Laura Sjoberg informs us that she is working to form a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, and Allies Caucus of the International Studies Association (the premier organization of academic IR scholars) in order to:
A. To promote fair and equal treatment of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, and Queer and Allies (hereafter LGBTQA) community in the International Studies Association (hereafter ISA) and in the profession of international studies, in areas including but not limited to graduate school admission, financial assistance in schools, employment, tenure, and promotion.
B. To combat discrimination against and provide support for LGBTQA faculty, student, and professional members of the International Studies Association.
C. To encourage the application of the skills of scholars and students of international studies to combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
D. To promote the recruitment of new members to the Caucus specifically and ISA generally.
Leaving aside that the last of the four goals amounts to a self-licking ice cream cone (not that there’s anything wrong with that) how needed are these? Is there really rampant discrimination on the basis of sex in the academy these days? Homosexuality is mainstream in our broader society at this point, much less the relatively liberal halls of academe.
Do LGTBQ types face discrimination in financial aid or grad school admissions? If so, how? That is, how would the bureaucratic offices who make these decisions even know that the people were LGTBQ? (One presumes, irrespective of the answer, that Allies are safe in this regard.)
I suppose that a man showing up for a job interview wearing lipstick and a dress might still be poorly received in many departments across the land. But so might a man showing up with a mustache or blue jeans or a too-nice suit.
Beyond this, what has any of this to do with ISA? It was “was founded in 1959 to promote research and education in international affairs.” Its current purpose is still along those lines:
I. Provide opportunities for communications among educators, researchers, and practitioners in order to continually share intellectual interests and meet the challenges of a changing global environment
II. Develop contacts among specialists from all parts of the world in order to facilitate scientific and cultural change
III. Provide channels of communication between academics and policy makers to promote a successful link between the production of knowledge and its utilization
IV. Improve the teaching and dissemination of ideas, concepts, methods, and information in the field of International Studies
Rather than hijacking a purely scholarly organization with grievance issues, why not form a caucus within, say, the American Association of University Professors?
One possible explanation: Sjobert is also chair of ISA’s Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section. In April, she expressed concern that some LGTBQ members of ISA might chose not to attend the 2010 annual meeting in New Orleans on the grounds that “there is a substantial risk of a lack of equal protection of the laws in the most dire possible situations, including but not limited to critical medical emergencies.” Apparently, this concern was not heeded and the meeting’s still on.
But, if LGTBQ activism can already take place (albeit, not successfully in this case) within the context of an existing organized section, why the need for a caucus?
Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle are among those recommending Saturday Night Live’s opening sketch parodying a joint press conference with President Obama and Chinese President Hu.
Drezner quips that the sketch manages to convey the nature of the relationship much more succinctly than his own 40-page academic treatise.
Note that, although it appears that President Hu has the power because he is repeatedly berating Obama, the content of the skit suggests otherwise. Hu’s repeated complaints that the United States is, er, “doing sex” to him demonstrates the very limited leverage China has over U.S. policy.
While $800 billion is indeed a lot of money, it’s not as large a chunk of U.S. public debt as widely imagined. But it’s enough to virtually assure that China will keep lending us more money.
As an aside, I’m bemused that SNL has managed to get away with having a white guy playing Obama for this long, much less having a white guy playing Hu and a white woman affecting the broken English of a Chinese translator.
Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private. After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained classified national security information at the drop of a hat.
While that’s a pretty persuasive critique on its face, the comparison is ultimately false.
In the case of the East Anglia listservs, the victims are private individuals. By contrast, the Pentagon Papers and various intelligence leaks published during the Bush era were owned by the United States Government and arguably kept secret partly to shield elected leaders from political fallout. Nor were the latter “stolen” in the same sense as the former. Rather, people authorized to receive the information shared it with reporters who are under no obligation to protect classified secrets.
What would be interesting is to see how the NYT and others handle illegally obtained documents from people with whom they don’t politically agree. Have they republished similarly stolen emails that were harmful to, say, tobacco companies or investment bankers?
