Month: November 2013

Ask Charles Camosy Anything: Why Don’t We Eat Our Pets?

In our latest video from Christian theologian Charles Camosy, he explores the moral hypocrisy of treating dogs as companions while treating pigs as food:

His book, For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action, came out last month. In a recent interview, Camosy suggested that at the very least, meat-eaters should choose where their meat comes from. He also offered some advice on how individual Catholic parishes might encourage such behavior:

[B]uying meat from local farms [instead of factory farms] is a much, much better option. No question. In general, we do much better buying locally rather than simply rolling over for consumerism and picking the cheapest price. We absolutely must become more connected to the processes by which food and other products come to us–not least to make sure that we are not formally participating in grave evil. This is a great opportunity for the Church to be the Church, and create structures of community to resist consumerism. Perhaps more parishes and dioceses could have formal programs where locally grown and raised food could be for sale? And these places should absolutely refuse to serve factory farmed meat.

Our recent thread on the cruelty of factory farming is here. Previous Dish on eating pigs vs dogs here. Camosy’s previous videos are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Mike Allen, Busted, Ctd

Chait reflects on the new Mike Allen take-down:

Playbook goes beyond the routine and wildly promiscuous use of native advertising. Indeed, the behavior Wemple documents would ordinarily amount to a scandal and a likely firing offense, except that it seems to be Allen’s essential job description. As Wemple points out, some of the advertisers are also Allen’s friends. And, of course, his sources also consist significantly of his friends.

The intermingling of media, business, and elected officials that is on gross display once a year during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and which Politico both covers and participates in with peerless enthusiasm, is Allen’s vision of how journalism is supposed to function normally. Sources, friends, and sponsors all blur into one mutually protective circle. Last year, Allen gave breathless, PR-esque coverage to Fix the Debt, the pillar of respectable establishmentarian lobbying, and then, within days, announced that the group was sponsoring Playbook. …

The Mike Allen scandal is not that advertisers purchased favorable coverage in Playbook. The scandal is that, at this point, such corruption is unnecessary.

Drum sees the story as the “latest example of the press going into full stonewall mode whenever they’re the ones a story is about”:

Of course [Editor-in-Chief John] Harris refused to say anything. It’s standard journalistic practice. It’s only other people who have to answer questions. It’s outrageous to expect news organizations themselves to do the same.

If the corruption is no longer a scandal, then surely a paper’s refusal to answer serious questions about its ethics is. By what right does Politico demand accountability from those in power, while refusing to engage in even a modicum of accountability itself? The lack of response must lead any objective person to believe the worst: that Playbook is neither ethical nor journalism. More from the Columbia Journalism Review:

Allen is DC’s access journalist par excellence, which is saying something in that town. Most beat journalists toss off the occasional beat sweetener/source greaser to gain access to a newsmaker and soft-pedal negative news to maintain that access. Access is a kind of currency: Get it and you can break news and rub elbows with important people. Allen makes this ugly sausage-making process more corrupt by mixing access currency with actual currency. Buy native ads in Playbook, get embarrassingly favorable news coverage in Playbook.

It stinks to high heaven.

Should Bikers Be Forced To Wear A Helmet?

Motorcycle Laws

The Economist argues yes:

When states repeal or weaken motorcycle-helmet laws, as dozens have, helmet use falls, fatalities rise and head-injury hospitalisations soar. Biker deaths rose 18% after Michigan repealed its all-rider helmet law in 2012. A rule obliges unhelmeted Michigan riders to carry at least $20,000 in medical-payments coverage. That does not even cover initial stabilisation in intensive care after a nasty crash.

Helmet-haters claim that increased deaths merely reflect a jump in miles ridden after laws are repealed, as bikers enjoy the wind in their hair. Not so. Some studies measure death rates by motorcycle-miles travelled: deaths-per-bike-mile rose 25% when Texas scrapped helmets, for instance.

But Ben Richmond feels that “statistics just don’t work against an emotional appeal of comparing laws to tyranny”:

[T]he trend as of late is against mandatory helmet laws. Today, 19 states and the District of Columbia have universal helmet laws. Only three states have no helmet requirements—Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire—while the rest have age-specified requirements. The American Journal of Public Health points to the laws that protect minors, saying that they prove “that legislators and some antihelmet law forces have accepted a role for paternalism in this debate.”

Some but not much, it seems. Since 1997 seven states have repealed their universal helmet laws. No state has enacted a universal helmet law since Louisiana reinstated the law in 2004.

