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Jonathan Bernstein is ignoring the polling numbers on Obamacare until it takes effect because he doubts Americans “have strong views of a law that they know little about and that has all sorts of components”:

Look, the Affordable Care Act is unpopular! After all, a new CNN poll finds 43 percent of respondents support Obamacare, while 54 percent oppose it. Look, the Affordable Care Act is popular after all! Or at least government intervention to achieve universal health insurance is popular. Yes, 54 percent oppose the ACA, but almost half of those think it’s not liberal enough. Wait — those can’t both be right, can they? The answer is more basic: Neither of them are. Conservatives convinced by this poll’s headline number that everyone hates Obamacare are wrong; so are liberals convinced that everyone really loves it are wrong, too. …

In the long run, what will really matter is whether the various programs included in the ACA actually work. If they do, they’ll be impossible to repeal (although fights over, for example, subsidy levels will become standard political fights). If implementation goes badly — if the exchanges are impossible to navigate, or large employers really do suddenly stop offering health insurance as a benefit — then new changes won’t take long.

Steve Benen, however, predicts divergent views to remain beyond implementation:

Now, because of state-by-state differences, there will be quite a bit of variety in outcomes. If you live in California or another state dominated by Democratic officials, you’ll likely have a very positive impression of how the law is being implemented, and how it benefits you, your family, and your community. If you live in, say, Texas, you’re likely to have a very different kind of experience. …

It’s not necessarily an explicitly partisan matter — I’m not saying that Democrats are necessarily better at health care governance. Rather, the point is, Democrats don’t have an ideological axe to grind when it comes to trying to sabotage federal health care law. Rick Perry, however, does. To be sure, these red-state residents won’t be left out entirely, and they’ll still benefit from all kinds of consumer protections and expanded access that they’ll really appreciate, even if they don’t yet realize the available benefits. But the full benefits of implementation will elude them for a while in ways blue-state residents won’t have to deal with.

Aviva Shen criticizes a new British ad campaign for deciding that “the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women”:

The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.

Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.

Jessica Grose is no fan of the ad, but she sees reason to encourage discussion of fertility:

[T]here has to be a way to have an honest conversation about how fertility declines with age—and about what having difficulty conceiving feels like—without claims that we’re “shaming” women or ad campaigns that are designed to scare women with images of pregnant old hags. If women don’t want to have kids, that’s great! They should not have them or be made to feel bad for not having them. But when 70 percent of women say they do want kids, and more and more are having them later and later, I don’t see anything wrong with arming them with facts.

A study (pdf) from a couple years ago tested women’s knowledge of fertility. One highlight:

Nearly half (47%) of women participating in the survey correctly recognize that 10–29% of all couples are infertile. However, approximately 9 out of 10 women do not realize that more than 7 out of 10 couples in which the woman is over 40 experience fertility problems.

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Dan Savage needs little introduction to Dish readers, but here is his Wiki page to peruse. Dan just came out with a new book yesterday, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics. From a recent interview with Logan Lynn:

Savage: Well, the book is about marriage and family, and is a bit more political. I talk about healthcare and Obamacare, gun control, sex education…it originally started out as just a collection of essays, things I had written other places, just bringing things I had written over the last decade together. Then I started revising them and reworking them. Originally the book was going to be 80% old stuff and 20% new stuff, and now it’s 90% new stuff. There’s basically nothing in there that isn’t reworked or brand new. There is a big chapter about marriage, and where we are at right now…and that’s been changing so rapidly, I want the book to come out ASAP. I wrote about adopting, about becoming parents, about Terry and I getting married; and this book has essays about life and memoir-y stuff about my mother’s death, about my son, now 15, coming out to us as straight when he was 12, which was kind-of bizarro hilarious…

Lynn: Alternate universe!

Savage: Yeah, like, how we were so careful all his life to let him know we loved him whoever he was, and yet somehow still he thought we were going to be disappointed that he wasn’t gay. It really broke my heart. So, I touch on all of that stuff. There’s some humor and comedy in the book as well. I wrote a play – a short play – that’s in the book about Jesus and the huge asshole, which is Jesus talking to a fundamentalist Christian who opposes healthcare reform. I think people will enjoy it.

