February 2014 – Page 13

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #193

A reader writes:

Hmmmmm. The fan palms (perhaps Sabals), not much of any other type of palm present except for miniatures, the hint of industry with smokestacks and powerlines in the background, make me think of the area northeast of downtown Jacksonville, FL, perhaps in proximity to Heckscher Blvd, near where I-295 & state 105 intersect, on a heading towards A1A (my favorite state highway in the US today!). If so, I’m glad the photographer caught it during a time of relatively few industrial explosions – looks more appealing then.

Another is apathetic:

This has got to be one of the most uninteresting and mundane views you’ve featured in a contest. The palm trees, flat terrain and mountains in the background appear to be Southern California, and I’ll be a little more specific to guess the L.A. Basin somewhere. But beyond that, I don’t really care.

The views are only as good as the submissions. Another reader:

Palm trees, red curbs, and it sure looks better than today in Minnesota! Hawaii?

Another:

I really don’t know. The vibe is definitely Southeast US – the buildings, the parking lot, the vegetation, to me it looks like any number of small cities in Florida. But the distant cranes and smoke stacks suggest a major port. Could it instead be Georgia? South Carolina? Can’t make out the license plates. Without the skills of many of your contestants, I’m afraid I’m going to have to just guess – how about Charleston, SC?

Nope, the other coast:

This has got to be southern California! Wide parking spaces, GM work van, yellow Prius taxis, combined with palm trees, smog, and mountains faintly visible in the background. What looks like a refinery or chemical processing plant in the background makes me say an area like Long Beach or El Segundo, but I don’t have the time to be a superguesser!

California it is. Another reader:

If I google one more California oil refinery I’m going to end up in GITMO, so I’m giving up. Guessing Huntingdon Beach because their parking lots have those double-line bay dividers and the diamond-shaped islands of shrub, but the distant industrial thing doesn’t seem to match.

Another gets on the right track:

The van and large pickup in the parking lot makes it the U.S.A. The combination of palm trees and eucalyptus trees makes it Southern California. The dark line across the horizon might be mountains, but I don’t think so – I think it’s a marine layer fog bank, and the camera wasn’t pointed toward the mountains. In the background you can make out both refinery towers and port cranes. That puts it somewhere near the ports of Los Angeles–Long Beach, probably the “South Bay” area: Torrance, Wilmington, San Pedro, somewhere like that. I didn’t try to explore it down to the street level.

Another gets the right city:

A completely nondescript yet very typical place in Southern California. The industrial background + a lack of visible landmarks rules out a large number of places in the LA basin but does not help me zero on a particular location. Judging by the shadows, the photographer is facing NNE, yet the mountains are far. So I’ll just guess Torrance.

Another nails the right building:

When I looked at this week’s contest photo, my first reaction was: “Wow, this is easy.” Eucalyptus trees and palm trees and an oil refinery all in the same picture? Smoggy mountains in the distance? This pretty much has to be somewhere in Southern California.

But it was only when I looked more closely at the photo that I realized just how easy it was (at least for me). You see, this is my hometown, Torrance, in the South Bay area of greater Los Angeles. The tallish building in the center of the photo is the Golden West Tower, an apartment complex for seniors built back in the 1970s. (As a child I watched the construction of that building from my second-floor bedroom window.) The refinery in the background is an Exxon Mobil facility (which exploded at least twice during my childhood.) The photograph was apparently taken from the Torrance Marriott South Bay Hotel, located just to the north of the Del Amo Fashion Center on Fashion Way. The person who took the picture is on the north side of the hotel looking to the northeast (you can just make out the San Gabriel Mountains in the haze on the horizon).

A wider view:

Another reader:

Ordinarily I try to send in some interesting tidbit about the places in the picture. But this week’s searches turned up a different type of results. The picture features a large ExxonMobile refinery that was evacuated last year and the Golden West Tower apartment building for seniors where an 80 year old resident committed a double murder-suicide in 2012. Oil and gun violence. A very American landscape.

Another adds, “I thought about calling up the hotel and asking about their room numbering scheme, but that just seemed creepy.” Another ventures a guess at the room number:

I finally got one. I have been reading your blog for years now and am going to join right away. Usually the contests are in some far off place, but this one is in my backyard. The photo in this week’s contest is taken from the Torrance Marriott Hotel. The only lower floors that have balconies are the 3rd and the 4th. So my best guess is Room #337.

