Author: Andrew Sullivan

Looking Back At “Baby Got Back”

Sir Mix-a-Lot talks about his legendary music video from 1992:

I knew for a fact that many artists felt that if they didn’t use a skinny-model-type woman in their video, then mainstream America would reject the song. But I do not agree with that: If you look at Dolly Parton at her peak, a lot of white guys were like “daammn!” At the same time, when I did casting calls for videos, curvy women wouldn’t show up. They thought they didn’t have a chance. Unless you were in the hood, women who had curves — and I’m not talking about women who are shaped like me, with a gut, but women who ran five miles a day, with a washboard, six-pack stomach and a nice round, beautiful, supple ass — wore sweaters around their waist!

Bottom line: Black men like curves. When they’re crooning to women about how beautiful they are in an R&B song, the ladies you see in the video don’t reflect what those guys like. Every time an R&B video was on, I heard women say, “I just saw him down in Oakland, and his girls wasn’t like that.” That made me think that this was more than a funny song, and it wrote itself.

How To Repel Tourism, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your post was right on the money.  I drive an 18-wheeler and haul cars in the US and Canada. When entering Canada, I’m treated with professionalism, asked specific questions, and granted access. But when I return from Canada, I am treated as if I’m, at minimum, smuggling something illegal and asked numerous questions, sometimes the same question more than once. I can only imagine the way foreign nationals are treated if I am treated this way as an American citizen. And I’m a white guy in my 60s who doesn’t fit any kind of a profile that would warrant this level of scrutiny.

Several other readers share their experiences:

Nice timing of your post, as I was just mailing my wife’s I-751 form to lift her conditional status on her green card.  Being born here myself, I had no idea on how badly we treat people trying to immigrate here until I went through it with my wife.

She’s from Germany, and before we got married we had to worry each time she entered the country, even though we were following the rules and doing nothing wrong.  She was grilled each time she entered and it was always the same; they presumed she was up to no good and she had to convince them otherwise.  All it takes is for one immigration agent to have doubts and you can be sent back and ruin your chances to complete the immigration process. I, on the other hand, never had any problems going to Germany and was never treated there like she was treated here.

Then we had to go to the immigration agency to be interviewed to ensure our marriage was legitimate.  I wasn’t worried, because from my perspective we had nothing to hide, but once the interview started it became apparent that the guy who was handling our case wasn’t simply interested in confirming that we were genuine about getting married.  He proceeded to tell me that I was a bad father because I was getting remarried soon after getting divorced and at one point looked at me and said, “You know your kids will be messed up for life.”  It was all I could do to not jump over the table and strangle the guy. My kids wellbeing have ZERO to do with the legitimacy of my marriage, but he wanted to get me mad, say something to give him a reason to deny her a green card.

I’m educated and have a good income, plus my wife’s from Germany, so I can only imagine we had it much easier than those without money coming from Third World countries.

Another:

This story is consistent with your post:

A virtuoso performer is devastated after he claims customs officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport destroyed 13 handmade flutes. Boujemaa Razgui says he was passing though the airport when he was questioned about the unique instruments the was carrying. He was then given a number call, only to discover that that his valuable nay and kawala flutes had already been deemed agricultural products and crushed. Razgui said: “They told me they were destroyed. Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. This is horrible. I don’t know what to do.”

It’s also consistent with what I hear from travelers generally, even those who are US citizens but who also may be of a darker hue or whose name is something suggests an ethnicity other than white, non-Hispanic.

Another:

I’m a US citizen who has lived outside of the US since 1998. My least favourite country to travel to is the US. While I’m sure that my experience is not as brutal as yours or as others who apply for visas, it can also be brutal for US citizens going home.

A year ago at Christmas my family (my wife and daughter are also American) was traveling home to be with our extended family. The border agent – I think this was at LAX – after asking us many questions about where we worked and what we did then asked us why we were coming to America. I wanted to tell him to fuck off as it was none of his business why I wanted to come home to my own country. Of course all I could do was smile and answer or else suffer the pain of being pulled into an interrogation room for hours. Previously to this he’d subtly changed our answers and repeated the same question back to us to try and catch us out as he appeared to assume we were lying. Mind you, I probably shouldn’t have told him that my wife worked in UXO removal eliminating the ongoing legacy of secret US bombing in Laos.

I’ve been pulled aside, carefully searched, and had my checked bag marked with a big red “Security Risk – Load Last” tag in Heathrow (I was working in Afghanistan at the time) and thoroughly questioned at many other borders. But they are almost always polite and in the case of the Heathrow agents apologetic for my treatment. But US border agents are almost unfailingly rude and brusque even if you’re an American flying home.

