Robert Bateman believes that the above exchange shows “what ‘Congressional Oversight’ is supposed to be about”:
Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and had her arm sewn back on, mostly, lays it down. A businessman is called out. It seems his company got something like $500 million in contracts from the government, primarily because his company was a “small business, disabled veteran owned.” His disability? When he was in prep-school, he twisted his ankle playing football. The prep school was the one at Monmouth, which is the feeder for West Point, but if you come in from civilian life, it has no military obligation at all. …
Representative Duckworth, who knows something about sacrifice to your nation, tears this man a new orifice. And I, for one, would ask that everyone, regardless of politics, forward the clip. This man, and those like him, hurt us.
RedState’s streiff blames the system, not Braulio Castillo:
Stipulated: the VA system is broken. Stipulated: an industry exists to help veterans get a VA awarded service connected disability rating. Stipulated: the military services are a part of that system. Regardless of what “Doctor” Duckworth might think of Mr. Castillo’s injuries, the facts are that he applied for the disability rating and the VA granted him that rating.
Marc Herman attempts to sort out why Castillo’s VA disability rating is higher than Duckworth’s:
How did Duckworth’s terrible injuries—she was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade—justify a lower VA disability benefit than Castillo’s old football knock? Well, the GAO has looked into how the VA assigns disability ratings several times over the past few decades, most recently late last year. It found the system to be pretty much a disaster, which is significant in a country where 2.4 million people have served in conflicts over the past decade-plus. Duckworth notes that the average wait for a disabled soldier to get a VA review of his or her injury is nearly nine months. … As long ago as 1988, the GAO looked into the matter, and found that the disability assessment system hadn’t been broadly updated since 1945. …
What sort of conditions might have shown up in a medical chart after 1945 but not before? Anything they’d invented by the time of the Vietnam war, say. Helicopters, for example. Or Agent Orange.
As The Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, the number of undergraduates earning degrees in English, foreign languages, history, or philosophy fell by about half between 1966 and 2010. But as shown in this great graph courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the late 1960s were actually a historical outlier, no doubt connected to the sudden flood of baby boomers onto campus. Most of the subsequent drop-off, meanwhile, actually happened in the 1970s. Since then, the humanities have accounted for roughly 6 to 8 percent of all college degrees.
None of this is particularly shocking. The typical college student in 2013 is not the typical college student of 1966. They’re older. There’s a good chance they commute to school, or are taking classes online. And they’re more pre-professional. As an industry, higher education has expanded to cater to them. According to the Department of Education, firefighting, homeland security, and law enforcement majors now make up about 2 percent of all graduates. They barely existed in the 1970s. Health professions now account for almost 8 percent of grads, more than double their share four-decades ago. Suffice to say, the 28-year-old going to school today to finish a B.A. in nursing, or criminal justice, is not the same student who would have been studying Homer in 1972.
The relative decline of majors like English is modest when accounting for the increased propensity of Americans to go to college.
In fact, the number of new degrees in English is fairly similar to what it has been for most of the last 20 years as a share of the college-age population. In 2011, 3.1 percent of new bachelor’s degrees were in English language or literature. That figure is down from 4.1 percent 10 years ago, 4.7 percent 20 years ago, and 7.6 percent 40 years ago, in 1971.
But as a proportion of the college-age population, the decline is much less distinct. In 2011, 1.1 out of every 100 21-year-olds graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, down only incrementally from 1.2 in 2001 and 1.3 in 1991. And the percentage of English majors as a share of the population is actually higher than it was in 1981, when only 0.7 out of every 100 21-year-olds received a degree in English.
Meanwhile, Peter Orszag parses the study that Klinkenborg mentioned, showing that college grads in general are slipping “further down the occupational ladder or out of work altogether.” Recent Dish on the humanities here and here.
I stopped shaving in my mid-20s. Back then, I would joke to people that I am a Grateful Deadhead lesbian with a German mother, making it a triple threat for not being allowed to shave my legs and arms. Though I’m nearly 50 now I still, after 25 years, sometimes worry about people judging me for my unshaven legs and armpits. Not enough to actually shave them, mind you, but that thought is always there. Part of me revels in the rebellion of it and that I get to say an internal “Fuck you and your rules, man,” like any good hippy should. But part of me knows I’m being judged and I cringe a bit. How many ways can I create to get stared at and judged as a 6’2″ butch lesbian in a Grateful Dead t-shirt?
