October 2014 – Page 69

Obama Beats Reagan On Private Job Growth, Ctd

Readers push back on this post:

I think you are reading your chart wrong. Reagan is the yellow line, Obama the royal blue. The yellow line is above the royal blue at all times. Even if you adjust both so that both lines start at zero, the yellow line is still above. Even Bill McBride’s table from the article you cited bears that out. Reagan’s total over two terms was 14,717,000, while Obama’s current total is 6,127,000; even using the projected, he comes up short (11,908,000).

Another looks closer:

You tortured the data quite a bit!

After 10 minutes of poking around the linked article, I finally figured out that what you mean is that job growth in Obama‘s second term – extrapolated out to a full four year term! – is sliiiightly higher than job growth in Reagan’s second term.

So what about the first term, does that not matter? Certainly in the world of “my guy” vs “your guy”, Democrats vs Republicans, you don’t have much to stand on. And of course historical periods are not so simply compared, as though one eight-year period has the same economic circumstances as another – or, in this case, another six year period – oops! Actually, what you are really doing is comparing a four-year term to a two-year term. OOPS!

This comparison is pretty sloppy. And one must note that blame falls solely upon you, as Bill McBride does not reach the same charged conclusion that you do. All he says is “Currently Obama‘s 2nd term is on pace for the third best term for these Presidents.”

I’ll take the hit. We’ll make sure this post is linked to in the first one. There was a lot going on yesterday and I screwed up. Another piles on:

This graph uses raw job numbers. The population of the US and the total workforce are significantly larger now than under Reagan. As a percentage of the workforce, job creation under Obama would be significantly less than under Reagan. Frankly I don’t know why Bill McBride even used raw job numbers for his graph; it’s misleading and lazy.

Also, the graph treats all jobs as being created equal. Two 5-hour-a-week jobs at minimum wage look superior on this kind of graph to one full time job at minimum wage let alone a full time job above minimum wage, but in terms of money to working families they are not. That sort of data is needed to make a real assessment of the jobs “added” under the various presidents.

The Battle For Kobani, Ctd

Since yesterday, ISIS militants in northern Syria have penetrated farther into the town of Kobani (also known as Ain al-Arab) on the Turkish border, driving back the Kurdish militias defending it and sending thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives to safe havens in Turkey:

Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for Kurds in Kobane, told Agence France-Presse that 2,000 civilians were evacuated on Monday and that all civilians were ordered to leave. More than 180,000 refugees from around Kobane have already poured over the border into Turkey since the siege on the city started three weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reports. IS fighters have already captured more than 300 Kurdish villages around Kobane, but the street-to-street fighting on Monday put them within a mile of the city center. They now surround the city on three sides.

New coalition air strikes reportedly launched today may not be enough to turn the battle against the jihadists, but there are signs that Turkey is preparing to act:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey suggested Tuesday afternoon that the strikes may have come too late, telling Syrian refugees at a camp in Gaziantep Province, near the border, that Kobani was about to fall, The Associated Press reported. “There has to be cooperation with those who are fighting on the ground,” he was quoted as saying, while adding that airstrikes might not be enough. The latest fighting is taking place in full view of Turkish forces who have massed tanks with their cannons pointing toward Syria but who have not opened fire or otherwise intervened.

Marc Champion urges more support and arms for the Syrian Kurds:

Kobani is the main town in the Westernmost of three areas that make up the self-proclaimed Kurdish-run autonomous region of Rojava. Kobani sits across the main road that runs along the Turkish-Syria border, and if Islamic State can take it, the group can pass through it to get directly from Aleppo in the West to other territories it holds in the east. Plus, the area controls a border crossing. So Islamic State wants to take Kobani, followed by the other parts of Rojava, to make their safe haven safer. Denying Islamic State this victory should therefore be important to the coalition’s goals.

