The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

This fascinating footage of coconut-carrying octopus – the first invertebrate to be found using tools – is making the rounds:

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Democracy in America blog at The Economist:

There hasn't yet been a country in which the task of cultural formation and reproduction was so thoroughly delegated to the entertainment industry as today's America. In a media-centric economy, the wages of contrarianism are fat. As are the wages of bombast. If sober, responsible analysis pulled in viewers, PBS and C-SPAN would be the titans of American broadcasting. Instead we have Fox News and MSNBC.

Are the wages of contrarianism really so fat? Feast your eyes on the most popular magazines in America.  They aren't contrarian. Now look at the most popular television shows. You've got to scroll through a lot to find any nonfiction, and Oprah, 20/20 and Dateline NBC surely have their flaws, but they don't exactly resemble what you find on Twitter under the hash tag "Slate pitches." And while I'd defend the Slate as a first rate Web magazine that publishes lots of worthwhile writing, it isn't as though their content is attracting the most eyeballs on the Internet — most obviously, they're orders of magnitude smaller than AOL, Yahoo News, and the New York Times Online.

This isn't to say that there isn't any excessive bombast or contrarianism-gone-wild going on in the media. But I do think it is too simplistic to say that it exists because "sober, responsible analysis" doesn't pull in viewers. The fact is that it is difficult and expensive to produce material that is both enjoyable and substantive — or, for that matter, to produce films that are entertaining and have artistic merit. Producing bombast is comparatively cheap, and excessive contrarianism is often the puzzling complaint of a subset of America that a) reads Slate daily; b) imagines it is representative of American media; c) mocks one of the few publications they actually read regularly for certain of its articles, though the complaints are actually as often about headlines that don't even particularly track the article.

On a tangentially related subject, I see that a critic of mine at True/Slant is asserting that "when a pundit or political thinker betrays his ideological brethren – at least rhetorically – he is heralded as a 'brave truth teller' and enjoys riches and fame" — this in a post that cites Andrew, Kathleen Parker, Chris Buckley and myself as the beneficiaries of this supposed bounty.

Every time I hear this argument, which is a lot, I am struck by its utter disconnectedness from reality. If a young pundit wants riches and fame, the surest approach is to find a belief system with a lot of adherents, and to creatively repackage those beliefs in various ways that affirm what they already believe. Perhaps it is too much to expect outsiders to realize that is how things work in the ideologically funded world of political publications and DC think tanks, but is it too much to expect folks to look at the New York Times bestseller list, or to notice who appears on television, or to recognize that obscure writers like me have never even made close to a six-figure income, while various group loyalists earn 7 figures and up for their output, whether they are in politics like Rush Limbaugh, or religion like Rick Warren, or reaffirming some subset of consumer and cultural norms, like Martha Stewart?

It is also worth mentioning that Kathleen Parker was a very successful columnist and an often heterodox thinker long before she trashed Sarah Palin — since the True/Slant blogger read Kerry Howley's excellent profile, it is strange that he terms Ms. Parker's writing on the former Alaska governor a betrayal — and that Andrew Sullivan built his own audience of heterodox thinkers from the beginning: he didn't rise by being and then betraying conservatives, he rose by being his unclassifiable self all along.

Getting back to the Democracy in America post, it notes:

Clearly, the Washington Post prints opinion pieces by Sarah Palin in large measure because they attract attention. With plummeting revenues in almost every corner of the media business due to a crisis of overproduction, the imperative to attract attention is becoming irresistible. You attract attention through contrarianism and bombast.

But the problem with Ms. Palin's op-ed wasn't bombast or contrarianism. It was a dearth of qualifications to write the piece, and a lack of persuasive reasoning within it. What plagues public discourse in America is an audience that mostly wants its beliefs reinforced. That is a far bigger problem than bombast — if Fox News stayed bombastic but departed from what now passes for conservative orthodoxy its audience would flee. It is downright strange to cast contrarianism or ideological disloyalty as grave problems, given the ongoing trend toward cocooning.

by Andrew

Love you:

Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Patrick writes:

Unwavering ideological voting, of the sort Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich exhibit, is the exception in politics for good reason.

Unwavering ideological voting is also an exception because it is usually unserious and lazy.  It is normally cast as a struggling individual hewing to his/her principles, but the world we live in is not some theoretical construct, and unwavering ideology is simply not a logical method for governing.  Problems generally require serious grappling for understanding and solutions, not a pre-existing formula.  Paul and Kucinich have difficulty extending their appeal beyond their strong supporters because of this reality, not because of special interests.

