Month: January 2013

Seeing Red AZ questions the Democratic coalition:

[W]hy would black American citizens, who have disproportionately high rates of unemployment both locally and nationally, be among those encouraging more illegals to be given legal status — allowing them to compete for jobs these citizens need and should have? … The Business Insider reported that while the overall employment rate remains weak, job reports show that minorities are still getting hit much harder by the job crisis — with African Americans suffering the highest unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics show the unemployment rate for black Americans jumped to 14.0 percent last month, from 13.2 percent the previous month. Hispanic unemployment was unchanged at 11 percent,while 184,000 more black Americans went jobless.

Mark Krikorian recently made a similar point:

Mass immigration isn’t the only cause of the deep employment problems of less-skilled black workers. It’s not even the main cause. But it’s the easiest one to remedy.

Such conclusions are bolstered by a 2006 paper [pdf] by George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon Hanson for the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Using data drawn from the 1960-2000 U.S. Censuses, we find a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose. Our analysis suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by almost a full percentage point.

A reader chimes in:

Regardless of how illegal immigration may help the 1% and even the 20%, you better hope the research on this is wrong, else we’re potentially setting up the irony of the first African-American president passing the single most harmful piece of legislation to African-Americans in 25 years.

Previous Dish on the economic benefits of immigration reform here and here.

Michael Brendan Dougherty contemplates the hit series:

The oddest thing about the show is that these girls are fascinated–that really is the right word here–by men who have so few qualities. And the fate of these girls is to continue these confusing sexual relationships with badly damaged men, where pantomimed rape fantasies are a feature and a bug, for perhaps a decade. Only then it may become permissible for their social set to start thinking of marriage.

Perhaps I underestimate the trials of my more suburban, married existence in comparison to those of my Brooklyn friends and their stand-ins on this drama. But for a show with the tone of wild celebration in self-discovery, enabled by so much social capital, the ambitions and possibilities for these Girls seem so small and sad, and their 20s seem tragic.

So few qualities in the men? Have you seen Adam with his shirt off? Have you never fantasized about fucking a carpenter with sawdust under his fingernails just after he fixed your creaking door? (#SullyTMI: I pulled that one off in real life in 1989.) As for the girls’ lives appearing sad, I think my favorite moment ever on the first season (at the very end) was the unexpected but deeply happy grin from Hannah after her alley showdown with Adam. She’s sitting in the middle seat in the back of a cab next to Adam, her distant yet irresisitible love/sex-interest, with his fricking bike on her lap. Yes, that’s being in your twenties.

As far as I’m concerned, Dunham’s as brilliant an actress as she is pioneering as a writer (a kind of Judd Apatow with balls and more intelligence). But I may be biased here. I must confess to a real admiration for Millennials – and this series lingers over their idiosyncrasies like a Planet Earth for Brooklynites and their ilk. They seem to me to be the most honest generation in a long time, realistic without excessive cynicism, ironic while retaining unironic experiences to be ironic about, sexually alive in ways that enrich life, rather than depress it. Some of the sex is a little graphic and a little funny. But that’s what sex is: often deeply awkward and hilarious, when it isn’t the most amazing thing you can ever experience. Thank God for a generation able to tell the truth about it – and so well.

TNC is much more positive than Dougherty. Here’s his follow up on the series’ awesome sex scenes:

What Girls says is “Fuck the gaze.” Lena Dunham ain’t really performing for you. She’s saying people like me–which is most of you–like to fuck. And in a real narrative of real life, the people who do most of the fucking don’t actually look like Victoria Secret models. Your expectations for what fucking should look like are irrelevant. Here is how it looks like to the narrator. I kind of love that. In this (perhaps limited) sense, I can understand the “For Us, By Us” acclaim.

The show’s disregard for male notions of sex is pretty profound. And it achieves this while still giving us a fairly interesting cast of male characters.

I would say it often embraces the male notions of sex and throws them back at the less mature gender (which makes the series kinda gay in the best way). Watching Hannah watch Adam jerk off in bed in front of her is something I didn’t expect to see on TV (and more disturbing than the high camp of American Horror Story). But I bet you it’s happened. Just as surely as I bet you it doesn’t mean the end of civilization.

Hussein Ibish checks in on the conflict within the conflict, the ongoing split between Fatah and Hamas. The people’s demand for one single government is viewed as Palestine’s version of the Arab Spring:

[But] Palestinian Islamists and nationalists still disagree on a huge range of issues, including the recognition of Israel, the use of violence, the role of religion in society, women’s issues and many other questions. These profound disagreements, and the practical problems of sharing power, mean that the grounds for reunification just do not exist. The division between Gaza and the West Bank could drag on for quite a long time.

He does suspect it will arrive sooner or later – “the question is, on whose terms”:

Real reunification will require a merging of security forces, which in effect will mean the victory of one vision of the Palestinian national agenda over the other: Hamas’s commitment to armed struggle and confrontation with Israel, and its willingness to subordinate the Palestinian cause to the broader regional Islamist agenda, or the determination of [PA Prime Minister] Fayyad and his colleagues to keep working practically on the ground to build the framework for a successful independent Palestinian state.

