Last night, Ben Sasse handily won the Republican Senate primary in Nebraska. Molly Ball analyzes the outcome, which is being hailed as a Tea Party victory:
Sasse actually represents less the Tea Party’s anti-incumbent rage than the sort of fusion candidate who can unite the party establishment and base—a well-credentialed insider who can convince the right wing he’s on their side. As Dave Weigel put it in Slate, “Sasse is a veteran of the establishment who masterfully ingratiated himself with the conservative movement.” Particularly in red states, he could represent the harmonizing future of the GOP in a post-GOP-civil-war world. Last week, Thom Tillis won the North Carolina Republican primary more by straddling the establishment and Tea Party than by taking sides; Sasse did so even more effectively.
All in all, last night definitely represented a hiccup for the “Year of the Republican Establishment” narrative.
I’m guessing the Powers That Be in the GOP and the mainstream media will emulate [Jennifer] Rubin by dismissing the results and focusing their attention on next week’s primaries, when the establishment is expected to do better in Idaho (Rep. Mike Simpson appears likely to hold off a right-wing challenger), Kentucky (Mitch McConnell has bludgeoned Matt Bevin into submission), and perhaps Georgia (“outsider” businessman David Perdue and career appropriator Rep. Jack Kingston are leading most polls and could be headed to a runoff).
At some point the pro-establishment narrative is going to have to come to grips with the fact that in almost every case the establishment champion has had to run hard right to survive, making victories when they happen mostly symbolic. But after Tuesday, just winning would be helpful.
Matt Lewis expects “Ben Sasse to be a very serious conservative Senator — not a ‘bomb thrower’ or a red-meat hurler”:
So I couldn’t be happier with the results. But I do think there is something else that deserves mentioning. There seems to be a sort of phony game that smart conservative candidates – those who are willing to do what it takes to win a Republican primary — must at least tacitly agree to play (or permit to be played on their behalf): They have to talk like tea party populists, even if they walk like cosmopolitan conservatives.
The Tea Party, easy as it is to mock and blame for defeats, has managed to install half a dozen senators who are young enough to run the upper house some day. Cruz, Sasse, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee won when they were in their 40s. Oklahoma’s T.W. Shannon and Mississippi’s Chris McDaniel, two Tea Party favorites for this year, are even younger. When given a shot at a safe seat, the movement elevates young, dynamic, ideological candidates.
After visiting Havana and stepping outside the city’s small, sanitized tourist sector, Michael J. Totten reviews how dismally the island’s Communist experiment has failed:
As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY HEADACHE?”
Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.
Education is free, and the country is effectively 100 percent literate, thanks to Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power. But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 100 percent. After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression.
Although Michael Jackson’s new posthumous album is topping the charts in 50 countries, Andrew Romano is disappointed with Xscape, which reworks Michael’s unreleased material into tracks like the “duet” with Justin Timberlake above:
Xscape is the second Jackson disc assembled by Sony since the artist’s death in 2009; the first was 2010’s Michael. But unlike MJ’s previous posthumous release—10 songs that Jackson wrote, recorded, and reworked from 2007 to 2009 but never got around to releasing—Xscape doesn’t have anything fresh to offer. It’s not a glimpse of what Jackson was working on post-Invincible (2001), his last studio LP. Nor is it a collection of archival ephemera and outtakes, like the Beatles’s Anthology. Instead, it’s something else entirely: a meager batch of pre-1999 scraps and stray demos selected by Epic Records boss L.A Reid to be “contemporized”—read: inflated, balloon-like, into something that will sell—by Timbaland, Stargate, Rodney Jerkins, John McClain, J-Roc, and various other producers.
In other words, Xscape is a product—and that’s exactly what it sounds like.