Frankly, it is this mindset– that ideologies remain constant and that a chosen ideology can be applied to any problems– that is at the heart of our sorry public discourse.  When issues are always presented as a choice between two (and it is always two) competing ideologies, then they can be discussed with almost no knowledge of the issues at hand.  Witness our Sunday talk shows, where guests (who are often experts in one field) pontificate on other topics in which they have absolutely no background.  They can do this because the debate is framed only in terms of ideology and political gamesmanship, which requires no new investigation or education, only a background in ideology that may have been gained decades ago.  As a result, we are often dumber for having watched.

by Chris Bodenner

On the heels of news that the regime is support the allegations against him, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, following interviews with Masoud Shafie, Tajbakhsh’s lawyer. Tajbakhsh has been sentenced to a 15-year prison term for alleged espionage and actions against national security by a lower court and is currently in the appeals stage. The case has also been substantially invalidated by gross breaches of Iranian law and international standards for due process.  […] Espionage is closely defined under Iranian law, and guilt needs to be established by evidence that highly confidential documents were passed to foreign governments. There are no references to such documents in the file.

Tajbakhsh, a renowned scholar and urban planner, was the only US citizen included in the mass show trials that followed the post-election unrest.  More information about the man here. A heartbreaking interview with his mother here.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In an earlier post, I recommended Jim Manzi's piece, "Keeping America's Edge," and here I want to zero in on its recommendations about immigration policy, a debate that is certain to arise again sooner or later, especially if the current economic downturn long endures.

Is there any policy question as vexing? Every American citizen is something of a gatekeeper for this prosperous land, deciding via their franchise how many others might partake of its fruits. Prudence and necessity demand some limit, but setting any limit forces us to confront the existence of extreme material deprivation — it is possible, living most places in the United States, to forget about poverty of the kind that is endemic in the Third World, whereas truly grappling with any cap on immigration requires knowingly preventing some number of people from escaping that kind of poverty.

My preference is for relatively high levels of immigration. It seems just to extend to others the means by which our forefathers arrived here; the benefits enjoyed by the average immigrant far exceeds the costs he or she imposes; and personally, I delight in immigrant culture, whether the Polish enclaves that endure in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the Latino diaspora that's brought street mangos to Pilsen, Chicago, or the sundry nationalities you find in the East Bay — and it is no coincidence that my two favorite places on earth are California and Spain. Spend any time around representative immigrant communities and it is impossible to hear xenophobic nonsense without feeling one's blood boil, and pondering how absurd are many of the negative stereotypes served up by garden variety racists.

Of course, relatively high levels of immigration comes at a significantly lower cost to me, a writer raised in an upper middle class home and educated in Catholic schools, than it does to the lower middle class — immigrants among them! — who must compete for jobs with new immigrants, attend school in classrooms where progress is slowed by language barriers, and grapple with the higher crime rates and public health problems seen in some immigrant enclaves.

Partly for these reasons, there is a near consensus in America that unlimited immigration via entirely open borders is not viable. What frustrates me is that, among many of the folks who style themselves immigrant advocates or pro-immigration, there is an utter refusal to articulate specific, workable views about what the limits should be, let alone to abide enforcing limits that are duly signed into law. One pernicious effect is that restrictionists are the only game in town for folks who want to enforce some limits on immigration, hence the rise of demagogues like Joe Arapaio, who are able to cast their extra-legal racial profiling as a defense of American sovereignty, rather than the assault on even legal Latino immigrants that it frequently ends up being.

Even the ill-conceived, so-called comprehensive immigration reform championed by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, legislation that would've institutionalized a second class of non-citizen guest workers at the mercy of their employers, wouldn't have resolved questions about limits and enforcement, except temporarily. What foolishness to imagine that short term boon was worth violating what ought to be a foundational aspect of any immigration regime: that the newcomers are welcomed as full citizens with the same rights as everyone else, an obvious enough arrangement if from them one expects commensurate loyalty.

So what does Mr. Manzi recommend?

…we should reconceptualize immigration as recruiting. Assimilating immigrants is a demonstrated core capability of America's political economy — and it is one we should take advantage of. A robust-yet-reasonable amount of immigration is healthy for America. It is a continuing source of vitality — and, in combination with birth rates around the replacement level, creates a sustainable rate of overall ­population growth and age-demographic balance. But unfortunately, the manner in which we have actually handled immigration since the 1970s has yielded large-scale legal and illegal immigration of a low-skilled population from Latin America. It is hard to imagine a more damaging way to expose the fault lines of America's political economy: We have chosen a strategy that provides low-wage gardeners and nannies for the elite, low-cost home improvement and fresh produce for the middle class, and fierce wage competition for the working class.

Instead, we should think of immigration as an opportunity to improve our stock of human capital. Once we have re-established control of our southern border, and as we preserve our commitment to political asylum, we should also set up recruiting offices looking for the best possible talent everywhere: from Mexico City to Beijing to Helsinki to Calcutta. Australia and Canada have demonstrated the practicality of skills-based immigration policies for many years. We should improve upon their example by using testing and other methods to apply a basic tenet of all human capital-intensive organizations managing for the long term: Always pick talent over skill. It would be great for America as a whole to have, say, 500,000 smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.