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Cue the Jaws soundtrack. Josh Rogin reports that the administration has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone in Syria:

President Obama’s dual-track strategy of continuing to pursue a political solution to the two-year-old uprising in Syria while also preparing for more direct U.S. military involvement includes authorizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first time to plan for multilateral military actions inside Syria, the two officials said. They added that no decisions on actually using force have yet been made.

“The White House is still in contemplation mode but the planning is moving forward and it’s more advanced than it’s ever been,” one administration official told The Daily Beast. “All this effort to pressure the regime is part of the overall effort to find a political solution, but what happens if Geneva fails? It’s only prudent to plan for other options.”

In an update to the story, a Pentagon spokesman claims that there “is no new planning effort underway” and that the “Joint Staff, along with the relevant combatant commanders, continue to conduct prudent planning for a range of possible military options.” Friedersdorf cuts through the pro-war jargon:

The article also quotes Robert Zarate, policy director at the Foreign Policy Initiative, a hawkish organization. His euphemisms of choice: “No doubt, the United States and its like-minded allies and partners are fully capable, without the use of ground troops, of obviating the Assad regime’s degraded, fixed, and mobile air defenses and suppressing the regime’s use of airpower.”

Does anyone think he’d describe Syrian planes bombing a U.S. aircraft carrier as “obviating” our naval assets? The question before us is whether America should wage war in Syria by bombing its weapons, maintaining a presence in its airspace, and shooting at its pilots if they take off. On hearing the phrase “no-fly-zone,” how many Americans would realize all that is involved?

I trust “start a war against Syria” would poll poorly.

Which is why we must be careful that this does not get rushed, especially after the Libya debacle. And yes: debacle. Here’s the actual Benghazi story Republicans are uninterested in, for some reason:

Attacks on police stations and patrols have become frequent in the city, which has been the scene of power struggles among armed Islamist factions.

There’s also a classic power vacuum, as the Libyan parliament bars anyone who was part of the former regime from governing, forcing the resignation of chairman of the Libyan General National Congress. It reminds me of the great error of de-Baathification in post-Saddam Iraq. Allahpundit suspects a no-fly zone (NFZ) over Syria won’t happen:

The only way a (NFZ) will play politically for Obama with American voters is if it’s the same sort of turkey shoot that the Libyan NFZ was — which it won’t be. McCain told the Daily Beast that a realistic plan for a no-fly zone “would include hundreds of planes, and would be most effective if it included destroying Syrian airplanes on runways.” It’d be a huge, aggressive operation, and the presence of those Russian missiles means it might not be without casualties.

I’d say the two most important imperatives for the Obama administration in the next three years are negative ones: not getting involved in wars in Syria or Iran. The more energy-independent we become, the easier it will be to leave this region to its own demons.

(Photo: Men search for their relatives amongst the bodies of Syrian civilians executed and dumped in the Quweiq river, in the grounds of the courtyard of the Yarmouk School, in the Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo on January 30, 2013. By J M Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

After digging into the literature on race and genetics, Ta-Nehisi interviews geneticist Neil Risch about race, IQ and other genetics issues. There’s a lot of good stuff TNC has unearthed – among them these papers: “The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research” and “Assessing Genetic Contributions to Phenotypic Differences Among ‘Racial’ and ‘Ethnic’ Groups“. Have at them. Here’s the final question and answer:

Your paper on assessing genetic contributions to phenotype, seemed skeptical that we would ever tease out a group-wide genetic component when looking at things like cognitive skills or personality disposition. Am I reading that right? Are “intelligence” and “disposition” just too complicated?

Joanna Mountain and I tried to explain this in our Nature Genetics paper on group differences.  It is very challenging to assign causes to group differences. As far as genetics goes, if you have identified a particular gene which clearly influences a trait, and the frequency of that gene differs between populations, that would be pretty good evidence. But traits like “intelligence” or other behaviors (at least in the normal range), to the extent they are genetic, are “polygenic.” That means no single genes have large effects — there are many genes involved, each with a very small effect. Such gene effects are difficult if not impossible to find. The problem in assessing group differences is the confounding between genetic and social/cultural factors. If you had individuals who are genetically one thing but socially another, you might be able to tease it apart, but that is generally not the case.