Peter Tabakis is outraged, not at the quality of the album, but rather at the crass profiteering it represents:
Xscape is far from terrible. The album’s source material is regularly pleasurable, often fascinating, and sometimes revelatory. But as merchandise – the noblest term you could apply to Xscape – most casual listeners will purchase a scandalously meager product. The “standard edition” consists of just eight songs, “contemporized” by Timbaland and a handful of guest producers (including Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon, Stargate, Rodney Jerkins, and John McLain). It comes at the low, low price of $8.99 on Amazon (for an MP3 download) and a buck more on iTunes. Conspicuously not included on the basic model are the original versions of Xscape’s songs. To get those, you’ll have to upgrade to the “deluxe edition”, which comes at a seven-dollar premium. But wait, there’s more. As an added bonus, “deluxe” customers will also receive a third version of “Love Never Felt So Good,” with Justin Timberlake plunked in. Why? Well, why not? Jackson’s family is strapped for cash. Epic isn’t doing much better. And they’re both looking to fleece you further over the coming years. So please, for their sake alone, act fast and purchase your copy today!
Or in the words of Black Keys drummer Peter Patrick Carney:
“[It’s] some fucking bullshit that sucks so bad that it took them three years after he died to make it listenable,” he tells Rolling Stone’s Patrick Doyle. “Like he had to be dead for three years for it to be released.” He suspects it finally saw the light of day because “L.A. Reid needed a new boat.”
There’s still no mistaking that voice; that fervent intensity he brought to every line. Can’t lie: It’s nice to hear. Still, there’s reason to wince about this project — it’s devoted to material that Jackson worked on for various albums, but didn’t finish or elected not to share. Making matters worse, these tracks don’t represent Jackson’s vision alone: Label president L.A. Reid commissioned producers to “contemporize” — his word — Jackson’s demos to appeal to the current market.
But the deluxe version also includes the raw demos before they were “contemporized.” Even in what sounds like a rehearsal situation, Jackson manages to convey the heart of a song. He nails all the twists of the melody. His passion sells it — you forget it’s not a final take. At times, he sounds like he’s thinking back to Motown days and recalling the influence of Stevie Wonder.
Once labelled absurd, the idea of mass testing of adults for HIV and AIDS is now part of the routine in British Columbia, proving the province is showing the world how to control and defeat the cruel disease, says the doctor leading the program. The B.C. government announced Monday it will become the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce guidelines for health-care providers to encourage all adult British Columbians to get tested for HIV.
A Canadian reader just got some personal news:
I was told this April 25 by my GP that I had tested positive for HIV.
On April 29 I had my first appointment at the infectious diseases clinic; my doctor is medical director of the county-level Infection Prevention and Control. That day I also had bloodwork and a baseline chest x-ray. On May 2 I had my second appointment with the ID doctor. He had my T-cell count but was a little upset that the viral load readings were not back yet. My next appointment is June 3, by which time I’ll have been vaccinated for pneumonia and Hepatitis B. I’ll also have been tested for tuberculosis.
Today I applied for the provincial drug program that will help pay for the inevitable cocktail it appears I’ll be on this summer. There’s an income-based deductable, for me it’s about $150 a month.
I am ashamed that I have the virus, and I feel like I’m adrift in a dark strange river, loosened from humanity. I cannot imagine how I’ll tell family and friends when it’s time. But I am being cared for. I will not lose everything I have in order to stay alive as long as science will allow. Society and state are acting with compassion and alacrity and foresight.
I am positive.
P.S. Your accounts of treatment and life with HIV pretty much helped me avoid a freakout a couple weeks ago.
That’s the name of Tyler Vigen’s site. How he describes it:
I created this website as a fun way to look at correlations and to think about data. Empirical research is interesting, and I love to wonder about how variables work together. The charts on this site aren’t meant to imply causation nor are they meant to create a distrust for research or even correlative data. Rather, I hope this projects fosters interest in statistics and numerical research.
Sift through its data sets, and you’ll find all sorts of statistics that can be mapped onto each other — margarine consumption and the divorce rate, crude oil imports and number of train collision deaths, bee colony growth and the marriage rate. If you ever need to demonstrate that two things can appear connected purely by chance or some entirely separate factor, this is your site.