Another:

Hi! Founding and renewing member here. So, I fire up the page, see the picture, turn to the wife and say “I know that building!” My grandparents lived in that large building in the ’70s. When I was a kid, we’d drive up from San Diego about every couple of months for a visit and have lox and bagels for breakfast and later go to the coffee shop around the corner for dinner. Every time. They were also the first and only people I knew that were actually afraid of the microwave oven. I could tell you more about them and my visits but I believe that’s a different contest. Now for the guessing: 6th floor, room 622.

So close. The winner was the only reader to correctly guess the room:

Well this just screams Los Angeles. But where? The real clue in finding the exact location was the refinery in the distance. The obvious first choice was the Exxon-Mobil refinery in Torrance. A quick search of hotels in the area turned up the Marriott at 3635 Fashion Way, Torrance, CA.

Now to guess the room number (argh). It looks like the floor is just above tree level, so it’s probably the sixth or seventh floor. I’ll go with the sixth floor. I can pinpoint the room visually, but I couldn’t turn up a floor plan to be sure of the room number. Taking a guess as to the numbering scheme, I’ll go with 629 (608, 607 and 630 would be my alternatives).

Thanks for an easy one this week. St Paul drove me nuts last week.

From the submitter:

I’m not sure if this one will be too easy, given that you certainly have many followers in Southern California, but I showed it to my husband, who grew up here in Los Angeles in the South Bay, and he didn’t recognize it, so here goes. That building in the distance is of no particular significance, by the way (it’s a retirement community), except that there was a murder-suicide there a couple of years ago, something that sadly is not unheard of in retirement homes. In the farther distance you can see the Exxon Mobil Refinery, and beyond that, mountains.

I had to spend a good part of the weekend chaperoning students from my school who were attending the Junior Statesmen of America Winter Congress that was being held at the Torrance Marriott. This photo was taken at about 11 am on Sunday, February 16 from room 629.

(Archive)

How Many Janitors Is A College President Worth?

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is considering capping its president’s salary at 10 times that of its lowest-paid employees:

Currently for St. Mary’s, the ratio is 13-1 when comparing the president’s salary to that of the college’s lowest-paid employees. In this light, the proposal to cap the ratio at 10-1 is not as much a major cost-cutting effort as it is a push to further address questions of income inequality. The ratio at St. Mary’s is already more reasonable than it is in many corporations or even at other universities ($441,000 was the median compensation for public-college presidents in 2011, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education). Still, those behind the initiative believe it could improve more — and that it’s an important effort to keep the income gap from widening even further.

Ry Rivard puts the proposal in context:

By comparison, in the corporate world, the CEO at clothing retailer Gap, which Wednesday said it would raise the minimum wage for its employees, made 331 times more than its average worker, according to a 2013 analysis by Bloomberg. But St. Mary’s plan isn’t as equitable as the compensation scale Ben & Jerry’s once used, which didn’t allow executives to make any more than five times what an employee made.

The St. Mary’s proposal does more than just tie presidential pay to that of less well-compensated staff members. It also seeks to make sure all employees earn at least $29,976, which is 130 percent of the poverty level—enough to keep a family of four off food stamps.

Right-Sizing The Military

Chuck Hagel’s 2015 budget would reduce the number of Army soldiers to the lowest level since before the World War II mobilization:

The budget also targets personnel costs, with cuts to soldiers’ housing allowances and commissary subsidies, as well as potential increases in health-care fees for the family of active service members. Hagel also proposed a one-percent pay raise in 2015, though pay for flag officers and generals would be frozen at current levels.

Those cuts take a small swipe at what’s known as “brass creep”—the swelling ranks of generals and admirals who earn high salaries and retire with cushy pensions. Congress approved multiple raises during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but a look at base pay rates (what soldiers earn before add-ons like housing allowances and combat pay) shows that the wartime wages didn’t trickle down the chain of command.