But an effective defense would require assistance from Ankara, and “Erdogan appears to be holding the town, and the coalition, hostage to his broader fights with the PKK and with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad”:

I’m not sure what the answer is for the Kurds of Kobani. They deserve sympathy for their plight, but their leaders are making a choice, too: To fight and die rather than give up their dream of Kurdish self-rule in a pocket of Syria. It seems clear that without Turkish support, the coalition can’t or won’t unleash its full air power to save Kobani, and that this support won’t materialize until the Kurds agree to a buffer zone. That, surely, is by now Rojava’s least bad option.

Goldblog fears a massacre in Kobani if ISIS is not beaten back:

I just got off the phone with a desperate-sounding Kurdish intelligence official, Rooz Bahjat, who said he fears that Kobani could fall to ISIS within the next 24 hours. If it does, he predicts that ISIS will murder thousands in the city, which is crammed with refugees—Kurdish, Turkmen, Christian, and Arab—from other parts of the Syrian charnel house. As many as 50,000 civilians remain in the town, Bahjat said.

“A terrible slaughter is coming. If they take the city, we should expect to have 5,000 dead within 24 or 36 hours,” he told me. “It will be worse than Sinjar,” the site of a recent ISIS massacre that helped prompt President Obama to fight ISIS. There have been reports of airstrikes on ISIS vehicles, but so far, Bahjat said that these strikes have been modest in scope and notably ineffective.

Zack Beauchamp explains how the jihadists advanced on the town so rapidly:

Why did things change? Most analysts say it’s about Iraq. When ISIS swept northern Iraq beginning June 10, its militants captured enormous amounts of advanced, American-made military equipment that had been dropped by the Iraqi army, including mortars and frontline battle tanks, which they’ve brought to the fight in Syria. The Kurdish forces are now outgunned. And because they’re surrounded, they can’t resupply.

But William Gourlay believes that “the brave fight of the PYD has demonstrated the military shortcomings of ISIS”:

That local militias – with only light arms and little outside support – can hold off a major ISIS offensive, including a great deal of heavy weaponry of US and Russian origin, indicates that ISIS’s military prowess is vastly overstated. The PYD militias are tenacious and are fighting to hold their homeland, to be sure, but one can only wonder how easily ISIS may have been defeated in this arena if the might of the US-led coalition had been effectively brought to bear.

“As Long As We’re Not Against It We Should Be Okay”

Zeke Miller hears from “Republican lawmakers who can’t wait to stop talking about gay marriage”:

Advisors to multiple likely 2016 candidates told TIME after the news broke that they are hopeful that swift action by the Supreme Court will provide them cover. “We don’t have to agree with the decision, but as long as we’re not against it we should be okay,” said one aide to a 2016 contender who declined to be named to speak candidly on the sensitive topic. “The base, meanwhile, will focus its anger on the Court, and not on us.”

But Vinik expects Ted Cruz to keep the issue alive:

As we’ve seen with Obamacare and immigration, when Cruz finds himself on the wrong end of public opinion, he doubles down on that position. That’s because conservative voters—the ones that will have an outsized impact on the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidate—are heavily opposed to Obamacare, to immigration reform, and, yes, to same-sex marriage. Cruz has reasoned that his best chance of winning the Republican nomination is to stake out positions as far to the right as possible. Whether or not he’s right, he will pull the entire Republican field to the right and make it even harder for his party to retake the White House.

Sargent argues along the same lines:

Some Republican operatives recognize the danger Cruz poses. GOP consultant Rick Wilson tells me:

“Putting the paddles on the chest of a divisive issue with absolutely no hope of the outcome he promises is a hallmark of Ted Cruz. When a plurality of Republicans in most polling is past this issue, it will only distract from more salient and compelling messages.”

Some GOP presidential hopefuls, such as Ohio Senator Rob Portman, plainly grasp that evolving on this issue is crucial to GOP hopes of evolving along with the country’s cultural and demographic shifts in ways that boost the party’s chances in national elections. But, as Ed Kilgore details, there will also be a powerful incentive for anti-gay demagoguery and opportunism from those — such as Cruz and Bobby Jindal — who hope to compete for a far right slice of activist social conservatives in key early states such as Iowa. And white evangelical protestants still overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. So this issue may not fade away as quietly as more culturally and demographically attuned Republicans might like.