Those all have correlation coefficients in excess of 0.99! That is very very high! By comparison, Alan Abramowitz’s extremely accurate “Time for Change” model of presidential elections (it predicted Obama would get 52.2 percent of the two-party vote; he got 51.4) has a correlation coefficient of 0.97, which Abramowitz correctly calls “extraordinary.” The point is that a strong correlation isn’t nearly enough to make strong conclusions about how two phenomena are related to each other. Abramowitz’s model is worth trusting not just because of its high correlation but because it predicts presidential elections based on factors that logically should matter to voters, like the state of the economy and what party currently controls the White House. That gives it theoretical plausibility, which a theory in which, say, US whole milk consumption is driven by the marital status of Mississippians, lacks.
Humans love correlation. We love correlation because we love stories, narratives: this happened, leading to this, and next should be this other thing. We look for the forms of stories in the world, and a story is roughly the opposite of coincidence, which is things just happening together because time is just a substance of many layers, a stack of happenings.
Laszewski believes the ACA’s big problem is that not “enough people are signing up for it to be sustainable in the long-term because the products it offers are unattractive”:
The polls and the market’s response to Obamacare are all consistent: The program is not attractive and needs some serious fixing but it isn’t going to be repealed. Republicans can continue to exploit this issue only if they understand this. And, Democrats can win the issue back, or at least neutralize it, if they can get beyond their current euphoria over “eight million” and get real about how unhappy people are with the program and the plans it offers––and come up with a plan to fix Obamacare.
I feel like I’m watching a football game here. The ball (Obamacare) has been fumbled. It’s bouncing down the field up for grabs. The Republicans are saying they don’t have to chase the fumble because, “We’re are so far ahead we’re going to win the game anyway.” The Democrats are saying, “What fumble?” They’ve got “eight million reasons why the ball hasn’t been fumbled.”
Relatedly, Cohn reads a McKinsey report that sheds light on the uninsured population:
About half of the people who McKinsey surveyed did not end up buying insurance—either because they shopped and found nothing they liked, or because they didn’t shop at all. When asked to explain these decisions, the majority of these people said they thought coverage would cost too much. Buttwo-thirds of these people said they didn’t know they could get financial assistance. In other words, they assumed they would have to pay the sticker price for coverage, even though federal tax credits would have lowered the price by hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.
With a little education and outreach, many of these people will discover that insurance costs less than they thought. When next year’s open enrollment period begins, they are more likely to get coverage. But the idea was to help more of those people this year. And if the administration deserves some blame for this shortfall, its adversaries deserve more. Republicans and their allies did their best to taint the law—and, where possible, to undermine efforts to promote it. Without such obstruction, even more uninsured people would probably be getting coverage right now.
In other Obamacare opining, McArdle wonders why the administration encouraged small states to set up their own exchanges:
I understand the argument for having state-based exchanges as an option. One of the nifty things about federalism is that states can be little laboratories, finding stuff that works that other states can then copy. I also understand the political argument that this appeased moderate Democrats, who were uncomfortable with the idea of a giant federal exchange taking over such an important economic function.
But the administration went far beyond “option”: It aggressively pushed state exchanges, repeatedly extending the deadline to decide until long after it was too late for anyone, state or federal, to do a good job building one. I can understand why they’d push big states such as Texas and Florida to build exchanges. But why encourage the District of Columbia, Hawaii and Rhode Island to follow suit? Arithmetically, it was unlikely that any of them would insure enough people to become financially viable — and certainly not in the time frame called for by the law. Why not quietly point out the terrible math and suggest they go federal?
I hate to add fuel to the ever-burning fire that is the cyclists-vs-drivers online debate, but I cannot help but point out that few of the reader rebuttals to the Idaho Stop post address the actual law in question. A quick recap of reader concerns that have nothing to do with the Idaho Stop law:
In San Fran, a reader is justifiably upset with cyclists that blow through stops when their car is present. Under the Idaho Stop Law, this would still be illegal.