Why The Nuclear Option Is On The Table

Last week, Bouie argued that Democrats “can nuke the filibuster and defend the president’s prerogative, or, they can let the GOP establish a new precedent, where the Senate only confirms Republicans nominees”:

Yes, at several points during George W. Bush’s tenure, Democrats filibustered his judicial nominees. But the issue isn’t filibustering as much as it is the GOP’s categorical opposition to Obama’s nominees. His nominations have faced an unprecedented level of obstruction, leading to widespread vacancies and judicial emergencies. Overall, Obama has had fewer federal judges confirmed than either Bush or Clinton.

Beutler weighed in:

Republicans could just agree to confirm some of Obama’s judges. I think Democrats would probably drop the nuclear threat if Republicans cleared two of Obama’s three D.C. circuit nominees. Maybe Republicans could secure the confirmation of a third, more conservative judge, or get the remaining seat on the court eliminated legislatively.
But their current position — daring Dems to go all the way nuclear or cave completely — gives Dems almost no choice but to pull the trigger. If Republicans had meritorious objections to any of these nominees, the nuclear threat would be a disproportional escalation. Obama could find other judges. What they’re doing instead is a judicial replay of their unacceptable bid to unilaterally gut Wall Street’s consumer watchdog office and void the National Labor Relations Board. Democrats didn’t stand for that, and won. Republicans caved and confirmed several waylaid executive branch nominees over the course of just a few days. They should run the same play again. And if Republicans don’t fold, they should go nuclear.

Ramesh pushed back:

One of the vacancies Democrats are trying to fill used to be held by John Roberts. After he became chief justice, Bush nominated the impeccably qualified Peter Keisler for the spot. The Democrats filibustered him, and the seat has gone empty ever since. A reasonable case can be made against filibustering judicial nominations, or for it. What can’t reasonably be argued is that Democrats should be able to use the tactic to keep a judgeship open until they have the power to fill it with a liberal, at which point Republicans have to stand down.

Chait countered:

The judicial war, like the Israeli-Arab conflict, can be dated back to nearly any starting point, but as good a place to begin as any is 2005. That year, Senate Democrats began dramatically ramping up the use of the filibuster to block George W. Bush’s judicial nominations, whom they deemed ideologically extreme. That is the episode National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru refers to recently in his defense of the current Republican Senate: “So when Democrats mounted an unprecedented series of filibusters against Bush’s appeals-court nominees,” Ponnuru writes sarcastically, “that was just normal politics.”
But Ponnuru omits what happened next. Republicans, outraged over the tactics, threatened to use the “nuclear option,” to change Senate rules and end the judicial filibuster. The two parties huddled and agreed that Democrats would stop filibustering judges except in the case of “extraordinary circumstances.” The Democrats then dropped filibusters even for highly ideologically nominees, like Janice Rogers Brown. That agreement held, more or less, ever since. As recently as this past June, Republican senators like John McCain agreed that Republicans would not filibuster Obama’s nominees, because “There has to be extraordinary circumstances to vote against them.”
For reasons that remain unclear, Senate Republicans have since decided to block Obama’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court, the country’s second-most-powerful court, en masse.

Sarah Binder looks at a larger data set:

First, most observers note that the GOP’s judicial blockade is unprecedented. I’m not so sure. Jonathan Chait observed in New York magazine on Wednesday that the Republican filibusters represent a “difference of degree that amounts to a difference of kind: They [the GOP] have declared their intent to impose permanent vacancies in Obama’s administration and in three swing seats in the crucial D.C. Circuit Court.” Others are bolder: Brian Beutler argues in Salon that the GOP’s “nullification strategy is radical, and entirely new.” The GOP’s rationales for blocking Obama’s D.C. Circuit appointees are certainly brash (and arguments about the circuit’s caseload have been effectively challenged). But along one dimension at least, GOP targeting of the D.C. Circuit reflects a more enduring partisan tactic in the wars over bench: Both parties for years have aggressively opposed nominees slated for appellate courts that are “balanced” between the two parties’ appointees.

Since 1981, 70 percent of nominees for circuits bending in favor of either Democratic or Republican appointees have been confirmed; over the same period, only 58 percent of nominees to evenly or near-evenly split courts have made it to the bench. Even if we control for the other forces that tend to depress the chances of confirmation (such as divided party government or the run up to a presidential election), nominations to split circuits are still less likely to be confirmed.