This Time He’s Serious?

On the heels of a UN speech that pissed off Israel to no end by accusing the country of committing “genocide,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is circulating a draft Security Council resolution that would compel Israel to withdraw from all occupied Palestinian lands by November 2016. The resolution is almost guaranteed to fail by way of a US veto, but Colum Lynch examines the strategic thinking behind the move:

The Palestinian strategy is driven by two basic assumptions, according to senior diplomats. The Palestinians believe they can never achieve agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power. At the same time, they doubt that President Barack Obama is prepared to invest the sufficient personal political capital needed to even revive meaningful peace talks. “They don’t believe they can make a deal with the Israelis as long as Netanyahu is president,” said one senior Western diplomat who maintains close contacts with the Palestinians. “They want to tell the international community that they have done everything on the diplomatic front.”

Juan Cole outlines the stakes for Israel:

If the US does veto the resolution, then Washington is clearly saying that it is all right with American elites if Israel goes on stealing Palestinian land on a vast scale and expropriating and oppressing the stateless Palestinians under its boot. In that case, Palestinian circles are suggesting that Mahmoud Abbas will have no choice but finally to go to the International Criminal Court to charge Israel with crimes against humanity (i.e. systematic war crimes). This step is serious, since the US cannot block the ICC and any judgment it delivered against Israel would be taken seriously in the European Union and many other countries.

But Shlomi Eldar considers this a mistake by Abbas, who he says is alienating badly needed allies among moderate Israelis:

The man who chose a different path than the twisted road of predecessor Yasser Arafat, and a totally different route than the rival Hamas movement, did not succeed in convincing the Israelis of the veracity of his intentions. Thus, as far as he is concerned, Abbas is embarking on a new path, his last path — a diplomatic battle to persuade members of the UN Security Council to support the establishment of a Palestinian state and its acceptance into the various UN organs. Thus, he will also attempt to placate Palestinian public opinion, which demands indicting senior Israelis responsible for the “genocide,” (according to Abbas and his advisors).

But this new path of Abbas also does not guarantee success. In fact, Abbas has almost no chance of making it to the finish line after fulfilling his promises to his nation. The UN will not determine the borders of a Palestinian state and cannot force Israel to accept conditions for withdrawal and evacuation of settlements, certainly not to partition Jerusalem. The UN will not be able to grant Abbas a Palestinian state on a silver platter.

But Ben White doesn’t see much anything new in Abbas’ threats:

Much of the Palestinian leadership’s strategy for the past two decades has been based on the assumption that “good behaviour” will convince the US, as well as European nations, to back Palestinian independence and call time on Israeli occupation. This has proven to be a dismal failure, and it remains to be seen whether another plan based on the idea of “embarrassing” the White House into declining to use its veto will be successful.

Mr Abbas’s headline-generating accusation of genocide thus actually spoke more about his weakness than his strength. Despite the grandstanding, Mr Abbas’s decisions to date indicate that he still views the ICC and other tools available to the Palestinians as cards to be played or held back for the sake of a bankrupt peace process, rather than as elements of a more comprehensive strategy for liberation and decolonization.

Ali Jarbawi proposes that Abbas also threaten to dissolve the PA, as a way of making Israel and the world take the situation seriously:

The international community must be convinced to move beyond managing the conflict to solving it. This will not happen until Israel and America fear that the situation within Palestine and Israel will deteriorate. And this will only happen if Mr. Abbas declares that he will dissolve the Palestinian Authority unless there is a set time frame to end the occupation.

As it stands, the Authority performs a role that comforts Israel. Israel gets the Authority to keep it safe through “security cooperation,” while Israelis are absolved of responsibility for their occupation while avoiding its costs. Indeed, until Mr. Abbas takes a tangible step toward dissolving the Authority, the international community, especially Israel and America, will not take him seriously, and his demands will remain nothing but complaints.

