Month: December 2013

Richard Cooper worries that “comic-book movies are all about superior beings dominating everybody else”:

The main problem is force: sheer physical force, which lies at the heart of the superhero myth, something Steven T.Seagle observed nicely in “It’s a Bird…”, his poignant autobiographical graphic novel about his reluctance to write for a Superman comic, in which he points out that Superman triumphs by being able to move faster and hit harder than everyone else: essentially a fascist concept. … Fascism also relies on people who must be crushed. The Batman films — and indeed the entire Batman mythos — are based on the idea that what criminals really need is a damn good thrashing, because it’s the only language these punks understand. The vicarious thrill in seeing Batman yell “Swear to me!” at some pitiful creep who swears to God he doesn’t know anything is for the nasty-minded child in all of us: an innocent pleasure until you start to think about the politics.

Chris Yogerst is unimpressed by this argument:

This reading of superheroes is common but wrong, a symptom of trying to impose political ideology on a universal, fictional myth. Superheroes do say something about the real world, but it’s something pretty uncontroversial: We want to see good triumph over evil, and “good” in this case means more than just defeating the bad guy—it means handling power responsibly.

The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom. They rarely deal with the government, and when they do it is with wariness, as in the Iron Man films, where Tony Stark refuses to hand over control of his inventions.

Devin Faraci adds that not all superheroes are alike:

It’s telling that Batman and Superman predate WWII; they both come from an age when little guy America wanted to be seen as tough. The Marvel heroes, though, come from a time when America was trying to juggle its self-image as the underdog with the reality of being the biggest, toughest kid on the block. These heroes were created during the Vietnam War – Iron Man’s first origin is explicitly set in Vietnam – and they reflect the cognitive dissonance we feel as ‘good guys’ who could also wipe out the Earth at a moment’s notice. If anything there’s a discomfort with power and force inherent in the Marvel heroes that is anti-fascist. … [In the X-Men franchise, w]e have the hated mutants working to change society’s view of them, working to remove institutionalized racism and, at the same time, doing it peacefully. The X-Men come into conflict almost exclusively with their own kind, and that conflict is about stopping violence, even when that violence is a reaction to hate. And they’re led by a guy who is so physically unsuperior he can’t even fucking walk.

(Image by Josey Wales)

This week, two carjackers in Mexico made off with a truck full of cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope with medical applications. But it seems they didn’t know what they were dealing with:

While Mexican officials initially feared that the material could have been stolen as part of a plot to build a dirty bomb, the material itself has since been recovered. What hasn’t been found are the two carjackers, but they won’t get far: authorities say the thieves will almost certainly [die] of exposure if they haven’t already … It wasn’t initially clear if the thieves knew what they were stealing. But when a small amount (a few dozen grams) of the cobalt-60 was found removed from its casing, authorities figured the duo had no idea what they had, as a thief deliberately targeting radioactive material probably wouldn’t have exposed himself to a deadly dose of radiation.

Julia Fisher details what that level of radiation exposure does to a human body:

Cobalt-60 is produced commercially for use in industrial plants and for cancer radiotherapy. Like any radioactive material, it can also cause cancer if you’re exposed to low amount over a long period of time. But how cobalt-60 will exact its punishment on the thieves is a different, gruesome matter. …

Thus, the thieves in Mexico are probably in great pain. They may have burns and blisters on their skin. They could have diarrhea, a headache, and a fever. They may be vomiting—perhaps even vomiting blood. Their stomachs and intestines could be bleeding. The radiation has probably depleted their supply of red and white blood cells. Lack of the former will reduce their bodies’ access to oxygen, making them tired; lack of the latter will lower their resistance to infections, making it easier for them to get even sicker. They may be suffering from seizures, or even in be in a coma by now.

Fisher talks to Mark Hibbs, who says the risk of criminals making a dirty bomb from such materials is lower than we think. He’s still plenty concerned, though:

The scenario Hibbs seems most worried about isn’t a TV-ready plot about a dirty bomb or other large-scale attack. It’s an accident borne of poor safety practices and too-scant public awareness of the dangers of nuclear materials.

