A psychological profile of the great Ron Swanson:
What The GOP Is Really After
Weigel explains the logic behind the GOP’s quixotic attempt to defund Obamacare:
As illusory as the “defund” campaign is, it’s flashy enough to obscure the gains won by hardliners. Every Republican leaving the meeting today suggested that a compromise funding bill or a compromise debt limit hike would set spending at the levels set by sequestration. At his short press conference, Boehner agreed with that. Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry sounded as cynical as Cole about Obamacare, saying it was “worth falling on your sword” to stop it, not saying that doing so would work. He was much more confident, and more insistent, that the eventual deals would force Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.
These would be solid Republican wins, enabled—as far as the conservatives can tell—by the most hard-core members’ willingness to humiliate their leadership. Republicans can see exactly how this plan will make that happen. They’re not able to say how the plan will actually defund Obamacare.
Malkin Award Nominee
Video edition:
Cohn recoils:
The ad doesn’t have a lot of hits yet and I’m reluctant to give it more attention. But it comes from Generation Opportunity, which appears to be a well-funded conservative group staffed by young people and based in Virginia. According to Chris Moody, of Yahoo News, the group is about to launch a 20-college tour in which they will try to persuade young people to “opt out” of Obamacare—i.e., to pay the financial penalty for uninsurance rather than take up coverage.
Bernstein suspects that this ad, and the other ad in this campaign, are really about raising money from Obamacare opponents:
These ads could not be better designed to do one thing: to get condemned by liberals. Thus impressing easily scammed conservative marks, who tend to really believe that if liberals hate something, it must be terrific and effective.
The Size Of Your Balls And Your Kids, Ctd
They may not be related after all. Alex Sobel Fitts says the story is “only demonstrating a correlation between a man’s balls and his parenting abilities, not causation”:
Additionally, the study’s authors aren’t even really talking about “parenting skills,” they’re talking about the engagement of a region of the brain correlated with “nurturing” during an fMRI scan—another form of inquiry laden with journalistic misinterpretation. It might all be in good fun (and a burst of Web-busting unique views for shoving gonads into your lede), except that, as Gary Schwitzer points out in a Health News Review post, “This is the kind of news coverage about a study that results in science and journalism about science losing credibility.”
Well, it was too good to resist. But happy to correct.
Jimenez’s Dangerous Sources
In our latest video from the author of The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, he defends the use of anonymous sources in his book, given how perilous the drug underworld can be:
A reader dissents over the series:
I’m a big fan, but I’m also fascinated (and slightly disturbed) by your aversion to hate crime laws and your recent advertising campaign for The Book of Matthew. I think your readers deserve to know: Have you ever been minding your own business, hanging out on the sidewalk, talking with friends at the end of a fun night out, and had a complete stranger walk up to you and punch your fucking lights out just for being a faggot? How many Saturday nights have you spent in Meridian, Mississippi, or Albuquerque, or Cleveland? Not everyone gets to pedal around all summer in the “A-Gay” cocoon of P-Town. For countless LGBT people living in small-town America, being yourself means risking your life. Hate crime laws are not perfect, but they are a deterrent. For you to argue otherwise is classic homocon elitism.
I don’t believe in arguing from a single personal incident. But yes, I was “gay-bashed” once, though not seriously. Just rushed by a group of young Hispanic men in Adams Morgan a decade or so ago, knocked over, kicked a little, jeered at, and then left. I wasn’t seriously hurt. My view is that the right approach to hate crimes like that, and much more serious ones, is to enforce the existing law against assault. It is already illegal to bash someone for any reason. And recall that in Shepard’s case, the two perpetrators of the crime are serving life-sentences without parole – in a state that had no hate crime laws on the books. For hate crime supporters, that’s an extremely inconvenient fact. And yet they spent the next decade raising gobs of money arguing that hate crime laws was the only way to bring gay-bashers to justice. Another reader:
The death and destruction of the AIDS pandemic led to a period of PTSD and deep mourning and even survivors’ guilt in the community. Gay men of a certain age tried to reach back to a pre-AIDs world to experience what they had “missed” and the drug at hand was meth. If the Matthew/meth connection had been better known at the time, it would merely have created a new backlash against an already devastated community by the wider world, which was already comfortable with blaming gay men for their “decadence.”