In any case, Haviv Rettig Gur notes, Netanyahu is ready with a counteroffensive:

For Israel, the Palestinians now present two choices, and hope to box Israel in with these choices: Hamas’s permanent war or Abbas’s maximalist (in Israel’s view) demands backed by the threat of international isolation. In response to this Palestinian “plan of attack,” Netanyahu has begun a subtle strategy of his own — one which addresses the other side’s internationalization with his own version of the same.

“I think that there are opportunities. And the opportunities, as you just expressed, is something that is changing in the Middle East, because out of the new situation, there emerges a commonality of interests between Israel and leading Arab states,” he told President Obama in the White House on Wednesday. … If the Palestinians won’t parley, Israel would take the Palestinian issue to the larger Middle East — where Netanyahu believes, particularly after the Egyptian experience in Gaza, that there is little more than rhetorical sympathy for their cause.

(Photo: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas sits after addressing the 69th Session of the UN General Assembly on September 26, 2014 in New York. By Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

How Marriage Equality Can Still Lose

Waldman outlines “one scenario by which what today seems like an inevitable forward movement for marriage equality could be undone”:

It involves a Republican winning the White House in 2016 and a liberal justice retiring, to be replaced by a conservative. This isn’t some remote possibility.

We have no idea what the election of 2016 will be like, and while as a liberal you probably think that the current crop of Republican contenders are a bunch of bozos, people thought that about any number of people who ended up winning the White House (see Bush, George W.). As of now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 81, Stephen Breyer is 76, Sonia Sotomayor is 60, and Elena Kagan is 54. Any one of them could retire for any number of reasons. And once President Rand Paul appoints Ted Cruz to take that retiree’s place, things look very different.

Ilya Somin says that “while this scenario is possible, I don’t think it is all that likely”:

Even if the GOP does win the presidency in 2016 (which is far from a sure thing), Ginsburg and Breyer would likely try to stay on the Court long enough to decide the gay marriage issue. It could very well be decided even before the 2016 election happens. Finally, a close 5-4 decision upholding laws banning gay marriage may not last for long. If public and elite sentiment continues to turn against such laws, the ruling would likely suffer the same fate as Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld anti-sodomy laws, but was widely reviled and got overruled in 2003. In this case, the tide of opinion is moving faster, and a reversal could happen sooner than that.

Is Lightning That Lethal?

Nope – 90 percent of people hit by lightning survive. One reason is that, unlike high-voltage accidents that happen indoors, lightning strikes last “less than a half-millionth of a second [and] often scorch the skin but don’t cause internal burns.” More fascinating details:

Just as crucial, most of the electricity in a lightning bolt does not pass through the body. Rather, it dissipates over the skin in what’s known as a flashover. Vernon Cooray, a lightning scientist at Uppsala University in Sweden, explains the phenomenon by contrasting the ways a human body and a tree react when struck.

Both trees and people are filled with a soup of water and minerals that conduct electricity pretty well. But because trees are covered in dry, inelastic bark, lightning traveling through the trunk has no escape route. It must stay its course. In the process, it superheats the water and sap inside the tree into explosive steam, which can rip apart the trunk and branches.

Compared with tree bark, human skin is much more pliant and moist. Sweat and rainwater make it extra conductive, providing an alternate external path for voltage. Most of the electricity can pass over strike victims rather than coursing through them. “The path through the body has much greater resistance than the path around the body,” says Vladimir Rakov, a University of Florida researcher and one of the world’s leading authorities on lightning physics. “Current always chooses the path of least resistance.”

A Linguistic Perp Walk

R.L.G. at The Economist calls out journalists who condemn criminal suspects by using “alleged” as “their own kind of get-out-of-jail-free card”:

“Alleged bomber”, “alleged murderer” and the like, especially next to someone’s mug shot, so quickly calls to mind the image of the person in question carrying out the act in question—even if this is not not consciously intended by the journalist—that it should be banned from newsrooms. Far better to refer to the “person suspected of guilt in the so-and-so bombing”, leaving the person a person and not yet a “bomber” until the verdict has come. In headlinese, where compression is key, “murder suspect” is preferable to “alleged murderer” (or, just as bad, “suspected murderer”).