If so, then were have a much better case for hypocrisy.
In a front piece story in today’s NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in.
Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.
[...]
With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[...]
Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode. The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.
[...]
The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government. “What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”
Emphases mine.
This sounds ominous and unsustainable. But Paul Krugman, recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, say these fears are overblown.
As Dean says, the numbers don’t fit the scare story — a decade from now interest payments will reach a level not seen since … 1992. And the market seems unworried, since long-term rates remain low.
The “Dean” is question is Dean Baker of The American Prospect. He sarcastically titles his post, “In Just a Decade the U.S. Interest Burden Could Be as High as It Was in 1992!!!!!!!”
There is no evidence presented in this article that the rise in interest rates will place the U.S. government in a situation where it will be unable to pay its bills and no one cited in this article makes such a claim.
The article is also completely unbalanced in not presenting the views of any economist who could put the deficit/debt issue in perspective for readers.
Krugman makes the same charge but, oddly, neither of them bother to actually present a counterargument.
Andrews argues that most of the debt is in short-term loans whose price will go up as there becomes more competition for money. He makes what strikes me as a plausible case that higher interest rates, growth in entitlement spending, and a smaller tax base will make servicing the debt very, very difficult. Countervailing factors could offset this but neither Krugman nor Baker tell us what they might be.
It’s true that we had gloom and doom forecasts during the 1992 recession. But we only solved those through the dual magic of the dotcom bubble and the post-Cold War defense drawdown. It’s not likely that those events will repeat themselves.
Photo by Flickr user kandyjaxx under Creative Commons license.
YOU’RE A sensible, principled conservative. You want America to be a land of boundless opportunity and freedom, where people are treated as individuals and judged on their merits. You reject the divisive identity politics of the left – what matters most about any of us, you would insist, is not race or class or ethnic origins: it is personal character and achievement. There are few things about contemporary politics you deplore more than the demonizing or scapegoating of entire groups (“white males,’’ “the rich,’’ “the Christian right,’’ “gun owners’’), as though every member of the group is interchangeable and indistinguishable, wholly defined by a single disparaging label.
True.
But let someone mention “illegal immigrants,’’ and your principles fly out the window.
No, not me.
So when Governor Deval Patrick recommends allowing young illegal immigrants – residents of Massachusetts who have graduated from high school – to attend a public college and pay in-state tuition, you flip out. This is outrageous, you protest. It rewards people who broke the rules. It’s unfair to the taxpayers who subsidize public higher education. Why should an illegal immigrant get a valuable tuition break that Massachusetts wouldn’t give to a kid from Maine or New Hampshire?
You vigorously agree with Charlie Baker, a Republican candidate for governor. “If you’re illegally here, you’re illegally here,’’ Baker said last week. “The notion that we should treat illegal immigrants with the same benefits and opportunities that legal immigrants and legal citizens have doesn’t make any sense to me.’’
It is dispiriting to see Baker, a man of considerable intellectual heft, stoop to such shallow sloganeering. It is even more dispiriting to see conservatives assail immigrants instead of the insane immigration system that gave most of them no legal way to enter the United States. On the whole, illegal immigrants are just the sort of newcomers Americans should embrace: self-motivated risk-takers, strivers determined to improve themselves, hard-working men and women willing to take the meanest jobs if it will give them a shot at building their own American dream. Why would we want to punish them? Why would we want to punish their kids?
But these aren’t mutually exclusive. I simultaneously agree with Jacoby that our immigration system is broken, that accepting and assimilating more of them is on the whole a good thing, and that it makes sense to educate assimilated immigrants and yet believe that we ought to enforce our laws. The fact that we can’t or won’t enforce our immigration policy is a good reason to change it — not a reason to pretend the laws don’t exist.
