Rule Number One: No knitting of baby kangaroos. Rule Number Two … well you know what that is.
The Marketing Of Obamacare, Ctd
Sarah Kliff examines the comparisons between the rollout of the “brand new, and relatively unpopular” Medicare Part D program in 2006 and the administration’s rollout of the ACA:
Part D was even less liked [than the ACA in the months prior to launch]: 21 percent of the public had a favorable opinion of the program in April 2005 compared to 35 percent in April 2013 for the Affordable Care Act. Americans felt like they didn’t understand Part D, either. And back in November 2005, nobody had any clue about whether costs would be affordable enough to entice seniors into the new program …
Medicare Part D had a sweeping, year-long campaign that began well in advance of the program’s launch. The Obama administration has decided to focus its efforts differently. It will do most of its outreach push in the late summer and early fall. The White House and its allies worry that if they begin their pitch too soon they’ll be selling a product that is nowhere near landing on the shelves.
To combat the ACA’s low public opinion ratings, HHS is reaching out to NFL and NBA stars to promote enrollment in the exchanges. Travis Waldron explains why the NBA might sign on:
The law, judging by conservative response and public polling, remains controversial, and taking a position on the program might risk alienating some NBA fans. But for the same demographic reasons that make the partnership appealing to the White House, it could be appealing to the NBA. Market research shows that blacks, Latinos, young adults, and Americans with low and low-middle incomes make up larger shares of the NBA’s fan base than they do of the general population, and all four of those groups are more likely to view both Obama and his policies more favorably. So while conservatives may be loud in their opposition, it’s hard to believe that their distaste for health care reform would take the form of concerted action like a boycott that would try to hurt the league economically. The NBA has embraced other issues that rankle conservatives, like climate change, environmentalism, and equal rights for LGBT Americans, without backlash.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Bernstein expects confusion over what’s included in the health care reform law to lead to cries of “keep your Obamacare away from my Affordable Care Act”:
[U]nder the hood, there is all sorts of government intervention going on—all sorts of new regulations about what insurance companies can do, how they must spend their money, what products they are allowed to offer through the exchanges. But that’s all going to become invisible to consumers over time. Even things which, for the first group of exchange users, will seem like a big deal. For those currently without the insurance they want because of a pre-existing condition, becoming newly eligible for coverage will be an obvious effect of Obamacare. But for the next generation (and I mean in as short a time as a year), most people will have no idea that they would previously have been bounced—just as almost no one will realize that they would have once been subjected to yearly and lifetime benefits caps, or would previously have been at risk for a rescission if they ever filed a claim.
Wowed By Windmills
American artist Anthony Howe creates wind-driven “kinetic sculptures” out of stainless steel:
The many windmill-like structures respond to their surrounding natural environments by reflecting sunlight and producing motion in response to wind. Using mainly stainless steel and fiberglass, Howe produces all kinds of interesting symmetrically balanced forms and shapes. Standing 17 feet high, the heavy metal glides effortlessly through the air, rotating in organically circular, harmonious movements. The three-dimensional sculptures are intricately balanced to produce mesmerizing patterns that viewers could watch for hours. Howe says he hopes to achieve “pieces [that] assume a spare, linear elegance when conditions are still, mutating to raucous animation when the wind picks up.”
After the jump is another mesmerizing video of a wind-powered sculpture in the shape of a human face:
More of Howe’s work here.
Is Meritocracy Moral?
In a special issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Greg Mankiw makes (pdf) a moral argument against income redistribution. Krugman summarizes:
Mankiw argues that the 1 percent make so much because of their high contribution to output — basically, that they have high marginal productivity. So they earn what they get; and Mankiw further argues that economic opportunity is in fact relatively if not perfectly equal. All’s fair!
Chait calls the article “an embarrassing piece of ignorant tripe”:
Mankiw asserts that his premise, that the rich deserve all they have and are entitled not to pay higher tax rates simply for the social good, “is more consistent with our innate moral intuitions.” If that’s the case, why was Obama so persistent about arguing for higher taxes on the rich, and Mitt Romney — the candidate Mankiw advised — so eager to avoid admitting he wanted lower taxes for the rich? And since Mankiw’s “innate moral intuitions” rest upon a series of shaky factual suppositions, perhaps he should consider the possibility that they are less a rational argument than a rationalization.