A so-called “indicted criminal” has an even stronger complaint than an “alleged criminal”. “Indicted” carries a strong judicial whiff—it is a technical term of criminal procedure—but it means nothing more than formally accused. In New York state, for example, a mere majority of a grand jury can indict by finding only “reasonable cause to believe” that a suspect committed a crime. Grand juries’ proceedings are sealed because nothing has been proved in the adversarial trial process yet. A conviction in the same jurisdiction requires unanimity that the suspect is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”, after evidence is presented in open court. In jurisdictions outside America, a single prosecutor may bring an indictment. So someone called an “indicted war criminal” has every right to complain that he has been found guilty before his trial has even begun.

Fluid Dynamics, Ctd

A reader responds to a recent post on sexuality:

There’s “more likely to be” bisexual, and then there’s “more likely to self-identify as” bisexual, and there are more social and cultural impediments to self-identifying as bisexual if you happen to be male. In my opinion, one reason that’s the case is because female bisexuality isn’t perceived as a serious threat to straight male culture and dominance in the ways that lesbians, gay men, and male bisexuals are.

Lesbians threaten the assumed place of the necessary male: “Oh no! They don’t need men at all!” Gay males represent threats to masculinity, but are safe in other ways: “He might want to bang me, but he won’t steal mah woman!” So there can be grudging acceptance there. Male bisexuals are a double threat: “Oh no! They might make me an object of desire and compete with me for females!” The female bisexual, however, can be neatly fit into the category of unthreatened male gaze that Paris Hilton co-opted: “That’s hot!”

All of which is the male view, of course, which is only one part of it.

Another part of it is that, in my experience, there seems to be a greater level of acceptance for sexual fluidity – sorry, Vanessa, I don’t actually care much for the term “bisexual,” and I don’t think it’s a better word – among women by women than there is for sexual fluidity among men by men, which might have something to do with the way bisexuality brushes up against a kind of solidarity among women that doesn’t exist among men, because it doesn’t have to; men aren’t oppressed in the same way. (As an aside: I await the rise of gay and bisexual solidarity among the current crop of men’s rights activists with bated breath.)

There seems to be a combination of factors at work in male and female cultures that creates more space for the acceptance of female bisexuality – both as a personal experiment and as a long-term identity – than for male bisexuality. That in turn leads to a greater willingness to self-identify in studies and surveys. The arc of evolving attitudes expressed in surveys of the 20-and-under crowd gives me hope that this will continue to change for the better, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.

Another reader points to a relevant passage from Sex at Dawn, the fascinating book by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha on the evolutionary roots of sexuality:

The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. Young males pass through a brief period in which their sexuality is like hot wax waiting to be imprinted, but the wax soon cools and solidifies, leaving the imprint for life. For females, the wax appears to stay soft and malleable throughout their lives.

This greater erotic plasticity appears to manifest in women’s more holistic responses to sexual imagery and thoughts. In 2006, psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to men and women, both straight and gay. The videos included a wide range of possible erotic configurations: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, lone man masturbating, lone woman mas- turbating, a muscular guy walking naked on a beach, and a fit woman working out in the nude. To top it all off, she also included a short film clip of bonobos mating.

While her subjects were being buffeted by this onslaught of varied eroticism, they had a keypad where they could indicate how turned on they felt. In addition, their genitals were wired up to plethysmographs. Isn’t that illegal? No, a plethysmograph isn’t a torture device (or a dinosaur, for that matter). It measures blood flow to the genitals, a surefire indicator that the body is getting ready for love. Think of it as an erotic lie detector.

What did Chivers find? Gay or straight, the men were predictable. The things that turned them on were what you’d expect. The straight guys responded to anything involving naked women, but were left cold when only men were on display. The gay guys were similarly consistent, though at 180 degrees. And both straight and gay men indicated with the keypad what their genital blood flow was saying. As it turns out, men can think with both heads at once, as long as both are thinking the same thing.

