Year: 2013

Eli Lake recounts his love affair with electronic cigarettes:

I could smoke when I wanted and I didn’t have to destroy my lungs, sinuses and circulatory system in the process. My clothes wouldn’t smell like a dive bar. I found the loophole, cheated cancer and rediscovered the pleasure of martinis. The added bonus with electronic cigarettes was I could smoke them anywhere. On freezing days, there was no need to huddle outside the office for four minutes to suck down my dose. I smoked on airplanes, in meetings and at restaurants. It was like a time machine to the golden age of smoking when there were ashtrays on elevators and in movie theaters.

He’s less sure of them now that he’s looked into the medical research:

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Besides the nicotine, the other active ingredient in my cigarettes is propylene glycol, a substance the FDA classifies as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe.” But there’s a catch. Most research about propylene glycol is about its effect when it’s ingested as an additive in food. Less is known about the effects of inhaling it as a vapor—dozens and
dozens of times a day. … Dr. Lowell Dale, the medical director of the Mayo Clinic’s Tobacco Quitline, was far more incendiary. Propylene glycol as a liquid, he told me, is “similar to anti-freeze.”

He’s getting lots of pushback from defenders of e-cigs in the comments section.

Chait views immigration reform as “the biggest test case of whether the party leadership, such as it is, can bend the activists to their will”:

[T]he party’s ability to make this decision stick will be a test of its ability to wrest control from the activists. One constant and somewhat unusual dynamic of the last few years is the degree to which Republican base activists — grassroots ones, not the ones based in Washington — were able to bend the party to their will. They repeatedly nominated ultraconservatives in Senate races over Establishment favorites. They dragged out the presidential campaign and forced Romney to endorse draconian positions, especially on immigration, that hurt him dearly.

Ambers bets that GOP base will eventually rebel.

A reader writes:

Check out the attribution to “Andy Sullivan” in Google search results. An interesting sort of meta-doppleganger going on when that post about your basketball Googleganger is “authored” by your other Googleganger.

That “Andy Sullivan” just started appearing in Google searches this week. Eerie. It seems to have something to do with my Google Plus account. The Dish team is investigating where this pleasant looking fellow came from.

Jacob Sullum summarizes a new public opinion poll (pdf) on cannabis:

Opposition to federal interference was even stronger than support for legalization. While 47 percent favored “legalizing marijuana for recreational use” and 53 percent said “the government should treat marijuana the same as alcohol,” 68 percent said the feds should leave state-legal growers alone and 64 percent said the same about state-legal sellers. These results indicate that some people who oppose marijuana legalization nevertheless believe the choice should be left to the states, as a consistent federalist would. Reflecting that tendency, most Republicans and self-identified conservatives supported marijuana prohibition, but most also said the federal government should not try to impose that policy on Colorado and Washington.

E. D. Hirsch believes that increasing vocabularies is the key:

Because vocabulary is a plant of slow growth, no quick fix to American education is possible. That fact accounts for many of the disappointments of current education-reform movements. For example, the founders of the KIPP charter schools, which have greatly helped disadvantaged children, recently expressed concern that only 30 percent of their graduates had managed to stay in college and gain a degree. But note that KIPP schools typically start in fifth or sixth grade, and while KIPP’s annual reports show that their students achieve high scores in math, they score significantly lower in reading. I interpret those facts to signify that middle school is too late to rectify disadvantaged students’ deficits of vocabulary and knowledge. Word-learning is just too slow a process to close those initial gaps in time for college. The work of systematic knowledge- and word-building has to begin earlier.

He advocates for “better preschools, run along the French lines; classroom instruction based on domain immersion; and a specific, cumulative curriculum sequence across the grades, starting in preschool.” Jacobs thinks Hirsch is often miscategorized as a conservative.

Hirsch has always been a committed political liberal: he has consistently stated that he wants a stronger educational system in order to address inequality and give the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised a better chance to succeed in American society.

That’s Butters to Hagel on the power of the Greater Israel Lobby:

Hagel completes the Kabuki dance. Any Senator who has refused to make military aid contingent on stopping the illegal West Bank settlements has been intimidated into doing a dumb thing – for this country and for Israel. But you cannot say that in public in Washington. And have your nomination survive.

On the broader question, I’m struck by the total embrace of neoconservatism on the GOP side even after Iraq; and by the really low-key, low-impact, risk-averse, underwhelming testimony from Hagel.

A reader notes:

Watching bits and pieces of the hearing on the web. Looks like a lot of angry old men really pissed off that anyone would question the wisdom of the Iraq war. Which demonstrates something: this was the biggest foreign policy mistake of modern US history, yet we had an institutional failure of accountability for it. This hearing is, it would seem, our sole accountability moment… but Hagel doesn’t quite seem up to the task.

No, he doesn’t. But I suspect that’s the point.

The revenue graphs we’ve shown so far include the huge burst of subscriptions at the time of the announcement, and a much lower line since. But if you chart donations from January 8 till today (excluding the big bang), you see that pre-subscriptions (become a member here!) have actually been gaining a little before the meter arrives on Monday (inshallah):

We have absolutely no idea what will happen when the meter comes into force next week. But we will keep you posted. Gross revenue as of now: $511,000.

“I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers,” – Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, September 13th, 2008.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the institution of marriage was a direct response to the unique tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended offspring … Only opposite-sex relationships have the tendency to produce children without such advance planning (indeed, especially without advance planning),” – Paul Clement, January 22, 2013, making the Republican House’s argument for keeping civil marriage exclusively for heterosexuals.

I’d say you can’t make this shit up, but Tina Fey actually did!