I sure can see the innate moral intuition in thinking that a talented person deserves to keep the fruits of her talent, even if it is beyond Chait’s imagination. But what I also see is context, because humans are social animals and all absolute moral claims, for a conservative, need to be adapted or mitigated according to the times and society we actually live in. That’s where I differ from Mankiw. When society is hurtling toward massive and destabilizing inequality which is jeopardizing core trust in the political system, then I think you need to adjust. When globalization and technology are massively enriching a minuscule few, where they once helped far more, it’s time to re-think.
The classic take on this was, of course, Michael Young’s prescient attack on the meritocracy and his fears were subsequently amplified by the brilliant book on the deep sources of our new soaring inequality, The Bell Curve. Young’s core argument:
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A socialrevolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.
With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
This is the problem, and it helps you understand that more education (or even higher tax rates) will not necessarily solve the problem of inequality. The causes are deeper and more corrosive – technological, global, and the unintended consequences of meritocratic sorting (which I suspect is also a key force behind cultural polarization from Iran and Turkey to the US. The most brutal take-down of Mankiw, for me, came from the Economist.
Matt Nolan comes to Mankiw’s defense:
All the stuff in this paper should be standard knowledge to virtually anyone who has studied economics – and I don’t mean at a high level. He is just trying to show the nature of the debate we can have around income inequality for non-economists – and illustrate that there are complicated issues, both in terms of getting the right “measurement” of things, and in terms of our normative assumptions around fairness. …
He is writing to intelligent non-economists about tax and redistributive policy, and illustrating that there are trade-offs, and fundamental normative questions, that have to be faced before we can make a conclusion. Simply concluding “soak the rich” based on a single graph without context and analysis is moronic.
Chris Dillow maintains that “meritocracy is no evidence whatsoever of the justice of a social system”:
Imagine a Stalinist centrally planned economy. The dictator knows that central planning is a difficult job requiring intelligence, skill and hard work. He therefore ensures a system of rigorous exams and hiring to ensure that the best people occupy key positions. Such a society will be highly meritocratic, in the sense that there’ll be a strong correlation between individuals’ success – their position in the hierarchy – and their “merit”: their IQ, capacity for work or (if you like) the “soft skills” which enable individuals to move up the hierarchy. Indeed, it’s quite likely that this society will be more meritocratic than free market economies, where dumb luck is so important. …
The point here is that you just cannot infer the fairness of an economic system from its degree of meritocracy. An unfair system might be very meritocratic – as in my example of an idealized centrally planned economy. And a fair system might be unmeritocratic …
And Barro thinks Mankiw is “accidentally mak[ing] the case for higher taxes on the rich”:
Normally, economists model labor as something that employees sell to employers. Raise income taxes and you cut the price received by the employee, so he works less. Cut taxes and he works more. A cardiologist might behave exactly like that, doing more procedures if his taxes are cut. But Lady Gaga can’t very easily decide to produce twice as many hit songs. She might only have so many good ideas. And unlike the cardiologist, producers of ideas have had big, positive pre-tax shocks to their income. Being able to sell into a global market and scale up quickly means a great idea is worth a lot more than it used to be. Even if the share of that value that is captured by the idea generator gets cut—whether through a tax increase or a weakening of intellectual property protections—creating great ideas should be more appealing than ever.
Syria, Our New Nineteenth Century Proxy War
The Economist is on board with Syrian intervention, from arms to a no-fly zone, largely because it means curbing the influence of Iran:
The growing risk of a nuclear Iran is one reason why the West should intervene decisively in Syria not just by arming the rebels, but also by establishing a no-fly zone. That would deprive Mr Assad of his most effective weapon—bombs dropped from planes—and allow the rebels to establish military bases inside Syria. This newspaper has argued many times for doing so on humanitarian grounds; but Iran’s growing clout is another reason to intervene, for it is not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon.
