Category: The Dish

The Dems’ Playbook Is Getting Stale, Ctd

Elizabeth Nolan Brown recently questioned the effectiveness of the Democrats’ War on Women rhetoric. Seth Masket asks for more evidence:

One of the races frequently singled out for the failure of the war-on-women strategy is the Colorado Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Mark Udall (or “Mark Uterus,” as some have taken to calling him) is running a few points behind Republican Cory Gardner despite a blistering series of ads portraying Gardner as trying to destroy all forms of contraception ever. Yet Udall is running at almost the exact same position in the polls as Sen. Michael Bennet (D) was at this point in 2010. Bennet’s come-from-behind victory was attributed by some to his aggressive war-on-women rhetoric, portraying his opponent Ken Buck as a retrograde sexist. Indeed, the gender gap in that particular race was an impressive 16 points. So if both Democrats were trailing by two points right before the election, and both were employing the war-on-women strategy, why was it deemed successful in one case and a failure in the other? …

Given the geography of this year’s election, it was always going to be a tough one for the Democrats. But it’s not clear whether focusing on abortion and birth control this year has made their task harder or easier, or whether it’s done anything at all.

Suderman focuses instead on the issues Democrats aren’t campaigning on:

Democrats are winning on issues like contraception, but Republicans are now more trusted on higher priority issues like the economy and the budget deficit. As Gallup concluded, “it has become pretty clear that Republicans have a distinct and emerging issue advantage in the 2014 campaign.”

Part of what’s fascinating is that this is happening despite how thin the GOP agenda continues to be. Republicans have campaigned heavily against Obama this year, but have been reluctant to offer specifics about what they support. Democrats are running on the wrong issues; Republicans are running on no issues. Yet voters seem to prefer whatever it is the GOP stands for to what Democrats have already done and still have to offer.

What Drives Foodies?

John Lanchester analyzes food obsession:

By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that more or less the entire developed world was shopping and cooking and dining out in a way that was given over to self-definition and self-expression and identity-creation and trend-catching and hype and buzz and the new new thing, which sometimes had to do with newness (foams! gels! spherification!) and sometimes with new ways of being old (slow food! farm-to-table! country ham!).

My mother was thinking about food like that from the start of the nineteen-sixties. I have spent a fair part of my working life writing about food, and have often been asked how and why I got interested in it. I was never able to give a full answer, because the pattern became apparent to me only years afterward. By now, it’s clear that my interest in food came from growing up with someone to whom food mattered the way that, to a great many people, it matters now.

Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious. The infinite range of choices and possible self-expressions means that there are so many ways to go wrong. You can make people ill, and you can make yourself look absurd. People feel judged by their food choices, and they are right to feel that, because they are.

Ghost Islands

ghost-island

Allison Meier profiles some:

In terms of abandonment, ghost towns get all the love — there are a spooky 160 of them on Atlas Obscura as of this writing. These gaping remains of human activity departed are both unnerving and often beautiful, but what about ghost islands? Around the world whole island communities have been evacuated and deserted, leaving the landmasses to nature and the atrophy of time. Here are eight of these ominous places on the water, and the details on why people left, and if you can visit the isolated ruins.

On the one seen above – Hashima Island, Japan:

Abandoned: 1974

Eerie Elements: Derelict, fortress-like compounds on Hashima Island once housed workers for a coal mining facility. The island was nicknamed “battleship” (“gunkanjima”) for its typhoon-resilient architecture that’s now crumbling like a dystopic wasteland.

Can You Go? Yes, tours have been operating since 2009. You can also explore it digitally through the ominous Hashima Island: A Forgotten World interactive project.

(Photo of Hashima Island by Jordy Meow/Wikimedia)

Turning Green After Death

Shannon Palus investigates eco-alternatives to traditional burial:

There all kinds of green practices and products available these days on the so-called “death care” market. So many, in fact, that in 2005 Joe Sehee founded the Green Burial Council—a non-profit that keeps tabs on the green funeral industry, offering certifications for products and cemeteries. Sehee saw a need to prevent meaningless greenwashing in the green burial world. “It is a social movement. It’s also a business opportunity,” he said. So what’s the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of a body? It all depends on your preferences.

For those who still want to be be buried, a greener approach may include switching out the standard embalming fluids made of a combination of formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol, with ones made of essential oils. And instead of a heavy wood and metal box that will take years to degrade and leave behind toxic residue, there are now Green Burial Council-certified biodegradable cedar caskets.

Others are choosing to forgo the casket completely and opt for what’s called a “natural burial,” involving only a burlap sack buried in the woods. If you don’t have a forest handy, in some cities bodies may soon be placed in an industrial sized compost bin, and turned over to create fertile soil.

A Rare Bleed

Penny Bailey profiles a man with an extremely rare, “precious, life-saving” blood type – one shared by only 43 people since it was discovered in 1961:

Rare negative blood is so sought after for research that even though all samples stored in blood banks are anonymised, there have been cases where scientists have tried to track down and approach individual donors directly to ask for blood. And because Rhnull blood can be considered ‘universal’ blood for anyone with rare blood types within the Rh system, its life-saving capability is enormous. As such, it’s also highly prized by doctors – although it will be given to patients only in extreme circumstances, and after very careful consideration, because it may be nigh on impossible to replace. “It’s the golden blood,” says Dr Thierry Peyrard, the current Director of the National Immunohematology Reference Laboratory in Paris.

