Month: May 2012

Rob Tisinai highlights a double standard:

[I]n 2009 over 110,000 women aged 55 and older got married. That accounted for 5.1% of all marriages that year. The birth rate of women in this group is so small that the Census Bureau and the CDC don’t even report it. For these women, "the" purpose of marriage is not procreation, not about bringing together moms and dads.

… So this is what Maggie [Gallagher] needs to resolve:  We’ve got two groups, both of whom wish to marry, neither of whom can conceive on their own. According to Maggie that’s a bad combination. Yet she’s willing to let them marry as long as they’re not same-sex couples. At this point it takes some real tap dancing to avoid the idea that it’s really just all about gays.

This picture taken on May 9, 2012 shows a man begging on a street in Shanghai. China's economic growth of the last 20 years has generally been met with declining happiness, especially among the poorest members of society, according to a US analysis published on May 14. By Peter Parks/AFP/GettyImages.

A/B testing is changing the way online business is conducted. How it works:

Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior—gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases—it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it’s quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. A/B allows seemingly subjective questions of design—color, layout, image selection, text—to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science.

The Obama campaign used it on their website, thanks to then digital advisor Dan Siroker:

By the end of the campaign, it was estimated that a full 4 million of the 13 million addresses in the campaign’s email list, and some $75 million in money raised, resulted from Siroker’s careful experiments.

Where the deficit came from:

[T]he main drivers of projected deficits over the next decade are the wars of the oughts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts and the so-called “automatic stabilizers” — unemployment insurance spending, lower tax burdens — built into existing policy to combat economic downturns. Recovery measures by Bush and Obama caused a short-term spike in deficits but have mostly phased out and thus represent only modest fractions of the national debt.

Margot Roosevelt speaks with veterans, who, in Master Sergeant Mark McDowell's words, have been "watching the primaries very closely to see who will be the least careless with soldiers and their families": 

Disaffection with the politics of shock and awe runs deep among men and women who have served in the military during the past decade of conflict. Only 32 percent think the war in Iraq ended successfully, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. And far more of them would pull out of Afghanistan than continue military operations there. While the 2012 campaign today is dominated by economic and domestic issues, military concerns could easily jump to the fore.

Nearly 90,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Israeli politicians and their U.S. supporters debate over whether to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities as partisans bicker over proposed Pentagon budget cuts. … If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population.

Philip Ewing recently noted that "[p]olitical donations from servicemembers and others connected with the military are shifting from presidential candidate Ron Paul to President Obama."

Andrew Beaujon ponders Obama's "gaylo":

One might, at this benighted point in print-journalism history, ask what difference the cover of a magazine actually makes. They’re not a huge economic force: Newsweek’s year-end publisher’s statement this past December gave an average of 40,342 single-copy sales per issue, down from 96,334 in 2007. But they still occupy a nice piece of cultural real estate. An article in a newsweekly has as much chance of becoming the focus of cultural conversation as a photo of a falling bear or a review of an Olive Garden in a North Dakota newspaper, but an arresting cover is an assertion that while print magazines’ power may have receded, they’re far from toothless.

The Newsweek tumblr has the outtakes from this week's cover. Refreshingly, Edward Wyckoff Williams tackles the substance of the piece and assails my equation of Obama's journey toward his own racial identity with that of many gay men towards theirs'. I don't see why this insight – backed by Obama's own written words – is somehow illegitimate because I am white. I was merely inferring things from Obama's own autobiography. If Williams disputes my account of Obama's account of his grappling with race as a kid, I'd be eager to see what sources he has in the book for my misunderstanding.

Maybe:

India and Uganda are the top two banana producers in the world. Ugandans eat more than two pounds of bananas daily, and in India, especially in the south, bananas are a crucial component of a mostly vegetarian diet. But those country’s banana varieties, which are starchier than what we pick up at the grocery store, are woefully low in nutrients. By packing more nutrients into a package so many already depend on, [James Dale] feels we could put a significant dent in a major health problem.

Not much, says Jonathan Tobin:

His exit from active campaigning will, no doubt, provoke some pundits to claim that in 2012, his libertarians stopped being a marginal factor in the GOP and entered the mainstream. But this is, at best, an exaggeration. There was some overlap between Paul’s strict libertarianism and Tea Party sentiment about the size of government, debt and taxes. But that common ground was dwarfed by the gap between Paul’s conspiratorial view of economics as well as his foreign policy views that had more in common with the knee-jerk anti-American doctrines of the far left than with that of most Republicans.

"Knee-jerk anti-American doctrines of the far left": an almost perfectly phrased expression of the closed mind. Charles P. Pierce thinks more pragmatically:

It is one thing to run amok at state conventions and town caucuses. It is quite another to try the same stuff at a national convention, at which the party (and, through it, the nominee) controls everything, including access to the site and the various security forces. And I believe that he's in this at least in part to make sure his son, Senator Aqua Buddha, is a force going forward. He's not the Jerry Rubin of 2012. He's going to sell them out. The only question now is for how high a price.

Reax to Paul's departure here.

(Chart by Josh Harkinson)

A perfectly qualified judge is rejected by the Virginia state senate because he's gay. Well, not exactly:

Marshall, the Family Foundation of Virginia and others who raised concerns about Thorne-Begland’s nomination said they did not object to him because he is gay, but because of his outspokenness on the subject of gay rights.

It's not that he's gay, but that he is not closeted or ashamed that troubles these people. And as fewer and fewer gays seek out the closet, or surrender to the shame it requires, the ability of the GOP to include any gay people at all declines, as we saw in the Grenell case. This is a party now committed to being homo-rein.

Who says records are obsolete? Try doing this with an mp3: