David Brooks Loves Charles Murray. A Marriage Made in Hell

Do you remember Charles Murray? One of the authors of the infamous Bell Curve book about the presumed lower intelligence of blacks? The man who has argued that a) blacks, b) Latinos and c) all women are intellectually inferior creatures. The man who has argued that poverty cannot be helped by anything the government could do, because that breeds indolence and poor work habits and in any case poverty is caused by the innate stupidity and bad work ethics of the poor.

Guess what. Murray has written yet another book, and this time even white guys can join the rest of us in Murray's humongous group of cretins. But only if they are not rich. The book, titled Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 was reviewed by Joan Walsh. She concludes:

At bottom, Murray’s old genetic fatalism undoes him in “Coming Apart.” Clearly the new lower class can’t be helped by government programs, but Murray doesn’t seem to think they can climb into the upper class by hard work and self-discipline either. Ultimately, he believes the sorting and separation of the classes is inevitable, given the cognitive intelligence differences between them. And here we’re back to IQ again.

Walsh's review is good. But it doesn't go deep enough. To review the final product of someone like Charles Murray (who has shown himself biased in the past) you can't simply assume that his data is good and reliable. Instead, you have to go and poke around in the garbage dumps where he might have found his data, and whatever you find must be taken home in plastic bags and subjected to careful forensic scrutiny. Then you have to go out again to acquire all the data he will have excluded, on purpose.

That's the job for someone in a hazmat suit and a couple of decades of time.

All this is background to explain to you why my holy inner rage flared like a volcano this morning when I read the introductory sentence in David Brooks' column "The Great Divorce":

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.
Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

And Hitler was the up-and-coming world leader of the 1930s, too. I keep being reminded of this quip about David Brooks:

When you want a truly vile opinion dressed up to sound innocuous, Brooks is your guy.

Indeed. My righteous anger left me stuck there, in those first few sentences. For the whole day.

Charles Pierce has a funny review of the rest of Brooks' ramblings. Brooks carries out the usual high-school class level analysis of what he calls the two tribes of America in Murray's book: The industrious rich people with 1950s values and the poor fat slobs who spend their days watching television and having children out of wedlock:

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.
Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.
The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Strict codes to regulate their kids? Whooah. And 1950s traditionalist values and practices? A housewife in every kitchen? Racist and sexist beliefs? McCarthyist fear of the communists? Is that really the way Brooks sees the top 20% of American earners (assuming that this is what the upper tribe might be based on)? Pierce responds:

(Mmm, word salad. "Postmodern neighborhoods"? Do you know what some of those elites "worked arduously" at in the first decade of the 21st century? Devising complicated financial instruments by which they could steal most of the money from the rest of the country and get away with it. They haven't "returned to 1950's traditionalist values and practices." Too many of their wives are working and taking the pill, which is covered by the gold-plated health-care plans The Firm offers to its most valued employees. I'd like to see data on how well they're "regulating" their kids, too, and find another verb, fool. Kids are not water heaters. David Brooks is impressed that Charles Murray, career hack, has found some white people he can treat like black people, and just in time, too. The country was beginning to notice that some of the fundamental economic unfairness built into the society, largely through policies that people like David Brooks supported. Save me, Racist Data Man!)

In Brooks' world values are odd things. The ones he likes he attributes to the 1950s conservative era. The ones he doesn't like he attributes to the 1960s hippies. Given that divorce rates are the lowest in places such as Massachusetts, the Sodom and Gomorrah of conservative imagination, I resent that false linkage. But what do you expect from the go-to-guy when vileness needs to be garbed in innocence?

The overall topic is well worth discussing. But Murray has pretty much poisoned the well, given his basic approach. What we really need is a good and objective survey of the statistical data and a concerted effort by many researchers to explain the various theories for what we observe. But the role of rising income inequality, the role of outsourcing, the role of dying factory towns, the role of poor schools, the role of cutbacks in the government safety nets, the death of good unionized jobs and the role of the flaws in the traditional patriarchal marriage certainly should enter the conversation.