And it’s a priceless gold, in most countries at least:

The first urgent request came a few years after Thomas began donating, when he got a phone call asking if he would mind taking, and paying for, a taxi to the blood centre in Geneva to donate for a newborn baby. That moment brought it starkly home to him how valuable his blood was. It was perhaps also the first intimation that the costs of donating would ultimately be his. Some countries do pay donors (and some pay more for rare blood) to encourage donations. But the majority of national blood services don’t pay, to deter donors with infections such as HIV.

Ouagadoucoup d’Etat

Burkina Faso’s president, Blaise Compaoré, stepped down today after 27 years in power, in the face of widespread protests – and the ablaze of parliament – against his plans to change the constitution and allow himself to run for yet another five-year term:

The announcement from Mr. Compaoré came on the fourth day of turmoil in Ouagadougou, the capital, as military commanders met behind closed doors and demonstrators urged them to oust the president. His departure was the culmination of 24 hours of frantic maneuvering. Mr. Compaoré declared martial law for a few hours on Thursday, then seemed to relent, offering negotiations on a transitional government and rescinding his martial law decree. …

Opposition to the president’s plans for another term had been building for weeks. Anger exploded Thursday as protesters stormed the Parliament building, bursting past police lines to prevent lawmakers from voting on a draft law that would have allowed Mr. Compaoré to run again next year. Thousands rampaged through Ouagadougou, burning the homes of presidential aides and relatives and looting state broadcasting facilities. Social media sites showed images of demonstrators toppling a statue of Mr. Compaoré.

Adam Taylor gauges whether Compaoré’s ouster “could ultimately be the spark for something bigger”, spreading to other African countries with long-entrenched autocrats:

“In Burkina Faso now it looks like citizens are making forceful demands for respect of democratic rules,” Pierre Englebert, a Professor of African Politics and Development at Pomona College explained in an e-mail. “That would be an unusual degree of political ownership. And it might well give hope to movements elsewhere, first of all in the Democratic Republic of Congo where things have also been coming to a boil.”

Notably, Vital Kamerhe, leader of Congo’s Union pour la Nation Congolaise, has tweeted a message of solidarity for Burkina Faso’s protesters, saying they are in the “same struggle.” And while many analysts are hesitant to make the comparison, some Burkinabè protesters have likened the protest to the Arab uprisings that began in 2010. … Either way, the comparison with the Arab Spring might not be a good thing: Like the protests in the Arab world, even if Burkina Faso’s protests end up being successful in their immediate aim, they may also carry with them a lot of risks and uncertainty.

Paul Melly’s analysis, written before Compaoré stepped down, focused on the possibility that other African leaders might try to relax their own term limits, even though such schemes have not always worked out well for those who tried them:

In Niger, a third term bid by former president Mamadou Tandja provoked his removal by the army in 2010, followed by a transition to new elections. In Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade did manage to change the rules, only to be punished by the voters with crushing defeat in the subsequent election in 2012. However, political culture in central Africa and the Great Lakes is rather different and authoritarian traditions are still influential in some countries. Few would bet against [Rwanda’s Paul] Kagame or Congo-Brazzaville’s Denis Sassou-Nguesso successfully pushing through a rule change to open their way to further terms of office. Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza and Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo might also be tempted to follow suit – although for them it could be a higher risk exercise, governing countries with vocal civil society and state machines of limited establishment power.

The Downgrading Of Our Economic Potential

GDP

Matt O’Brien is disheartened by the above chart, which was created by Larry Summers:

It shows how much more pessimistic the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has become about the economy, revising its estimate of potential economic down in each of the last seven years. The economy, in other words, has grown so little that the CBO doesn’t think it can grow quite as much anymore. Although, of course, GDP has still fallen far short of even these diminished expectations.

This is scary stuff. Much more than a series of descending lines can really convey. If it’s right, it means that the Great Recession has made us permanently poorer. That the economy will never get back to its pre-crisis trend. Instead, it will stay stuck in a “new normal” of slow growth that feels like a slump—forever.

O’Brien also throws cold water on last quarter’s seemingly-impressive 3.5% GDP growth:

So how good is the economy, really?

Well, we can get a better picture if we strip out the noisy inventory and net export numbers to leave us with something that goes by the catchy name of final sales to domestic purchasers. Then we can look at growth over the past year to smooth out, for example, the polar vortex-induced dip at the start of the year. This shows us the economy’s underlying strength, basically how much of today’s growth we can expect to continue tomorrow. And … it’s pretty much the same now as it’s been throughout the recovery: growing 2.4 percent a year. Now it might, just might, be picking up ever-so-slightly right now. Or it might just be ticking up. We’ll see. But in any case, it’s not that much different from what it’s been: a recovery that’s given us plenty of head fakes, but has really just been chugging along at the same speed the whole time.

Jared Bernstein is more upbeat:

[T]here’s a lot of momentum in these trends and my expectation is that the steady recovery remains on track. That’s not the express track, to be sure. We never had the needed bounce-back after the Great Recession and we settled into trend growth before repairing enough of the damage. There’s still a lot of slack in the job market and that’s why most households’ real wages and incomes have been pretty flat.

So I’m definitely not saying all’s well. Instead my point is that it will take a lot more quarters and years of this slow and steady improvement to squeeze the remaining slack out of the job market and get back to full employment. And only then do I expect to see many more people benefiting from the growth …

Chico Harlan compares the US to Europe:

That [3.5% GDP] figure came amid growing fears that Europe is sliding into its third recession since 2008. And while the United Kingdom is faring well, too, economists predict that by 2015 the United States will be the rich world’s standout economy.

“GDP growth of 3.5 percent?” said Jay Bryson, a global economist at Wells Fargo. “If you said that to a European right now, they’d start to cry tears of joy.”