Selfie Defense

Silvia Killingsworth responds to Oxford Dictionaries choosing “selfie” as “Word of the Year”:

photo-35Strictly speaking, the modern-day selfie is a digital affair, but it’s a novel iteration of an old form: the self-portrait (a friend on Twitter joked, “was Lascaux the first selfie?”). As Kate Losse points out in her excellent primer, a notable point of inflection in the selfie’s recent meteoric rise was the addition of a front-facing camera to the iPhone 4. A selfie doesn’t even have to be of one’s face; my colleague Emily Greenhouse described Anthony Weiner as “a distributor of below-the-waist selfies.” Jack Dorsey, arguably the pioneer of the mass-distributed selfie, also introduced us to selfie Vines, six-second videos shareable on Twitter. Indeed, the selfie is nothing if not a visual shorthand for Dorsey’s initial vision for Twitter as a status updater—“here’s where I am, here’s what I’m doing.”

That selfie with Dr Ruth was taken last night in the green room of AC360 Later. Good times. OUPblog rounds up various scholarly reactions to the concept of the selfie. From José van Dijck, author of The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media:

Are all selfies the same? I don’t think so. There is quite a difference in taste and message between selfies on various social media platforms. Facebook selfies tend to be the most ordinary self-portraitures; they are pictures posted by people who want to look normal, happy, nice. Instagram is for ‘stylish’ selfies or ‘stylies’. On Instagram, you don’t portray yourself; you paint a desirable persona.

The apex of good taste may not be a self-portrait but an artistic picture of your most coveted object, such as an expensive bracelet on your wrist or four pairs of shoes representing you, your trendy husband, and your two adorable kids. Snapchat selfies are more like funny postcards: look at me, see how waggish I am, how abrasive I look, you’re not going to catch me in a snapshot. Snapchat selfies are meant to fade away like a dream as they vanish in less than ten seconds. So each selfie peculiarly reflects the flair and function of the platform through which it is posted, perhaps even more so than its sender’s taste. The medium is a big part of the message.

Poulos suggests that selfies “beam our conscious self-regard back at ourselves”:

[W]hat is it we see when we look back at ourselves again and again? Have you tried staring in the mirror for five minutes? (I have.) Try it. It’s like staring into a stranger’s eyes … much in the way that staring into a stranger’s eyes, nose to nose, quickly becomes strangely similar to staring into … your own.

Yep, it’s true. The deeper you look at anyone, including yourself, the more you see just another human. It might take a while, but selfies are on track to restore for us some of Narcissus’s innocent love for humanity. He was so gorgeous he couldn’t get on with his life. But that’s not true of any of us. And the longer we stare that fact in the face, the more our selfies will come to reflect what they so often already contain: the simple joy of being alive.

Or the eternal urge to get laid. Just keeping it real here. Update from a reader:

Ah, your “selfie” with Doctor Ruth brought back some funny memories. Before she became famous, Dr Ruth had a live call-in sex advice radio show in NYC, on Sunday night at 10 pm. I remember listening to her show with the volume turned way low so my mother wouldn’t catch me listening. Dr Ruth took her role as an educator so seriously, and knew how important it was in a suppressed society such as ours. And she would handle the people who called in as a goof with such grace. I recall a teenage girl who called in saying her boyfriend was pressuring her to perform oral sex, but she was afraid because she thought that boys ejaculated a gallon and she would choke. Dr Ruth calmly assured her that it would only be a teaspoon or so. The caller sounded so relieved, I’m guessing the boyfriend got his blowjob soon after.

Previous Dish on selfies here, here, and here.

The Political Threat Of Soaring Inequality

I read several pieces today that, together, were a somewhat grim insight into the acute social and economic crisis of our time. The first is a challenging and persuasive historical account by historian Peter Turchin of what Aristotle first observed in The Politics. The graphic (by Jennifer Daniel) is a crude but powerful summary of an historical pattern we see again and again in human history:

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In this cycle, I’d say the US is roughly in the elite fratricide moment, which means very choppy waters ahead. Turchin’s thesis is basically the following: the eternal tension between liberty and equality has a recognizable shape in historical and economic cycles, which are perhaps better understood today. The optimal moment for successful societies is when the middle class dominates, where political institutions reflect a mass interest in governing the society well, because everyone feels they have a stake (so more people than usual want and need collective success), and because they share some basic commonalities in experience, and so can find a way to compromise.