Brooks wants to keep all that outside the door, to mute what the media sells us (soaps, scandals, sex and serial killers), to ignore the fundamental role of Americans as consumers for the products of global firms. He pretends that values are something fairy godmothers (well, probably fairy godfathers) offer people and all the people need to do is to pick the right ones! Then you, too, can be rich though you won't enjoy it very much, given Brooks' description of those austere and rigid church-goers who adamantly regulate their children.

I have not read Murray's book yet, so I cannot tell what kind of data mining he has carried out. But I do note a selective flavor in Brooks' quote, this one:

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.
More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike.

That reference to the income inequality is the extent of Brooks' nod to the economic realities. He quickly moves on to everyone in 1963 having egggzactly the same values! Men were out there working very hard. Women are not mentioned because they are supposed to be in the kitchen, for the benefit of the country.

But what really drew my attention was that reference to the labor market participation rate of men between 30 and 49. If you want to find out the group of men with the highest participation rate you would zone in on that age group, sure. So picking that number is intended to provide a high estimate of the great work ethics of men in those days.

But note that we are not told what the corresponding percentage would be today. Neither are we told that economic opportunities have changed, some for the better (such as more men and women perhaps studying rather than working, even in this age group) and some for the worse (manual and many service jobs leaving the country) and that there are now families where the man might be a stay-at-home dad while his wife works full time. We are simply given that one number as a sign of how horribly everything has changed.

I must hand it to these guys. Their task is to make us look away from the ever increasing income inequality of this country which is happily turning into a banana republic, and they are so good at that! Here I sit actually arguing with David Brooks! As if arguing with word salad makes any sense. Just stick a fork in it already.

What Murray really says is that the poor are at fault because they are stupid, fat, lazy and without sexual morals. The rich deserve their wealth because they are smart, slim, monogamous and rigid parents. Brooks chimes in about the proper guilt liberals and progressives should feel about this, presumably because they advocate sloth and obesity and group sex, and about the crucial role of the 1960s hippies. Those are the groups which really caused the obesity epidemic, the increasing income inequality and the high divorce or non-marriage rates of the less wealthy Americans. Probably the global climate change, too.

That's miraculously inane.
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Added later after some calming down: The basic problem in most of Brooks' pseudo-sociological and pseudo-psychological theories can be clarified with this particular example: If poorer people have different values, hobbies or interests then Brooks assumes (without even mentioning that it's an assumption) that it is those values, hobbies and interests which are the cause of poverty. That a somewhat more likely explanation goes in the other direction, from poverty to particular lifestyles, hobbies and interests, is completely ignored. The true explanation is most likely even more complicated, given the vicious cycle aspect of poverty.

Jeanette Winterson v. Henry Miller (by Suzie)

You must read Jeanette Winterson reviewing a new biography of Henry Miller by Frederick Turner in the NYT.

Miller was obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself or the women in his life. Turner sympathizes with the Miller who must sell his well-cut suits on the streets of Paris for a fraction of their worth, but is apparently indifferent to the fact that [his wife] June was selling her body on his ­behalf. ...

It never occurred to him that no matter how poor a man is, he can always buy a poorer woman for sex. It does not occur to Turner either, who calls Miller throughout a “sexual adventurer.” This sounds randy and swashbuckling and hides the economic reality of prostitution. Miller the renegade wanted his body slaves like any other capitalist — and as cheaply as possible. When he could not pay, Miller the man and Miller the fictional creation worked out how to cheat women with romance. What they could not buy they stole. No connection is made between woman as commodity and the ­“slaughterhouse” of capitalism that Mil­ler hates.

Winterson ends with this:

The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?

Her biography, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?", comes out in March.

The Contraception Wars. Preliminary Negotiations by E. J. Dionne

E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post ended up in a pretzel shape trying to explain why Obama wasn't sufficiently fawning towards the US Catholic bishops* in the contraception wars:

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.
His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

...

As a general matter, it made perfect sense to cover contraception. Many see doing so as protecting women’s rights, and expanded contraception coverage will likely reduce the number of abortions. While the Catholic Church formally opposes contraception, this teaching is widely ignored by the faithful. One does not see many Catholic families of six or 10 or twelve that were quite common in the 1950s. Contraception might have something to do with this.