In our paper, we tried to show that a trait can appear to have high “genetic heritability” in any particular population, but the explanation for a group difference for that trait could be either entirely genetic or entirely environmental or some combination in between.

So, in my view, at this point, any comment about the etiology of group differences, for “intelligence” or anything else, in the absence of specific identified genes (or environmental factors, for that matter), is speculation.

I note that Risch says that “traits like ‘intelligence’ or other behaviors (at least in the normal range), to the extent they are genetic, are ‘polygenic.'” That has to be true. The answer to this question is likely to be extremely complicated – rather like the impact of genetics and environment in the persistent phenomenon of homosexuality. But what if the normal range is where we shouldn’t look for insight. The major ongoing Chinese experiment to find the genetics of intelligence is focusing on extremely high IQ individuals – to see how their DNA is different than the rest of us. Razib praises TNC’s interview. But he thinks that the race, IQ and genetics question “will semi-resolve within the next 10 years”:

Let’s focus on the black-white case in the American context. On intelligence tests the average black American scores a bit less than 1 standard deviation below the average white American. As I’ve observed before the average black American is ~20% European, but there is variation around this value. Because the admixture is relatively recent (median ~150 years before the present) there is a wide range across the population of ancestry. In fact, the admixture is recent enough that siblings may even differ in the amount of European ancestry on a genomic level. An additional issue which is of relevance is that the correlation between ancestry and physical appearance in mixed populations is modest. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who are more European in ancestry in the African American population who have darker skins and more African features than those who have less European ancestry. Obviously on average more European ancestry predicts a more European appearance, but this is true only on average. There are many exceptions to this trend.

At this point many of you should have anticipated where I’m going. If the gap between blacks and whites on psychometric tests is totally driven by genetic differences between Africans and Europeans, then the gap should be obvious between pools of individuals of varying levels of European ancestry within the African American population. It seems unlikely that it would be that simple (i.e., all driven by genes without any sensitivity to environmental inputs or context). Therefore I suspect some design where you compare siblings would be more informative.

I cannot predict scientific findings. But I hope we make empirical progress, with less political drama. The main threat to that, of course, is the political stigmatization of such research. Which is why Jason Richwine’s sweeping political inferences from decent empirical work was actually self-defeating.

Garance Franke-Ruta compares Obama’s bureaucratic scandals to Clinton’s rivetingly human ones:

The main difference is this: In contrast to the highly personal nature of the Clinton scandals, none of the so-called Obama scandals involve direct actions by the president or his wife, let alone their romantic or financial dealings before or during their time in office. Instead, the controversies swirling around the administration all involve the conduct of individuals within the federal government overseen by Obama as the head of the executive branch.

Well: duh. Meanwhile, Charles Franklin rightly recommends patience when assessing the impact of recent events on Obama’s approval numbers:

In the rush to find instant effects of events, we look at data before there is enough evidence. But more important, the enduring political impact of events, if there are any, are not usually things we see in a week or even two but rather shifts in trends that set approval on a new trajectory, whether up or down. Rare events, such as the killing of bin Laden do produce almost immediate jumps in approval, but those events usually prove fleeting and the trend rapidly returns to its previous track. The real test of the impact of events over the past two weeks will come in six months when we can look back and see if May 8 represented a turning point after which the trend in approval shifted, either up or down, with lasting consequences. Such enduring shifts are the events that reshape presidencies, not short term bounces.

I agree. And, of course, we cannot know if there’s something more there than has yet to meet the eye. But the critical issue will also be the economy – which buoyed Clinton in his darkest hours – and the failure or success of the GOP in actually proposing some solutions to some pressing problems that can actually stand a chance of getting done. In other words, it’s not just Obama and the “scandals”. It’s the general political climate that could make these grow in intensity or peter out.

Ezra weighs in on Chait’s piece on Josh Barro and the plight of reformists on the right:

If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.

He is indeed a moderate Republican, which is why I’ve always liked his approach to governing and to policy. And that, of course, makes Ross Douthat nervous, because Ross is a smart man trying to engage a party that is currently out of its tiny mind. He reminds me of sane and sober Labourites in the early 1980s. But at least they fully copped to the extremism of their own side.