When societies grow more unequal, commonalities fray. Wealth accumulates among the few, who begin to see the polity as something to be used for private interests rather than engaged in for public-spirited reform. But as wealth at the top grows and grows, and as more and more of the middle class attempt to become part of the super-wealthy club, the loss of economic demand among the increasingly struggling majority puts a crimp in the social mobility of the wannabe elites. So we have a wealth glut: hugely wealthy one-percenters and a larger group of under-employed or unemployed professionals. It’s from these disgruntled elites that you will get the tribunes of the new plebeians. And they will be guided by revenge just as destructively as the top one percent is now guided by naked self-interest.

What disappears in this moment of the cycle is the lubricant for all successful polities: a sense that we are all in this together. When that crashes into economic stagnation, and the fight for a slice of the pie gets even more frenzied, you’re in for some serious social unrest – which will either lead to a period of reform or to further social and economic disintegration.

So do we have elite fratricide? When a Harvard and Princeton alum like Ted Cruz emerges as a wildly swinging wrecking ball for the entire global economy, you bet we do. When Republicans up the ante on judicial appointments by trying to prevent a president from filling any vacancies and when the filibuster has become much more common than, you know, actual legislation, ditto. When the response to that is to scrap one of the last remaining mechanisms for legislative balance and compromise, ditto. When a major political party offers nothing on a major social and fiscal problem, like our grotesquely inefficient form of socialized medicine, but is content merely to attack, attack and attack the law of the land and sabotage it, ditto. When a former Tory prime minister breaks ranks and accuses his elite successors of ignoring the impact of growing social immobility, ditto. When news channels decide to become propaganda channels, and when there are close to no major media institutions retaining trust as neutral arbiters of our national debate, ditto. When elite sister breaks with elite sister over an appeal to the masses, ditto.

You can probably add a whole litany of additional data points yourselves. But to my mind, what matters now in politics is finding a party or a candidate that recognizes this core problem and tries to ameliorate it.

Obama was and is such a person, but the response to his moderate reforms shows how deeply intractable this crisis now is. It may have to get worse before it gets better – and that may mean a dangerous period of unrest and dysfunction. But the challenge remains: how do we reverse this centrifugal force on the polity, especially when it has been put on steroids by the globalized economy? At some point, someone among the sane Republicans and sane Democrats is going to have to run on a robust and aggressive platform of reform that can – yes – begin sharing the wealth and tackling the entrenched and destabilizing perquisites of the super-rich, as well as tackling the populists who engage in selfish and dangerous exploitation of the resentments of our time.

For now, though, we actually have a figure in the middle of this polarizing vortex still straining to forge a middle ground. He’s our president. If he doesn’t succeed, someone else more radical will follow him. That’s why I, as a conservative, continue to support him. It’s time to leave ideology in the dust and see our predicament with unblinking eyes. It’s time for a conservatism that can grasp the necessity for reform – despite the ideology that made sense thirty years ago but has obviously become incapable of adjusting to our time – and build a new majority from the center on out. That small-c conservatism – the type that cares about the coherence and stability of the polity above all other considerations – can take shape among Democrats and Republicans. If Obama cannot succeed in it, more radical options will present themselves. But if real reform cannot find an anchor in this society anywhere, we will all face the consequences.

Reality Check

Iran Deal Support

Americans support the proposed nuclear deal with Iran by a 2-1 margin:

Some members of Congress will probably oppose any deal with Iran on ideological grounds. But a number of them are probably also worried about their own political fates and see high risk in supporting a deal with little apparent reward. After all, if a deal succeeds, all the credit will go to President Obama and his administration. But if it’s less than a total success, any congressman who supported it will be open to attack.

This new poll, then, could free up members of Congress in how they approach the negotiations, giving them a bit more political space to support a deal that has such wide popular support, despite the political risks. That could be a significant asset for the Obama administration in making any nuclear deal happen.

I would note how significant the support is among Republicans. It’s a good sign of a resurgent pragmatism after the neoconservative nightmares of the recent past. It’s also in some ways a vindication of the foreign policy of the first president Bush and the final repudiation of the mindset and policies of the second.

Toying With The Nuclear Option, Ctd

There are reports that Reid may reform the filibuster today:

Democratic aides confirm to First Read that they’re expected to vote today to change the rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for all executive appointments, except to the U.S. Supreme Court. Such a move requires just a 51-vote majority, so Democrats could lose four of their colleagues and still win the vote. Senate Republicans counter that if Democrats go through with this change, they’ll reciprocate the next time they control the White House and the Senate — including for Supreme Court picks. “If [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] changes the rules for some judicial nominees, he is effectively changing them for all judicial nominees, including the Supreme Court,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said yesterday, per the Washington Post. But Harry Reid believes he does have 51 votes, especially since he convinced Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to climb on board this nuke-option train. She had been an influential holdout in the past.