...

And it was offered a compromise idea to do just that by Melissa Rogers, the former chair of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. (Rogers and I have worked together on religion and public life issues over the years, though I played no role in formulating her proposal.) In The Washington Post’s “On Faith” forum in October, she pointed to a Hawaii law under which “religious employers that decline to cover contraceptives must provide written notification to enrollees disclosing that fact and describing alternate ways for enrollees to access coverage for contraceptive services.” The Hawaii law effectively required insurers to allow uncovered individuals to secure this coverage on their own at modest cost.

As I've written before, the bishops' stance is not logical. They want the religious right not to offer contraception to any worker at a Catholic institution, whether that person is a Catholic herself or not. A more logical argument for them to make would be that no Catholic person should be provided such insurance, wherever she happens to be working. I'm not advocating that point of view, just stating it as the more logical interpretation of the demands of the Roman Catholic church.

But what would that "modest cost" of the contraceptive pill be, the arrangement Dionne appears to favor? How much would the women working for Catholic universities and hospitals have to pay out of pocket? Who would subsidize that cost?

What does this mean? Let's break it down another way. Technically, the poverty line in the US for a four person family is $22,350. That's $1,862.50/month. Nearly half of the women previously mentioned in the "sexually active, but not interested in having children" bucket fall below that poverty line. Having an infrastructure that forces a woman to pay up to $50/month for contraception in that budget is a huge burden on families.

I doubt anyone would subsidize the cost of contraceptives for the workers whose choices would be determined by the US Catholic bishops. They'd be on their own and would have to pay more for their contraceptives than others, simply because of the religious identity of their employer.
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For some odd reason that term in my mind is now inextricably linked with all those Monty Python "Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition" skits. Probably because these guys suddenly appear from nowhere and appear to take over the political process.

The Return of Feudalism

Digby shows us an interesting graph about income inequality in selected countries in 1980 and 2008. The income shown omits capital gains but otherwise reflects the income share of the top 1% of all earners:

The conclusion is pretty obvious: The United States leads the race towards a banana republic. Or perhaps the return to a feudal society, given that upward class mobility in this country is weaker than in those socialist old-Europe countries.

Is this a fair development? According to Fox News, it is! Quelle surprise as the French surrender monkeys would say:

Fox Blasted Obama's Speech On Inequality By Accusing Him Of "Class Warfare." Fox News figures responded to Obama's December 6, 2011, speech on inequality in American by accusing him of engaging in class warfare. [Media Matters, 12/6/11]CARLSON: I think, so when the president says "fair share" there's a couple points here, and earlier last hour I said maybe there should be a disclaimer underneath, which is the reason that we're putting up this graphic for you. Because if in fact you're paying tax on ordinary income, and you're in the highest tax bracket, then you're paying 30-some percent. But then if you take that money that you've already paid taxes on, and you go and invest and you make a profit, a long-term profit, more than a year of investment, then you pay another 15% on top of that. And by the way, with the "fair share" argument, 47% of Americans don't pay federal income tax.
KILMEADE: That didn't get into the State of the Union.
CARLSON: But that didn't get into it, but that is also part of the fair share. So if we are going to be fair to everyone, should those people then starting paying at least something?
DOOCY: Kick in a buck, kick in something!
KILMEADE: And in many cases some are getting refunds on money they haven't earned, They go beyond the money they earned for the year come April, so that's where a lot of that tax money's going. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/25/12]

America: Love It Or Leave It

That's what hippies used to be told. Or so I have been told. It was fun to see the same argument used now:

Speaking to a Lincoln Day Dinner in West Palm Beach for the Palm Beach County GOP, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) fired off a humdinger of a line that within minutes drew recriminations from Democrats on Twitter.
"We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

Contrast this to the often-heard false equation politicians make between the government and the family. We must all tighten our belts! We must decide if granny gets her heart fixed or if the children get dental care! Just like a real family.