Jacoby cherry picks a particularly hard case:
A couple from Brazil, seeking a better life for themselves and their 2-month-old daughter, enter the United States unlawfully. They settle in Massachusetts, where 18 years later the girl graduates from a public high school, as assimilated and acculturated an American as her classmates in every respect – except that they are US citizens, and she, by virtue of a decision made when she was a baby, is not. Her classmates can attend the University of Massachusetts, paying $9,704 a year in tuition, the price tag for Massachusetts residents. She can attend only if she pays the out-of-state rate of $22,157; if that’s more than she can afford, she’s out of luck.
This has to be unrepresentative. What percentage of illegal immigrant children of college age have been residents of the state for eighteen years?
On the other hand, Jacoby has a point about irrationality among conservatives on the issue.
An unsigned piece at Stop the ACLU retorts, “what Jeff is missing is that the people looking for a better life entered the country illegally. Why should we excuse that behavior? We shouldn’t embrace that behavior just so they can build the American dream.” Jacoby doesn’t “miss” that; he argues that the system essentially doesn’t allow these people a legal means of immigration and that millions of them are already here.
Still, the reaction is understandable: These people are here illegally. Granted, in most cases, it was their parents who broke our laws, merely bringing their kids along for the ride. And some percentage of the kids are for all intents and purposes Americans, having grown up here and having no memories of “home.”
But it does seem perverse to reward their parents for flouting the law. Those who are trying to get in legally are waiting years and foregoing this opportunity for their children, after all. Openly declaring a policy that “once here, you’re here” both makes those who play by the rules suckers and ensures fewer will play by the rules.
Clifton B of Another Black Conservative argues that we can’t afford it. “What Jeff Jacoby (like so many in Washington) has forgotten is that America is $12 trillion dollars in the hole. Half of every dollar we spend is borrowed money. Money that must be paid back by a generation that is too young to vote their objections or accept the responsibility. Sure it would be nice not to punish the children of illegal immigrants for the parents’ lawbreaking. However the stark reality is that for us to be generous the way Jacoby suggests, requires us to be cruel to our very own children by robbing their futures to pay for our current mistakes.” A similar argument is made at 24Ahead.
That just doesn’t make sense. Either the in-state rate is a worthwhile investment in the future of Massachusetts residents or it isn’t. Adding in a relative handful of students isn’t going to break the bank.
The latter goes on to make a more compelling argument:
[C]ollege resources and discounts are a finite resource: just like in a game of musical chairs, there are only so many to go around. Any illegal alien who gets a “chair” (education slot or discount) means that a U.S. citizen will have to “stand” (not be able to go to college or not be able to afford it). If any of “400-600 additional students” that Mass can admit are illegal aliens, that means that U.S. citizens could have gotten those slots/discounts but lost out. Mass voters are in effect valuing foreign citizens higher than their fellow U.S. citizens, turning their back on U.S. citizens in order to help foreign citizens.
The problem with that, though, is that there’s no such thing as “citizenship” at the state level — only residency. It’s arguable than an 18-year Massachusetts resident with illegal immigrant parents are more entitled to in-state resident tuition rates than her cohorts who are American citizens whose parents moved to Massachusetts two years ago and have hardly paid anything into the state treasury.
But, surely, it makes no sense to declare a policy that those who are here in violation of our laws should be able to bring that fact to the attention of the government and thereby be rewarded.
Correction: I originally misread Jacoby’s example as saying the parents in question had subsequently attained US citizenship. I’ve rewritten two paragraphs that referenced that erroneous fact, as they confuse the issue needlessly.
Yet more evidence that privacy going away in the social media age.
Facebook can be a double-edged sword, a Canadian woman learned when an insurance company cut her health benefits, claiming she was healthy after seeing pictures of her smiling in bikini at the beach.
Nathalie Blanchard, 29, took long-term sick leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, more than a year ago for severe depression. She was receiving monthly benefits from her insurance company, Manulife.
When Blanchard called Manulife to inquire why the payments dried up, the insurance company said that “I’m available to work, because of Facebook,” she told CBC television. She said that Manulife cited several pictures Blanchard had posted on her social networking website page, including some showing her enjoying herself during a male strip-tease show at a Chippendales bar, celebrating her birthday and bathing in the sun.