It may not sound as scary as terrorism, but Hibbs warned that the real risk here may be when countries such as Mexico falter in safely and securely moving around nuclear materials in a way that risks exposing small numbers of innocent people. “The biggest threat is the environment where a source like this would get lost,” he said, comparing Mexico to Thailand, which experienced a similar incident in 2000.

“In Thailand, the perpetrators were the victims. Someone found a source [of radioactive material] in a scrap pile, gathered that what was inside the locked box must be valuable, and cut it open,” Hibbs recounted of the 2000 incident. “The cobalt was so hot that a couple of people got fatal doses after they handled the cobalt for a short period of time. Others had bad radiation burns. They had no idea that what was in that box could kill them.”

It’s worth recalling the glee with which many hacks determined that the Obama presidency was over before the second term had really kicked in, well, only a month ago. The Healthcare.gov fiasco was Katrina; the Syrian pivot was a disastrous wobble; the Iran negotiations were abject surrender; the economy was going nowhere. And it’s not as if there weren’t good reasons for the punditocracy’s sudden lunge for the presidential jugular. The botched website launch remains a pretty unforgivable product of presidential negligence.

But it’s worth digesting how all these alleged disasters have settled down. Obama’s alleged surrender to Putin on Syria … has led to something no one really believed possible: a potential shut-down of Syria’s WMD potential. What Bush failed to do in Iraq (because Saddam’s WMDs were a fantasy), Obama has almost succeeded in doing in Syria – with Putin’s help. The Iran negotiations – far from being a surrender – have set the stage for a real rapprochement. Les Gelb notes:

The Obama team has won the first round on the six-month agreement with Iran by a knockout. The phony, misleading, and dishonest arguments against the pact just didn’t hold up to the reality of the text. As night follows day, the mob of opponents didn’t consider surrender, not for a second. Instead, they trained their media howitzers on the future, the next and more permanent agreement, you know, the one that has yet to be negotiated.

Even George Will has conceded as much. There is a chance that the Middle East, far from exploding in another spasm, is actually safer today than in recent times. Netanyahu’s worst instincts have been rather coolly checked. The reactionary forces in Iran are on the defensive. Kerry has in no way given up on a two-state solution on his watch. And today, we got a glimpse of a much stronger economy than most were expecting, and the disastrous website … has been patched up as promised (with, of course, some ways to go). Alec McGillis sums it up:

The bungled healthcare.gov Web site emerged vastly improved following an intensive fix-it push, allowing some 25,000 to sign up per day, as many as signed up in all of October.

Paul Ryan and Patty Murray inched toward a modest budget agreement. This morning came a remarkably solid jobs report, showing 203,000 new positions created in November, the unemployment rate falling to 7 percent for the first time in five years, and the labor force participation rate ticking back upward. Meanwhile, the administration’s push for a historic nuclear settlement with Iran continued apace.

All of these developments are tenuous. The Web site’s back-end troubles could still pose big problems (though word is they are rapidly improving, too) and the delay in getting the site up working leaves little time to meet enrollment goals. Job growth could easily stutter out again. The Iran deal could founder amid resistance from Congress or our allies. Still, it seems safe to say that the Obama presidency is not, in fact, over and done with.

Far from it. The filibuster has been tamed, and the courts freed from total obstruction. The GOP remains utterly devoid of any constructive alternative to Obamacare, whose losers have been far less vocal – so far – than the winners. The president is on the offensive – on economic inequality and healthcare. It’s far too soon to project anything certain. But what we sure can say is that a huge amount is still to play for.

http://youtu.be/LMzvLYHhucA

Joe Lhota’s prognostications of doom (seen above) are looking ever more unfounded. NYC mayor-elect Bill de Blasio appointed William Bratton as his new police commissioner on Thursday. Bratton, who led the NYPD under Giuliani in the ’90s, was the architect of the very same stop-and-frisk program de Blasio ran against during campaign season. Mychal Denzel Smith is disappointed, but not surprised, at the choice:

While he criticized outgoing commissioner Ray Kelly for the “overuse-and-abuse of stop-and-frisk,” de Blasio has stopped short of calling for an end to the policy altogether. He has been in favor a “mend, don’t end” approach, supporting the reforms as handed down by US district court judge Shira Scheindlin as a result of the Floyd v. City of New York case. His choice of Bratton for police commissioner is consistent with his previously stated positions … The mayor-elect had an opportunity to signal a fundamentally new approach to the way policing would be done in NYC, but chose instead the safe and familiar, which has never benefited the communities that elected him to office. De Blasio has always been the most progressive candidate with a chance of winning, not the most progressive.

Heather Mac Donald declares Bratton’s appointment proof of “the limits that now constrain even the most left-leaning urban politicians”:

Though de Blasio demagogued against the NYPD during the election campaign, his selection of Bratton shows that he understands that his mayoralty will be judged first and foremost on whether he maintains New York’s status as the safest big city in America …

Thanks in part to de Blasio himself, the NYPD has been plagued in recent years by specious allegations that it was deliberately targeting blacks and Hispanics for racially biased pedestrian stops. Bratton understands as well as Kelly, however, that effective, unbiased policing will inevitably produce racially disparate enforcement data, given the vast disparities in crime commission and victimization. In 2012, according to NYPD figures, blacks in New York City committed over 78% of all shootings, for example, though they are only 23% of the city’s population. Whites committed 2.4% of all shootings, though they are nearly 35% of the city’s population. At the same time, blacks were 74% of all shooting victims; whites just under 3%. The ratios of stops to arrests and to population data were virtually identical in the Los Angeles Police Department under Bratton and in Kelly’s NYPD.

Drawing on an interview of Bratton from this May, Jeffrey Toobin suggests that his understanding of stop-and-frisk differs both from de Blasio’s and from that of Bloomberg’s commissioner Ray Kelly:

Bratton emphatically endorsed stop-and-frisk as a police tactic. “First off, stop-question-and-frisk has been around forever,” he told me. “It is known by stop-and-frisk in New York, but other cities describe it other ways, like stop-question-and-frisk or Terry stops. It’s based on a Supreme Court case from 1968, Terry v. Ohio, which focused very significantly on it. Stop-and-frisk is such a basic tool of policing. It’s one of the most fundamental practices in American policing. If cops are not doing stop-and-frisk, they are not doing their jobs. It is a basic, fundamental tool of police work in the whole country. If you do away with stop-and-frisk, this city will go down the chute as fast as anything you can imagine.”

We also discussed the current controversy over stop-and-frisk under Raymond Kelly, Bloomberg’s Police Commissioner. “What you have right now is a controversy in which nobody really understands what they are fighting about,” Bratton said. “Stop-and-frisk is not a tool solely to look for guns. Unfortunately, both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner refer to it that way, and that’s a problem because so few guns are recovered. But so what? The vast majority of stops are for a wide variety of things. Is someone drinking a can of beer on the corner? You want to stop that behavior. If somebody is aggressively panhandling on the street, urinating against a building. Is there somebody that you suspect is casing a building? Or is that two guys just locked out of their apartment? Police officers notice what may be a burglary. Of course they should be noticing and investigating. There are countless examples of what you want police to do.”

Brad Knickerbocker unearths another Bratton interview in which he emphasized the importance of consistency and public trust in police work:

“I’ve spent my life in the police profession, and I’m proud of that,” he said. “But I am also very cognizant of the profession’s limitations, its potential for abuse, and its potential negative impact.”

“Policing has to be done compassionately and consistently,” Bratton continued. “You cannot police differently in Harlem than you’re policing downtown. The same laws must apply. The same procedures must be employed. Certain areas at certain times may have more significant crime and require more police presence, or more assertiveness, but it has to be balanced. If an African-American or a recent immigrant – or anyone else, for that matter – can’t feel secure walking into a police station or up to a police officer to report a crime, because of a fear that they’re not going to be treated well, then everything else that we promise is on a shaky foundation.”

