January 2013 – Page 14

Will The Sequester Give The GOP Leverage?

[T]he sequester doesn’t touch Medicaid, Social Security or Pell grants. It exempts most programs for low-income Americans, like food stamps. Veteran’s benefits are home free, as are federal retirement benefits. Medicare providers see cuts, but Medicare beneficiaries don’t. And fully half of the cuts come from the military — a huge reduction in defense spending that Democrats couldn’t dream about achieving any other way.

That’s not to say Democrats will love the sequester. It slashes deep into everything from the National Institutes of Health to the Office of Vocational and Adult Education to the Environmental Protection Agency. Worse, the cuts are done with a cleaver rather than a scalpel. Rather than giving agencies control over how to apportion the spending cuts, every affected program simply sees the same reduction. Democrats don’t much like that, but given the sequester’s disproportionate focus on the military, it’s even worse for Republicans.

Our Family Time Shortage

Yglesias asks, “what do people have less of than they had 40 years ago?” Krugman nominates family time:

[W]hat we have is a situation in which American families have more stuff, but they have managed to afford that stuff only by being two-income families, with ever less family time — unlike their European counterparts, who have gained in shorter hours and vacations what they lost in stay-at-home wives.

(Chart from (pdf) the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis)

The Formula For Lifespans

Robert Krulwich reveals it:

Life is short for small creatures, longer in big ones. So algae die sooner than oak trees; elephants live longer than mayflies, but you know that. Here’s the surprise: There is a mathematical formula which says if you tell me how big something is, I can tell you — with some variation, but not a lot — how long it will live. This doesn’t apply to individuals, only to groups, to species. The formula is a simple quarter-power exercise: You take the mass of a plant or an animal, and its metabolic rate is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Amtrak’s WiFi? Ctd

A reader writes:

If it’s really so hard to provide good wifi, how is it that airplanes can do it? Not too many cell towers at 30,000 feet and 500mph, last I could see.

Another:

How to fix Amtrak? Well, if they decided to charge $12 per day like GoGo does for flights, they could probably boot enough people off the system to get speeds up for the ones who stay on. And maybe this would raise enough revenue to build dedicated, track-side wifi facilities for areas with poor service. But even GoGo isn’t infallable (it usually quits several times during a flight and needs to be rebooted) and it’s certainly pricey. I guess I really should just jailbreak my iPhone and use it as a hotspot.

Before the Northeast Corridor got wifi, Amtrak’s Downeaster from Boston to Portland, Maine was wired for service in 2007. The first iteration was, by all accounts, pretty horrible. It used only one provider, so when that signal wasn’t available, it was toast. The revamped wifi is better, but it still runs in to a major problem: outside of major population centers, good service is aimed at Interstate Highways.

If you ride the bus from Boston to Portland (which also has wifi – the train and bus are in a sort of symbiotic competition, unlike further south on the Northeast Corridor where the bus is a budget product and the train is a luxury, although if you really want a bus experience, you can take the Greyhound, which Concord Coach and Amtrak have almost completely driven off the route) connection speeds top out slower, but service is more constant. The train traverses some more rural areas in New Hampshire and Maine, at which point the service grinds to a halt. I have found that when the Dish stops loading (oh, I guess I read other things on the train, too, from time to time) I can look at my phone and it invariably shows little or no service. At which point I look out the window or – horrors! – read a book. (Or go down to the cafe and get a beer.)

The MBTA in Boston has wifi on commuter trains as well, which works better because the trains traverse more settled areas at generally lower speeds and fewer people use the service (especially outside peak commute times). Still, on the outer reaches of some of the lines where the train passes through horse farms between stations, service can be shoddy. But it’s free, so we can’t complain too much.

Who’s Really Behind The Anti-Hagel Ad Campaign?

Surprise!