But here’s the thing I notice about not shaving. Deadheads and hippies mock women who don’t shave. Other hippy women mock not shaving. Many lesbians shave, to be attractive for other lesbians, though at least they don’t care or even blink when a women with hairy legs walks past them at Pride. And even my female German cousins now shave their legs and armpits (they didn’t up until we were about 30). If it’s just straight men asking for this, they have even more power than even the wildest of far-left radical hippies and feminists could ever imagine.
Another female reader:
I shave my legs only because I’m straight and hairy legs signify otherwise. I don’t feel shame about having hair on my legs (or armpits), nor do I feel that appearing lesbian is objectively bad. It’s just factually incorrect in my case. The haircuts, clothes shopping, hair products, makeup, hairdrying, face tweezing, jewelry, “accessories” (ugh) and on and on are just so fucking time-consuming, and it’s not fair. And I say this as someone who lives in Seattle, where my no-makeup, no-manicure, minimal jewelry, sensible-shoe, perpetual-bad-hair-day look makes me a pretty normal-looking straight woman. I don’t think it matters how girly you look otherwise; sporting hairy legs immediately labels you as gay – such is the ridiculously strong cultural expectation of bare-leggedness for straight women. (Considering how few of my lesbian friends/acquaintances currently have hairy legs – that’d be zero of them – it’s even more nuts that hairy legs remain a signifier of lesbiantasticness, but a signifier they remain.)
Another sends the above Youtube:
This song by Keb’ Mo evokes a strong positive reaction from his female fans whenever he plays it. It’s my favorite song of his (and I’m a big fan).
Another:
I have four reasons why women enjoy shaving their pubic hair:
1. Oral sex, the runaway winner. Both giving and receiving. I give you a pass on knowing this, Andrew, but this is probably the #1 reason why women in relationships go bare.
There is no comparison in the amount of enjoyment for the giving party. No comparison. It also feels better and more sensitive receiving (at least with a clean-shaven man or a soft-skinned woman as the giver; I can’t speak to receiving from a bearded man as that’s the one experience I haven’t had). If the giving partner is happier to give, the receiving partner is happier – full stop. What percentage of women cannot achieve orgasm through intercourse alone? More enjoyable foreplay makes for more orgasms, which makes for stronger relationships.
2. More comfortable during hot humid weather. Hair sweats. Sweat chafes.
3. Lochia! I’ve given birth five times. Lochia is a comparative BREEZE without hair (especially during the first few weeks when you’re not physically able to shower very often).
4. Less hygiene maintenance during the gloppy, mucousy week around ovulation, less annoyance during that slow 24-hour trickle after sex, and obviously less odor and cleanup during menstruation. The normal gooey hassle of femininity is hugely reduced when you don’t have individual curly strands of hair to keep clean.
Maybe you read all that and went, “ew, I don’t want to hear about this.” Well, I don’t want to live it! Female bodies are full of icky-feeling liquid messes, and shaming me into accepting a life without modern, unnatural conveniences like tampons and razor blades isn’t un-repressing me.
Another:
I’m a female ginger, and I have hairy arms and hair on my chest. The latter is quite fine and downy, and when I was younger, it really bothered me. I was relieved whenever I ran across another female whose arms were also noticeably hairy and I shied away from two-piece bathing suits because of the hair on my torso, which probably only I noticed according to my husband whose attention I had to direct to the issue, and being quite the bear, he laughed.
I don’t worry about the hair anymore. Mostly because I am older and I long ago stopped caring about culture and its norms, but this conversation reminded me that as a female, there are a lot of inane “rules” we are expected to adhere to in terms of our bodies that are largely dictated by men. Men are free to be apes, which happens to suit me (except for the ear and nose hair – pluck that, seriously).
