Month: June 2012

Nick Haslam makes a serious case for studying it:

In 30 years of studying the field I rarely came across any recognition that human beings are creatures who excrete. Much of what we psychologists care about is on the mental side of the mind/body divide, but even when we go corporeal we eliminate elimination. Psychologists have examined the psychobiology of eating, sleeping and sex at great length, and devoted numerous journals and professional associations to them. We have investigated how substances cross from outer to inner but largely ignored traffic in the other direction.

Perfection:

Janeen McGuire Nelson highlights the tension between what's personal and what's professional:

The hidden covenant of being a marriage and family therapist is that we must allow our clients, as well as the general public, to hold on to their delusions that we are omnipotent and almost perfect. It could be considered the Mary Poppins Rule: Therapists are practically perfect in every way, and we never explain anything. The Mary Poppins Rule is passed down to us from our teachers and mentors in the form of osmosis because it is against the unspoken rules to speak of it. Compliance is mandatory, spit spot, so I couldn’t have my clients knowing that my daughter was bi-polar, or that my husband was chronically unemployed, or that my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic. 

"An absolute building freeze would be such a painful but necessary compromise. It might also encourage residents of settlements deep in the West Bank to move to areas that will remain part of Israel, especially if the freeze were accompanied by financial inducements to relocate… [The Israeli government would lose]  the excuse that any freeze would risk toppling a fragile coalition that relies on right-wingers who have threatened to withdraw in the event of another freeze. The new national unity government is now sufficiently large and diverse that it could now survive a walk-out by elements opposed to any freeze," – Alan Dershowitz, WSJ.

Beinart crows:

Good for Dersh. Post-Oslo, the real divide in organized American Jewry isn’t between people who say they support a Palestinian state and people who say they don’t, since most Jewish leaders now pay the concept lip service. The real divide is between people willing to ask Israel to do anything differently to keep the two state solution alive and people who won’t. With his op-ed, Dershowitz places himself, gingerly, on the other side of that divide from AIPAC.

May many follow.

"It makes absolutely no sense … [Obama's healthcare overhaul] is anything but socialist. It's bailing out for-profit companies," - Greg Pason, national secretary of the Socialist Party USA. 

A reader writes:

Ever since you posted that you're not into deodorant or guys who shave, I've noticed that the ads on the Dish have been marketing anti-perspirant to me …

Yunomine Onsen, Japan, 8 am

The WSJ reported yesterday that the ACA will kill some low-cost college healthcare plans. Amanda Peterson Beadle defends the law:

600,000 students — 7 percent of 18 to 23-year-olds in college — bought insurance through their school’s plans, according to the GAO. Some of these schools require students to have insurance, but the plans some schools offer are mini-med plans that provide almost no protection when students actually get sick or injured. Upping the standards may lead a few schools, like Bethany College in Kansas, to drop student plans, but it will lead to much better coverage for more students.

Avik Roy differs:

Michael Hash, director of the Office of Health Reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, put it this way to Radnofsky: "Given today’s health system, [limited-benefit plans] wouldn’t represent a good value…[they] would likely not begin to cover the first day in the hospital."

But that doesn’t justify banning limited-benefit plans in their entirety. A plan with a payout cap of, say, $100,000 would still be far cheaper than what the law requires, while covering a week in the hospital. And there’s a larger issue. It’s precisely the proliferation of overly generous insurance plans that causes runaway health costs in the first place. When you have a plan that covers everything, you tend not to be concerned with the cost-effectiveness of the care you receive. And that, in turn, leads to excess health spending, which in turn makes insurance costlier.

Derek Thompson illustrates:

JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest calculates that the major countries on the euro are more different from each other than basically every random grab bag of nations there is, including: the make-believe reconstituted Ottoman Empire; all the English speaking Eastern and Southern African countries; and all countries on Earth at the 5th parallel north.

And here is your tweetable fact: A monetary union might make more sense for every nation starting with the letter "M" than it does for the euro zone.

McArdle joins the growing Beast team of bloggers. I'm psyched. The Beast's monthly uniques also just hit a record high of 12.7 million. In other good news, my old magazine, The New Republic, really does have a new lease on life.

The Dish's best resource is you. To wit: a reader with too much time on his hands dug into Politifact's massive data base of corrections and analysis. As he puts it,

What I’ve been doing the last couple days is manually transferring all the Politifact rulings from people here …that have “Republican” and “Democrat” next to their name, into a great big spreadsheet.

Of course, there's a big bold disclaimer: Politifact picks and chooses what topics it covers; it itself is not unblemished in its impartiality; none of this pretends to be a comprehensive, independent analysis of large swirling, now uncoordinated campaigns. Nonetheless, you can separate out party leaders on both sides, as selected by Politifact, and gauge their truthfulness, as measured by Politifact. Based on the following leaders – Romney, Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Gingrich, Perry, Santorum for the GOP and Obama, Biden, Reid, Pelosi, and  Clinton (Hillary) for the Dems, we get this graph:

That's a lot of flaming trousers. Now for the media: Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Erick Erickson, Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Grover Norquist, Bill O’Reilly, and Michael Savage for the GOP and Paul Begala, Donna Brazile, James Carville, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Lawrence O’Donnell, Keith Olbermann, Ed Shultz, and Cenk Uyger for the Dems. Hail the presence of Fox News at the far end of truthiness:

One last graph, comparing Obama and Romney in the words that come out of their own mouths, as measured by Politifact:

Again, what you see is a GOP advantage in truthiness in general but a huge discrepancy when it comes to total, massive, pants-on-fire whoppers. Romney, for some reason, seems attached to the Big Lie.