The biggest individual financier of the so-called super PACs that sought to defeat Mr. Obama, Sheldon Adelson, is so invested in the fight over Mr. Hagel that he has reached out directly to Republican Senators to urge them to hold the line against his confirmation, which would be almost impossible to stop against six Republican “yes” votes and a unified Democratic caucus… But it is unclear whether he is directly financing any of the anti-Hagel advertising.

So one of Netanyahu’s point-men in the US is a key opponent of Hagel. Republican fundraiser, Foster Friess, also cites Israel as the core issue against Hagel in the article, although he is skeptical of the impact of big ad buys. So one assumes it’s supporters of the Greater Israel Lobby who are behind the far-right attacks on a Republican nominee. (If LCR wants to prove this isn’t so, and they weren’t bought by outside interests, they have my email address and I’d be delighted to publish the truth). But what of the strangely anonymous left-wing group, “Use Your Mandate”, publishing fliers against Hagel on issues like gays and women? Andrew Kaczinsky investigates:

A new group opposing Chuck Hagel bills itself as a gay-rights organization made up of mostly Democrats — but it has close ties to the Republican Party. The New York Times Times reported that Use Your Mandate uses Del Cielo Media, a prominent Republican firm, to purchase its television advertisements, the same as used by the Emergency Committee for Israel.

He finds elaborate methods used to disguise the source of the fliers.

This is, of course, a free country and people should be free to spend their money as they see fit on political causes, even doomed ones. But there surely has to be some accountability and transparency at some point, especially if one group is portraying itself dishonestly. The point of free speech is in part to express yourself – with your name proudly attached. So why do these neocons refuse to identify themselves? Why are they hiding? What could they conceivably have to hide?

Some thoughts on the “night-flower” strategy here.

(Photo: Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., nominee to be Secretary of Defense, arrives to meet with Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., in the Hart Senate Office Building on Wednesday, January 23, 2013. By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty.)

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Since 1965, arguably the most important conservative politician after Ronald Reagan is Newt Gingrich. He achieved some remarkable, impressive things. But he practiced a style of politics that was quite different from Reagan’s. It was characterized by apocalyptic and incendiary rhetoric, anger, impatience, and revolutionary zeal. While his positions on issues were often conservative, Gingrich’s temperament and approach were not. Yet it is the Gingrich, not the Reagan, style that characterizes much of conservatism today. It would be better for conservatism, and better for America, to recapture some of the grace, generosity of spirit, and principled politics of America’s 40th president,” – Pete Wehner, Commentary.

The View From Your Window

Boston, Massachusetts, 10.02 am

Moral Perversity In David Mamet

This is a first sentence only a teenage anarchist could write:

The police do not exist to protect the individual. They exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal… Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot. Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer.

Look: for over two decades I lived on a street corner in DC actually named after a gang. I recall four people being shot dead in my alley or on the sidewalk outside during that time. I have regularly heard gunshots at night. And the police did protect me. By patrols, by check-points, by klieg-lighting at night, by conversations and consultations, they kept the neighborhood safer. Not safe, but definitely safer. Can they be there every time someone might get mugged? No. Do far fewer people get mugged now than they did a decade ago because of police work, among other things? Abso-fucking-lutely. That is what they exist for: to prevent crime, not just bring criminals to justice in the afermath. And in DC, over the last couple of decades, a new city emerged:

You will see in Mamet’s imaginary dystopia, this is a city in which “crime runs riot.” But every category of crime is down over the decade – with murder down almost a half in ten years. But how does it compare with comparable cities in Texas, Florida and Arizona – which Mamet cites as key evidence? First up: it’s worth noting that the FBI discourages simple ranking of cities by crime, for all sorts of reasons extrapolated here. So I will not throw this data out there, as Mamet did, without that caveat. Checking the numbers, however, for last year you find that in terms of aggrevated assault per 100,000 people, Miami and Houston have a rate of 361 and 329 respectively (third and fourth in the nation after Detroit and Baltimore. Chicago weighs in at 222 and DC at 154.

Robberies? The allegedly Marxist regimes in Chicago and DC clock in at fourth and tenth. That might seem to buttress Mamet’s point until you see that Miami and Houston are at fifth and sixth as well and that Phoenix and Dallas are not far behind.

