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.

UPDATE:  Adam Serwer points me to this Jezebel post to let me know that “getting away is relative.”

Megan McArdle points me to this amusing video about which  Gizmodo’s John Herrmann gushes, “I’ve read the articles, watched the instructional videos, and gotten an invite, but nothing—nothing—has done more to explain to me how this mind-melting Internet Thing works than Pulp Fiction, spectacularly adapted for Google Wave. (Warning: Tarantino language ahead)”

It’s an entertaining illustration but, frankly, not one that makes me pine for an invite.  Yes, Wave would seem to combine several existing tools in a streamlined way.  And it might be extraordinarily useful way of doing certain kinds of collaborative work.  Mostly, though, it looks like a big time-waster.

Mickey Kaus noted the other day that the UAW, which owns large stakes in both GM and Chrysler without paying a cent thanks to their support for the election of President Obama, is cutting their own companies a break and sticking it to Ford.

I knew they’d find a way to punish Ford: The new UAW contract with Ford apparently does not give America’s surviving non-bankrupt automaker parity with GM and Chrysler, reports Bloomberg: “The plan doesn’t include cuts to retiree benefits, such as vision coverage, that were granted to GM and Chrysler.” Rather, the pain seems even more concentrated on future hires (if there are any) than with the GM/Chrysler deals. … TTAC wonders whether the UAW had an extra incentive to resist giving concessions that might make Ford more successful now that the union owns a large chunk of its main domestic competitors. [emphases original]

Megan McArdle cries Foul!

It seem to me that this is a clear and insurmountable conflict of interest.  Should the UAW be compelled to relinquish its stake in the automakers, or stop representing Ford workers?  I’d say they should.  Not that this has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening.

It is, to say the least, problematic for a labor union to own competing firms.  But to the degree that the conflict of interest hurts Ford’s UAW employees, they could presumably divest and start a new union.

The real issue is the antecedent to this situation:  The federal government picking winners and losers between firms.  The federal taxpayer bailed out two of the Big 3 and now has powerful incentive to assure the success of those two companies at the expense of the third.  Not only is Ford much less likely to get government contracts now but they’re much more likely to come under higher regulatory scrutiny.  That they also have a more hostile union — one that no longer ultimately needs them to stay in business — is mere icing on the cake.

A man carrying an anti-abortion sign was murdered this morning.

A well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed Friday morning in front of a Michigan high school and another man was shot and killed just miles away in what police are investigating as related incidents.

Michigan State Police have taken a suspect into custody but have not released the name of the victim, the Flint Journal reported. The school was placed on immediate lockdown, though no students were injured or involved in the shooting, Ossowo Hish School officials told the paper. School officials say the shooting took place outside of school grounds around 7:30 a.m., when most students were already inside the building for classes. The school, located 20 miles west of Flint, is now allowing students to leave with a parental escort, WLNS News reported.

The suspect was picked up at his home at about 8:15 a.m. and is now being investigated in connection with a second killing that occurred a few miles away from the school, WNEM News reported.

As police sift through the second “homicide scene” near an Ossowo gravel pit Friday morning, they have ringed off a section of street in front of the high school, where a large sign bearing the image of a baby and the word “Life” can be seen, the Flint Journal reported.

Having only the information quoted above, I agree with Megan McArdle that “this seems more like a lone lunatic than a political killing” and share her hope that “if it does turn out to be someone with a political agenda, the right can manage to refrain from claiming that this is really a symptom of some dark rot at the center of liberalism.”

It does, sadly, seem yet another data point in my longstanding There Are Nuts on Both Sides meme.  Thankfully, even though this is the issue that seems to motivate the most vitriol in our politics, the number of murders committed since 1973’s Roe v. Wade can still be counted on both hands.  There have been more people killed for their sneakers than their views on abortion.

Megan McArdle asserts that there are lunatic fringes on both sides of the aisle and her commenters go on to demonstrate the validity of that assertion.

I would take some exception, though, to her contention that “Ohio voting machine conspiracists” were “not anything like the mainstream of the Democratic party.”  I call your attention the Rolling Stone cover story “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Wikipedia is implementing a new policy requiring that changes to articles about living people be approved by moderators before going live, essentially abandoning the wiki model.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

[...]

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

[...]

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.

This will slow down the addition of breaking news — a death or some other hot item — to the site but otherwise likely won’t have much in the way of negative effects.  And, certainly, the ability to create mischief is greater for a public figure than, say, the entries on aardvarks or moon rocks.

Presumably, however, this will make it more difficult to add biographies of marginally famous people .  Some years back, for example, there was a hubbub over whether Megan McArdle was sufficiently noteworthy to merit an entry.     This will make Wikipedia more like a traditional encyclopedia, which is a mistake.  The Internet is essentially infinite, so there’s little reason to limit the scope of topics in the same way that the editors of a dead tree set do.  One of the beauties of the wiki model was that it allowed the development of a rich database of knowledge of interest to niche users.

Luysii points to CDC data showing that American mortality rates are dropping year after year while we simultantaneously get fatter and fatter. S/he points to several possibilities:

#1: More people are exercising than they used to. How many joggers and walkers did you see on the streets 20, 30 years ago?

#2: Fewer people are smoking. Forget lung cancer (if you can). The big risk for smokers is premature vascular disease. Normally we all have carbon monoxide in our blood (it comes from the breakdown of hemoglobin). [ Brit. Med. J. vol. 296 pp. 78 - 79 '88 ] Natural carbon monoxide production would lead to a carboxyhemoglobin level of .4 – .7%, but normal levels in nonsmokers in urban areas are 1 – 2%. Cigarette smoke contains 4% carbon monoxide, so smokers have levels of 5 – 6%. This can’t be good for their blood vessels.

#3: Doctors know more than they did. My brother is a very competent internist. He took over the practice of a similarly competent internist after his very untimely many death years ago. Naturally he got all the medical records on the patients. He found letters (now over 25 years old) from the late MD to his patients informing them of their lab results, and assuring them that their cholesterol was just fine at 250 mg%.

#4: The drugs are better. In addition they may be working in ways that we have yet to fathom. Consider the statins — their effect on vascular disease is far greater than their effect on blood lipids (cholesterol, triglyerides) — particularly when compared to other agents that lower blood lipids to the same extent.

Megan McArdle guesses it’s not exercise, since fat people probably aren’t the ones jogging. Additionally, a commenter reasonably points out that we may be “exercising” more because our lifestyles, especially our jobs, are less sedentary than they were.

Many of the recent advances in medicine have specifically aimed at ameliorating the effects of obesity and high cholestorol.  We’ve also gotten radically better at neo-natal care and otherwise radically improving survivability in those first days and weeks of a baby’s life.

Beyond that, it’s also quite possible that advances in medicine are a small part of the story.

• Violent crime is down.

• So are deaths in auto accidents.

• We’re less likely to get killed on the job – directly offsetting the fact that sitting behind a computer all day makes us more likely to get fat.

• We’re not losing tens of thousands of people to war every few years.

I’m sure I’m missing half a dozen other contributing factors. What are they?

Andrew Sullivan:

The survival of my own marriage is entirely in the hands of the federal government. I have no right to stay in my own home with my own husband – just the government’s permission until they choose to revoke it. Gays do not have core constitutional rights in America. They have no right even to a secure home. And this president is in no hurry to do anything about it.

There’s no rational basis for allowing Britney Spears but not gays to get married.  And I agree that gays who got married in the handful of states that allow or allowed it but live in a state that does not are in a bizarre state of limbo.

But when was the last time that the federal government — or, for that matter, a state or local government in the United States — intervened to deny consenting adults the right to live together in the same domicile? Further, how are Andrew and his husband any less protected in that regard than Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman?

What “core rights” are being denied Andrew owing to his sexuality?  Certainly, not his freedom of expression. Or any of his other First Amendment rights.

Are there laws of which I’m unaware that make it harder for a gay man to buy a gun?  Can troops be quartered in gay homes?  Do police need a warrant to search them?  Do gays not get jury trials?  The right to an attorney?  A jury?  Are gays charged higher bails or punished more cruelly and unusually?  Can gays not vote?

Indeed, aside from the right to marry a person of the same sex — which is denied to heterosexuals as well, albeit with disparate impact — what rights, core or otherwise, are denied gays?

UPDATE: In the comments below, PD Shaw surmises that Sully is making an oblique reference to his current immigration status limbo which, Alex Knapp suggests, he would not be experiencing were he married to an American woman.  This, though, is an issue with bureaucratic discretion in enforcing an outdated and silly law, not gay rights per se.

Similarly, Steve Verdon notes that many municipalities limit the number of unrelated individuals permitted to share a domicile.  But that’s neither an anti-gay measure no even a “nanny state” issue but rather locals seeking to maintain the quality of their neighborhoods.  One doesn’t buy a single family home in the suburbs with the intent of living next door to 37 migrant workers sharing three bedrooms.

Megan McArdle reports that she has had a fourth bicycle stolen since moving to DC, all of them locked, all of them at her home, the most recent inside a stockade fence.  In frustration, she observes, “I think I’m done with bike commuting. I’d rather just hand out $100 bills to random people on the street; at least I wouldn’t be rewarding theft.”

This is followed by a remarkably heated exchange in the comments section, numbering 60 as of this writing, wherein readers lambaste Megan for being a dingbat and each other for various transgressions.

Freddy Mercury and company offer some related thoughts:

Via Megan McArdle, I see that President Obama told a woman whose now-105-year-old mother got a pacemaker five years ago that, under Obamacare, we might just give old ladies a pill:

Megan observes, “I don’t know that this is going to hurt the image of healthcare reform.  But it probably isn’t going to help.”  That was my reaction, too, until I realized that the exchange took place in the ABC News town hall special on June 25 and this was the first I’d heard of it.

Of course, the fact that Michael Jackson died the same day might have something to do with that.

Reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Megan McArdle wonders why the space program lost its momentum.  Jim Henley reckons it’s because “space travel is expensive, dangerous, unprofitable and (medically, biologically) kind of” problematic.

I’m old enough to have been alive for the moon walk but too young to remember it.  I admire the adventurism and have a sense nostalgia for it and very much enjoyed “The Right Stuff,” “Moon Shot,” and “From the Earth to the Moon.”   I even got enthusiastic about the first couple of flights of the space shuttle.

Alas, space flight now has the romantic appeal of commercial air travel.  Despite being dangerous as hell, shuttle missions have been ho hum for twenty years; they’re only interesting when they’re tragic.  The space station has only slightly more drama than any other scientific laboratory.

In the old days, our astronauts were heroic men culled from the ranks of military fighter pilots and test pilots; now, they’re mostly technicians.  As rigorous as the selection and training process is — and, again, as risky as actually heading off to space is — most of those who go off to space are the functional equivalent of those of us sitting in the passenger section of a Boeing 777 typing away on our laptops.

Space may be the final frontier but, absent some incredible advance in technology, there are no great manned missions in our near future.  How much of an advance over walking on the moon would walking on Mars really be?  And anything beyond Mars is so far away that it simply doesn’t make sense to try to send human beings there, since it would take years.

Oh, and scientists would rather have the money to fund better telescopes and more efficient ways of studying space.

Frankly, I’m more anxious for the next “Star Trek” movie to come out than I am for the next big manned space project. Although, if we develop warp technology and the Vulcans initiate first contact, I could change my mind.

Hearty congrats to the world’s tallest female econoblogger and Reason’s newest Koch fellow, who, I have it on good Twittority, are engaged to be married after dating slightly less than a year. Rumors that Peter was guilted into making an honest woman of Megan by Stacy McCain are completely unfounded.

UPDATE: A picture speaks 1000 words:

Confirmation from Suderman and McArdle.

Megan McArdle, reporting from an annual gabfest in Aspen:

The questions for [Austan] Goolsbee are much more hostile than they were last year.  I don’t know whether to attribute this to the economy, or the fact that the disadvantages of Obama’s policies are now apparent.  All policies sound better when they’re in white paper, and Obama’s rhetorical deftness made it particularly easy to make his proposals sound like all things to all people.  Now deficits have to be paid for, climate change bills turn out to lack teeth for anyone except the Chinese, health care gets scored by the CBO rather than optimistic campaign members.

Quite so.  Last year, Goolsbee was a smart outsider, pointing to deficiencies in the extant Bush administration’s policy outcomes.  This year, he’s an insider presiding over a giant mess.  While one aspires to the latter position, the former is more comfortable.

The post’s title, of course, refers to a quotation from the philosopher Michael Gerard Tyson.  (Reported variants include, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”)   It may or may not have been inspired by of Helmuth von Moltke’s dictum “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

As President Obama settles into his fifth month in office, his personal popularity remains high but his job approval is slipping drastically, according to a new NYT/CBS News poll.

A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings.

A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.

As Mr. Obama finishes his fifth month in office and assumes greater ownership of the problems he inherited, Americans are alarmed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to boost the economy. A majority said the government should instead focus on reducing the federal deficit.

But with a job approval rating of 63 percent, Mr. Obama has the backing of Democrats and independents alike, a standing that many presidents would envy and try to use to build support for their policies. His rating has fallen to 23 percent among Republicans, from 44 percent in February, a sign that bridging the partisan divide may remain an unaccomplished goal.

Compared to President Bush’s abysmal numbers, these numbers are quite good.  And, certainly, he inherited some extraordinary challenges, what with arguably the worst economy in decades and two ongoing wars.

Still, we’re finally witnessing something I predicted would happen during the Democratic primaries but did not.  Obama has been unrivaled in being all things to all people.   He managed to get the staunchly liberal base of his party on board while also gaining the support of libertarians like Megan McArdle and conservatives like Andrew Sullivan.

Now, though, he can no longer issue carefully crafted statements that people inclined to like him can imagine are exactly their preferred policies.  Instead, he has to make actual policy choices.  Inevitably — no matter how fantastic any group might think each decision is — this makes enemies.