Another US citizen:

On your tourism post, I’m not exactly a world traveler, but I’ve traveled to Europe a good bit.  Last year my wife and I went to England and Turkey.  We flew into Heathrow and it took us about 10 minutes to be on the way to the Heathrow Express.  We filled out a little form and told a very nice man that the reason for our visit was pleasure and, after a stamp in my passport we were off.  We flew from London into Attaturk Airport in Istanbul and the wait was a bit longer because we had to go through two lines (one for the visa and one for customs) but it might have taken 30 minutes total as the lines were long.  Again, we filled out a little form and told the men at the two booths that we were in Turkey for pleasure, got stamps and we were off.

It was quick, easy as about as painless as checking out of the grocery store.  Given that I’m an American, I had no idea getting into here was so hard, but I’m certainly not surprised.

Poverty Is Not A Gateway Drug

A federal judge has struck down an infamous Florida law, backed by Governor Rick Scott, that required regular drug tests from welfare recipients:

In this case, U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven rejected the notion that there is any correlation between applying for welfare and abusing drugs. “[T]here is nothing inherent to the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a ‘concrete danger’ that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use or that should drug use occur, that the lives of TANF recipients are ‘fraught with such risks of injury to others that even a momentary lapse of attention can have disastrous consequences’,” Scriven wrote. Florida’s law subjects all TANF applicants to random drug testing. While applicants must “consent” to the test through their signature, those who decline are not eligible for the program. … But as Scriven pointed out, “there is no evidence that there is greater drug use and child abuse within the population of economically disadvantaged families who participate in the TANF program.” In fact, Florida’s experience with the program suggested that welfare applicants are less likely to abuse drugs than the general public, with only two percent of applicants testing positive.

Bouie highlights the massive costs and insignificant impact of such testing regimes:

In Minnesota, more than 70,000 people are enrolled in the state’s main cash welfare program. Of those, just 2,800—or 4 percent—have felony drug convictions, compared to 1.2 percent of the overall adult population. In all likelihood, the state will lose money as it tries to identify and test these recipients. In that, it will join the dozens of states who have plowed ahead with similar proposals. In Utah, for instance, only 12 out 466 people—or 2.5 percent—showed evidence of drug use after screening, at a cost to the state of $25,000. Likewise, Florida spent more than $45,000 on testing to no avail—just 108 of the 4,086 people who took the test failed. Out of the 1,890 people screened for drugs in Oklahoma—which passed a test law in 2012—just eighty-three people tested positive, at a cost of $83,000 to the state.

One of the biggest failures is in Missouri, where the state spent $493,000 on drug testing for this fiscal year. It received 32,511 welfare applications and referred 636 for drug testing. Only twenty came back positive, although nearly two hundred people refused to comply. But even if all 200 were drug users, that still comes to more than $2,200 per positive result, which is more expensive than the median benefit in the state.

Scott has vowed to appeal, saying, “We should have a zero tolerance policy for illegal drug use in families — especially those families who struggle to make ends meet and need welfare assistance to provide for their children.” Lemieux doesn’t buy it:

Ah, yes, “zero tolerance.” So Florida has mandatory drug tests for everyone who, say, claims property taxes as a deduction against their federal income taxes, right? And people who receive agricultural subsidies? We can’t have taxpayer money subsidizing an illicit lifestyle. WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!?!?!?!?

Update from a reader:

Don’t forget that Florida Governor Rick Scott has a strong financial interest in mandatory drug testing: He owns a company that provides the service to the state. Of course, given that he transferred the shares to his wife just before he took office, technically his wife owns it, not him. That is enough to get around Florida’s laughable conflict-of-interest laws.

Divorcing Your Family

Keli Goff wonders when it’s acceptable to cut a close relative out of your life:

January has long been considered the most popular month for divorces with many unhappy spouses ready to make a fresh start after faking it through the holidays for the sake of the kids or other family members. But what if the dysfunctional relationship in your life isn’t with your spouse, but with another family member? Is January a good time to consider divorcing a sibling, parent or other family member who makes you miserable?

While divorce is widely accepted today there remains a stigma around ending a relationship with other family members, often no matter how egregious their behavior. I was reminded of this just before the holidays when on a recent episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Lifeclass, megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes chastised two sisters who had not spoken in years. The reason for the estrangement:

one sister tried to engage in an affair with the other’s boyfriend but was caught before the relationship was consummated. The sister in question had never apologized to her sibling for this transgression. Yet for some reason Jakes seemed under the impression that having this woman out of her life was a major loss for the sister whose boyfriend the other one had tried to shag and insisted they reconcile. But the question I kept asking is: why?

Why should this woman want a person she cannot trust and has shown her no remorse or empathy to remain in her life? What benefit is there in such a relationship? Jakes insisted on the importance of blood, which seems an odd reasoning to focus on when it comes to defining what constitutes a worthwhile relationship, particularly since we live in a society in which there are plenty of strong, healthy adoptive families who do not define family along bloodlines.

