Month: June 2012

Buzzfeed recently demonstrated how Romney creates little buzz. Reihan wonders whether that's a feature rather than a bug:

If, and it’s a big if, Mitt Romney is elected president and he presides over an economic expansion, it would be interesting to see if he could actually succeed in lowering the temperature by being less of a lightning rod. Many of President Obama’s allies and admirers believe that he has only been a lightning rod because of right-wing antipathy grounded in racial anxieties. Conservatives, in contrast, generally believe that the president has been highly ideological. What we can all agree on, however, is that President Obama is a charismatic, larger-than-life figure who attracts considerable attention, and who has had an outsized impact on the national consciousness.

Man I can't stand these false equivalences. Obama's record is so non-ideological he all but screams at you in his pitiless pragmatism. He tried to be boring, he adopted Republican ideas (tax cuts in a recession, the healthcare individual mandate, cap-and-trade) but the right simply cannot tolerate being governed by the other party. At all. When one party essentially nullifies the actions of another and commits solely to defeating the other candidate without any interest in the compromises that are necessary for this system to work, it is emphatically not a reasonable response to reward it, and then claim Romney's a boring bring-people-together pragmatist. His platform is the most rigidly ideological of any candidate since Goldwater.

If you want actual boredom, i.e. an interest in making government work, in reaching compromises with the other party, in trying to find a middle ground while the other side ratchets up its hysteria like a nine year-old … then Obama is the only choice. Electing Romney would vindicate the politics of total war and obstruction. And the results would be anything but boring: massive new debt through huge new military spending and more tax cuts for the very wealthy, while hollowing out America's infrastructure and gutting programs for the sick and poor.

He wasn't given much of a chance of survival at birth, but Mac Starnes is obviously not the kind of kid who gives in to fate. He cannot speak or swallow, but text-to-speech software liberates him into humor, nuance and wit. We hear a lot about the dangers of technology. Here is a case of its amazing moral power if used well:

Life matters. Every life.

A reader writes:

"A culture war within a minority." Really?! C'mon Andrew. I'm a secular'ish 35-year-old Jew living in Brooklyn, and I can assure you that there's not much of a culture war going on here. Brooklyn remains the same old cultural "sponge" (as opposed to "melting pot") that it has always been. Thank God. I'm a few blocks walk from Lubovitch Crown Heights and I'm living in Hipster/yuppie/Caribbean Prospect Heights. Relax, I can assure you that we're all living happily (relatively) together, one amongst millions of billboards notwithstanding.

Another:

I agree, that Hebrew billboard exhorting ultra-Orthodox Jews to avert their eyes upon entering Manhattan is disturbing. But I have a slightly different take on what this billboard represents.

The attitude expressed in the billboard is that the outside world and outside ideas are dangerous and must be shut out. A similar message was delivered to 40,000 ultra-Orthdox Jews last May at a sold-out rally condemning the Internet. The billboard is not reflective of a culture war of the ultra-Orthodox versus the non-Orthodox Jewish populations – at least, not in New York.  The non-Orthodox Jews are just one other dangerous influence among many that must be avoided. 

In the US, the two groups have relatively little interaction; they exist in separate communities and there is no need or desire for the communities to engage with each other.  In Israel, on the other hand, the two sides are forced to interact because of the Orthodox influence within government and their monopoly control in critical areas: conversions, marriage licenses, burials, Kashrut standards for food, etc. and this leads to much conflict.

Another:

Your post on the "Shield your eyes" billboard in NYC is perfect for what we saw yesterday in the heart of Jewish Los Angeles.  I’ll try to get a photo of the billboard, but the Stop $30 Billion (to Israel) group has placed a billboard on La Cienega in LA, literally in a stretch of West LA that includes MANY synagogues and Jewish schools.  [Above] is what the billboard looks like (not sure when I can snap and send a photo). My wife and I nearly crashed our car. Where I live this takes some huge, pachyderm-sized testicles.

Interesting watching the Jonah Lehrer kerfuffle play out from my perspective. 1st takeaway: journalism is dripping with schadenfreude.