Another:
I have dark hair, and lots of it. Dealing with upper lip and even underarms is no big deal; it only takes a few seconds. But shaving my legs takes 5-10 minutes every time. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it essentially doubles my shower time on days when I do it. On the other days, my legs don’t show, period. I recently wore jeans on a 90-degree afternoon because I was rushed that morning. I cringe at my arm hair, too, but I learned in middle school that shaving your arms is somehow even more shameful than leaving them hairy.
Given the extent to which leg hair affects my life, I’ve considered laser. But the dilemma is my daughter. She’s 5, and a carbon copy of me. Her hair will get darker, and she’ll probably have the same issues that I do. Maybe she’ll want to laser it off, too. What would I say? Half of me would want to challenge the notion that a significant portion of her body hair should be removed permanently – no need to adopt my hangups. But the other half thinks back on my own experience and would love to save her the trouble of shaving through all those years before she can afford to pay for removal herself, if that’s what she’s going to do anyway. So I keep shaving, and hope to find her some better role models in the meantime.
One more:
There’s another element to this, which is what many women do to keep hair off other parts of their body – like their faces. I have dark, curly, thick hair; I’m Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side. Since I was a teenager I’ve grown facial hair, and as I aged, it got worse. I had highly-visible hair on and under my chin; on my cheeks; on my upper lip; and I grew a pair of thick sideburns that would be the envy of many men.
As an adult I finally felt I had to confront this – I’d started going everywhere with my eyes down, unable to look people in the eye – and so I had it lasered off. This is a painful, slow, and expensive method to permanent hair removal; basically you are burning out the melanin in your hair follicles with a laser. It hurts like hell, like being snapped repeatedly with an electric rubber band (though the degree of pain varies by person and treatment). Some of the hair grows back, but less of it each time, and it’s thinner, lighter, and weaker. After an intensive initial treatment period lasting about a year, I now go back for a treatment about every eight months or so.
It’s been unpleasant, but I can honestly say that it has changed my life. I feel good; I look good; I walk with my eyes up, meeting people’s gaze.
But I did leave the sideburns. They were so thick I frankly didn’t see how they could be unobtrusively lasered away, since between treatments they would grow back and be obvious to anyone who saw me over time. It was too embarrassing. Now they are the only remnant of my prior hirsute self, and I don’t actually mind them (and I’ve had partners who found them downright hot.) So I trim them down and forget they’re there, and that mostly goes okay except for the occasional incident where I hear a whisper, or catch a stare on the street or on a train.
Still, I imagine my experience isn’t that unusual. For women, facial hair is common, and what we go through to get rid of it – and the judgment we suffer for it, much of it from other women – would surprise you. Behind many a perfectly smooth female face lie thousands of dollars and hours of pain in treatments.
Thanks, as always, for hosting such a fascinating discussion.
Yglesias sees a “pretty strong” case for the war on coal in the above chart from the Hamilton Project, which shows the total social cost of a kilowatt-hour of energy from a variety of resources:
[T]he only way to consider new coal-fired plants a remotely plausible undertaking is to completely ignore the social costs of burning the coal. By the same token, simply throwing all my garbage into my neighbor’s backyard could look like a cheap and appealing alternative to proper trash disposal if I were allowed to completely ignore the costs to my neighbor.
Existing coal plants are a closer call since the private costs of a plant you’ve already built are naturally quite low. But we can see quite clearly that phasing out existing coal in favor of new natural gas is a clear winner. It’s worth dwelling on that for a moment, since it’s actually quite extraordinary for the cost of a brand-new infrastructure project to be lower than the cost of continuing to run what you’ve already built. The moral of the story here is that if you were able to completely ignore political considerations, the case would be very strong for an aggressive and robust war on coal even if you don’t care a whit about renewable energy.
Meanwhile, David Brodwin tires of climate change’s “environment vs. economy” storyline:
Many politicians and journalists will frame this issue in a misleading way. It will be positioned as a question of “promoting growth and jobs” versus “protecting the environment.” Those who oppose action on climate will ask if we can really “afford” to take action on climate at a time that the economy is still in recovery. This framing is misleading because it implies that taking action to protect the climate will cost more than it saves. Nothing could be more wrong. Stabilizing the climate by reducing carbon emissions saves the economy much more than it costs.
Katy Steinmetz describes an outing for returning veterans:
Then they sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a long plank, loaded their guns, and waited in silence for the snow geese to appear. Though seven men sat in the blind on that February morning, the hunting trip was really for just three of them: combat-wounded veterans invited by Freedom Hunters, one of dozens of non-profit groups across the U.S. who believe that hunting can be therapeutic for returning troops. …
The three men say that hunting reminds them of the camaraderie and ritual that defined their time in the service. On the ground in Maryland, they became a makeshift platoon. “You’re replicating the training, the kind of thing that you love to do,” Corbett says, “almost like that guard duty that every sailor and soldier and Marine goes through.” Lamke calls the long stretches of quiet in the goose blind “shared solitude” because he knows he’s with other veterans who feel like they’re at a listening post again. “Even if we never say a word to each other,” Lamke says, “we’re always looking out for each other.”
But it’s not without its dangers:
Military psychiatric experts say that mental health issues make hunting a dangerous hobby for some veterans. “Watching [an animal] die may trigger a lot of intense emotions and impulses,” says Nash. “And having a loaded gun in your hand when you’re feeling intense emotions is probably not a good thing.” Ritchie warns that the smell of gunpowder or ring of shots might trigger flashbacks and that veterans who have had suicidal or homicidal thoughts shouldn’t be going afield. Freedom Hunters tries to screen for potential problems by asking veterans basic questions about hunting experience and combat injuries. But they do not outright ask if a potential hunter has suicidal tendencies or known flashback triggers.
Wth the Senate on board, Dylan Matthews previews the House’s Gang of Seven bill:
The bill will almost certainly include a path to citizenship, border security measures, a guest worker program and other similar attributes to the Senate Gang of Eight bill. However, there will likely be significant differences. [Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.)] has said that he thinks some parts of the Senate bill — such as the scale of its guest worker program, as negotiated by the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — are unworkable, and the House bill may reflect those differences of opinion.
Diaz-Balart has also sounded optimistic about passing the bill through the House with majority support from Republicans, allowing House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) to obey the “Hastert rule,” wherein only bills supported by a “majority of the majority” reach the House floor. However, [Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.)] has signaled it may be able to come to a vote without meeting that requirement. Some outside observers are optimistic about this channel; Clarissa Martínez-De-Castro, director for civic engagement and immigration at the National Council of La Raza, expressed optimism about it in an interview last month.
Nate Cohn, on the other hand, argues that “if the Senate bill can only attract 30 percent of Senate Republicans, it has no chance of earning 50 percent of the more conservative House GOP caucus”:
Which brings immigration back to the so-called “Hastert Rule.” Last week, Speaker Boehner suggested that he wouldn’t move an immigration bill without the support of a majority of House Republicans. If so, immigration reform is in jeopardy. The Speaker and House Republicans have few incentives—if any—to cave to immigration reform. When Boehner folded on the “Hastert Rule” in the past, many or maybe most House Republicans probably thought it was a good idea. No, they didn’t like Sandy relief, VAWA, or the fiscal cliff compromise, but none of those bills were bad enough to justify stomaching the public backlash that would have accompanied outright blocking the legislation. In contrast, House Republicans appear authentically opposed to immigration reform. They also hail from safe, conservative districts where the Hispanic vote is unlikely to threaten their reelection campaigns.
Morrissey agrees that immigration reform could fail in the House:
[W]hen will the House get around to passing their bills? Nothing has come out of committee yet, and there’s only about three weeks left on the legislative schedule before the August recess. When they come back, both chambers will be working on debt ceilings and FY2014 budgets, which have tighter deadlines than does immigration reform. There’s a good chance that the House will end up doing nothing on immigration reform, or perhaps only passing a border-security bill that the Senate will ignore.
Chait sees another way forward, a “discharge petition” to make sure the bill gets a vote:
If 218 members of the House sign one, then it automatically comes to the House floor for a vote. Last December, Democrats in the House threatened a discharge petition to bring up a Senate bill extending the Bush tax cuts on income under $250,000 a year. …
So then the question would be, could Democrats find seventeen House Republicans willing to endure the wrath of conservatives to sign a discharge petition? The threat would come from primary challenges from conservatives. On the other hand, there is a lot of pro-immigration money out there available to support any Republican facing such a challenge. And the other big advantage of a discharge petition is that Republicans wouldn’t need to save bipartisan face by rounding up a respectable number of their own party to support it. Just the bare minimum would do.