In Louisiana, a reader begrudgingly shares his lane with cyclists but is frustrated when they pass him at stop signs. Passing a car at stop signs is called lane splitting. It is not part of the Idaho Stop law, and in most places it is already legal for cyclists to pass cars that are stopped at intersections.
In NYC and elsewhere, readers are upset with cyclists who endanger pedestrians in intersections. The Idaho Stop law would require cyclists to stop for pedestrians at intersections, so it would not affect the legality of the scenarios described – the cyclists endangering pedestrians would still be ticket-able.
The Idaho Stop law is something like the “if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around” riddle: it only really changes what is legal when no one else is around (or, I suppose, if you are stopped at a red light). It would have negligible impact on drivers’ and pedestrians’ experiences, and that is the beauty of the law.
Another notes:
I was both amused and disappointed to see all the readers pushing back against the Idaho Stop, not one of whom referenced the data that you linked to in your initial post:
Public health researcher Jason Meggs found that after Idaho started allowing bikers to do this in 1982, injuries resulting from bicycle accidents dropped. When he compared recent census data from Boise to Bakersfield and Sacramento, California — relatively similar-sized cities with comparable percentages of bikers, topographies, precipitation patterns, and street layouts — he found that Sacramento had 30.5 percent more accidents per bike commuter and Bakersfield had 150 percent more.
That datapoint ought to inform this discussion, no? Indeed, I would argue that that fact ought to END this discussion.
But many readers keep it going:
I’m sorry you opened the giant can of worms that is cycling vs. motorists.
I’m clearly biased as a city dweller who relies on my bicycle for 80% of trips. However, one thing I always find amusing in these “clutch-your-pearls-think-of-the-children” stories of out of control cyclists: you’re all frickin’ alive! Cyclists rolling a stop sign are such a giant threat to personal safety, and yet most of your readers only discuss near-misses, and those that claim they’ve been hit have lived to bitch about it. Cars kill people; cyclists don’t (insert handful of cases here). That’s the reality.
Another writes from the state in question:
I am a daily bike rider in Boise. The “Idaho stop” works well because Boise is a small city/large town with limited traffic and low congestion. It would be an excellent system for other places that I have lived, including Austin, Portland (OR), and Davis, CA. But it wouldn’t necessarily work well in larger cities such as SF or Seattle that have heavier traffic.
I suspect that it also works because bike riders in Boise and Idaho know that cars have the “real” right of way. The right to the road is contested in places like SF and Seattle but it is not contested in Boise and Idaho. Cars own the roads. Because of a fluke in the law, we have great bike rules. Bikers are a minority and act based on self-preservation rather than acting as if they own the road.
I can’t speak to your readers’ experiences outside of New York, but the midtown Manhattan reader can bugger off with his/her sanctimony about cyclists riding the wrong way or not obeying traffic in the city. I commute to work by bicycle in Midtown. I use the bike lanes – one of Bloomberg’s best accomplishments – because they alow me to ride without fear of getting plowed into by traffic. But every single day, at morning and afternoon rush hour, it is virtually impossible to use the bike lanes because pedestrians treat them as sidewalk extensions. Every day of the week, pedestrians swarm the bike lanes – and no amount of bell-ringing or screaming dissuades them.
Bottom line: it’s useless to complain in Manhattan. Pedestrians and drivers complain about cyclists flaunting of traffic laws (in addition to complaining about each other), while at the same time not respecting cyclists right to the road. And admittedly, many cyclists don’t respect the laws of traffic, so it’s a bit rich for them to complain about drivers and pedestrians too.
To quote one of my favorite films, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Another:
Slightly tangential – but as a hiker in the Santa Monica mountains north of LA, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been clipped by mountain bikers cruising down the trail at 5 or 6 times walking speed. I know it sounds like I’m whining but it’s chaotic, really dangerous and nobody is doing anything about it.
One more comments:
And now your blog has devolved into the comments section from any cycling-related news story. Here’s how it plays out:
Comment 1: “Waaah waaah, a cyclist acted like an asshat one time and now I hate all cyclists because they think they’re entitled jerks.”