Ross won’t quite. He disputes Ezra on two grounds: first that the political environment has changed too. He says, for example, that the GOP’s retreat from cap-and-trade is a function of the 2008 economic meltdown, a temporary abatement in warming, the failure of global cap and trade, etc. But that would lead to healthy conservative skepticism of policies like cap and trade, and an attempt to think through alternatives. Jim Manzi represents this line of thinking best. But what Ross’s party has actually done is embrace total climate change denialism. That’s a huge shift toward irrationalism, fueled by fundamentalist Christianity, which, of course, Ross won’t recognize as a core part of the GOP problem. Because if he did, he would be Frummed out of the party altogether.

Then Ross argues that the GOP is more moderate than Ezra claims. So Ross defends the GOP on, say, immigration, because it has a healthier internal debate, which more closely represents public divisions. But, in fact, the GOP base, as Ross knows, is dedicated to destroying immigration reform, just as it did when even Bush was in office. Again, compare this with Reagan’s amnesty and an era where open borders conservatives were mainstream in the GOP (yes, I remember that). The actual Ronald Reagan would not stand a chance in today’s GOP. And the only argument for immigration reform that has any real traction in the party is electoral and arithmetical, not ideological. And those spearheading the effort, like Marco Rubio, face a perilous future in their party.

On taxes, the GOP is relentless, even though the boundaries of the debate have shifted dramatically their way since the 1980s. With revenue far too low, and structural spending bound to increase as we support baby-boom retirees, an absolutist refusal to raise any more revenues is a 10 on the scale of 1 – 10. This is especially true when the GOP is demanding much more spending on national “defense”. Yes, there are, mercifully, a few civil libertarian voices on the right, but surely Ross knows that his party reacted to Obama’s war on terror speech last week as if it were treason. Butters:

“At a time we need resolve the most, we’re sounding retreat.”

Peter King, the former terrorist-funder turned terrorist scourge, echoes the Ailes line:

“In many ways al Qaeda is more dangerous now than it was prior to September 11.”

Does Ross believe that? Does any sane person believe that? The truth is that the GOP is the most extreme, nihilist pseudo-conservative party I have seen in my lifetime in any developed country.

The GOP, for example, is in favor of torture as a national policy, placing it outside every mainstream right-of-center party in the West. How far have they traveled? Reagan strongly supported and signed the UN Convention Against Torture (and anything even close to it).

On Medicare, Ross is right that premium support, done right, is an arguably centrist position. But we know what Paul Ryan originally wanted – and Obama is the first Democratic president willing to cut Medicare seriously as part of a big fiscal deal. Every time Obama moves to the fiscal right, the GOP moves the goalposts one more time – and then demonize the president for, say, a stimulus package that was one third tax cuts. On social issues, the GOP is now further to the right than it has ever been, while the country has found a new middle. The GOP supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay couples from having any formal rights at all; and a federal ban on all abortions. Again, you have to find a neo-fascist party in other Western countries to see any Western equivalent. The fundamentalists cannot compromise on this – because their God won’t compromise. And the base has no other ideological foundation than fundamentalism of various neurotic kinds.

There’s a case to be made for pure oppositionism. But I truly think Ross under-estimates the depth of the nihilism that truly motivates his party, the thinly veiled racism and unveiled homophobia that courses through its activist veins, and the theocratic impulses that uniquely fire up the base. And I don’t think the fever is breaking. The IRS scandal will deepen and intensify all the defensive and self-defeating paranoia on the partisan right. Issa will be their champion; Ailes the fanner of the conspiratorial flames; and talk radio the defining ideological conversation.

Barro sees this as plainly as day. Ross is making, presumably, another calculation. For my part, I suspect there’s little hope for the GOP; and I increasingly see it as conservatism’s most implacable ideological, radical, destructive foe. I thought it would get worse before it got better; but I see no signs of the pathologies weakening. In the wake of an epic defeat, they appear to be gathering strength.

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[Re-posted from yesterday with many questions added by readers]

A brief bio of Barro:

He is the lead writer for the Ticker, an economics and politics blog hosted by Bloomberg L.P.. He appears regularly on Bloomberg Television and has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Time named Barro’s Twitter feed one of “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013”, one of ten in the Politics category. In 2012, Forbes selected him as one of the “30 Under 30” media “brightest stars under the age of 30.” Barro describes himself as a Republican, but has expressed opposition to the policies of the Republican party.