Derek Mead explains why the Pentagon is cutting personnel:

The main reasoning behind the personnel cuts, according to the Defense Department, is that the US does not need to maintain a force capable of large-scale land occupation when the war in Afghanistan is drawing to a close. Instead, the military is increasing its focus on special operations and cyberwar—and increasing its use of robots.

The growth of war bots has been noted for years now, thanks to revelations about the drone war and key reports like Peter Singer’s 2010 “War Machines” story for Scientific American. Since then, we’ve seen the military head further into its cyberpunk phase, with autonomous killer robots now going through testing, which the UN has cautioned against. But in the near term, the reality for the military means higher tech soldiers in fewer numbers; whether they are firing smart rifles or flying drones, a high-tech, automated army can be less costly if utilized effectively.

But Christopher Preble argues that the cuts don’t go far enough:

The Pentagon apparently still intends to retain 11 aircraft carriers, possibly cutting into modernization of the Navy’s surface combatant ships. As had been reported earlier, the venerable A-10 attack aircraft is going away, but the Pentagon remains committed to the troubled F-35. The early details don’t address the possible modernization of the nuclear triad, which is sure to compete with other Air Force and Navy priorities. If the Pentagon isn’t serious about confronting those tradeoffs, the resulting infighting could get ugly.

David Edelstein suggests that Hagel may be “tying hands” – preventing the US from engaging in more foreign entanglements. But Millman doubts a smaller army will rein in the interventionists:

The proposed changes in forces structure do not imply a shift non-interventionism. They will make it even more difficult to contemplate long-term, large-scale occupations, but such would have been difficult to contemplate even at a 500,000-person Army. That still leaves very much open the use of force in more “discrete” ways – drones, Special Forces, etc. – that have been the hallmark of the Obama Administration since the beginning of the drawdown in Afghanistan. We should also remember that fighter jock Donald Rumsfeld also advocated a lean and mean Army, and planned the Iraq War precisely as a demonstration of how much we could achieve without deploying an occupation-scale force. We all know how that turned out, but while some learned the lesson, “don’t do that again,” others learned the lesson, “we need to learn how to do that better before we do that again.”

Allahpundit imagines what kind of hay the Republican presidential candidates will make of this:

Rubio, a hawk in the McCain mold, will rip Obama for retreating — but candidates like Walker and Christie will try to walk a line between hawks and doves. So will Paul, actually: His big liability potentially is being seen as Ron Jr. on foreign policy so he may feel obliged to balance his praise for the “smaller, leaner military” approach with criticism of Obama for not beefing up certain areas. And what about Cruz? In a sense he has the opposite problem of Paul, wanting to attack Obama for weakening America but needing to find some merit in cuts to the budget.

Kori Schake is pleased that the Pentagon is learning to live within its means:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel deserves considerable credit for owning up to the fiscal reality that defense spending will no longer have galloping rates of increase. Specifically, he deserves credit for bringing the department’s budget into compliance with the law. An obvious point, one would think, is that the budget request ought to be in line with the Defense Department spending cap legislated in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Not something we loyal opposition should applaud, since it ought to be standard practice. Yet this is the first budget that acknowledges Congress has given federal spending guidelines that must be followed. The budgets submitted by Barack Obama’s administration were in excess of the top line.

Larison pushes back on the headline, seized on by the right, that the budget reduces the Army to pre-WWII levels:

Critics of any reduction in the size of the military or the military budget are always going to seize on such misleading comparisons to make reductions appear to be much more significant, so it’s important not to blow them out of proportion or make them out to be something more than they are. Before and during the 2012 campaign, Republican hawks repeatedly claimed that the Navy was being shrunk to WWI-era levels, which was true provided that you paid no attention to the quality of the ships, the vast technological differences between the two periods, and the relative strength of other naval forces. Likewise,references to having the “smallest Army since 1940″ conveniently ignore that the U.S. will still have more men under arms than any country in the world except for the two most populous countries, and will still be far and away the leading military power in the world.

Peter Weber does the math:

Here’s another way of looking at Hagel’s budget: In 1940, U.S. defense spending was $1.7 billion, or 1.3 percent of GDP; in 2011, it was $705.6 billion, or 4.7 percent of GDP. Hagel’s budget proposes lowering defense spending to $496 billion — the cap in last December’s bipartisan budget deal, or about 2.7 percent of GDP. America would still be spending more than twice as much on defense as it did in 1940, as a percentage of GDP.