Comment 2: “No, you saw one person doing something stupid; most cyclists are perfectly law abiding. Since when did all drivers go the speed limit, not run red lights, come to complete stops at stop signs, etc.?”
Comment 3: “I’ll respect cyclists once every one of them follows ALL laws without exception!”
See this story from Monday’s WaPo if you don’t believe me.
Previous Dish spats between cyclists and drivers here and here.
Victoria Turk outlines the ruling handed down by the EU Court of Justice yesterday, requiring Google to comply with a request to remove personal information from its search data:
The case in question was referred to the European Union Court of Justice after being upheld by one of Spain’s top courts: In 2010, Spanish national Mario Costeja González brought a complaint against Google regarding the information that appeared when people searched for his name. Specifically, googlers would be referred to pages from local newspaper La Vanguardia from 1998, which revealed that González had had his home repossessed. The Spanish data protection agency AEPD ruled that Google had to remove those results as they were no longer relevant. Unsurprisingly, Google refused and a legal tussle ensued—but the decision has been upheld.
Henry Farrell emphasizes that the ruling “doesn’t assert a right to be forgotten as such”:
Its most important consequences are buried in the legal technicalities. First, it holds that Google (and, presumably, other search engines) are “data controllers” engaged in data processing each time they serve up a search result. Translated from legalese, this means that Google’s search engine results are fully subject to European data privacy law, which has many requirements beyond this new ‘right to be forgotten.’
This is new – and important.
Google and Microsoft’s European lawyers are facing into a series of very long nights as they figure out the implications of this ruling for their search business. Furthermore, the court ruled that because Google has an advertising subsidiary in Spain, it is subject to the control of Spanish data protection officials who want to protect the interests of Spanish citizens. This ruling immediately makes it more difficult for Google (and other web giants) to take advantage of regulatory differences in the European Union.
Another, equally important aspect, as noted by European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, is the ECJ’s assertion that European law applies to services offered by US-based companies operating off US-based servers. In her words “companies can no longer hide behind their servers being based in California or anywhere else in the world.” From a multinational technology company’s viewpoint, this means that no longer can a single service be offered globally since it will be subjected to a fragmented regulatory landscape.
You won’t be able to “censor Google” just because you don’t like something. Nor will asking Google get something deleted. There’s no new “right to be forgotten”. There’s nothing new today that need worry publishers and journalists – Lord Leveson’s Whingers’ Charter has far more of a chilling effect on news operations, especially smaller ones. And Google can say no to complaints. The courts ultimately decide whether a complaint has merits or not. In short, power hasn’t shifted dramatically one way or another. It hasn’t really shifted at all. All the ruling did was make Google subject to European laws.
Keating expects the decision to have unintended consequences:
I sympathize with people in cases like this and I completely understand that in EU countries, many of which have fairly recent experience of life under authoritarian governments, the right to privacy is interpreted more broadly. But while this case has pitted European privacy advocates, fired up in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, against Internet behemoths like Google, I suspect that the ironic result of the decision will be to empower governments and corporations at the expense of individual users.
There’s no shortage of legitimate worries about this approach. It threatens free speech. Airbrushing history, even with the best of intentions, is almost always a very bad idea. It will place an arbitrary and costly imposition on search-engine companies. And such a sweeping new right is sure to have unintended consequences — for starters, by potentially depriving the public of useful information.
Moreover, the administrative complexities — where exactly does the ruling apply? To whom? How will disputes be arbitrated? — are deeply confounding. The costs to companies and governments of making such a policy work are incalculable. The consequences of censoring search results could quickly become perverse. And so on.
Matt Ford asks if the court’s decision will also require Google to scrub coverage of the case:
Ultimately, the ECJ’s ruling also demonstrates the quixotic nature of Internet censorship. González filed his lawsuit so people wouldn’t know that his home had been repossessed and put up for auction in 1998 because of his mounting social-security debts. Now, thanks to the court’s ruling, that information will be published in newspapers and on websites around the world—including this one. Will this article soon be unsearchable in Europe, too?