Based on these postings, the firm claimed Blanchard was no longer depressed.
Manulife declined to comment on the incident but said in a statement that “we would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.” But the company did recognize that it uses such information to learn more about their clients.
Hilarious. I’m not sure that a few instances of smiling over the course of a year proves that Blanchard isn’t clinically depressed. But it’s hard to argue that her insurance company ought to subsidize a lifestyle of strip shows and beach vacations.
Glenn Beck has a plan. Actually, the Plan. Which he reveals on his website.
Today, I have stopped looking for a leader to show us the way out because I have come to realize that the only one who can truly save our country…is us. To change America’s course we need to change ourselves, our expectations and our willingness to accept the unacceptable. When we refuse to allow our children to receive a trophy for participation, we are on the road to restoring the meaning of merit in our Republic. When we insist that no one is too big to fail, we will be able to learn from our mistakes, and when we demand that we are self-reliant, we will ensure that others can rely on us, not the government.
[...]
- Education is key, and not just for our children. To that end, we will be conducting a series of conventions. These will be full-day experiences where you will be immersed in learning about topics ranging from self-reliance, community organizing, the economy and how to be a political force in your own neighborhood and country. The first one will be in Orlando at UCF Arena on March 27th. You will also be able to vote to have a convention in your region by clicking here.
- I have begun meeting with some of the best minds in the country that believe in limited government, maximum freedom and the values of our Founders. I am developing a 100 year plan. I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting, using only the battlefield of ideas.
- All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding.
- On August 28, 2010, I ask you, your family and neighbors to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country.
The Soviets and Chinese Communists were famous for Five Year Plans that Americans used to make fun of. Beck, apparently, figures that their flaw wasn’t the hubris of planning the next five years but stopping 95 years short.
Apparently, the plan has yet to be hatched. It’s intriguing to announce a 100 year plan but tell people they’ll need to wait nine months and a week to get the details.
If nothing else, Beck has intrigued NYT correspondent Brian Seltzer and a few bloggers. Seltzer reports that Beck “emphasized that while candidates may align themselves with the values and principles that he espouses, he would not take the next step to endorse them.”
Mr. Beck is not the only media firebrand trying to mobilize Americans disaffected with a Democratic-controlled government. The radio host Laura Ingraham is inviting candidates to sign a 10-point pledge on her Web site. Sean Hannity, on his afternoon radio show and prime-time Fox News program, is promoting “Conservative Victory 2010,” his name for the map on his site that will spell out questions for candidates. And the former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, has steered viewers to his Web site, where they can contribute money to his political action committee in support of conservative candidates.
Pundits have used their media stages to encourage political action before, but people like Mr. Beck and Mr. Hannity are taking on outsize roles now, political experts and conservative commentators say. One reason, they say, is the weakened state of the Republican Party.
Beck’s strangeness aside, the idea of reshaping the American political system from the bottom up is interesting. But while I rather like the idea of pressuring the Republican Party to get back to its small government roots — even by challenging it with a libertarian oriented third party — there’s precious little evidence that there’s anything close to majority support for that as a style of governance. Like it or not, the Republicans became a Big Government party in recent years because that’s what the people have demanded.
I still see enthusiastic small government types calling for dismantling the Department of Education and other bits of leftover rhetoric from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. But I doubt that even twenty percent of Americans are in favor of such a move.
The two parties and their constituent interest groups have done a superb job of poisoning the well. Republicans have virtually ensured that we’ll never have anything short of a massive defense budget and we’ll never have the sort of confiscatory tax brackets for high earners that they have in Europe and we had here as recently as John Kennedy’s administration. And Democrats have made it a virtual certainty that we’ll not only not cut back on the social safety net but that it will incrementally increase and periodically boom. The “compromise” solution is massive deficit spending.
