Month: November 2014

Boer Deng updates us:

Fretting over space junk is universal among people who care about satellites or space travel. Even partisans in Congress agree that it is a problem. “The scientists who predicted climate change started the same way I did,” [space-junk expert and astrophysicist Don] Kessler muses. “They were thinking about what would happen if we keep dumping things into the air around us. I was thinking about what happens if we do it in space.”

Yet space pollution talks have not been poisoned by political division.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California and a climate change skeptic (“CO­2 is not a pollutant,” he has opined), has grimly warned that space pollution is “getting to a point of saturation now, where either we deal with it or we will suffer the consequences.” Donna Edwards, his Democratic colleague from Maryland, thinks Congress should devote more money to tracking the detritus.

A plan to clean up space is held back by different kind of political paralysis than partisanship. In the United States, three separate agencies handle licensing for various aspects of a commercial satellite launch. Another set of rules governs military activities, with yet another for civilian government research. Who has authority to enforce rules or mete out punishment is murky. Moreover, some Defense Department satellite orbits are classified, as is the reason the department deployed an anti-satellite weapon of its own in 2008 after China’s test the previous year. Any discussion about space regulation, such as one held during a meeting of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in May, is filled with bureaucratic verbs that end in -ize (legitimize,compartmentalize, theorize). Too much remained unknown, lawmakers concluded, so they weren’t “ready to legislate yet.”

Previous Dish on space junk here.

(Image by NASA)

Lisa Guernsey reads through a guide on the subject:

For years, the [American Academy of Pediatrics] has told parents to avoid using screens with children younger than 2. It’s a recommendation based on an understandable concern that parents will substitute screen-watching for the warm, real-world interactions children need. But it doesn’t allow for the possibility that cuddle moments might be possible with a screen on the lap.

Worse, the “no screens” dictates have led to confusion.

As a journalist who has spent a decade reviewing research on screentime and young children, I have spoken with families across the country about how they use technology with their children. Parents have told me about exhausting maneuvers they have attempted to keep their baby’s head turned away from screens when their older children are watching. One mother in Portland, Ore., was visibly upset when she approached me after a public forum on the subject. She and her 1-year-old had been Skyping with her mother in China, and she desperately wanted to keep doing so because they all loved the interactions, but she worried that something emanating from the screen would harm her baby. In fact, a 2013 study in the research journal Child Development shows the opposite: Webcam-like interactions with loved ones can help young children form bonds and learn new words.

Fox News continues to cover the ACA architect’s controversial remarks:

Cillizza tries to understand Republicans’ obsession with Gruber:

Nothing makes conservatives more angry than the belief, which they think is widespread among liberals, that they are stupid. That if only conservatives read as much as the left or had the intellectual capacity of the left, they would see things the way the left sees them.

Jonathan Cohn insists that the wool wasn’t pulled over Americans’ eyes:

Did the Obama Administration engage in some creative salesmanship of its own?

Of course it did. And in one very regrettable instance, it misled the public about how the plan would work out. Obama repeatedly told people, without qualification, that they could keep their insurance if they liked it. In fact, many people who bought insurance their own and held plans that didn’t live up to the new law’s standards would have to give them up.

Most ended up learning this in the worst possible way: When a cancellation notice from an insurance company arrived in the mail last fall, and without a working Obamacare website to check out their new options. These people constituted a small number of people, relative to the whole population, and it’s still not clear how many lost plans because insurers seized the moment to drop less profitable products in the market. Had Obama merely said “most people” could keep their plans, or “if you have a good plan already, you can keep it,” he would have been fine. He didn’t.

But accusations that Obama and his allies systematically misrepresented the law in other important ways—or hid its key features from the public—don’t gibe with the historical record. The official debate over its provisions lasted approximately a year, the unofficial debate stretched back even farther than that, and during that time analysts pored over details and partisans on both sides argued over virtually every aspect.

Ezra adds that Gruber “was really, really frustrated by Washington’s games”:

He was really annoyed at politicians framing things and writing legislative language to support their press releases rather than the final law. As involved as he’s been in the policymaking process, Gruber is, first and foremost, an MIT economist. And he’s got little patience for Washington’s tendency to take clean, straightforward policies and complicate them in the name of politics. ….

But Gruber did something stupid here: he tried to look knowing and clever to his audience by dismissing the intelligence of voters. His actual point there is ridiculous. The idea that most voters were paying close attention to subtle framing decisions around risk pooling or excise taxes or even mandates is absurd. Voters aren’t dumb. They just don’t follow politics closely. When Washington tries to trick people, it’s almost always trying to trick itself.

On the other side of the debate, Peter Suderman uses the administration’s spin against it:

Responding over the weekend to questions about Gruber’s statements, President Obama pushed back on Gruber’s role, labeling him “some adviser who was never on our staff.” Gruber’s remarks, Obama said, were “not a reflection on the actual process that was run” when crafting and passing Obamacare.

These reactions from Obama and others were, for the most part, technically true—but nonetheless misleading about Gruber’s influence on the law. At a minimum, they were not fully transparent about his role. In attempting to downplay Gruber’s remarks, Obamacare’s supporters had instead proved him right.

Earlier Dish on the story here and here.