A Flurry Of Pageviews

The Weather Channel’s website is taking a cue from sites like Upworthy, using click-baiting techniques to drive traffic:

The traffic monitor Alexa ranks weather.com the 28th-most visited website in the United States, above Yelp, nytimes.com, and the highest-ranking pornography site. Roughly four in five of the site’s visits come from people interested in the forecast. But for the past year or so, the website has worked to keep the forecast-checkers there for original, vaguely weather-related media. … And so, over the past year, the non-forecasting part of weather.com underwent a drastic overhaul. That section of the site is now comprised primarily of original, “shareable” content advertised with Upworthy-style headlines, which maximize traffic by attracting clicks and jibing with Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm. In 2012, according to [weather.com editor-in-chief Neil] Katz, the copy in this part of the site was roughly 80 percent wire and 20 percent original; over the past year, that ratio has been reversed, with an endless stream of wire photographs replaced by original images taken by more than 100 photographers around the world. The site’s newsroom exceeds 40 journalists, most of them hired since December 2012, from outlets including The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Everyday Health.

The change has been successful. The non-forecasting content on weather.com more than doubled its page views in 2013, from about 1.2 billion to about 2.5 billion, according to internal numbers. (The site still receives the vast majority of its overall page views—about 13 billion total in 2013, according to comScore, averaging 54 million unique visitors per month—from people checking the forecasts.)

Mental Health Break

Not everyone is bummed about the snowstorm:

A reader sent it in:

They may not be able to build snowmen, but no human being can hold a candle to a dog’s joy when the snow piles up. Pooches of all breeds run, eat, and toss snow as if it were money falling from the sky. Seriously, it’s wonderful just to watch another creature have that much fun. Thought you’d enjoy!

The Pull Of Peanuts And Cracker Jack

Eric Loomis wonders if sports fans will ever stop shelling out for stadium tickets:

Here are two assertions that don’t seem contestable: (1) The cost of attending most major sporting events has been rising in real terms for decades. (2) The cost of watching most major sporting events via remote technology has been plunging, especially in recent years.

As a simple matter of economics, these trends can’t both continue indefinitely. Forty years ago the average NFL ticket cost $30 in 2013 dollars: this year the average is probably over $100 when you include the cost of private seat licenses. And the cost of parking and concessions has risen even faster than ticket prices. Meanwhile a giant television with a superb picture costs in real dollars what what a 12-inch portable black and white TV that pulled in a fuzzy broadcast of two games per weekend cost a generation ago, and you can for a fairly modest price watch literally every NFL game of the season on your iPhone if you so desire.

On the other hand – people have been predicting that broadcasting sports events would kill the live gate ever since the invention of television, and pretty much precisely the opposite has happened: as more sports have become available on TV (and now through other technologies as well), the live gate for major sports events, in America at least, has continued to grow.

Obamacare Acceptance

Sargent thinks “there are scenarios under which [Republicans] might negotiate for certain types of changes to the law, in exchange for changes Dems or liberals want.” He rattles off reforms Republicans might propose:

Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation laid out the types of incremental changes Republicans might pursue. He suggested Republicans might propose various ways of relaxing Obamacare’s regulations, in keeping with conservative policy ideas, that wouldn’t destroy the law. For instance, they could propose allowing insurance sales across state lines so competition drives down prices, something liberals might be willing to accept under certain circumstances if the law’s uniform federal minimum coverage standards are kept (which could theoretically prevent the “race to the bottom” liberals fear).

Or Republicans could propose to make tax deductions available to those over 400 percent of the poverty line who do not qualify for Obamacare subsidies, helping those who see premiums go up (which Republicans have turned into a major issue) and mitigating Obamacare’s redistributive elements a bit. Or Republicans could propose relaxing the limitations on age ratings, allowing insurance companies to charge more than the current three-to-one ratio the law mandates between older and younger people.

Joshua Green agrees that Republicans should face reality:

The fact is that even if Republicans win the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2016, they won’t dare strip benefits from what, by that point, will probably be upward of 10 million people. The best they can hope for is to be able to change the law in a way that’s more amenable to conservative ideals, as Frum was counseling them to do four years ago. What changed on Jan. 1 is that the “repeal” crowd became obsolete. The new coin of the realm for conservatives is coming up with a viable-seeming alternative to Obamacare that allows for the reality that Republicans are never going to strip millions of people of their health insurance. That’s what matters now.

Drum isn’t holding his breath:

Sargent acknowledges that none of this will happen in 2014, and possibly not until after 2016 too. That’s my guess as well. And even then, there will probably be only minimal Republican appetite for dealmaking. … I’d guess that 2017 is about the earliest likely date for Republicans to give up their dream of total repeal.