While we occasionally get Ross Perot types calling attention to the unsustainability of that approach, the excitement quickly fades. While all of us can find big chunks of the budget we’d pare, there’s not enough overlap to get anywhere close to majority support — let alone the sixty votes necessary to get much of anything through the Senate. And those who would face cuts to their subsidies care more and are better organized than those who want the cuts.
Dave Schuler likes to point out that things which are unsustainable will not be sustained. But the nature of the American political system guarantees we won’t do anything until an absolute crisis forces us to.
The University of East Anglia mail server was hacked earlier in the week and a string of private correspondences between esteemed climate scientists were published. In addition to some juicy internecine gossip becoming embarrassingly public, a few of the messages seem to reveal doubts about the evidence for global warming and at least one refers to a statistical “trick” being used to hide lower-than-predicted surface temperatures in recent years. James Delingpole dubs this “Climategate” and pronounces it “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming.’” Andrew Bolt calls it evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. Michelle Malkin terms it “The global warming scandal of the century.”
Andrew Revkin of the NYT — himself a subject of some of the emails in question — summarizes the controversy:
The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.
In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.
Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.
The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.
Ronald Bailey, though, warns, “Before jumping to conclusions, remember that many of us write private emails that we might not want to see publicly distributed.”
Indeed, an unsigned post at the RealClimate blog (which I presume was written by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, given parallels with the Revkin story) argues,
Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.
It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.
No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
Given what I know about academia, research, and science, this strikes me as eminently plausible.
Ed Morrissey sees evidence in the emails that the scientists in question are rejecting data that goes against the prevailing consensus and concludes, “That’s not science; it’s religious belief.” But producing research findings that conclusively shatters the prevailing wisdom is the gold standard of science. It’s the stuff of Nobel Prizes and eternal fame. That’s how the handful of scientists known to every schoolboy (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc.) got there.
But one doesn’t want to publish findings claiming to shatter the consensus only to have one’s work revealed as shoddy. So, scientists having a Eureka! finding are likely to test and test again before going public. And, sadly for them, they’ll likely find that their novel finding was a not so novel error.
Climate change, while an important topic, is one that I follow only at the periphery. Frankly, it’s an incredibly specialized field and I lack the time to keep up with the literature, the training to understand it, and the motivation to change either of those facts. My biases and general impressions on the matter, however, are as follows:
There’s overwhelming consensus among the experts on this subject
Conspiracies involving hundreds of people over several decades are next to impossible to pull off
There’s next to zero incentive to perpetrate this conspiracy on the part of scientists
There are enormous incentives for people wanting to influence government to leap from the scientific data to grandiose public policy solutions
Because of the above and biases that spring from my academic training and political ideology,
I tend to believe the vast preponderance of scientists who say the climate is changing and that human technology is a significant variable in said change
I tend to be skeptical of radical government-mandated fixes
A CNN poll released today finds that “opinion about which political party is responsible for the severe economic downturn is shifting.” According to the survey, “38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. That’s down 15 points from May, when 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May. Twenty-seven percent now say both parties are responsible for the economic mess.”
Similarly, the Gallup tracking poll has President Obama dipping below 50 percent approval for the first time, with 49 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving of the job he’s doing as president.
None of this is surprising, really. While we may technically be out of the recession, unemployment is now in the double digits for the first time in many Americans’ memory and trending upwards. Obama’s sitting in the White House and, rightly or wrongly, he gets the blame.
It’s actually rather remarkable that he’s doing as well as he is. I credit Bush Fatigue. People were so glad to see his predecessor leave office that Obama still seems good by comparison.
But that won’t last forever.
As longtime readers know, I believe presidents get far, far too much credit for good economic circumstances and far, far too much blame for economic downturns. But that’s the nature of the game.
Yesterday, the NYT and other outlets reported that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided against running for governor of New York. But the Daily News is reporting that he is instead “very likely” to run in the special election to fill the remaining two years of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat.
The Republican heavyweight was considered the GOP’s best shot at reclaiming the governor’s mansion. The only declared candidate on the Republican side is little-known former Long Island Rep. Rick Lazio.