Adam Serwer is cautiously optimistic about Bratton:

Despite his ties to Giuliani, Bratton may be better prepared to handle an overhaul of the NYPD than he might appear. After running the NYPD, Bratton led the Los Angeles Police Department through court-ordered reforms monitored by the Justice Department. The LAPD had its own toxic relationship with racial minorities in the city, but a 2009 study showed that crime continued to decline even as police abuses were reined in and relations with city residents were improved.

Mike Riggs highlights Bratton’s support for putting cameras on cops:

Even though it’s unclear what will happen with stop-and-frisk, there is one policy on which Bratton has made his opinion known, and that’s on-body cameras for officers. “So much of what goes on in the field is ‘he-said-she-said,’ and the camera offers an objective perspective,” Bratton told The New York Times earlier this year. “Officers not familiar with the technology may see it as something harmful. But the irony is, officers actually tend to benefit. Very often, the officer’s version of events is the accurate version.”

Ronald Bailey recently made the case for to equipping cops with cameras:

Won’t police officers resist wearing video cameras? Initially, perhaps. But most patrol officers are now becoming comfortable with dashboard cameras in their cruisers. A 2004 study for the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that in cases where police misconduct was alleged, in-car video evidence exonerated officers 93 percent of the time.

The same report further noted that dashboard cameras enhanced officer safety, improved agency accountability, reduced liability, simplified incident review, enhanced new recruit training, improved community perceptions, helped advance case resolution, and enhanced officer performance and professionalism. … Body-worn cameras will clearly augment all of those objectives. And it will accomplish an important democratic task as well: turning the tables on the functionaries of the surveillance state. It gives citizens better protection against police misconduct and against violations of their constitutional rights. And it protects good cops against unfair accusations, too.

Bailey also discussed this issue earlier in the year.

Earlier this week, Suzy Khimm outlined a possible budget deal:

Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan, Congress’s budget leaders, are currently aiming for a deal that would undo somewhere between $60 and $80 billion of sequestration cuts over the next two years, according to Congressional aides and others familiar with the talks. Overall, the deal would raise 2014’s discretionary spending levels from $968 billion to $1 trillion, and Republicans are insisting on additional deficit reduction.

The basic outlines of the deal are still in flux, and those figures could change in the coming days. “The actual numbers are very fluid. I wouldn’t take them as certain by any means,” said one Republican aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Barro discounts such reports:

I can buy the idea that Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), who is leading negotiations for House Republicans, will reach a spending deal with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) I remain skeptical that such a deal can pass the House of Representatives with a majority of Republican votes, and without making outside conservative groups go insane, before the government shutdown deadline of Jan. 15.

Josh Green throws more cold water:

What appears to have happened here is that Republican leaders who’d like very much to do something positive gave a sunnier take to outlets such as Politico than was warranted, perhaps in an effort to build momentum toward a deal.

Late on Monday, Bloomberg’s James Rowley and Roxana Tiron reported (in an article not yet online) that Democrats on the budget committee were much less sanguine that an agreement is imminent. “It’s a jump ball right now,” Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told reporters.

This suggests that the budget negotiations may instead follow a much more familiar pattern—rank-and-file members rebelling against leadership; mounting panic and economic uncertainty; and finally, as the shutdown threat looms, a last-minute deal that leaves everybody angry and unsatisfied.

Nevertheless, Chait thinks a deal is possible because “the Republican negotiating position is steadily eroding”:

The original design of sequestration was to impose automatic cuts that would give both parties an incentive to deal: half the cuts would go to domestic programs, which Democrats like, and half to defense, which Republicans like. Republicans persuaded their defense hawks to sit still and be quiet, in the belief that this would increase the GOP’s negotiating leverage. Last January, Boehner boasted, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal editorial page, that he had silenced pro-defense Republicans (“I got that in my back pocket”).