The leader fails to persuade me for a few reasons. There is no analysis of the consequences of entering a civil war as decisively as The Economist wants. And there is an assumption, not an argument, that Iran is obviously the biggest threat in the region, and that a nuclear Iran cannot be contained, as every other new nuclear power in history has 
been. And I suspect crippling a rising Shia power – by brutal sanctions – will not end well for the US and has already failed to achieve its stated goal.
I’m also unsure whether it is better for the US for the Sunni or the Shia factions of Islam to prevail in the growing regional religious war. I’m only sure that we should not care enough to ask the question. These are not our religious wars. We had ours in the 16th and 17th centuries. No one intervened to police ours – and because of that, we arrived at our own liberal evolution. Non-intervention can be a blessing in resolving core internal conflicts that need to be resolved internally before a new order can arise. That may take decades or centuries. And if we are yanked by every outbreak into intervention, we shall indeed soon be like Gulliver.
One useful way of thinking about this is to ask oneself: what would China do? They’re our main competitor and only likely challenger in global power. And they merrily look the other way, while getting the bulk of the Iraqi oil American soldiers in part died for. Yes, the humanitarian horrors are there. So were they in Iraq, where today, after democratization and an elected government, 24 people were murdered and an insurgent cell making chemical weapons was busted. We were there for a decade and this is what we left behind. How on earth does anyone think we’d do better with a fraction of the resources in Syria?
Larison rolls his eyes at The Economist:
The fact that Iran’s ally in Syria has been fighting off an internal rebellion backed by several other regional governments for the last two years suggests that Iranian power in the region isn’t waxing. It is at best holding steady, and it has clearly declined from where it was a few years ago. Put simply, Iran is in no danger of becoming the region’s hegemon.
Iran and its allies are on the defensive, and even if Assad holds on to power for the next few years Iran and Hizbullah will be preoccupied with propping him up. If an important American client or ally somewhere were wracked by civil war and its government was in danger of being overthrown, no one would be claiming that U.S. regional influence was on the rise. So there’s not much merit to the idea that Iran is gaining in regional influence and strength. On the contrary, it is desperately trying to stave off a serious setback. Even if Iran “wins” in Syria, it won’t be in a better position than it was two years ago. Its regional influence would almost certainly be reduced.
Steve Clemons agrees and wishes the administration would return to the sober calculus preceding the Libyan intervention:
With Syria, Obama is behaving in ways that run counter to the decision criteria he applied in Libya. He is committing intelligence and military resources to a crisis that does not have UN Security Council sanction, and he is not framing his response to the chemical weapons use in terms of either punishing the commanders who authorized their use — or to security those weapons. Instead, Obama is joining the rebel forces and committing to a regime change formula that could potentially falter. And that is before calculating the global strategic costs of getting in a nasty stand-off with Russia whose support is needed on other global challenges.
Larison fires back that “Clemons gives the intervention in Libya more credit for coherence and planning than it deserves”:
[T]he main problem with the analysis here is that it fails to account for how the administration’s muddled Syria policy is in many respects a product of the decision to intervene in Libya. The Libyan war created false hopes of similar action elsewhere, but it also applied a standard for intervention that the conflict in Syria would not be able to meet. Partly to placate critics at home, the administration emphasized the unique, virtually unrepeatable conditions that made direct intervention in Libya feasible.
The Loony Right And The Senate
Some ominous signs from the primary process.
SCOTUS Votes Against The Voting Rights Act
Amy Howe puts today’s SCOTUS decision, which struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, “in plain English.” Dylan Matthews talks to election law expert Rick Pildes, who thinks some reactions to the voting rights law are “hyperbolic”:
After the oral arguments in March, he noted that the home page of the Huffington Post Web site featured the headline “Back to 1964?” Nonsense, he argued. “No one in their right mind can think that there’s a risk that we’re on the verge of going back to the world that existed before 1965.”
So, what is the risk, if there is one? Pildes notes that the Justice Department has come to use section 5 more as a tool to that ensure minority populations are represented in legislative bodies than a way to tackle “ballot box” issues, like voter ID, wait times at the voting booth, and so forth. “For several decades now, it’s been far more significant in terms of redistricting issues than it has in ‘access to the ballotbox’ issues,” he says. “We like to talk about first generation versus second generation claims. First generation claims are about access to the ballot box. Second generation claims are about the representativeness of districts and how they are constructed.”