Conor weighs in:

Circa 1940, the U.S. had a grand total of zero nuclear weapons. Today the U.S. has 5,113 nuclear warheads. An already dated Wired article noted in 2011 that the U.S. had 7,494 drones, including 161 Predators, which are used for targeted killing. The U.S. also has ten aircraft carriers. How many carriers does our closest military rival have?

One.

(Chart from the BBC.)

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes me:

I would never want to coerce any fundamentalist to provide services for my wedding – or anything else for that matter – if it made them in any way uncomfortable. The idea of suing these businesses to force them to provide services they are clearly uncomfortable providing is anathema to me. I think it should be repellent to the gay rights movement as well.

I don’t want to come across as snarky, but do you think that maybe the fact that you live in one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world and have virtually unlimited alternative options for just about anything you’d want might make it easy for you to come to this opinion? Think about all the gay couples living in small towns, where the next closest florist isn’t interested in driving that far for a delivery. In fact, I believe you brought up a very similar scenario when it came to pharmacists in rural areas deciding they could refuse to dispense birth control to unmarried women on religious grounds.

Another reader:

I don’t think Erick Erickson has a point at all; I think he’s cunningly crafted an argument that appeals to people’s sense of personal freedom, while supporting a law that allows unacceptable discrimination. The strength of one’s feelings do not justify discrimination. Is it okay for a Christian florist to deny service for a Jewish wedding? Can a Muslim taxi driver refuse to pick up a single woman without a male escort? Part of the price of obtaining a business license and doing business in America is the agreement to provide services without discrimination. If your personal feelings are so strong that it is unacceptable to bake a cake for a gay wedding, then don’t bake cakes for a living. That’s the choice.

Another:

Erickson would have a point if any of the bills proposed were in states that actually allow gay marriage.

In both Kansas and Arizona, gay marriage is NOT legal. How are we supposed to understand their point that it’s “only about services related to gay marriage” when they’re passing laws to deny service where there is no gay marriage? Come on!

Another:

Suppose two people, Dave and Pat, book a caterer for their wedding. The caterer is a fundamentalist (or secular) bigot and, owing to the androgynous name Pat, simply concludes that this is a hetero event. It is not until the caterer arrives, sets up, starts cooking, and serves a full round of appetizers that the caterer sees the two men kiss, freaks out, packs up and leaves the event stranded without food. By what principle would this behavior be acceptable? Are there now gay dollars and straight dollars? Would Dave and Pat be subject to a counter-action since they hid their identity from the bigot, costing them spoiled food and wasted time? I don’t see how you or Erick could deny the bigot these rights as well.

Of course people are allowed to make moral objections and withhold service (or purchase) because of them. But we have Civil Rights laws because we have decided, as a people, to state up front that race, religion, gender and sexual orientation are not acceptable categories for moral objection when it comes to government, hiring, housing or commerce. The caterer is providing a service, period. In a truly free market, that is the only value worthy of consideration.

More dissent can be found on our Facebook page:

It will always be a slippery slope, Andrew. You start with the obviously “sacred” wedding cakes and bouquets. And if the pious cake baker gets a pass how about the caterer? And if the devout florist gets a pass how about the flower wholesaler? And if the photographers get a pass. And who can expect a printer to print an invitation for Sally and Jane? Then how about the paper supplier. And think about the sweet old couple who own the turn of the century Bed & Breakfast Inn. That is so personal – I mean – you know – sheets and toilets. Hair dressers obviously. How about the guy who owns the only gas station in town whose beliefs are just as deep? Should he be forced to enable this couple to gas up just because his contact is brief? How many minutes of contact is required before you can discriminate? And is the discrimination limited to the couple or does it extend to the individuals when traveling on business? And who decides who is LGBT?

Of course a proprietors retains their First Amendment rights to express their religious and political beliefs. They may post a disclaimer on their website or in their place of business advertising that they oppose same-sex marriage (or whatever) but that they comply with applicable anti-discrimination laws.