Should the historical record be changed? Certainly. Was it a tragic missed opportunity to have aired the dirty laundry in the 1990s? Unlikely.
This kind of defensive, cowed argument for deliberate lying is exactly what I think civil rights movements should avoid. I think Shepard deserves better than that. And it’s not “dirty laundry”. It’s simply a very relevant fact in the tragedy. And if we had seen the role of meth up close earlier, we may even have been galvanized to tackle the meth epidemic more aggressively sooner – saving countless lives, careers and relationships.
Why Are So Many Americans Unbanked?
While working as a teller at a check cashing business, Lisa J. Servon was surprised to learn why its customers preferred it over commercial banks:
The primary critique of check cashers is that they are expensive. Sitting in my New School office eight miles south of Mott Haven, I had believed that, too. When I interviewed my customers, however, I learned that for many lower income people, commercial banks are ultimately more expensive. The rapidly increasing cost of bounced checked fees and late payment penalties has driven many customers away from banks, particularly those who live close to the edge, like many of my RiteCheck customers. A single overdraft can result in cascading bad checks and hundreds of dollars in charges.
She goes on to argue that the “banking industry needs to develop different fee and service structures designed to accommodate lower income depositors in much the same way banks currently provide VIP treatment to high-net-worth individuals.”
How Frequent Are Mass Shootings?
A reader writes:
During your participation in last night’s AC360 Later, Emily Miller took issue with Anne-Marie Slaughter when she said there have been mass shootings “every couple of months” since Newtown, to which Miller countered strongly by saying that was not factual.
Here are the facts. According to an investigation by Emily Thomas (published yesterday, coincidentally), there have been “at least” 17 mass shootings in 2013 alone [defined by the FBI standard of four victims or more]. So not only is it factually accurate to say there have been mass shootings “every couple of months”, it’s factually MORE accurate to say there have been mass shootings every couple of weeks. In fact, Monday’s tragic Navy Yard shooting was the second mass shooting in September alone, and the month’s not even over. So, as a matter of fact, Anne-Marie was right and Emily was wrong. Chilling graphic here.
Paul Campos looks at a different standard over a longer period of time:
[Looking at shootings in which at least 14 victims died], it turns out that the rate of this type of mass shooting in America was nearly twice as high in the 25 years between 1966 and 1991 as it has been in the 22 years since (there were four such shootings in the former period, and two in the latter). Or we could use the FBI’s definition of a mass shooting: one in which at least four people, not including the perpetrator, are killed. This is a vastly larger category … : there were about 600 such incidents in the United States between 1980 and 2010. As James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University points out, the rate of such mass shootings does not appear to be rising
Another reader comments on a related post:
I agree with most of what Frum says about some moderate gun regulations based on personal behavior, but then he crosses into crazy land, both in terms of policy and politics. There are approximately 16,000 homicides each year in the US, 11,000 involving a gun. How many of those deaths are the result of mass shootings? Less than 100*. So when Frum says, “The classes of weapons associated with mass casualty shooting could be more strictly controlled,” he is basing a policy decision on a class of homicide that represent only .625% of all homicides.
In my class on risk assessment 20 years ago, this would be called example bias. Mass shootings are traumatic, random events with huge media coverage that also happen to be very rare when compared to boring, and common, shootings related to criminal activities. People will incorrectly claim that more people die in fires than in drownings for the same reason – the media covers fires because they are visual, and most people find dying in a fire more horrific than drowning. Mass shootings are an edge case. I would be fired as an engineer if I had a large problem to solve and I spent time obsessing on an edge case.
From a political point of view, spending time on the modern sporting rifle ban (technically they are not assault rifles because they cannot fire in fully automatic) is a bad idea not only because the votes do not exist but because the slippery slope arguments stops being crazy if the opposition walks up to the line and leans as far over that line as they can without crossing it. Banning a gun is as close as you can get to taking guns as you can get. Nothing riles up the pro-gun base more than the thought of people taking their guns, so even mentioning a ban is close enough to confiscation that you might as well be saying that you will take their guns.
So a word of advice for the gun-control crowd: never mention a gun ban again if you want to pass something like universal background checks that have a chance of actually saving a significant number of lives. It ain’t gonna happen, and it will likely torpedo any chance of getting any other gun regulation.