— Mike Daisey (@mdaisey) June 21, 2012

Jonah Lehrer, a friend of the Dish, got caught recycling pieces of his own writing. Jack Shafer ponders the transgression:

In the early hours of l’affaire Lehrer, my instincts were telling me that Lehrer had transgressed, but I couldn’t figure out whether his offense was a felony, a misdemeanor or a violation of journalistic taboo. A variety of observers were calling what Lehrer did “self-plagiarism,” but in my mind plagiarism requires some act of thievery. You can’t steal money out of your own bank account, can you? You can’t commit adultery with your own spouse, right?

Shafer eventually concludes that Lehrer "cheated his new publishers by breaking the implied (or written) contract that he was producing original copy." Josh Levin sees all this as proof that Lehrer is running on empty: 

[B]logging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and TheNew Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.

Felix Salmon counters:

While I’m sympathetic to Levin’s point here, I think his prescription is entirely wrong. The problem with Jonah Lehrer, like the problem with Zach Kouwe, is not that he was humbled by the insatiable demands of Blog. Instead, it’s that he made a category error, and tried to use a regular blog as a vehicle for the kind of writing that should not be done in blog format. Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.

Yep: the readers long ago became an engine for new thought on the Dish. Try having 270 opinions every week on hundreds of different topics and getting any of them right.

(Context for the chutzpah-filled tweet here.)

TNR recently profiled Sister Gramick and we’re honored to have her voice on the Dish all this week. Previous videos here, here and here. A reader sends an email related to the today’s topic:

After reading the beautiful letter by the Franciscans that you posted last week and hearing the impassioned words of Sister Jeannine Gramick on your blog today, I decided to write you in the hope that you might share my letter with your readers. At my school, half of the professors of childbearing age do not belong to the faith. Since most of us are untenured, we are reluctant to disclose our views on the HHS mandate that university health insurers must provide access to birth control for students and employees. Rather than rehashing the arguments in favor of the administration’s plan, I want to explain what it feels like to work for an institution that not only assumes the right to decide the legitimacy of my prescriptions and procedures, but which also regularly treats its female faculty, staff, and students like ill-informed miscreants.

Women at my school have become resigned to public scolding by our student newspaper and the numerous guest lecturers invited by our administration. Each week I open the editorial page to find accusations of laziness and licentiousness on the part of those who would indulge in the luxury of birth control. Catholic officials visit campus to share their uniform perspective on the threat posed by the government to the sanctity of reproduction. In fact, everyone has been given a platform to air their concerns except, of course, the women who work here.

Like the moral crusades that defined paternalistic attitudes toward women throughout modern history, the Catholic hierarchy assumes a protectionist stance toward the women engaged by its institutions. We’ve been told that our reproductive treatments may be covered if our reasons for needing them are medical rather than “immoral,” and only then if the university is generous enough to acknowledge the validity of our prescribers’ diagnoses. It is absurd to assert that Catholic objections to the mandate have nothing to do with women’s rights while simultaneously scrutinizing and silencing the very women affected by the new law.

Calling itself the victim in a cultural “war on religion,” the Church demeans women’s ability to comprehend the stakes of the debate. We understood in the 1910s that arguments about the sanctity of the home were attempts to keep women out of the public sphere. We understood in the 1950s that laments about the breakdown of the nuclear family were meant to keep women out of the workforce. We understood in the 1970s that invocations of chivalry were used to keep women out of powerful military positions. And now this. We’ve heard it all before.

Catholic leaders have warned that should its organizations lose lawsuits that would make them exempt from the mandate, schools like mine would be required either to restrict their services to the Catholic population or to deny health care coverage to their workers. Indeed, Franciscan University in Ohio and Ave Maria University in Florida have already eliminated their student insurance plans. Yet we ought to keep in mind that Catholic schools and hospitals cannot maintain their status in the marketplace of ideas and treatments without hiring talented non-Catholics. The Church’s anguished concern about the future of Catholic institutions thus ought to run in the other direction: without non-Catholic employees, what hope do Catholic universities and hospitals have of providing high-quality education and care?

If my university is willing to discount whatever contributions I might make to a debate that concerns my own biological functions, why should it assume I have the intellectual capacity to educate its students? My classroom authority has been undermined by my own administration, which has proven itself ready to suppress my objections in the name of freedom. Of course, tenure-track and contingent faculty have difficulties opposing all sorts of administrative policies on all kinds of campuses. Yet when these regulations extend to our bodies and find their way into the national conversation, we ought not to allow our consent to be coerced by our tenuous employment status. Female employees at universities like mine must find ways to make our voices heard. As private entities, Catholic schools are well within their rights to treat us this way. I just wish that they would stop pretending to speak on our behalf.