Justice Richard Bosson in the New Mexico Supreme Court decision regarding Elane Photography/Huguenin said it perfectly:

The Huguenins are free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish; they may pray to the God of their choice and follow those commandments in their personal lives wherever they lead. The Constitution protects the Huguenins in that respect and much more. But there is a price, one that we all have to pay somewhere in our civic life.

In the smaller, more focused world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world. In short, I would say to the Huguenins, with the utmost respect: it is the price of citizenship.

Who Controls Ukraine Now?

Masha Lipman warns that the new balance of power is unstable:

The authority of the decision-makers in the Ukrainian parliament is not entirely secure. At least some of their decisions may be questioned by regions in the east of the country that barely took part in the bloody struggle in Kiev. In the mostly pro-Russian Crimea, fifty thousand people showed up for a rally on Sunday where the governing force in Kiev was denounced as “Fascist riffraff.” They chanted, “Long live the great Russian city of Sevastopol!” Separatist sentiments are widespread in the Crimean peninsula; Sevastopol, its largest city, is the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet, which makes the Crimea even more of a problem for the new government in Kiev.

Alex Berezow argues that the opposition “must act quickly and carefully to fix Ukraine’s enormous problems, otherwise the country could split in two”:

The new government must reunify the country. Mr. Yanukovych’s supporters — including the Kremlin — feel as though his removal from power was unlawful. That is going to cause long-lasting ill feelings. The new government must make it clear that Mr. Yanukovych’s expulsion was due to corruption and corruption only. However, the parliament has already voted to drop Russian as one of the country’s official languages. This is a big mistake. It gives the impression that ethnic Ukrainians in the western part of the country despise the ethnic Russians in the eastern half. Does Ukraine really want to have an ethnic conflict added to the current political crisis?

Jamile Trindle and Keith Johnson wonder how Russia will respond:

The new leaders were part of the opposition that revolted against President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to accept Russia’s cash and reject closer trade ties with Europe. Now, they are free to put the country back on a European trajectory, and reconsider signing the trade and political agreement that Yanukovych rejected, but they may face the same fallout from Russia that he did. Ukraine relies on Russia, not just for trade, but also for natural gas imports.

If Ukraine’s short-term financial lifeline comes with the signing of the association agreement with the European Union, which will allow for a free trade zone and lift visa restrictions, it will carry one big additional risk: the threat that an angry Russia could use its energy leverage to try to cow Kiev back into its orbit.

(Photo: An anti-government protestor waits in front of a parliamentary building in Kiev on February 25, 2014. Today Ukraine’s interim leader delayed the appointment of a new unity government until February 27 as the country tries to find a way out of its most serious crisis since independence. By Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

The Dingell Dynasty

Michigan Representative John Dingell is retiring at the end of this term after six decades in Congress. Allahpundit notes that Dingell inherited his seat from his father and might pass it on to his wife:

The guy who held Dingell’s seat before he was first elected to the House in 1955 was … John Dingell Sr. And Dingell Sr wasn’t a newcomer: He took his seat on March 3, 1933, the day before FDR was sworn in as president for his first term. The Dingells have been represented in Congress since before the New Deal. And at age 60, Debbie’s got a fair shot at a long run herself. If she can serve 19 years, it’ll be a full century of Dingellmania in the House for Michigan. And if she can’t serve 19 years, no worries. Christopher Dingell, John’s son, was elected to the state senate at the tender age of 30 and now serves as a judge. He’s a few years younger than Debbie and is right in line behind her. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a Dingell-versus-Dingell primary for the old man’s seat. That would be a fittingly grotesque end to having one family dominate its district for more than 80 years.

Philip Klein sees both Dingell’s dynastic succession and his long Congressional career as anti-democratic:

He was re-elected over and over again due to the way congressional districts are drawn up and because incumbents have such a huge money and influence advantage that it creates a barrier to entry for any potential challengers.

The United States was created by a revolution against a monarchy, and yet Americans have had an unhealthy obsession with political dynasties. As if the working assumption that Hillary Clinton will be the next Democratic presidential nominee isn’t enough, Jeb Bush is increasingly being talked about as one of the leading Republican candidates. And seriously, does anybody believe that Caroline Kennedy is the most qualified person in the country to serve as the ambassador to Japan?