The female subjects, on the other hand, were the very picture of inscrutability. Regardless of sexual orientation, most of them had the plethysmograph’s needle twitching over just about everything they saw. Whether they were watching men with men, women with women, the guy on the beach, the woman in the gym, or bonobos in the zoo, their genital blood was pumping. But unlike the men, many of the women reported (via the keypad) that they weren’t turned on. As Daniel Bergner reported on the study in The New York Times, “With the women . . . mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.” Watching both the lesbians and the gay male couple, the straight women’s vaginal blood flow indicated more arousal than they confessed on the keypad. Watching good old-fashioned vanilla heterosexual couplings, everything flipped and they claimed more arousal than their bodies indicated. Straight or gay, the women reported almost no response to the hot bonobo-on-bonobo action, though again, their bodily reactions suggested they kinda liked it.

Codifying Consent

(NSFW):

Shikha Dalmia argues that the California consent law ignores the realities of sexual encounters:

The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other. What’s more, whether due to nurture or nature, there is usually a difference in tempo between men and women, with women generally requiring more “convincing.” And someone who requires convincing is not yet in a position to offer “affirmative” much less “enthusiastic” consent. That doesn’t mean that the final experience is unsatisfying — but it does mean that initially one has to be coaxed out of one’s comfort zone. Affirmative consent would criminalize that.

The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen. Sex is inherently dangerous. There will be misadventures when these experiments sometimes go wrong. Looking back, it can be hard to assign blame by ascertaining whether both partners genuinely consented. Indeed, trying to shoehorn sex into a strict, yes-and-no consent framework in an attempt to make it risk free can’t help but destroy it.

Jonathan Chait questions how much an affirmative consent law could accomplish:

It surely is possible to imagine that sex that comports with these new guidelines is sexy, or even more sexy than the kind most people have now. Yet one might find these ideas about reimagining sex attractive, as I do, while still having deep reservations about codifying them into law.

The fact that we need to change cultural attitudes about sex itself underscores the fact that cultural attitudes about sex lie well outside the contours established by the state of California. What percentage of the last decade worth of Hollywood sex scenes, if acted out between college students in California, would technically constitute rape? A majority? Ninety percent?

Deprogramming and reorienting societal ideas about sex is an evolutionary process. California isn’t merely attempting to set out to nudge the culture in this direction. It is reclassifying all sex that falls outside those still-novel ideas as rape. A law premised on this sort of sweeping, wholesale change is likely to fail.

Meanwhile, Danielle Citron argues that more laws are needed to deal with another area of sexual activity:

Why is it legal in many jurisdictions to disclose a person’s nude image in violation of that person’s expectation of privacy? A combination of factors is at work. One stems from the public’s ignorance about so-called revenge porn. As brave individuals have come forward to tell their stories, we are only now beginning to understand how prevalent and damaging revenge porn can be.

Another reason is that society has a poor track record addressing harms primarily suffered by women. It was an uphill battle to get domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment recognized as serious issues. Because revenge porn impacts women far more frequently than men and creates far more serious consequences for them, it is another harm that society is willing to minimize, trivialize, and tolerate. Although most people today would recoil at the suggestion that a woman’s consent to sleep with one man can be taken as consent to sleep with his friends, this is the very logic of revenge porn apologists.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I got an email from a friend today. The subject line read simply enough:

I’m married at home!

He explained:

The Virginia AG has announced that my marriage is now recognized in our home state. Well, that’s not his precise wording. But knowing this might happen did not prepare me for the joy I feel.

“Married at home”. How crazy that those two things could have been understood as separate for so long.

Our coverage of the momentous non-decision today began here, with bloggers puzzling what it all meant here, and the shoe really beginning to drop here. My reflections on the Court’s minimalism and the wisdom of avoiding a gay Roe vs Wade here. Ted Cruz has a cow here. The data now showing more than half of all Americans in states where marriage equality is the law is here. Plus: a piercing theological defense of the full inclusion of gays in the Catholic church – delivered last Friday in Rome.

And news you won’t find on Fox: how the Obama recovery beats the Reagan recovery in terms of private sector job growth.

The most popular post of the day was SCOTUS Clears The Way For Marriage Equality, followed by Obama Beats Reagan In Private Sector Job Growth.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here.

See you in the morning.