Drum sighs:
Ten years ago I might have had a smidgen of hope that this would turn out OK. There would be abuses, but maybe not horrible, systematic ones. Today I have little of that hope left. The Republican Party has made it crystal clear that suppressing minority voting is now part of its long-term strategy, and I have little doubt that this will now include hundreds of changes to voting laws around the country that just coincidentally happen to disproportionately benefit whites. There will still be challenges to these laws, but I suspect that the number of cases will be overwhelming and progress will be molasses slow. This ruling is plainly a gift to the GOP for 2014.
John Fund spikes the football, calling it “actually a victory for civil rights”:
[Section 4’s] consideration of state requests for election changes was often arbitrary and partisan, as witnessed by the recent smackdown that the DOJ got from a federal court when it tried to block South Carolina’s voter ID law. The rest of the Voting Rights Act remains in place and will be used to ensure minority voting rights. Congress is free to come up with a different, updated coverage formula for pre-clearance, but given the DOJ’s current stained reputation Congressional action looks unlikely in the near future.
Clint Bolick, director of litigation for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, says the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will also reduce the balkanization of racial gerrymandering that has become so popular lately. “Voting districts drawn on racial or ethnic lines divide Americans,” he says. “This decision helps move us toward the day in which racial gerrymandering becomes a relic of the past.”
Josh Marshall ponders short- and long-term consequences:
I still remain generally hopeful, over the medium term, certainly the long term that the changing nature of the electorate will prove too strong to be bridled by Republican voter suppression efforts which will undoubtedly redouble in response to this wildly activist ruling by the Supreme Court. In the short term, it’s not so clear, though, particularly with regards to 2014. Indeed, the 2012 election and this decision fit together like two pieces of a puzzle.
Republican state governments pushed through numerous laws to thin the electorate and particularly to reduce minority voting. It wasn’t totally successful because of a mix of energized minority voters who turned out in droves in response to these attacks and also because a small band of civil rights and voting rights attorneys who fought the laws across the country, making ample use of the Voting Rights Act.
Josh Green’s perspective:
On its face, this looks like a big victory for Republicans. But is it really? I suspect it will turn out to be a poisoned chalice. Many of the GOP’s current problems stem from the fact that it is overly beholden to its white, Southern base, at a time when the country is rapidly becoming more racially diverse. In order to expand its base of power beyond the House of Representatives, the GOP needs to expand its appeal to minority voters. As the ongoing battle over immigration reform demonstrates, that process is going poorly and looks like it will be very difficult.
Tim Murphy thinks Justice Roberts is relying on bad data:
The basis for Roberts’ argument is that the formula for determining which states, counties, and municipalities warrant special scrutiny under the VRA is outdated. Racism doesn’t exist along a North-South axis as it did in 1965, and Congress is relying on outdated information, Roberts argued. The formula that governs which parts of the country are covered “that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs,” Roberts contended. But Roberts, who during oral arguments relied on bungled Census data to assert that Massachusetts has a worse record on voting rights than Mississippi, doesn’t appear to have paid close attention to the data.
In May, political scientists at the University of California-Davis and the University of Connecticut published a study that seemed to anticipate Roberts’ critique, maintaining that “the geography of anti-black prejudice” in the United States closely tracks with the geography of the Voting Rights Act. That is, the states and districts that receive special attention under the VRA because of their histories of discrimination remain the problem areas. (Here’s a handy map from the New York Times that breaks the similarities down.)
And Derek Thompson flags the above chart, from Roberts’ own opinion, showing the effect of the VRA:
Buried deep in Roberts’ opinion, on page 15, is this remarkable chart comparing voter registration numbers from 1965 to 2004. The influence of the VRA in increasing black registration percentages appears extraordinary and undeniable.
Peggy Noonan, Call Your Office
Your conspiracy theory just imploded.
The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #159
A reader writes:
Deciduous trees of some sort, mechanically raked beaches, the characteristic look of white lifeguard stands and jetties jutting out into the ocean, and something about the quality of the light on the water all say “New Jersey beach” to me. The big hotels of some sort in the back ground, suggest North Jersey, rather than South Jersey. I’ll take a flyer and say it is Ocean Grove.