Jonathan Bernstein responds:

The good news about dynastic politics is that the practice appears to be decreasing over time, despite the current Republican string of nominating dynastic candidates for president (depending on whether one wants to count John McCain, the only non-dynastic nominee the party has had since 1984 was Bob Dole in 1996, and Dole’s wife wound up serving in the cabinet and the Senate). But yes, I think a polity set up so that families perpetuate themselves in political office is less of a democracy than one in which dynastic politics is rare.

Uganda’s Gay Cleansing Begins

Burroway passes along this chilling image:

Just one day after Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the tabloid Red Pepper has launched a massive vigilante campaign on the front page of its latest edition. Four photos appear on the front page, with additional photos on the inside pages along with names, addresses and other identifying information on 200 people that the paper says is gay.

J. Bryan Lowder has more on the signing of the law:

According to local reports, President Museveni couched his decision to sign the bill in terms of science, noting that he believes his country’s scientists can “rehabilitate” gays because “nurture is the main cause of homosexuality.” If nothing else, such comments demonstrate how privileged we are in being able to debate the finer points of “choice” and sexuality.

Melina Platas Izama places it in the wider context of African morality politics:

Recent “moral” legislation extends beyond homosexuality, however, and focusing on the salience of LGBT issues may obscure other arenas in which moral dictates are being employed for political purposes. The signing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda comes just weeks after the signing of the Anti-Pornography Bill, widely reported by local and international media as the “mini-skirt ban,” despite no mention of skirts in the bill itself. Legislating morality may seem odd in a country where more than three quarters of survey respondents believe “some of” or “most of” parliamentarians are corrupt, according to Afrobarometer data, but perhaps it is precisely because of their credibility deficit that politicians are employing moral dictates as a nearly costless alternative to delivering the goods and services that are so badly needed.

In addition to serving as quick and cheap political wins, these laws can also be easily converted into tools for political witch hunts.

Christine Hauser points out that Scott Lively, the American evangelical activist believed to have influenced many foreign anti-gay laws, stopped short of condemning the bill:

Mr. Lively often writes about homosexuals on his website, where on Feb. 17 he described the Uganda bill as “overly harsh on its face, but this is typical of African criminal law across the continent.”

On Monday, after the bill was signed into law, The Associated Press quoted Mr. Lively as saying: “I would rather the Ugandans had followed the Russian anti-propaganda model which reflects my philosophy of preventing the mainstreaming of homosexuality with the minimum limitation on personal liberties for those who choose to live discretely outside the mainstream.”

Oh, and those Western gays President Yoweri Museveni accuses of exporting homosexuality to his country? Many Ugandans owe them their lives:

Not only does Uganda have no legitimate grievance against Western homosexuals, it has reason to be hugely grateful to them. If it weren’t for Western homosexuals, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans alive today almost certainly would be dead. The anti-HIV drugs that keep them healthy were a direct result of gay activism, which also helped make the medicines accessible to Ugandans and others in developing countries.

Previous Dish on Uganda’s anti-gay law here and here.

Why The Kansas Bill Backfired

New polling out of Kansas helps explain it:

PPP finds that Kansas voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposed bill in the legislature that would let businesses refuse service for same sex couples. Only 29% support it, compared to 59% who are opposed. The opposition to the bill is bipartisan with Democrats (13/80) and independents (24/61) overwhelmingly against it and even Republicans (40/44) narrowly so.

At the same time support for legalizing gay marriage has increased a net 8 points over the last year and now 44% of voters favor it to 48% who are opposed, compared to a 39/51 spread last February.

Maybe this is the moment when the over-reach became too obvious to ignore. But then I’ve thought that before in the past, and it keeps getting worse.

The Tiger Gets Hungrier

For a long time now, the Republican party has essentially decided to ride the tiger of right-wing extremism to electoral victories and total Washington gridlock. The real action on the right side of the aisle has been on the far right, with each new anti-Obama movement and eruption out-doing the last in terms of upping the ante. Shock-jocks have defined the message, aided and abetted by key leadership figures. And so, in the latest manifestation, we have the former vice-president, Dick Cheney, telling Sean Hannity the following last night:

They peddle this line that now we’re going to pivot to Asia, but they’ve never justified it. And I think the whole thing is not driven by any change in world circumstances, it is driven by budget considerations. He would much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.