Last week the Dish highlighted Chait’s profile of Barro. Andrew Leonard wrote of him recently:

He is, in my opinion, a rare breed indeed: an intellectually honest analyst of political and economic affairs who makes up his own mind, does not hew to any preset ideology and relies on facts to makes his arguments. People who disagree with him have labeled him conservative, liberal and libertarian. That’s not easy to achieve! Barro can wage total war against the notion that austerity is the correct prescription for our economic problems while at the same time arguing that public sector unions are bankrupting state governments. I follow him because I always learn something from him, even when I disagree with him. … Josh Barro is also the gay son of the famously arch-conservative economist Robert Barro, which makes him inherently interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of his analysis, and everything to do with the social and cultural splits that define our current society.

To submit a question for Josh, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing Josh answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. Thanks for your help.

Peter Bronski takes on skeptics who question the possibility of “high renewable” energy future:

Such skeptics often point to a number of familiar criticisms: that high penetrations of renewables are not possible; that such a future requires major technological innovation; that it requires unreasonable amounts of energy storage to balance variable wind and solar; that it requires massive build-out of transmission infrastructure, biomass generation capacity, large-scale hydro, or all of the above; that it requires major investment that simply isn’t there; that it is uncompetitively costly (at least without large subsidies); that variable renewables will undermine the reliability of grid power. Couple such skepticism with IEA’s recent report noting that renewables have yet to make a serious dent in the carbon intensity of the global energy system—on which fossil fuels seem to have a strangle hold—and it’d be easy to side with the skeptics, but they are wrong.

Renewables’ track record shows that they continue to outpace skeptics’ expectations.

“People thought that maybe renewables would get to two percent. When they did that, people said maybe five percent. Then 10 percent,” says Hutch Hutchinson, managing director at [the Rocky Mountain Institute]. “Renewables have been fighting and scratching the entire way. Now, there’s good analytical evidence that with some creativity and customary levels of reinvestment in our energy system, we can get to a high renewables future.”

Bronski insists that the energy industry needs to change its mindset:

“Renewable energy futures are no longer a matter of technology—we have all the technologies we need—and are no longer a matter of economics either,” says REN21’s [Eric] Martinot. “We’re just not making the cost comparisons in the right way. It’s our way of thinking and our power industry structure that makes renewable energy seem more expensive, not the technology itself.” That power industry structure includes hefty and durable fossil fuel subsidies, which amount to $1.9 trillion per year or more, according to a report from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year. Those fossil fuel subsidies far outweighed the smaller and more transient subsidies offered to renewables, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2012.

(Photo: A 2 MW wind turbine of German alternative energy producer Energiequelle GmbH spins in a field of wheat on June 20, 2011 near Feldheim, Germany. The country is investing heavily in renewable energy sources as part of its plan to abandown nuclear energy by 2022. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images.)

Ron Unz thinks that “principled liberals and conservatives should both demand that any immigration reform proposal also include a sharp rise in the federal minimum wage”:

The reason is simple. Any increase in the supply or job mobility of willing workers will tend to benefit Capital at the expense of Labor, stifling any growth in working-class wages, especially given our high unemployment rates. The last 40 years have seen a huge increase in immigration, and it is hardly coincidental that median American wages have been stagnant or declining throughout most of this same period. A large boost in the minimum wage, perhaps to $12 an hour or more, would be the best means of reversing our current economic race to the bottom.

Cowen, on the other hand, doesn’t see unskilled immigration as threat:

In my view the evidence (and here) suggests that the negative wage pressures on unskilled labor, to the extent they have international origins at all (as opposed to TGS or automation or political factors), come more from outsourcing and trade than from immigration.  So if you limit low-skilled immigration, outsourcing likely will go up, as it would be harder to find cheap labor in the United States.  The United States will lose the complementary jobs as well, such as the truck driver who brings cafeteria snacks to the call center.  Conversely, if you increase low-skilled immigration, you will also get more investment in the United States and more complementary jobs as well and possibly some increasing returns from clustering and maybe more net tax revenue too.  On top of that the individuals themselves have greater choice as to where to spend their lives and build their careers.