Waldman notes that Reid’s threats “could be just a negotiating tactic” :

The outcome Democrats would probably most prefer is what happened the last time we went through this, in 2005. In that case the controversy was over a group of Bush appointees who were true radicals, none more so than Janice Rogers Brown, who calls the New Deal a “socialist revolution” and says things like, “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery.” That controversy ended with an agreement in which Bush got his nominees—Brown now sits on the D.C. Circuit—and Democrats promised to use the filibuster only in “extraordinary circumstances.” In other words, it was a complete win for the Republicans. The biggest difference between then and now is that Democrats never questioned whether Bush had the right to fill judicial vacancies; they had specific objections to particular nominees.

Jonathan Adler argues that “filibuster of judicial nominees is bad for the courts”:

It was a bad thing when first used against Miguel Estrada, and it is bad now.  Of course it’s rich for Senator Reid and his colleagues to complain about the use of a tactic they themselves deployed with relish (and used to defeat just as many nominees), but that’s politics (and Kerr’s law).  I have no idea how Senate Republicans are likely to respond if Senator Reid pulls the trigger, and how this could effect the ability of the Senate to conduct other business, but I won’t shed a tear for the end of judicial obstruction.  So go ahead Harry, make my day.  I am sure the next President will appreciate it.

Ezra explains the Democrats’ thinking

The main reason filibuster reform typically fails is that the majority party is scared of what will happen when the minority party gets into power. But Senate Democrats just watched Republicans mount a suicide mission to shut down the government. Their confidence that Republicans will treat the upper chamber’s rules with reverence is low, to say the least.

This has led to some fatalistic thinking about filibuster reform: If Republicans are going to blow the filibuster up anyway, Democrats might as well take the first step and get some judges out of the deal.

Ed Morrissey predicts the GOP ‘s response:

We’ll see what happens, but if Reid does pass this, expect Republicans to retaliate — and expect them to end the rest of the filibuster as soon as they have the majority. After all, if it’s not good for confirmations, why should it apply to legislation?

That’s such a stupid statement I can barely believe it. Obviously confirmations are, in part, about the executive branch’s ability to do its job. Legislation is rightly understood as a Congressional duty, in which a Congressional minority has much more of a stake. I find what the GOP has done in this recent case – a kind of inverse packing of the court – to be appalling. Earlier Dish on the nuclear option here.

The Drug Double-Standard

Matt Steinglass presents “everything you need to know about the absurdity of America’s war on drugs”:

When Trey Radel, a congressman from Florida, was charged with cocaine possession on Tuesday, he released a statement that began as follows:

I’m profoundly sorry to let down my family, particularly my wife and son, and the people of Southwest Florida. I struggle with the disease of alcoholism, and this led to an extremely irresponsible choice. As the father of a young son and a husband to a loving wife, I need to get help so I can be a better man for both of them.

This is a perfectly reasonable and entirely sympathetic statement from somebody with an addiction problem. The queer bit is that in making this plea for understanding, Mr Radel feels on solid ground ascribing his misbehavior to alcoholism, but isn’t willing to talk in the same way about his drug use. Alcoholism, apparently, does not carry the type of stigma that would prevent Americans from empathizing with or, potentially, re-electing Mr Radel. He expects that his readers will share his view of alcoholism as a disease.

In contrast, he terms his cocaine use “an extremely irresponsible choice.” Alcoholism is a disease; cocaine possession is a choice. Because, after all, something can’t be evil or criminal if it’s involuntary. How can it be a crime to have a disease? Right?

This is ridiculous. People who develop substance-abuse problems need treatment. Whether the substance they’re abusing is cocaine or alcohol carries no moral weight, and it shouldn’t carry any legal weight either. Trey Radel should not be able to excuse his cocaine use by pointing to his alcohol use; neither is any better or worse than the other. The same goes for Toronto’s Rob Ford: we, the public, should not have the synapse connections that make it possible for Mr Ford to say he may have used drugs while “in a drunken stupor” and expect that to serve as an excuse.

Barro’s related thoughts:

Radel says he is seeking “intensive in-patient treatment” for alcoholism. If he has a substance-abuse problem I wish him all the best in getting it treated. But I’d also note that politicians who get in trouble for drugs feel public pressure to seek rehab even if they never had an addiction.

Radel wouldn’t be allowed to say “I do coke because it is fun and I don’t have any problem requiring treatment” even if that’s an accurate description of his situation.