Another:
Playa del Carmen, Mexico? The long jetty has changed in the 20 years since I was last there. And there’s much new construction near the beach, but the look is much the same.
Another:
That sure looks a lot like the “seedier” part of Malibu, near Pacific Palisades and just north of Topanga Canyon. Catalina peeking over the horizon to the right. I think I parked in that parking lot in the foreground on many an occasion in the ’70s.
Another gets on the right track:
I live on Lake Michigan, and this just screams large, inland lake. Reminiscent of Rust Belt. Could be any lakeside area in an arc starting at Buffalo, NY westward, and up to Duluth, MN. How about Erie, PA?
Another locates the right city:
The window latch looks American (I had one similar in Texas many years ago, never have had overseas); the architecture looks vaguely New England to me; the beach feels like a lake (not enough protection for it to be the ocean or a large sea), but for it to be a lake it has to be a large lake because you can’t see the opposite shore. Putting that together led me to the Great Lakes. The empty beach and calm waters make me assume it’s early morning – thus the shadows mean we’re looking north on a western shore.
So then it was a matter of searching Google Earth for a beach front with a uniquely shaped breakwater and high rise buildings in the background. After a lot of trail and error, that led me to the Loyola University Lake Shore Campus, where I was able to find Santa Clara Hall (the building in the right foreground with the square chimney and unusual atrium. I’d like to figure out the actual building, but I’m in Laos and my Internet is dodgy and I can’t get street view to open, so this will have to do: Loyola University Lake Shore campus in Chicago, looking north over the Santa Clara Hall.
Another sends an aerial view:
Another reader:
I recognized this view immediately! I lived in Chicago about 15 years ago, when my daughter was born, and we used to visit Rogers Park often. Our close friends lived a few blocks away in a rental on Pratt, overlooking the beach. It was one of the few affordable lakefront areas left. Love it there.
This is a view to the north from the Campus Towers apartment building at 1033 W. Loyola Ave., adjacent to Loyola University. It’s from a window at the front of the building, on about the 8th floor, with a slight northeast angle. That’s Hartigan Beach (though people tend to refer to the beaches informally by street names, and the part we see is at the end of W. Albion), one of a string of public beaches along Lake Michigan run by the Chicago Park District. The Rogers Park neighborhood borders Evanston, IL. If you follow the shoreline and go a bit inland, the small cluster of tall buildings you see through the upper left of the window is in Evanston.
I haven’t made a VFYW guess in months (years?). But I did come close on a couple. I have my fingers crossed on this one, but I’m worried that anyone who’s ever been to Chicago is going to recognize it!
Another:
That is the pier with the light stretching out into Lake Michigan, taken from south. On the spit of land in the distance at the top left of the lake lies the Northwestern campus. You can walk right out the city from Pratt Boulevard onto the beach. A beautiful spot, and a fitting photo; I live just a few minutes’ walk away and must now say goodbye, as I am leaving Chicago after nine wonderful years.
Another angle:
Another reader:
Other than the fact that this is the alma mater of Bob Newhart, I have no stories about the North Shore of Chicago. But I do have a story about how many of these window views I’ve identified:
#33 — Double bay in Sydney, but that was before I realized we had to identify the very window. And I e-mailed it to the Andrew’s address, not the contest.
#40 — Mission Bay, San Diego. Got the resort right, misidentified the porch one cottage to the right.
#76 — MS Galaxy of the Tallink Silja Line docked in Stockholm (won it, got the book, thank you.) 11/12/2011
#125 — Balmoral Lodge, Queenstown, NZ 10/20/2012
#131 — Glen Drive, Sausalito, CA 112/4/12
#142 — The Hotel Captain Cook, Anchorage, AL 2/23/13 (off by one floor. Damn!)
#157 — Tom-na-Criege Lodge in Onich/North Ballachulish, Scotland (too easy, I know)
And this one.I know, as a previous winner, I’m not eligible to win, but going through the archives to get the right numbers of each brought back so many memories of fun Saturdays chasing some of these. I haven’t had time to go after all of them but this is a great game to play.