Dalia Hatuqa believes Fatah is on the defensive:

More Palestinians are growing weary of [Fatah’s] sole emphasis on civil disobedience and nonviolence, calling it outdated at a time when Hamas is flaunting its ability to fire rockets into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and extracting concessions from Israel as a result. These various maneuvers, combined with a general apathy prevailing on the streets, have put the group’s future in question.

(Photo: Hamas supporters take part in a rally celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas Islamist movement on December 13, 2012 in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. By Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

OK, I’m not quite neutral, since I work for a well-known old magazine, but whatever: dial it down on the “how stupid is the MSM for not verifying Manti’s girlfriend?” Journalism on deadline is hard. So in the course of practicing it, journalists don’t have time to require sources to prove basic facts nobody would invent, because their productivity would grind to a halt. When someone gives you their name on the street, you don’t ask for ID. When they say they work at a bank, you don’t treat them like a liar and force them to prove it. You write “Joe Schmo, who works at a bank…”   Who the fuck makes up family members (or girlfriends)? And just as reporters don’t assume sources lie about basic biographical details, editors don’t regularly treat reporters as potential liars, which is why the New Republic and the New York Times and the Washington Post got hoaxed.

And the undertone that “legacy media” is so much worse than the blogosphere is getting cloying. How many e-mails did you publish in “Cannabis Closet?” and “It’s So Personal.” I admire your campaigning, and I admire your opening your blog to readers. But it would have been trivially easy to make up these stories, stories that you passed on to a huge readership without verification, in order to move the needle on crucial public policies.

Points taken. But in the course of one of the biggest hoaxes in the history of sports journalism, there was not one deadline. There were weeks of potential follow-up – and which journalist wouldn’t want to find and interview the mythical girlfriend? Is blaming this fiasco on deadline pressure all you’ve got? Seriously?

But, yes, in the absence of a staff large enough to fact-check every email we publish, the Dish only has thousands of potential fact-checkers every day – our readership. For example, after we ran one of the “It’s So Personal” stories on Marfan Syndrome, several readers immediately jumped on inconsistencies in the story, causing the original reader to correct himself. This process goes on every day; we are constantly updating posts with corrections, clarifications or additional information that put them in a more accurate light. We actually are on a deadline. In fact, we are never off one. And I’m happy to compare our record of factual errors with any comparable site or newspaper.

Ambers still believes that Obama will tackle America’s drug laws during his second term:

Several Obama advisers told me that he wants to tackle the drug problem at some point during his second term, and nothing has changed. I would be surprised, and chagrined, and apologetic to readers, if, at the end of the term, Obama has done nothing. He has four years ahead of him. I understand the frustration of drug reformers. They will have to wait. The politics are shifting on drugs, but they’re still optically difficult for a black president. Timing matters.

Mike Riggs voiced his skepticism last week. He’s right to. For two years, some of us assailed Obama for dragging his feet on gay rights. But now think of the last four years culminating in that Inaugural Speech yesterday – a speech that, despite its rather pedestrian critics, will for ever be a part of every gay American’s consciousness of American history. My own appreciation of Obama’s deep understanding of the gay experience – because of his extraordinary capacity for empathy and identity – is here. Throughout the 2008 primaries, we were told he wouldn’t be as fierce an advocate as Hillary Clinton. Well, that’s unknowable. What’s knowable is that those of us who trusted him but insisted on results … were right.

For all those of you who would love to see the corner turned on marijuana as it just has on marriage, I have just a few words: Make. Him. Do. It. With passion, anger, relentless – but above all, by reason and conversation with your fellow citizens. As with marriage, the closet must fall before real consciousness shifts.

(Photo: Getty.)

Marty Lederman closely examines the legal arguments that could allow SCOTUS to avoid any vast federal decision in the marriage equality cases now coming before it – in particular on the issue of standing. He has seven posts in full on the question which you can read here in reverse chronological order. It’s not for everyone – except for those who truly want to understand what this epochal year for gay Americans could ultimately lead to … or not.

A reader writes:

What I heard brought me a comparison similar to yours to Whitman and his sweeping portrait of America as the landscapes and people that make it. My reaction was to think of Carl Sandburg, and the subtle legacy his work plays through Barack Obama’s life.

The man who interviewed Obama for his position as a community organizer in Chicago, asked the younger President what he know about the city. His answer: “Hog Butcher for the World”, the first line of Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’.

Sandburg was rooted in Chicago and Illinois, as Obama soon would be, and moreover they shared a love of Lincoln and his dreams (expressed far better than I could in this brief article [PDF]. But more than that, and more than for Whitman, Sandburg’s deep connectedness to the people of his city and land evokes a care towards the pains of life’s industry in a way that is deeply felt in Obama’s writings:

I AM the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I’ve always felt the poem ‘Chicago’ itself encompasses Obama’s rise, the confidence and overconfidence that is nevertheless part of his appeal:

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!

Like Sandburg, Blanco brings out the full weight of work in peoples’ lives, those of both his fellow citizens and his parents who worked so that he might succeed:

Continue reading Blanco, Whitman And Orwell, Ctd