Indeed, the House wouldn’t have to legislate at all — it could (and would have to) simply photocopy the Senate bill. No hearings, no negotiations — and since the House is bad at all those things, that’s another plus.
I fear that the chaotic nature of the GOP may turn this critical moment to ashes. But Chait’s proposal is an intriguing one. And some of the grandstanding right now is exactly that: grandstanding. My true worry is simply that the GOP hates the president so much that giving him another massive reform, after Obamacare, would cement his transformational legacy and drive them nuts. It’s not rational, but reason has almost no role any more in the GOP base.
“Mike Huckabee is not only recruiting Jesus to be a foot soldier in the culture wars; he’s trying to raise money for his political action committee on it. I understand that how one views this is entirely subjective, but I for one find this kind of thing to be, at a minimum, tasteless and crass. We all get the game that’s being played: the Supreme Court renders a verdict on a hot-button social issue –and within hours ‘Jesus wept’ is used as a fundraising tool. One has to strike while the iron is hot, after all. Still, you might think that a Christian would use a good deal of caution when it comes to leveraging poignant verses about Jesus into three dollar donations for HuckPAC. …
I will say that on policy, Mr. Huckabee and I are fairly close in the views we hold (though certainly not identical). But what troubles me, and what I would hope would trouble Huckabee, is we’ve seen what happens when Christians use their faith as a blunt political instrument. It isn’t good for politics; but it’s a good deal worse for Christianity. A politicized faith is discrediting. It pushes people away. And it frankly distorts who Jesus was,” – Peter Wehner.
Andrew, please don’t ruin this great joy we’re all feeling about DOMA and Prop 8 by getting caught up again in your personal three-decade-old psychodrama with the Clintons. Bill is not a sociopath, per your recent post. He may have been craven to sign DOMA because he thought it was needed to salvage his reelection (and he may have been right, for whatever that’s worth), but that doesn’t even put him in the top 100 lists of political villains towards the gay community in the 1990s. If you haven’t read Josh Marshall’s take on DOMA back then, you should. He perfectly captures my take on the situation at the time, and now.
For the record, I’m a 45 year old gay man, and no I’m not an HRC guy – I find them as useless as you do – and you’re a personal hero of mine. But please don’t go down one of the over-the-top rabbit holes you do a couple times every year.
Andrew, in another post you said that gay rights proponents should approach their former adversaries with a spirit of generosity. Maybe you should start with yourself and your bitterness towards the Clintons.
When he actually apologizes, I’ll leave this behind. But you cannot forgive someone who refuses to admit they did something wrong. Even above, he fails to take responsibility for what he did. He never took responsibility for his own actions. he wasn’t a passive observer on this; he was an active enemy of marriage equality, even exploiting homophobia in a re-election he was already winning in a landslide. Another reader:
I’m not going to defend Clinton and his craven actions around DOMA, but there are a few things that strike me about then and now. We had just come through the Federal Marriage Amendment. So, DOMA could be seen as a stop-gap measure to keep something like it from actually happening. Clinton doesn’t seem to have mentioned this in his more recent speeches, but it was surely a factor. Also, I have to wonder if something like DOMA needed to happen to get us to where we are today.
It kept us “safe,” if you will, from same-sex marriage while allowing it to build up from the grassroots. Of course, we’ll never know given that we can’t go back and test that theory. But change does often happen this way.
Tim Noah recognizes that “one of the ironies of the marriage equality movement is the conservative movement’s stubborn refusal to recognize its fundamentally conservative nature”:
John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner [of Lawrence v. Texas] were not conservatives’ type of people. One was demonstrably irresponsible, the other was a rootless drifter, and their case was about a sexual act (albeit one never actually committed) that most conservatives really don’t like to think about. Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer [of U.S. v. Windsor], on the other hand, are precisely conservatives’ type of people (except for their sexual orientation and maybe their politics). They are (in Spyer’s case, were) affluent and mutually committed and responsible members of society. Their case is about not being bullied by the IRS into paying too much in taxes, which is something conservatives fret about all the time.