Another view:
Regarding the track seen above:
As an alumnus of Loyola University Chicago this week’s photo looked immediately familiar. The picture is taken from the Campus Towers at 1033 W. Loyola – looking north to Hartigan Beach. I ran cross country and track at Loyola. At the beginning of the school year our morning workout would be to run two miles north along Lake Michigan to the Evanston border and back to campus – ending at Hartigan Beach where we would finish with push-ups and sit-ups.
The field next to Campus Towers is named for my former teammate and friend, Sean Earl, who died from cancer in the year 2000 at the age of 21. Sean was a walk-on to the Cross Country team. He didn’t have a lot of talent – in fact he struggled to make it through that easy four-mile run before the workout on Hartigan Beach for the first month of his freshman year. But he didn’t give up. He squeezed every bit of potential out of his body – a body which had a tumor that had been there since he was born – and yet wasn’t found until his junior year.
As you know, losing someone close to you when you’re young changes the way you see the world. Thanks for providing a reason to think about him. Thinking of him reminds me about what’s important in life.
On a more mundane note, another reader gets the right floor:
Well I think it’s just dumb luck that I figured out this week’s VFYW. With just a random sense that I was looking at one of the Great Lakes (not that I’ve ever been), and knowing that a view from that high up meant that the window was in or near a city, I started scrolling around Google maps until I stumbled across the Chicago geography that we’re looking at. Specifically, we’re looking north from the Campus Towers Apartment Building on Loyola University’s campus. The exact address is 1033 W. Loyola Avenue. Given the slant of the window and the positioning of the photo, I know we’re looking out of the furthest east window on the north side of the building. I’ll guess the 13th floor, since in every previous entry I’ve guessed too low, and the 13th floor appears to be one of the top floors in the building.
Only one other reader matched that accuracy, but this one breaks the tie by having correctly guessed a difficult view in the past:
Seemed pretty clear this was North America, based on the style of some of the buildings. My first thought was East coast, but the beach seemed too small and the water too calm to be the Atlantic. That left one of the Great Lakes. Seems to be taken from a rather tall building, given that the window is quite a bit above the surrounding 3 and 4 story structures. One house in particular reminds me of style of house that my grandfather built and lived in in the early part of the 20th century in Chicago. So that is where I started looking. It didn’t take long to zero in on the area near Loyola University, where the shore and jetty match the VFYW image perfectly. The picture was taken from the Campus Towers apartment building, at 1033 West Loyola Avenue.
Getting the window needs a bit more effort. The building has two distinctive sort of bay window shapes in the front. Given the angle of the window in the VFYW image, the picture was taken from one of the two columns of windows that angle toward Lake Michigan. The view also aligns almost perfectly with the structure/shape on the roof of the building across the street, which means that the image was taken from the bay windows on the lake side of the building.
Now comes the WAG (Wild Ass Guess) – which floor. I am going to guess the 13th floor (do buildings have a 13th floor?) counting the ground floor as 1. I circled the window in the street view below:
I have erred on the low side in the past, this time I am probably too high.
Not this time. One more reader:
Unlike previous entries now I have a story and a connection. I am so excited that I can hardly type this, but here goes. This is from Rogers Park in Chicago, until very recently my neighborhood. It is the far north of the city, just a few blocks south of Evanston (visible, barely, as the tip of Northwestern’s lakefront campus in the far distance). The picture is taken from (probably) the 9th floor or 10th of 1033 W Loyola Avenue (remember that most buildings in Chicago use the European system of numbering floors: ground, 1, 2, etc.) and your source is likely a student at Loyola.
I walked my dogs past this building every day for years and lived just a few blocks away with my partner. In the picture you can just almost see the roof of the building where we met at a New Years Eve party in 2001. You can see the “lighthouse” (a small navigation light that everyone calls the Lighthouse) on the end of the pier off of Loyola Park. It is a great place to take a date on a summer’s night for a walk and a kiss. You can see the tennis courts that some dog owners use as a fenced-in poop-zone and playground (I say this as a dog owner who never did that.) You can see the spot on the beach that needs to have all of the broken bottles and glass cleaned up before I will go out there again in bare feet (all helpfully marked on my annotated map.)