*The FBI defines a mass shooting as one involving 4 or more deaths, committed within a 24hr period at a single location not related to criminal activity. 2012 was an exceptional year for mass shootings and exceeded 100, but generally it’s less than 100.
The above map by Jan Diehm is also based on that FBI standard for mass shootings.
A Civil War Within A Civil War, Ctd
Keating relays the latest from Syria:
Today brings news that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al Qaeda-affiliated group, has overrun a town near the Turkish border after fighting with the western-backed Free Syrian Army. The development highlights the fact that the Syrian war is not a two-actor conflict anymore. As Time’s Aryn Baker put it a few days ago, “For the past several months rebel groups aligned with ISIS in Aleppo province have spent nearly as much energy battling factions serving under the umbrella of the Western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) as they have fighting the [Assad] regime”.
Fisher analyzes the rebel-on-rebel violence:
Some analysts might be tempted to see a silver lining here.
The United States has long been wary of giving Syrian rebels much support because it doesn’t want to aid the al-Qaeda-allied ISIS, and it’s really tough to aid one rebel group without indirectly helping another. If the FSA and ISIS divorce, that would theoretically make it much easier for the United States and other Western countries to back the FSA without worrying about indirectly helping al-Qaeda. Indeed, as the FSA inevitably loses ground to ISIS, it could be an imperative. If you think that a stronger FSA is in Syria’s interests, either because you want to see the rebels win outright or just to balance the battlefield enough to convince Assad that he can’t win and should cut a negotiated peace deal, then it’s potentially good news that the United States might feel freer to give the FSA a boost.
It wouldn’t be Syria unless even the good news were also bad news, though. The United States has seen this movie before, in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, the United States backed its favored Afghan rebel groups to oust the Soviet military occupation. After the Soviets left, those rebel groups fought among one another, a second war that proved even worse than the first. Because chaos and militancy tend to breed extremism, the group that emerged from Afghanistan’s chaos was the Taliban.
Previous coverage here.
Rapprochement With Rouhani? Ctd
Fareed encourages the administration to engage with Iran:
Now of course this could all be camouflage and smoke screen. But there is another possibility. The international sanctions against Iran are hurting the country badly. Tehran’s support for Bashar Assad’s brutal regime in Syria is costing Iran money and arms every month and has tarnished its legitimacy at home. The Arab Spring, for all its problems, has put the spotlight on Iran’s Supreme Leader, who has been in power for 24 years. One of the chants heard in Tehran two years ago was “Mubarak, Ben Ali, now it’s time for Sayyid Ali [Khamenei].” In these circumstances, defusing some tensions, easing the sanctions and reviving the economy would be extremely useful to the regime in Tehran.
At the very least, the Obama Administration should come up with a reasonable offer that would signal to the Iranian people that if the regime is willing to credibly forswear nuclear weapons, ordinary Iranians will have a brighter future. But it is difficult to sound reasonable while you are beating the drums of war.
Relatedly, Fisher analyzes Rouhani’s interview with NBC (snippet above):
As Rouhani-skeptics often point out, the president is not the final authority in Iranian politics. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is ultimately in charge, especially on matters of national security and foreign policy. The best case for skepticism about Rouhani’s peace overtures is that he’s just freelancing and will inevitably be undercut by Khamenei. That’s still possible, but Rouhani told NBC News that Khamenei gave him full authority to cut a deal with the West over Iran’s nuclear program — the single biggest sticking point of any negotiations. If true, then for Khamenei to hand Rouhani that power would be a remarkably positive step just in itself, a sign of institutional weight shifting toward compromise and diplomacy. That Rouhani could actually see it through is even better.
Ask Trita Parsi Anything
[Updated with many more questions submitted by readers]
From his bio:
Trita Parsi is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States and A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, and has contributed articles on Middle East affairs to the New York Times, WaPo, Wall Street Journal, and many others. He is also a frequent guest on CNN, PBS’s Newshour, NPR, the BBC and Al Jazeera. You can follow him on Twitter here.
We are sorry to note that Urtak, the great polling service we have used to collect and vote on questions, is no longer active. We hope the replacement format below will suffice. Vote on the questions below:
Our recent Iran coverage is here. Our Ask Anything archive is here.