When the history books are written, one likely conclusion will be that the swift ascendancy of gay rights in the second decade of the 21st century was largely attributable to gay people’s relentless pursuit of a boring lifestyle.
And this has definitely affected my views about American conservatism. There is a conservative position against marriage equality, which is simply resistance to any drastic change in such a crucial institution. But thanks to federalism, we can now see that fears of unintended consequences have not materialized so far in any of the equality states, and that marriage as a whole is in a much worse state where heterosexuals-only marriage endures. What you would expect an actual socially conservative party to do would be to adapt to these new realities, after legitimate initial skepticism, and try to coopt an emerging social group by integrating them into society in a conservative way.
Imagine, say, a pro-marriage movement among African-Americans. Do you think the GOP would oppose it ferociously? Imagine any group’s desire to leave behind leftist balkanization and cultural revolt in order to embrace the values of family, stability and responsibility. On what grounds would the GOP oppose it? None. So why the resilient hostility to gay conservatives and their remarkable triumph in a traditionally leftist sub-population? In fact, it is precisely those gay conservatives who are barred from Fox News – or immediately hazed by homophobes like Erick Erickson.
In Britain, you can see a direct analogy. The Tories went from hostility to homosexual equality in the 1980s to an embrace of it as a conservative cause in the 21st Century. To cite David Cameron’s speech to his own party conference:
I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative, I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.
Canada’s and New Zealand’s Conservative parties have also backed the reform. And many Republicans have supported it now as well. So why the remaining resilience?
The only real explanation is religious fundamentalism.
The GOP, at its core, is a religious organization, not a political one. It is digging in deeper on immigration reform, and marriage equality, and abortion. It is not acting as a rational actor in political competition but as a fundamentalist movement, gerrymandering its way to total resistance to modernity’s increasing diversity of views and beliefs. It is emphatically not a socially conservative force: it is a radical, fundamentalist movement, incapable of accepting any political settlement that does not comport with unchanging, eternal dicta.
It is the great tragedy of the era that Republicans targeted one of the few grass-roots, genuinely conservative movements as their implacable enemy in the last quarter century. They went after the one group truly trying to shore up and support marriage – and they even wanted to amend the Constitution to do so. They did so, I believe, for one reason alone: fundamentalism. And that is not conservatism. In so many ways, it is conservatism’s eternal nemesis: the refusal to adjust to the times in favor of an ideology that never changes.
(Photo: Same-sex couple Joseph and Jim pose for a photo as they wait to be officially married at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office on the first day New York State’s Marriage Equality Act went into effect July 24, 2011 in New York City. By Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images.)
There was always something desperate about them: an attempt somehow, after five years of remarkably scandal-free governance, to try once again and prove Michelle Malkin’s fantasies (and Peggy Noonan’s feelings) correct. Darrell Issa was the perfect charlatan for the purpose; and Roger Ailes desperately needed a new narrative in the post-election doldrums. But there really was no there there … and you can feel the air escaping from the hysteria balloons. Chait marks the end of this strange interlude of Republicans’ creating reality and failing:
The IRS inspector general is defending its probe, but the IRS’s flagging of conservative groups seems, at worst, to be marginally stricter than its flagging of liberal groups, not the one-sided political witch hunt portrayed by early reports.
What about the rest of the scandals? Well, there aren’t any, and there never were. Benghazi is a case of a bunch of confused agencies caught up in a fast-moving story trying to coordinate talking points. The ever-shifting third leg of the Obama scandal trifecta — Obama’s prosecution of leaks, or use of the National Security Agency — is not a scandal at all. It’s a policy controversy. One can argue that Obama’s policy stance is wrong, or dangerous, or a threat to democracy. But when the president is carrying out duly passed laws and acting at every stage with judicial approval, then the issue is the laws themselves, not misconduct.
The whole Obama scandal episode is a classic creation of a “narrative” — the stitching together of unrelated data points into a story.
The Dish 