Murders – which may be in Mamet’s mind, the most important thing that guns deter – has seen a resurgence in Chicago this year. But its rate per 100,000 (6.8) in a crime wave is still not that far from Miami/Fort Lauderdale’s (6.1). As for DC, compared with cities in Arizona, Florida and Texas, which Mamet cites, the numbers per 100,000 residents are these: Houston (5.4), Phoenix (4.9), Tampa (4.7), Dallas-Fort Worth (4.5) and DC (4.4). Again, I would reiterate that these are very crude numbers – but they do rebut the claim that cities in Texas, Arizona and Florida “are much safer” than Washington DC or Chicago. Four Three out of the top ten cities for crime are in Florida, Arizona and Texas.

As for Mamet’s claim that “there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals”, the evidence, so far as we can glean, seems to come from a 1993 study by Gary Kleck, which is also contained in this 1995 paper (pdf) by Kleck and Gertz, which finds 2.5 million annual “defensive gun uses” by individuals each year. This puts defensive gun use at about five times the frequency of criminal gun use. But another study (pdf) by McDowall and Wiersma criticized the Kleck results by noting that “defensive gun uses” were not defined by actual use of guns in self-defense, but by claims of deterrence by people carrying concealed guns. Which may account for the difference between that datapoint and the National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that “gun offenses exceeded protective incidents by more than 10 to 1.” That’s not another slightly different result; that’s a different universe from Mamet’s anarchist mindset.

I’m not making an argument for or against gun control here. I’m just trying to show that Mamet’s broad generalizations are empirically wrong and need to be corrected.

An Editor Now At Large

Michael Kinsley marks his return to TNR by reflecting on his on-again, off-again relationship with the magazine:

This time, I return not as the editor (please direct your complaints and article submissions elsewhere) but as “editor-at-large.” I see this as a sort of avuncular role, in which my primary duty will be cornering the young people in the office and forcing them to listen to tedious anecdotes about the old days. I also plan to write self-indulgent, lachrymose memoirs of journalistic colleagues and friends as they, one by one, drop off their perches.

Heh. I always preferred Michael Lewis’s description of being a “senior editor” at TNR: “I am senior to no one and I edit nothing.” The best job in journalism, in my book. Another Kinsley classic:

Every editor has a set of stock excuses for turning down articles with minimal damage to an author’s feelings. I usually went with a vague, “Doesn’t meet our needs right now.” It always amazed me when a disappointed author would cross-examine an editor, pointing out the logical flaws in the reason offered for not publishing his or her masterpiece. “What do you mean, you just ran a piece on a similar topic? That one was about tourism in Bolivia. This one is about Trotskyism in Bulgaria. You’re not making any sense!” I used to think, “Well of course I’m not making any sense. I’m lying to avoid saying, ‘Your piece is unpublishable crap.'” What I usually said was a cowardly, “Let me have another look.”

He wasn’t as kind to the interns. I repeat myself like an editor-at-large might, but I will never forget giving Mike a first draft of a long and carefully wrought piece (I had yet to be turned into a proper hack), and getting the edit back within a few hours. About two thirds of the piece had been highlighted with the immortal words:

This is crap. Cut it.

I did.

Leaning Into The Pain

“‘Look up, not down,’ [Aaron Swartz] urged readers of his weblog; ‘Embrace your failings.’ ‘Lean into the pain.’ It was hard to take that advice himself. He kept getting ill, several illnesses at once. Migraines sliced into his scalp; his body burned. And he was sad most of the time, a sadness like streaks of pain running through him. Books, friends, philosophy, even blogs didn’t help. He just wanted to lie in bed and keep the lights off.

In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death (though I’m not dead yet! he added). To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be,” – from the Economist‘s heart-breaking and deeply personal obit for a genius and dreamer whose life was cut short by a prosecutor who didn’t so much over-reach as persecute and bully.