But pro-defense Republicans were only willing to sit quietly in Boehner’s pocket as long as they could rely on their party to ultimately cut a deal to prevent the $20 billion in defense cuts set to take place starting next month. As the deadline gets closer, dissent is popping up everywhere. Defense hawks are openly itching for a budget deal, as are the Republicans who have to actually draw up the cuts to domestic spending required by sequestration. (Those cuts include transportation, infrastructure, and other things Republicans hate much less than aid to poor people.) The Republican dissidents, combined with Democrats, form a potential majority in the House in favor of undoing sequestration.

Beutler considers Boehner’s options:

If Murray and Ryan manage to reach an agreement, conservatives groups — Heritage, Club for Growth and others — will very likely savage it, and if past is prologue, rank-and-file Republicans will follow, and GOP leaders will have to decide once again whether escalating a shutdown fight would be preferable to breaking the Hastert Rule.

If the deal falls through, Speaker John Boehner has posited that he’ll place legislation to renew funding for the government at sequestration levels on the House floor, and finish out the fiscal year without a budget. But it’s unclear if that bill could pass. House Republican military hawks are desperate to avoid this round of automatic cuts, because they primarily reduce defense spending. They’d have to be strong-armed into supporting a bill that allows those cuts to happen. Republicans might think battered Democrats would help them assemble a majority, but I believe they’re mistaken.

A reader writes:

Please take a moment to merge your miscarriage series with the religious corporations thread, because science: Plan B does not cause abortion because it does not prevent implantation.  Plan B is progesterone.  It does absolutely nothing if you have already ovulated and had the misfortune of having conceived the night before.  In fact, as every woman who has had trouble staying pregnant knows, progesterone is what they prescribe, after a few miscarriages, to help a fertilized egg implant and “stick” in the uterus.  So it actually HELPS pregnancies become more viable.

But if you already conceived, you are screwed; Plan B actually ups the chances that you will end up with a baby. Plan B only works if you had sex and have not yet ovulated, in which case the hormone surge will push your ovulation a couple weeks into the future, preventing you from releasing that egg down into the fallopian pool of waiting sperm.  It in no way whatsoever interrupts an actual pregnancy after the moment of conception.  It does not harm a single hair on a blastocyst’s one-celled head.

Indeed, an overwhelming number of studies in the past decade back up the reader’s point that Plan B does not prevent implantation. Last year the NYT did an extensive investigation that showed how all the ambiguity around the issue is traced to the FDA’s dubious labeling of Plan B back in 1999:

Labels inside every box of morning-after pills, drugs widely used to prevent pregnancy after sex, say they may work by blocking fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Respected medical authorities, including the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo Clinic, have said the same thing on their Web sites. …  But an examination by The New York Times has found that the federally approved labels and medical Web sites do not reflect what the science shows. Studies have not established that emergency contraceptive pills prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb, leading scientists say. Rather, the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, and some pills also thicken cervical mucus so sperm have trouble swimming.

It turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work.

Because they block creation of fertilized eggs, they would not meet abortion opponents’ definition of abortion-inducing drugs. In contrast, RU-486, a medication prescribed for terminating pregnancies, destroys implanted embryos.

The notion that morning-after pills prevent eggs from implanting stems from the Food and Drug Administration’s decision during the drug-approval process to mention that possibility on the label — despite lack of scientific proof, scientists say, and objections by the manufacturer of Plan B, the pill on the market the longest. Leading scientists say studies since then provide strong evidence that Plan B does not prevent implantation, and no proof that a newer type of pill, Ella, does. Some abortion opponents said they remain unconvinced.

After The Times asked about this issue, A.D.A.M., the firm that writes medical entries for the National Institutes of Health Web site, deleted passages suggesting emergency contraceptives could disrupt implantation. The Times, which uses A.D.A.M.’s content on its health Web page, updated its site. The medical editor in chief of the Web site for the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Roger W. Harms, said “we are champing at the bit” to revise the entry if the Food and Drug Administration changes labels or other agencies make official pronouncements. “These medications are there to prevent or delay ovulation,” said Dr. Petra M. Casey, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Mayo. “They don’t act after fertilization.”