So a former vice-president is out there, saying the president prefers to spend money on food stamps than on “support for our troops.” He could have made an argument why he thinks we should maintain the stratospheric levels of defense spending that have been in place since 9/11; he could have argued that the US needs to maintain the ability to fight two major land wars simultaneously in perpetuity. He could have said a lot of things. But he decided to accuse the commander-in-chief of not supporting the troops and actually wanting to keep people in poverty. There is this belief out there that Republican extremism comes from the base and not the elites. But Cheney proves otherwise.

Now we get the extreme religious liberty bills across the country that are clearly a function of gay panic among fundamentalists and a decision to capitalize on it for electoral gain; we have a Republican lobbyist pulling a publicity stunt by drafting a law to ban gay players from the NFL; we have a state senator, using sarcasm in such a way as to describe mothers as “hosts” of unborn children; we have gubernatorial candidates proudly campaigning with a man who called the president a “subhuman mongrel”; and the list goes on and on:

attempting to make contraception illegal (North Carolina), requiring sonograms and their images of fetuses to be presented to women seeking abortions (several states), advocacy of secession (Colorado and Texas), making enforcement of federal laws regarding guns a crime (Missouri), adopting a tax code that puts a greater burden on the poor and middle class while advantaging the rich (North Carolina and Kansas), mandating photo identification for voting while making the availability of those IDs only in Department of Motor Vehicle offices where the non-driving majority of those without IDs never go (a number of states), refusing federal funds for expanding access to Medicaid for millions who need such access and protection (21 states, all with Republican governors) and, attempting to mandate the teaching of “creationism” in schools (several states).

Now, it’s true that some kind of pushback seems to have begun.

Nugent felt obliged to apologize; McCain is now against the Arizona law that puts religious liberty on steroids; the Chamber of Commerce has tried to push back on the more extreme Tea Party candidates. But the truth, it seems to me, is that the kind of cost-free extremism fostered by Fox News and Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin has a logic and momentum all its own. And at some point, a party that seems increasingly defined as angry, contemptuous of the president, constantly rabble-rousing (Jindal yesterday) and hostile to immigrants, gays, Latinos, African Americans and women will become so tainted in an increasingly diverse, pluralistic and multi-racial society it may take a generation to recover. Right now, there seems little cost to continuing to ride the tiger of senior rightwing rage – as the GOP looks confidently toward the mid-terms. The checks on it, however welcome, seem tactical and defensive rather than structural and positive. The lack of any unifying, multi-cultural message is gaping. Until these problems are more deeply addressed, until someone is capable of tackling them with clarity and reformist urgency, an entire generation may be lost to the left.

For Obama to win them over is one thing; for the GOP to tell the younger generation to get lost is quite another.

(Photo: Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty)

Medical-Grade Merde

According to an op-ed in the latest issue of Nature, the FDA should rethink its classification of feces as a drug. Christine Gorman elaborates:

Fecal transplants have become increasingly important over the past few years as a way of basically taking the healthy gut bacteria out of one person and putting them in another person whose own gut bacteria are deficient in some way. … Currently, the FDA has given fecal transplants a kind of waiver from some of the stricter rules that govern the development and testing of medications. But that’s only as long as the treatment is used strictly for C. difficile infections, which cause debilitating gastrointestinal problems and are not otherwise easily curable. Many physicians and patients would like to know if the therapy could be made to work for other bowel problems – such as Crohn’s disease.

But the stricter FDA rules would make it harder to test fecal transplants for no good reason.

Regulating fecal transplants like other tissue products would still keep patients safe, the [Nature] authors argue. And it would undoubtedly keep the cost of treatment lower than would otherwise be possible if some large company with deep pockets had to undertake the sorts of tests that would need to be done to approve fecal transplants as if they were drugs. After all, if there’s something we have a lot of in this world, it’s poop.

Among other things, the researchers worry that people will make themselves sick with DIY transplants:

Websites explaining how to do fecal transplants at home are becoming common, they point out, but patients who pursue this outside of medicine cannot be protected from diseases transferred with the gut contents, or from injuries if the transplant is done badly.

Previous Dish on fecal transplants here and here.

(Graph from Nature)