Year: 2013

A reader writes:

I love the newest MHB. Did you know that Pogo has been banned from the States for ten years?

The full story is above. Pogo has also put up a petition on WhiteHouse.gov to “Allow Mashup Artist “Pogo” (Nick Bertke) to Re-Enter the United States.” He needs 100,000 signatures by April 13, so please help if you can. Pogo has enriched the Dish over the years as the single biggest contributor to the Mental Health Break. Go here to view all of those videos.

Chinese and Iranian users rely on Google Reader to evade government firewalls. Did Google think of that? techdirt.com/articles/20130…

— George Musser (@gmusser) March 15, 2013

The discussion around Google’s announcement that it will shut down its Reader service has focused largely on the impact on the American blogging crowd. Zachary Seward takes a broader view:

[M]any RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked. And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader.

Tom Vanderbilt searches for it, but comes up empty:

What you are buying, in essence, is time. This is how locks are rated, by agencies like the Underwriters Laboratory: How long will it be able to withstand a variety of attacks. “I have always been happy to acknowledge any lock can be compromised,” Field said. “It’s just how much effort is someone going to take.”

“Anyone who says they have a lock that can never be picked is fooling themselves,” he continued. “There will be a compromise of some sort.” I was unsettled to hear this from a maker of locks, and I wanted to press him: But what about the perfect lock? What if money were no object? But I began to see I was on the wrong track. “Why would you want this elaborate thing when you’ve got windows on the first floor? People would smash windows and come in,” he said. “All you want is something that will show you a sign of forced entry. You want to protect things. If someone does break in you’ve got the insurance—that’s part of your risk management.”

NOW WITH VIDEO: participant at CPAC defends slavery as good for black people; it gave them free food: thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/0…

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) March 15, 2013

As Charlie Cook underlines how disproportionately white the GOP has become since redistricting, and as a minority outreach session degenerates into an argument about the virtues of slavery and segregation, National Review actually runs a post about the greatest thing about CPAC this year: the shoe shine:

Dino Wright, manager and owner of the shoe-shine booth, has worked at the hotel since it opened five years ago.  CPAC and events like it boost business for Wright. He says he thinks it’s because he “provides a very important service to this very image-conscious group.”

Wright began shining shoes after the airline he once worked for defaulted on its pension obligations, driving him to find a source of income in retirement.

“I was able to create a pension for myself by creating an entrepreneurial activity,” Wright says. He noticed that fewer people were entering the shoe-shining profession, and “I saw that as an entrepreneurial opportunity” – an ethic that sits well with the CPAC crowd.

And then the photograph:

And scene.

Dr. Leslie Kernisan ponders the possible implications of app use in patient care:

I can envision apps helping patients and families manage a medical care plan. But I worry that we’ll end up making the same mistakes with apps as we’ve often made with the prescription of medications: recommendations based on marketing rather than thoughtful assessment of expected value, and prescription of apps for every little medical condition rather than choosing a few high-yield apps based on a whole-person approach to managing healthcare.

Recent Dish on a self-urinalysis app here and an STD app here.

Josh Barro sees the personal nature of Portman’s marriage equality flip as a political plus:

I’m reminded of a 2010 interview of Charlie Baker, then seeking the Republican nomination for governor of Massachusetts, with a conservative talk show host. Baker was asked why he supported same-sex marriage, and he responded by talking about his gay brother and how it was a personal issue for him. The host moved on.

Now, I doubt Baker’s gay brother mattered at the margin in his support for same-sex marriage. All living Republican ex-governors of Massachusetts, except the ones named Mitt Romney, support same-sex marriage. Baker was a top staffer in the administration of former Governor Bill Weld, who was arguably the most pro-gay governor of either party in the early 1990s. Shortly after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, Weld delivered the homily at the gay wedding of two officials who had served alongside Baker. Baker picked a gay state legislator as his running mate.

But by framing the issue around his brother, Baker made same-sex marriage personal not just for himself but also for the questioner. It’s almost a dare: “What are you going to do, attack my family?” And just as personalization is important for supporters of same-sex marriage, abstraction is important for opponents. It’s a lot easier to oppose same-sex marriage if you pretend the gay people hurt by the policy don’t actually exist. Portman’s gay son allows him to put same-sex marriage opponents on uncomfortably personal turf.