One source said Giuliani is prepared to run for U.S. Senate against Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand next year to fill out the remaining two years of Hillary Clinton’s term.
Still, a number of sources said no decision has been made and a Giuliani spokeswoman downplayed the reports. “Rudy has a history of making up his own mind and has no problem speaking it,” she said. “When Mayor Giuliani makes a decision about serving in public office, he will inform New Yorkers on his own.”
[...]
Former Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, a close Giuliani pal, said the former mayor has shared doubts with him for weeks about running for governor. “What he said to me is that he doesn’t think he’s going to do it,” Molinari said about a conversation earlier this month with the former mayor. “It just didn’t make any sense to him.” Molinari said the ongoing circus in the state Senate, combined with Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s iron grip on Assembly matters, had convinced Giuliani that a Republican governor would have little ability to get things done quickly in Albany. “The big drawback for him was – could I really be effective?” Molinari said. “He saw too many hangups there. He’s not running for the title, that’s for sure.”
That, and the very real possibility he’d lose to popular Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
But it’s not entirely clear what a Senate seat would do for Giuliani, either. He’s used to making decisions, so he’d be an ineffective legislator. And if his goal is to run for president again in 2012, it’s not clear how five minutes in the Senate would bolster his resume — as he’d have to hit the campaign trail almost immediately. He’d be better off going the Newt Gingrich route and simply establishing himself as a Republican Wise Man, doing as many public appearances as possible.
Frankly, 2008 was his best chance and he blew it. He was at the height of his popularity and running against a lackluster field for the nomination. Yet he ran a joke of a campaign — literally — “A noun, a verb, and 9/11.” As he moves further and further away from the 9/11 attacks, his light dims.
He’ll be 68 during the 2012 race — facing, should he make it to the nomination, an incumbent president with superb campaign skills — and 72 for 2016. The latter will be 15 years after his finest hour.
For the second time in a week, Fox News has been caught using old video to give the false impression of larger-than-actual turnout at appearances of politicos they supported. Sufficiently embarrassed at having been caught, Fox executives are promising “serious disciplinary action” for those responsible.
While the incidents add fuel to the fire that Fox is a Republican shill outlet rather than real news — and there’s growing truth to that charge — the real story here is that Fox has joined the larger trend in broadcast journalist of becoming a hype machine.
I was a big fan of Fox News when I first came across it a decade or so ago. Mostly, I just watched Brit Hume’s nightly “Special Report” newscast, although I did occasionally watch some of the talking heads. At the time, I found it a refreshing alternative to the networks and CNN, all of which had a significant leftward bias but pretended otherwise. Fox — or, again, at least the Hume show of that time — had a slight rightward bias but it seemed genuinely interested in being “Fair and Balanced” and more-or-less living up to its “We Report, You Decide” mantra.
Somewhere along the way, it became both more partisan and more shrill. Everything was Breaking News and hype.
The thing is, it’s not just Fox.
As I’ve mentioned perhaps too many times, I’ve long since drifted away from watching television news on a regular basis, finding the Internet a much more efficient and less aggravating means of getting information. But I catch news shows from time-to-time, usually while traveling or because someone else has the television on. And everything from “Good Morning America” to the nightly network news promos to local news radio is in the same hype mode. It’s all crisis this, emergency that, and tragedy the other.
It’s like Jerry Springer is suddenly in charge of all news programming.
Still, Fox is in a special category because it is perceived as the conservative network. Too many of these episodes and it will simply be dismissed as hackery by all but the most die-hard Republicans.
There are already a goodly number of conservative-leaning outlets such as Drudge, WorldNetDaily, and CNS that even unabashed Republicans are embarrassed to cite as sources for their arguments.
Fox isn’t there yet. It would be a shame if it crossed into that territory, however, as there’s no road back.
Amanda Carpenter broke the news Tuesday that “The government Web site that promised to show exactly where the $787 billion in stimulus spending was going to ‘create or save’ jobs is allocating billions of tax dollars to hundreds of congressional districts that don’t exist.”
