Month: June 2012

Christopher Orlet worries about "hypermobility" as a mark of success: 

As localist author Bill Kauffman has noted countless times, in America to achieve is to leave. And one's success is often measured by the distance one travels from home. For young Midwesterners that often means lighting out for one of the big cities on the coasts. And that is only the beginning of our hypermobility. Americans, on average, move every four years, whereas staid Europeans relocate on average twice in their adult lives. All this transience cannot be good for society. 

Seth Stevenson explores them: 

Perhaps the most emotional issue in the world of queuing is the human quest for fairness. "When we see people arrive after us and get served before us we get very angry," says [MIT professor Dick] Larson. "We can remember it for days, sometimes. And there have been incidents of ‘queue rage.’ People have drawn knives and guns."

Sometimes we will make exceptions. We seem to be OK with the idea of an express lane at the supermarket—someone buying one roll of paper towels shouldn’t be forced to wait behind someone buying a full cart of groceries. We also allow for differing priorities at an ER, with more critical cases being admitted first even if they showed up last.  But in most situations, we demand social fairness. No one is more important than anyone else, and everyone should be served in the order he or she arrived.

A reader writes:

This stood out to me in "The Lies of Mitt Romney III":

"we remember the president’s own party had a super majority in both houses for his first two years"

I'm not sure how Romney defines a super majority, but my recollection was that the Dems only had a filibuster-proof majority (including two independents) from the time that Al Franken was finally seated (July 7, 2009) until the point that Teddy Kennedy passed away (August 25, 2009). That's only seven weeks, not two years.

And there was never a supermajority in the House as Romney claims. The balance at the start of the Congress was 257 – 178, which is a Democratic share of only 59 percent, not 67. So again, Romney simply lied. Obama never had a super majority in both Houses, let alone for two years. In the Senate, his super-majority lasted seven weeks.

Please stay vigilant. Your eyes are as good as ours. Scan Romney's statements for factual untruths – not embellishments or exaggerations, but empirically false statements. Update from a reader:

Not to let Mitt Romney off the hook, because his "two years supermajority" claim is still blatantly false, but there was an interim Senator from Massachusetts who was, in fact, the 60th vote for healthcare reform after Ted Kennedy died. Paul Kirk served as interim Senator from Massachusetts from September 24, 2009 to February 4, 2010.  Therefore, the Democrats had a Senate supermajority for seven weeks with Kennedy and nineteen weeks with Paul Kirk, for a total of 26 weeks, or half a year.

Update from another reader:

By the time Al Franken was sworn in on July 7, 2009, Ted Kennedy had not cast a Senate vote for about four months because he was terminally ill with brain cancer. (He died on August 25, 2009.) Robert Byrd was also hospitalized from May 18 through June 30, 2009 and may not have been well enough to attend Congress and vote for some time afterward. Thus the Democrats did not really have the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster until Kirk took office. Byrd (who died in June 2010) was also periodically too ill to attend and vote during the September 2009-February 2010 period, though I have not been able to confirm this with a quick Google.

An experimental film about "forms and shapes food makes when you flatten them":

Here's the moment when Big Football looks like Big Tobacco. It's 80 pending lawsuits brought together in one master complaint:

"The NFL, like the sport of boxing, was aware of the health risks associated with repetitive blows producing sub-concussive and concussive results and the fact that some members of the NFL player population were at significant risk of developing long-term brain damage and cognitive decline as a result," the complaint charges.

"Despite its knowledge and controlling role in governing player conduct on and off the field, the NFL turned a blind eye to the risk and failed to warn and/or impose safety regulations governing this well-recognized health and safety problem."

Once again, it's not the problem as such that will kill football first; it's the cover-up. If it can be proved that NFL officials knew of the dangers to players for years and did nothing to ameliorate or prevent it, indeed made more and more money off their bludgeoned human cattle, then all bets are off.

Seth Masket doubts it:

What this election gave us is a rare and precious thing: a gubernatorial rematch. Walker and Barrett faced each other less than two years ago. Walker beat Barrett by five points back then, after raising $11 million to Barrett's $6 million. That is, Walker raised 65% of the funds raised by the Republican and Democratic candidates that year and he won 53% of the two-party vote. This week, Walker raised about 88% of the funds raised by the two candidates and he won — wait for it — 54% of the two-party vote.

So there's your money effect, folks. Go from a 2:1 money advantage to a 7:1 money advantage, and it could increase your vote share by a full percentage point! Woo hoo!

Paul Waldman, commenting on chart above from Gavin Aronsen, defends outside money:

This was as nationalized as any state race can be. If a bunch of liberal billionaires had stepped up with an extra $26 million so Barrett could match Walker's money, would Barrett have said, "No, I'll only accept help from Wisconsin-based super PACs!" Of course not.

Todd Purdum checks in on the president's putative "team of rivals": 

The larger truth is that modern presidents, with a few exceptions, don’t need, and don’t use, Cabinet members as privy councillors on the most important questions. They have other people for that. Presidents do need competent, even if anonymous, executives to run the vast machinery of the federal government, but most Cabinet secretaries don’t really do that either—at least not in the classic C.E.O. sense—leaving such work to their deputies and the professional civil-service staffs. In fact, experience has shown, it is hard for modern presidents to attract private-sector C.E.O.’s to serve in the Cabinet because of the financial and personal sacrifices required. Hank Paulson, George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, once told me that if he’d known how arduous the confirmation would be for his own non-controversial appointment to the post he would never have left Goldman Sachs. The Cabinet these days amounts to a kind of demographically balanced assembly of team mascots, with increasingly ill-defined roles. 

Jacob Levy proposes a reconciliation of sorts:

When I first started researching freedom of association, I was annoyed that so much of the literature was dominated by the case of unions, since that wasn’t a case I was interested in.  I now think that was the wrong reaction, and that I should take the centrality of unions to fights for freedom of association as indicative.  There is widespread revealed-preference demand for associations of something like this form, and as a libertarian I should pay attention to that, not sweep it under the carpet.

There's a reason no Republicans mention him at all.