Fiscally conservative types are aghast at the enormity of the bailout and the unprecedented intervention in the economy, such as the GM and Chrysler takeovers.  Meanwhile, the netroots are disappointed with Obama’s relative moderation on the social issues, like gay marriage.

The gaps on the “Views of the President” part of the poll and the “Views of the [Specific Issue]” would seem to indicate that there’s a lot more room for Obama’s support to soften.  A whopping 57 percent think he’s doing well on the economy, for example, yet only 41 percent think he’s doing the right thing on the budget and only 30 percent think he’s got a clear plan.  Something has to give, eventually, and I’d lay my bets on the 57.

Similarly, Obama has only 44 percent approval on health care.  I strongly suspect that this number will plummet, not increase, once he’s actually worked out a deal.  The left will be outraged that a Democratic president and Democratic Congress didn’t move us much closer to Single Payer.  The right — and my guess, the moderates, too — will think we’ve gone too far towards socialized medicine.   That’s just the nature of making hard decisions on divisive issues.

None of this is a prediction on the 2012 election, by the way.  Obama is an outstanding campaigner and is likely to be personally popular three and a half years from now.  And there’s no sign at all that the Republicans have revitalized their message and have a strong candidate ready to carry it.   Unless those things happen, Obama could get reelected with a 45 percent approval rating.

UPDATE: The new NBC/WSJ poll is out and it shows similar trends.

Nearly seven in 10 have serious reservations about the federal government’s ownership stake in General Motors. Almost 60 percent say that President Obama and Congress should worry more about keeping the deficit down — even if that means it will take longer for the economy to recover. And fewer than half of Americans have confidence in the president’s policies to improve the economy.

Obama remains a popular figure in the poll. But these numbers on the deficit and the government’s intervention seem to mark a new period for the administration, as the public moves from welcoming his inauguration and first days in office to examining his initial actions as president.

[...]

The drop mainly comes from independents, who backed Obama by 60 percent to 31 percent in April, but approve of him now by a 46-44 clip.

These trends are also interesting and conform to what I’d have guessed:

26 percent view Dick Cheney favorably, which is up eight points from April

24 percent view Nancy Pelosi favorably, which is down seven points from April

25 percent hold a favorable view of the Republican Party, which is an all-time low for it in the poll

45 percent hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Megan McArdle has two excellent posts this morning that, while seemingly unrelated, aren’t.  First, she wonders “Why Doesn’t the Market Produce Non-Smoking Bars?”

This seems like a market failure.  You can explain it through preference asymmetry and the profitability of various customer classes:  heavy drinkers are more likely to also be heavy smokers, and they are the most profitable customers.  Bar owners don’t want big groups of people who are going to take up three tables for an hour and a half while nursing one white wine spritzer apiece.  They want people who are there to drink.  In a competitive equilibrium, they couldn’t afford to go non-smoking because they’d lose their most profitable customers to all the other bars.

Second, answering a blogospheric hue and cry from the weekend, she examines why cable news largely ignored the Iranian election controversy.

The cable networks are hamstrung by the fact that they don’t have much footage of what’s going on in Iran.  As I watch, they’re showing a combination of shots of peaceful protests in Western countries, lying propaganda footage from Iran’s state television system, and random b-roll of unidentified protests in some unidentified country that does not seem to be Iran.  This is less than must-see-TV.

In both cases, arguably, the market produced bad results for good, understandable reasons.

The vast majority of people would prefer that bars be smoke-free, for reasons of both health and aesthetics.  Bar owners nonetheless won’t ban smoking on their own, because smokers are excellent bar customers and, in their estimation, won’t drive away more business than they bring in.

Now, this doesn’t explain why more bars catering to the majority non-smokers didn’t open spontaneously.  Even if it’s true that, in the aggregate, smokers consume a disproportionate amount of bar drinks, it doesn’t follow that there aren’t plenty of non-smoking individuals who are also serious drinkers and would appreciate the opportunity to spend $10 on two additional beers or an additional scotch rather than on dry cleaning cigarette stench from their suits.

The second case is harder still.   The owners of the cable news networks have apparently decided that people would rather hear chit-chat than see hard core reporting of foreign news.  Or, at least, the appetite for foreign news day in day out is not bringing in enough money to cover the enormous expensive of adequately staffing foreign bureaus.    And, absent having made that investment ahead of time, there’s no way to ramp up to provide serious coverage of breaking events people are interested for non-sustained events.

When I was first watching the network newscasts with interest, the Big 3 all had huge overseas bureaus.   ABC News had three anchors briefly, with Peter Jennings reporting from the Moscow desk.  Now, the best they can do is buy Christine Amanpour plane tickets and figuratively parachute her to various locales to give the appearance of doing real reporting.