Month: May 2012

I kid you not. But there is a lovely symmetry here.

Friedersdorf reframes the marriage equality debate around something called social reality:

Gays in North Carolina and everywhere else in the United States are never returning to the closet. Gay couples are going to be on television sitcoms, in movies, and dining at downtown restaurants on Saturday nights. Kids are going to have gay friends in school, and they're going to have straight friends with gay parents. As older people die and kids grow into teens and adults, acceptance of gays as normal is only going to increase. The question that remains is how these gay couples are going to live. When they live together or raise children together, are they going to marry?

Or are they going to cohabitate and raise kids together while unmarried?

Some of what Mitt Romney did as a schoolboy definitely falls into that category. My high school classmates tormented various teachers routinely. Leading a blind teacher into a door is cruel, but it's still within the category of prank, in part because it targets authority. Bart Simpson pranks. But Nelson Muntz bullies. And the story of the attack on the young nonconformist gay boy is a particularly ugly piece of bullying. It was a vicious and violent assault by a mob organized by Romney, who held him down on the floor, and cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

I do not believe Romney has no memory of this. I believe he is lying. His absurd statement that he has no memory of the event but that he didn't target the boy for being gay is hilarious for its self-contradiction. A boy who routinely snickered "Atta girl!" when one young gay kid in his class spoke up is not just bashing hippies. I went to an all boys high school in the 1970s. What Romney did was a gay-bashing.

Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?

Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.

And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.

Felix Salmon thinks so:

[W]e can now take advantage of long-term fixed financing (thanks, Uncle Sam!) to own a home for a monthly payment less than the cost of renting. Which doesn’t mean that prices won’t fall further, of course. But at least there’s a good chance that if you do buy a house right now, with a fixed-rate mortgage, then if push comes to shove you’ll probably be able to rent it out and more than cover your mortgage payments.

Yglesias agrees:

Now before you go buy a house, do make sure to check against local conditions. My understanding is that this math doesn't necessarily add up in Hawaii, the New York area, or the vicinity of San Francisco. But if you've never owned a home you should take a hard look at the local math.

Along the same lines, Felix Salmon takes a close look at Manhattan's housing market. Kevin Drum adds a grain of salt:

The question is: what does this mean? Option 1: housing prices have overshot on the downside and are now due to rebound. Option 2: We're not building enough rental units to meet demand. Option 3: There are so many foreclosed and underwater houses on the market that this is just the way things are going to be for a while. That's the problem with data like this: it can mean a lot of different things, so it's hard to say what its predictive value is.

Russell Brandom wasn't impressed with his experience using 23andme:

Take height, for example. We know that tall parents have tall kids, but if you start looking for specific segments of DNA, you'll find over a thousand, none of which contribute more than a millimeter. The top 180 genetic markers still only account for 10 to 12 percent of the height variation from person to person. The rest of the story refuses to be pinned down. Brilliant people have spent years staring at these numbers, unable to sort them into any kind of rational order, even though to the untrained eye, there seems to be no mystery at all. Tall mom, tall dad: tall kid. But the closer we look, the less we understand.

Misha Angrist defends genome testing against Brandom's critique:

If we’re talking about hereditary breast cancer, an autosomal dominant condition, then a single bad copy of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes would mean something like an 80% lifetime risk of developing breast and/or ovarian cancer in female carriers. 23andMe tests for the three most common hereditary breast cancer mutations in Ashkenazi Jews. As it happens, I am of Ashkenazi descent and my Mom had early-onset breast cancer (she is alive and well and is wondering why you never call). Thus, when I learned from 23andMe and DNA Direct that I did not carry any of those mutations and therefore could not transmit them to my daughters, I was relieved.  Fucking right I was! Say what you will about consumer genomics, but hereditary breast cancer risk information is not useless.

Razib Kahn seconds Angrist:

A non-trivial minority of people do receive actionable information from personal genomic results. By and large I am skeptical of individual risk prediction, and I communicate that skepticism to friends. But in one case a friend ended up with a large effect macular degeneration mutation. Before he had signed up for testing I told him to sleep through the risk prediction part. I don’t do that now. Chances are there won’t be any surprises. But some serious information will be received by 1 in 10 to 1 in 100.

Buzzfeed digs through the Ed Sullivan archives to find this startling gem of a video:

Brian Beutler explains: 

Where the federal government stepped up to prevent states and municipalities from laying off teachers and other government workers in previous recessions, it’s fallen on its face under Obama. More broadly, government spending at all levels rose steadily under Presidents Reagan and both Bushes, but was mostly flat under Clinton and has gone negative under Obama. How does this phenomenon contribute to current economic woes? It’s impossible to know for sure. But if like the Wall Street Journal you imagine that the massive government job losses in Obama’s first term had never happened, then, all else equal, the unemployment rate right now would be down near 7 percent, a full percentage point below where it actually is.

More on "big government" Obama here. 

Salman Shaikh gives up on Kofi Annan's UN mission:

Let's be clear about why Annan's mission has been unsuccessful. It is not failing because the U.N. observers have been slow to deploy, or even because Assad has yet to implement a single point from Annan's six-point plan. The fundamental reason for Annan's failure is more basic than that: His plan is flawed because it was formulated on the misguided belief that the Assad regime will ever stop using violence against domestic protesters and negotiate with them in good faith.

Hayes Brown tempers the criticism somewhat:

The critiques of the Annan plan are many, and for the most part accurate, including that the number on the ground is but a few. However, one point that many seem to overlook is that the Annan Plan is an attempt to staunch the blood flow in Syria, without healing the wound. The latter is the political process that the Annan Plan hoped to foster. As a way to slow the violence, without completely halting it, the deployment of the UN Supervisory Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) has been effective.