The F.D.A. declined to discuss decisions about the effect on implantation or to say whether it would consider revising labels. But Erica Jefferson, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, acknowledged: “The emerging data on Plan B suggest that it does not inhibit implantation. Less is known about Ella. However, some data suggest it also does not inhibit implantation.”

Scientists say the pills work up to five days after sex, primarily stalling an egg’s release until sperm can no longer fertilize it. Although many people think sperm and egg unite immediately after sex, sperm need time to position themselves. … Some abortion opponents said that while emergency contraceptives’ primary function may be delaying ovulation, they doubted that scientists could exclude the possibility of implantation effects. “I would be relieved if it doesn’t have this effect,” said Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “So far what I see is an unresolved debate and some studies on both sides,” he said, adding that because of difficulties in ethically testing the drugs on women, “it’s not only unresolved, but it may be unresolvable.”

Several scientists acknowledged that absolute proof may be elusive; in science, as James Trussell, a longtime emergency contraception researcher at Princeton, said, “You can never prove the negative.” But he and others said the evidence from multiple studies was persuasive.

How did the statement about implantation end up on F.D.A.-approved labels? Beginning with the 1999 approval process, the maker of Plan B — Barr Pharmaceuticals, later acquired by Teva Pharmaceuticals — asked the F.D.A. in writing not to list an implantation effect on the label, said people familiar with the requests who asked for anonymity because such discussions are considered confidential. Anti-abortion activists were not yet publicly focusing on the issue. “There were other drugs that I remember causing controversy,” said Dr. Jane E. Henney, the F.D.A. commissioner then. “This wasn’t one.”

Back then, scientific research concentrated on whether Plan B’s active ingredient, a synthetic progesterone, safely and effectively prevented pregnancy, not on how it worked, said Dr. Kristina Gemzell-Danielsson, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who participated in World Health Organization studies leading to F.D.A. approval. The F.D.A.’s own description was speculative, saying Plan B “could theoretically prevent pregnancy by interfering with a number of physiological processes” followed by a long list, including ovulation and implantation.

A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of approval process documents found no discussion of evidence supporting implantation effects.

The above video of Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens cracking a joke at the expense of sick people makes Kilgore, well, sick:

The robust laughs of Hudgen’s audience when he compared pre-existing condition coverage to an ex post facto request for auto insurance collision coverage after a motorist causes a wreck is about as disgusting as the stupid analogy itself.

Beutler comments on the video:

This might sound unusually callous, even for a Georgia Republican — or like typical reactionary anti-Obamacare horseshit taken just a bit too far. But it’s actually worse. It’s a symptom of how deep the rot of 47 percenter thinking has crept in the conservative movement.

It’s no longer just people who have negative income tax liability whom conservatives write off as hopeless dependents, but anyone who benefits in any way from any government program or consumer protection (except, of course, for Hudgens’ mortgage interest deduction, or the irrelevance of his preexisting conditions as a member of a group plan, or his untaxed premium contributions, or his parents’ Medicare).

Hudgens has already apologized for his remarks, and his experience will serve as a warning to Republicans running for office on anti-Obamacare platforms not to take their attacks too far. But this wasn’t a symptom of an ideologue’s tendency to exaggerate — it’s part of the foundation of the conservative belief system. The fact that it’s an Obamacare benefit just makes it more likely that one or more Republicans will screw up or fall into a similar trap.

Drum joins the discussion:

It’s one thing to oppose Obamacare. But Republicans have no realistic alternative. They can blather away about tort reform and HSAs forever, but even low-information voters dimly understand that it’s just blather. Either you’re going to cover sick people or you aren’t. And if you do, you’re going to end up with something that has most of the same features of Obamacare. Smarter Republicans understand this perfectly well, which is why they dance around the issue so manically. They know that their plans don’t actually provide health coverage for much of anyone at all. Dimmer Republicans like Hudgens don’t have a clue, so they just tell dumb stories to well-heeled crowds. I’m not really sure which is worse.