Another potential problem with the legal precedent is abuse. “[Hypothetically], I can demand takedown and the burden, once again, is on the third party to prove that it falls within the exception for journalistic, artistic, or literary exception,” [law professor Jeffrey] Rosen warned in 2012, when EU commissioners proposed the right to be forgotten. “This could transform Google, for example, into a censor-in-chief for the European Union, rather than a neutral platform.” Failure to comply with the restrictions could result in heavy fines, he explained, while compliance would mean “a far less open Internet.”
And Victor Luckerson explains why such a decision would never fly in the US:
First, Europe’s new ruling is difficult to reconcile with the First Amendment, which grants citizens the right to free speech. A U.S. law that compelled a company like Google to limit the type of content it shows in search results likely wouldn’t pass muster in American courts, experts say, because it could be construed as a form of censorship. “The First Amendment really does prevent this kind of widespread unpublishing of data,” says Danny O’Brien, international director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “In the U.S., free speech sort of trumps privacy.”
Last week, the Senator from Kentucky suggested (NYT) that Republicans might want to dial down their rhetoric on voter ID laws in order to stop alienating black voters. However, after a predictable firestorm of criticism, his spokesman walked it back on Monday, stressing that Paul had never come out against voter ID as a matter of policy. Chait doesn’t see what all the fuss is about:
Paul’s original heterodoxy didn’t take him very far out on a limb. What he told the Times was, “Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing. I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.” Paul was not arguing against vote suppression on moral grounds but practical grounds (“it’s offending people”). He wasn’t asking Republicans to stop engaging in vote suppression altogether. Taken literally, he wasn’t even asking them to stop being crazy about vote suppression. He was just asking them not to be too crazy.
But James Poulos calls Paul’s recent comments on race “the most important development of the nascent presidential campaign”:
Our ambitious activists of all stripes have just about sucked the last drop of pathos out of “raising awareness.” But for years, the GOP’s establishmentarian leaders have come to think of Hispanics and minority outreach as virtual synonyms. Despite the occasional Condi Rice, Herman Cain, or Michael Steele, the fact is that Republicans have all but written off black Americans. They are on the verge of giving up on them, of trying to forget they exist.
For the men and women who seem invisible to the GOP, what Rand Paul is doing may or may not be a canny effort to outflank his party’s complacent elite and its cantankerous base. (Paul’s counsel is to cool it on Voter ID, not oppose it.) What it is, no matter what else, is genuine awareness.
Yes, this is a relatively new look for Paul. Yes, it has taken a while for him to find his footing. But his approach is working.
Weigel thinks everyone is missing the big picture, which is that Paul wants to restore voting rights to felons:
The irony is that Paul’s felon-voting stance is plenty radical all by itself. Go back to the stories of felon-voting laws from after the 2000 election. The reaction to the 1970s/1980s crime waves have a long tail, turning plenty of minor-looking crimes (listening in to a police radio in Florida, for example) into felonies. This ended up being a net benefit to Republicans, and, being in the business of winning elections, few hurried to change the laws. As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney could run ads scorching Rick Santorum for daring to support felon voter restoration. Paul didn’t “evolve” on voter ID, but he really has developed a daring policy change after talking extensively to black voters and leaders.
Above all, righties want someone in office whom they can trust will defend their values. The more Paul takes positions like this one — let’s be for voter ID but not talk about it — the harder that is. But now I wonder if maybe I’m missing the point of what he’s trying to do. All along, I’ve thought his chief appeal was as a man of principle — libertarian on many issues, conservative on a few, but unafraid to buck either side to defend his beliefs. I thought that’s how he’d run in 2016, precisely because he’s interested in showing righties that he’ll defend their values relentlessly in office. Maybe, though, he’s starting to re-position himself the same way that Rubio’s re-positioning as an establishment candidate. Maybe Paul’s new brand is less about standing on principle than about (as strange as it is to say it for a member of the Paul family) electability, forging an unorthodox new right-wing platform that supposedly gives the GOP its best chance in the general.
The Dish 