That parable doesn't work. Families can't print money and don't have private military forces. Families don't have the same tasks and functions as governments do, and arguing that governments should tighten their belts in a recession simply makes the recession much worse.

But still. If the United States is seen as a family, then surely it is a most dysfunctional one when a politician suggests that some members of the family should just get the hell out of here.

This is a trivial post. But it's a nice way to show the two common angles in political debates: The "Murkan People All Want The Same Thing" angle and the "Kill The Opposition" angle. Neither is very adult.

On Nature Programs

Why do nature programs concentrate so much on the last day in the life of various prey animals? What is the underlying message they are sending us? Nature red in tooth and claw? But each of those animals had other days in their lives, some many other days. Note, also, how rarely these programs portray the last day in the life of a predator.

It's as if we are being told to look at only one of the many faces of nature, and perhaps to identify with the predators.

Civil liberties v. civil rights (by Suzie)

What do you think when you hear the phrases "civil liberties" and "civil rights"? I hope a discussion of the differences will shed light on why Glenn Greenwald and others considered progressive have praised Ron Paul.

Definitions vary, but "civil liberties" generally refers to rights guaranteed by the government for all citizens, while "civil rights" describes laws passed to remove barriers that keep certain groups from enjoying the same liberties that others have.

Civil liberties are concepts; civil rights pertain to practice.

The Bill of Rights was meant to limit the power of the federal government to infringe on the rights of white men who owned land. Movements for civil rights often end up giving more power to the federal government.

Thus, it's not surprising that libertarians -- and I count Greenwald among them -- would praise at least some of Paul's views while people like me don't want to give any credibility to a man whose actions would remove civil-rights protections.

As I've written before, some men fear government the way I fear men. I keep my windows shut on a warm Florida night, and it's not because I fear a black ops team is going to leap in and assassinate me. Government entities have threatened me at least twice for not naming sources, but they've never tried to rape or kill me. If you're a man, don't 'splain to me how it's the evil State that robs me of my freedom.

Amnesty International and other human-rights organizations have come to understand that government doesn't just restrict liberty by its actions, but also by its inaction.

Although the First Amendment made my career possible, I don't worship it the way Greenwald and others do. I understand that "free speech" means "free from many government restrictions," but other than that, you're on your own, pal. Violence and the threat of violence, great gobs of money, etc., control speech.

Defend free speech, but please don't pretend there's no link between speech and actions. Example: Pornography is propaganda.

To better understand these issues, let's look further at Greenwald's views. Salon, which publishes his columns, calls him "a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator." Out magazine elaborates:

By the third year of law school, he was working for a large law firm. But realizing that representing Goldman Sachs would have destroyed him psychologically, he set up his own firm, which represented several neo-Nazis and other unpopular clients.

I hope someone will point out his significant civil-rights cases. The only mention I found was his suing his landlord over discrimination. Perhaps his most unpopular client was Matthew Hale, "pontifex maximus" of a white-supremacist church engaged in a "racial holy war." Church members had committed racial violence before, and their holy books encouraged violence. Read what the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white-supremacist groups, says about Hale.

One of his friends and followers, Benjamin Smith, was a character witness for him in his application to join the Illinois Bar. Two days after Hale was rejected, Smith went on a shooting spree, killing two people and wounding nine others.

Hale was sued on behalf of two Jewish teens and a black minister who had been shot. The Center for Constitutional Rights and others helped, and Greenwald defended Hale. (Irony alert: In Anderson v. Hale in 2001, a U.S. district court found that Greenwald "recorded telephone conversations with various third party witnesses, without disclosing to those witnesses that they were being recorded.")

In 2003, Hale was arrested "on charges that he had solicited someone to kill a federal judge," who presided over another case against him. In April 2005, he was sentenced to 40 years. (Two months earlier, a man, not tied to Hale, had killed the judge's husband and mother.)