This is an area of Chicago that should be in much better shape. There is a great sense of community here, a lot of quirky shops, and a lot of neighborhood sponsored street art. People who live in Rogers Park tend to love, passionately, this offbeat neighborhood. The area around Loyola University (the location of the window) anchors the south of this wonderful neighborhood and gives the area a touch of campus life. There is a great world to explore in this photograph.
And yet the crime and violence is increasing and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. Just this past week a favorite bar a few blocks north saw the brutal beating of a regular who tried to stop a fight. Locals are worried that this sort of thing will get out of hand and a great neighborhood collapse into the crime and violence of more challenged neighborhoods of Chicago. It will take some effort and attention to save a wonderful neighborhood.
I am excited to see a neighborhood that I love in the contest. I love the idea that some of your readers will have the surprising realization that Chicago has many miles of wonderful beaches. That brings me a big smile.
(Archive)
Throwing The Kitchen Sink At Climate Change
Ryan Koronowski outlines the main talking points from Obama’s climate speech at Georgetown University, which will take place later this afternoon:
The plan, according to senior administration officials, has three pillars: cutting carbon pollution in America, leading international efforts to cut global emissions, and preparing the U.S. for the costly impacts of climate change. President Obama will frame action as a moral obligation to do what we can for “the world we leave our children.”
Executive action remains one of the only serious avenues left to cut greenhouse gas emissions — a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that the U.S tax code is not currently doing it, and congressional action still looks unlikely. Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, said in his briefing Monday that the president’s view “reflects reality.” Carney said “we’ve seen Congress attempt to deal with this issue and fail to.”
Brad Plumer calls the White House plan a “kitchen sink approach”:
The White House is asking the EPA to propose rules for those existing plants by the summer of 2014 and finish them by 2015. “It’s an aggressive timeline and everyone will have a strong opinion about it,” says a senior administration official. “And we’re focused on making sure there’s adequate time to engage key stakeholders here.” …
[T]he White House is pursuing a slew of complementary measures, too. For instance: The White House is hammering out an agreement with China and other countries to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a potent greenhouse gas used in everything from soda machines to many car air conditioners. The administration will also develop a plan for curbing methane emissions from natural-gas production. The Energy Department will set new efficiency standards for appliances and buildings. The Interior Department will try to speed up wind and solar development on public lands. Foreign-aid agencies will cease financing coal plants overseas (except when there are no possible alternatives).
Molly Redden, meanwhile, previews the coming legal battles over any EPA action:
“There is no end to the legal creativity of the regulated industry,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of environmental law at the Georgetown University Law Center. David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed. “Virtually every rule that the EPA adopts under the Clean Air Act,” which the Obama administration will use to regulate power plants, “is litigated. So the fact that it’s litigated doesn’t say a thing about the strength of polluters’ legal arguments,” he said.
And yet, as Simon Lazarus and Doug Kendall have pointed out for Grist, any challenge to new regulations would wind up before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where conservative appointees hold a majority. And the threat of a court decision against them has already cowed the EPA into delaying its rules for new power plants earlier this year.
Jonathan Cohn considers the implications for international climate policy:
The U.S. and other nations have agreed to finalize a climate agreement in 2015, at another upcoming summit. If, by then, the U.S. is on track to fulfill its previous pledge, other nations might be more inclined to agree to more reductions of their own. Many experts believe that round of international negotiations represents the next, and maybe the last, great chance to avoid some serious and potentially devastating changes to the climate—among them, more severe weather like droughts, floods, and storms.
Philip Radford hopes the speech marks a beginning rather than an end:
[T]o truly meet his obligation to future generations, this must be the foundation – not the final act – of his climate legacy. The current Congress has made it clear that it will be on the wrong side of history, so it is absolutely vital for the President to use his authority to reduce power plant pollution, move forward with renewable energy projects on public lands, and increase energy efficiency. What the President will propose today is just a part of what it’s possible to do without Congress, and to solve the climate crisis, the solutions will have to be equal to or greater than the problem.
(Photo: A man poses for a picture with a kitchen sink at the Climate Camp on Black Heath on August 26, 2009 in London, England. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)