This is an imperfect foundation for a system of immigration, to be sure, but I am hard pressed to articulate anything better, and it offers substantial upsides that are absent from the present approach.

Beyond the economic boon of high skill immigration — nothing to scoff at for a country in fiscal shape as bad as ours — a system that sought talent would do three things: 1) lessen the burden on the Americans who are least equipped to compete with immigrants in competition for jobs; 2) act as a counter to the populist notion that immigration is bad for America, thus ensuring that future immigrants will continue to be welcomed and lessening social tensions; 3) were the system set up the right way, it might also create good incentives in various countries, encouraging remittance-hungry governments to set up educational opportunities for their best and brightest, and basically extending the American dream to young ambitious people who'd perhaps think of our country more favorably given the prospect of being able to immigrate here if they reach certain meritocratic benchmarks.

On a subject as complicated as this one, I try to keep all my conclusions provisional — my mind is always open to better immigration regimes than I've considered — but I'd ask critics, whose push back I eagerly await, to answer one question: Is our current system, or some other realistic system, any better overall than what Mr. Manzi has proposed?

by Patrick Appel

Megan wondered yesterday if other conservative Democrats who don't particularly want health care reform to pass will act:

Lieberman is in some ways in the easiest position–the party is not helping him get reelected, and he's going to lose his committees eventually anyway, because everyone's mad at him.  So the other weak sisters are willing to let him take the lead.  But if he gives in, will they go along, or will they just find their own reasons for saying no?

TNC counters Megan over whether Lieberman will be, or should be, stripped of his committees.

by Andrew Sprung

In his serial performances as spoiler first of the public option and now of Medicare expansion, Joe Lieberman has emerged as the Sarah Palin of the health care reform debate. He doesn't even try to credibly reconcile his current statements with past ones or to give explanations for his policy proposals that would withstand even momentary scrutiny.  He's just thumbing his nose at the very notion that informed debate can shape the legislative process. 

Here's Lieberman's office "explaining" why he was for Medicare expansion before he was against it:

In a September interview with the Connecticut Post, Mr. Lieberman suggested giving people 55 and older "an option to buy into Medicare early" if they were laid off or couldn't otherwise get affordable coverage.

A Lieberman spokesman, Marshall Wittmann, said that idea was superseded when the Senate Finance Committee passed a plan that would give the uninsured, including those over 55, subsidies to buy private insurance. Mr. Lieberman's "view is, essentially, that because we have subsidies, the Medicare buy-in would be redundant," Mr. Wittmann said.

There were subsidies for those who can't afford insurance in the three House bills and one Senate bill that passed out of committee over the summer. There were subsidies in the Baucus bill, the outline of which was clear when Lieberman made his proposal in September. There were subsidies for those who can't afford insurance in every Democratic proposal since John Edwards rolled out his plan in 2007. So come again, Senator?

Lieberman elaborated to the Daily Beast:

Senator Lieberman's comment reported by the Connecticut Post in September was made before the Finance Committee reported out the Baucus bill, which contained extensive health-insurance reforms, including a more narrow age rating for pricing health-insurance premiums and extensive affordability credits that would benefit this specific group of individuals. These health-insurance reforms and affordability credits have been strengthened in Senator Reid's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and will provide even greater relief for those 55-65 years old.

The Baucus bill allowed insurers to charge older plan members four times as much as younger customers. The Reid bill allows them to charge three times as much. The House bill, twice as much. Are we supposed to believe that in September Lieberman was so worried that the Baucus bill would leave 55-64 year-olds so high and dry (and would become law, unmediated by the four more generous bills then working their way through Congress) that it was necessary to mitigate its cruelties with a proposal he now calls a budget-buster?

All of this is in any case irrelevant to whether allowing Medicare access is a good idea. The rationale for that proposal, as for the public option, was to reduce costs both for individuals and for the government. If the Medicare option, once subsidies kick in, is cheaper than private insurance offered on the exchanges, it would succeed on both counts.  Lieberman claims that widening access would "threaten the solvency" of Medicare. Ezra Klein demolishes that argument — which, if true, would have been true in September as well, when Lieberman floated his proposal.

One final  twist to Lieberman's illogic. Here's one more statement relayed by the AP:

Asked about the video [in which he proposed Medicare expansion] on Monday, Lieberman said his comments were made before the Senate health care bill, which includes health insurance subsidies, was finalized. The subsidies would make a Medicare buy-in program unnecessary because the people who could benefit would get subsidies instead, he said.

"This was before the Finance Committee came out with its proposal and I was suggesting various ideas for health care reform that did not involve the public option that was the focus at that time," Lieberman told reporters.

So…Lieberman only proposed Medicare expansion as an alternative to the public option that he feared the public option would make it into the Baucus bill. Now, three months later, when Democrats lack the votes to pass a bill with the public option and cast about for a substitute, Lieberman kills the substitute he floated in September.