“Ask Anything” archive here.

A reader quotes me:

"But if your enemy brings an AK-47 to the fight, what's a man gonna do?" This is probably the most loathesome sentence you've ever written, at least that I've seen. So it's manly to generate propaganda about your political opponent? Oh, I'm sorry, you weren't even kind enough to write "political opponent" – they're the "enemy." And they're bringing an AK-47? It's good to know you've dumped advocating for more honest political discourse and have adopted the big swinging dick mentality of the Republican party. Goodbye to all that, indeed.

You will not find propaganda here. Opinion yes; but propaganda no. My point was about how to respond to an opponent willing to lie so brazenly, and spread those lies with a massive financial arsenal. I don't think you should lie. But I do think you can scare, using tactics the GOP and the Dems have honed for years. You think Bill Clinton got re-elected without scaring the elderly shitless about Medicare? I'm just asking for the same steely political skill. Another reader has it right:

I'm a Frank Rich fan but disagree with him on this one.  Yes, hit the Republicans as hard as you can (ie. don't be a Dukakis, dude), but do it with the truth.  The job losses Bain caused and its eye-popping profits are fair game, but the real silver bullet for Obama is the Romney/Ryan budget.  Make it crystal clear that Romney has no plan to revive the economy other than massive tax cuts for the wealthy and slashing to the bone everything else the government does, and far, far fewer people will vote for him. Oh, and please mention he favors another war to deal with Iran.  

With the current Republican party, you don't have to lie. The truth is damning enough.

The debate goes on, but this Dish reader may have brought it to an empirical end:

Sorry Andrew, but Mitt and Breitbart are full of shit (big surprise, that) about the 37 pages to change an address. Did you actually read the PDFs, beyond verifying that the document has a total of 38 pages? It took me about 15 seconds to find the instructions for changing current business location. Said instructions point to several sections relevant to whether I'm changing my business address, the address of my billing service, or the address of my record-keeping service.

The change-of-address form is two pages, one of which consists entirely of a single checkbox in which one indicates the states from which most of one's claims arise. The other two (change of biller and change of record location) are one page each. Then there's a signature page. This took me about two minutes to figure out; presumably someone in the health care business who does this for a living would have no trouble at all with this procedure. The remaining pages are instructions and forms for other transactions such as initial enrollment, reporting legal action, and so on. So the total to change one's business address is two pages, including a checkbox that's a full page only because it lists every state. Were one also changing billing service and records management service, two more pages would be needed. Then a final page to sign the thing. I'll be generous and assume I'm doing all three changes together, so call it five pages which by my count is a lot less than 37.

Some further points:

(1) The real question is how this compares to the paperwork involved should a doctor decide to make similar changes with a private insurer. I'm not in the provider side of the medical business, but in my experience as a patient in the private insurance system I sure don't see much evidence of efficiency; for instance, why do I have to fill out the exact same five pages of insurance forms every fucking time I take my kids to the doctor, rather than simply reporting no change since last time? Or worse yet, the paperwork (and uncertainty) involved when taking a sick kid to an out-of-network doctor's visit when on travel. Perhaps a Dish reader in the healthcare business can comment on the view from the provider's side.

(2) Can you think of how to condense a one-page form for change of billing service into less than one page? I can't. Therefore I'm guessing the form for giving similar information to a private insurer is no smaller or simpler to work through.

(3) Mitt highlights this 37-page document as an example of inefficiency, but it's actually exactly the opposite. A number of different changes to a practice's medicare enrollment can be done in one 37-page form, with one unified set of instructions, instead of 8 different 12 page forms for 8 different tasks, with a greater total page count because some common information (basic instructions,  forms for current address, business owner information, signature pages, etc) must duplicated, and worse, a greater potential for confusion because 8 different sets of instructions must be kept coordinated and consistent. Not only is one large but multipurpose form simpler for a provider to use, it's less costly for the government to produce and maintain. Mitt's example of government inefficiency is in fact an example of fairly good business practice on the part of government, and if Mitt's business experience involved actual business operations instead of speculation and raiding, he might understand that.

This is brilliant politics on Mitt's part, but it's dishonest as hell.

Which is a pretty good description of his campaign so far.

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 10 am. Not mine. But it's been beautiful here since we arrived.