Researchers at the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity found 440 “phantom districts” listed on Recovery.gov, consuming $6.4 billion and creating or saving nearly 30,000 jobs. Their findings are listed HERE.
For example, Recovery.gov shows 12 districts, using up more than $2.7 billion, in Washington, D.C, which only has one congressional district. [Actually, it has none. - jhj]
Recovery.gov also shows 2,893.9 jobs created with $194,537,372 in stimulus funding in New Hampshire’s 00 congressional district. But, there is no such thing.
The site also shows $1,471,518 going to New Hampshire’s 6th congressional district, $1,033,809 to the 4th congressional district and $124,774 to the 27th congressional district. In fact, New Hampshire only has two congressional districts; inviting confusion about where the money listed for the 00, 4th, 6th and 27th districts is going.
After being beat over the head with this on the blogs, Twitter, and the late-night comic shows, the White House admitted error and has said it’ll put out a more accurate list, while muttering something about distractions.
Aside from the obvious 57 states joke (which an Instapundit reader beat me to), I’ve dismissed this story as mildly amusing but no big deal.
It seems, however, that the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee is less than amused and will hold hearings on the matter. Others in Congress were also upset — and not just the usual suspects.
The errors raised the ire of Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wisconsin, and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. On Monday, he said the mistakes “are outrageous and the administration owes itself, the Congress and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes.”
“Credibility counts in government, and stupid mistakes like this undermine it. We’ve got too many serious problems in this country to let that happen,” Obey said.
While I agree in principle, the reality is that large bureaucracies continually make incredibly boneheaded mistakes of this variety. The key is transparency, which lets interested parties quickly spot problems and get them corrected — as happened in this case.
It is, however, refreshing to see Congress investigate something that is actually under their purview and to do so with a president of the same political party that controls both Houses. That’s how the system is supposed to work but, alas, frequently doesn’t.
Gail Collins proclaims the first ten years of the new millennium “the Decade of Medical Backtracking.”
Somewhere between the reports that Pap smears and tests for prostate cancer aren’t all they were cracked up to be and the news that a high fiber diet doesn’t do anything to prevent cancer, the health establishment began looking decidedly nonomniscient. Then this week, a federal task force reported that most women don’t need annual mammograms. Even more fascinating, they suggested that doctors stop telling their female patients to self-examine their breasts for lumps.
[...]
Every rational American wants qualified experts to keep re-examining current medical practices. The only thing that bothers me about the mammogram report is all the emphasis on the “anxiety” that might follow a false-positive. We live in a time when we are constantly being reminded that a fellow plane passenger might be trying to smuggle explosives in his sneakers. We can manage anxiety.
I am going out on a limb to say that the real problem with a test that creates a lot of false-positive results is that it leads to a lot of other medical procedures, some involving hospitals. Unless you are genuinely sick, there is no more dangerous place to be hanging around than a hospital.
And let’s not forget the longer-term changes of mind on things like silicon breast implants, artificial sweeteners, and the danger of eating eggs.
Collins is right that we want medical science to constantly challenge prevailing assumptions and give us their best guess as to the truth. I continue to wonder, however, about the rigors of medical scholarship, which seems to frequently draw wide conclusions based on studies of very small, self-selected samples.
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Democratic candidate for Texas attorney general, claims a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages actually bans all marriages.
The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”
Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas,” including common-law marriages.
She calls it a “massive mistake” and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem. “You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says,” said Radnofsky, who will be at Texas Christian University today as part of a five-city tour to kick off her campaign.
While I don’t have any fancy law degrees, it’s pretty clear to me that the amendment does not endanger “marriage” in Texas. The key word in the clause in question is “create.” Given that 1) marriage existed in Texas before the amendment and 2) that the first clause in the amendment reiterates the existence of marriage, merely clarifying its definition, the subsequent clause rather clearly bans only the creation of analogous institutions.
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