equality has brought.

God knows I am not a collectivist. I'm a loner who has been at odds with vast tracts of my own gay community for decades. But I cannot indulge the fiction that gay people don't need one another still, that our communities and subcultures don't nourish us. I hope that issues such as marriage and the military, which signal to closeted conservative gays that they too can have dignity and pride if they come out, make such monolithic communities and subcultures less necessary. That's happened already, and yes, we are all the better for it. But reducing us entirely to individuals or to collectives misses the dynamic between the two. We exist in both gay and straight culture, the way Obama exists in white and black culture. You can dismiss this tension – or you can try to understand it better.

Netflix Gets Original

Nick Summers profiles Ted Sarandos, the executive behind the company's foray into original programming:

To writers and producers, some of Netflix’s inexperience at programming is an asset—there are no intrusive notes from network suits, because Netflix doesn’t employ any. Netflix is not subject to the FCC’s broadcast regulations or cable carriage disputes. Because everything on its service streams on demand, there is no programming grid—no worries about going up against Monday Night Football. Most significant, when Netflix makes a series available online, it posts all the episodes at once: no more parceling out the drama week by week. That is a fundamental change in the way “television” series can be created.

Constituency Politics

How not to do it:

Erin McPike unpacks Obama's method: 

Latino audiences are informed that Obama’s Justice Department has challenged the state of Arizona over its anti-illegal immigration legislation, that he supports the DREAM Act that would grant citizenship to some young people brought illegally to this country as children, and that the president vowed to produce comprehensive immigration reform legislation if elected to a second term. 

Women’s groups are reminded that feminists within the administration pushed successfully for provisions in the Affordable Care Act stipulating that birth control and contraception be included in federally mandated health insurance. College students have been promised the administration’s help in keeping rates low on some government-backed student loans. The gay and lesbian community needs no reminding that Obama himself finally endorsed same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney’s answer to almost all of this — gay marriage is a separate category — is a vow to work tirelessly to improve the economy.

Alec MacGillis doesn't see a social issues-based strategy.

Is Fundamentalism Winning The Population Battle?

Eric Kaufmann crunches the numbers:

In the Muslim world, women most in favor of sharia law have twice the birthrates of Muslim women who are most opposed. Religious Arabs have the numbers to reap the electoral rewards from the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans who report “no religion” are leading the shift to below-replacement fertility. In most of Europe, the nonreligious average around one child per woman. In the United States, they manage 1.5, considerably lower than the national 2.1. This disadvantage is not enough to prevent religious decline in much of Europe and America today, but secularism must run to stand still.

Israel's Orthodox population is another example:

Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class.