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune ran a commentary by current and former officials with the Anti-Defamation League. Greenwald responded:

Once we head down the road of holding people legally responsible for the consequences of expressing their beliefs, meaningful 1st Amendment protections would quickly cease to exist. For instance, individuals who espouse pro-life views could be held responsible for the murder of abortion doctors on the theory that pro-life speeches "incited" these murders. Black leaders who rail against white racism can be blamed for race-motivated, black-on-white crime. People who condemn homosexuality can be blamed for gay-bashing attacks. Those who speak out against the extremism of Muslims could be held responsible for hate crimes against Muslims.

The vast majority of people find Hale's racist beliefs to be odious and evil. Far more odious, and far more dangerous, is the belief that criminalizing certain viewpoints by calling them "hate speech" is something that can be done while still retaining our 1st Amendment freedoms.

I'm wary of criminalizing "hate speech," too, but Hale didn't simply speak in a hateful manner, [ETA] as the ADL commentary points out. A better comparison would be a crime boss who says another group needs to go, without specifying what should be done and who should do it. I might characterize opponents as misguided, but I would never suggest they were more odious and dangerous than neo-Nazis. (Credit goes to the Reid Report for pointing me toward this case and other writing.)

Feminists may see parallels with anti-abortion extremists, as Greenwald did. Amanda Robb had a terrific piece of investigative journalism in 2010 in Ms. Magazine on Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller, and those who supported Roeder. Although he pulled the trigger, she argues, he didn't act alone.

I don't know Greenwald's current views on abortion, but in 2005, he didn't mind the government imposing some restrictions. On his blog Unclaimed Territory, he argued that it wasn't good strategy to oppose Samuel Alito's Supreme Court confirmation because of his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Greenwald wrote:

A law requiring a woman to notify her husband before she can abort her baby (not that she obtain consent of her husband, and not that she notify the father of her baby -- only that she notify her husband, if she has one) -- does not seem that it would greatly offend very many people beyond the hard-core, absolutist pro-choice minority, which is going to oppose Alito no matter what.

Two months later, in a list of the 10 worst Americans, he included Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored Roe v. Wade.

With a single, intellectually flimsy judicial opinion, [he] did more than anyone else to inflame and render irresolvable America’s paralyzing and internally destructive culture war.

Greenwald said the list included names from commenter Hypatia, and he didn't agree with all of her choices. This gave him plausible deniability. Although he published the list, he could argue that he disagreed with the inclusion of Blackmun, and I have no way to contact Hypatia to prove otherwise.

This post was one reason I chose "hermeneutics" to describe my attempt to figure out what Greenwald does or does not believe. His writing reminds me of food critics who write with an invisible I, such as: “The truffled hummingbird wing pleased the palate,” or old-style journalists who write, "One might believe that X lied." If someone says the writer called X a liar, the writer can say, no, some people might believe that, but I'm not expressing my opinion.

Greenwald has written that he was neither liberal nor conservative and didn't vote in 2000. He supported Bush and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Out magazine says: "In his early days as a blogger, Greenwald supported Democratic candidates who shared his pro-civil liberties views." Was that 2005 when he started Unclaimed Territory? I read through those posts and didn't notice much support for Democrats. Instead, he argued against gun control and considered "few problems ... more pressing" than illegal immigration.

In 2005, he contrasted Bush and Clinton, saying Bush had remained “steadfast” in refusing to cave to the pressure of “the preening, hubristic, status-obsessed Washington media elite.” Among these elites, Greenwald included investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre, and later exposed torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

On CNN, Hersch had said generals were worried that Bush wasn’t listening to them and others, including himself. They worried about an escalation of air strikes and the death of civilians. (Is Greenwald now an elite for wishing that Obama would listen to him?)

In the following, Greenwald had links to whom he was referencing. I'll put them in brackets.

Ever since he took office, Bush has refused to play by many of the long-standing rules of the Washington game. He doesn't fire his cabinet secretaries and aides when editorial boards and other politicians demand that he do so. [Donald Rumsfeld] The appearance of as-yet-unproven scandals doesn't cause him to dump whomever is said to be associated with them. [Karl Rove]

In 2006, he wrote that, in the past, "conservatives vigorously opposed every proposal to expand government investigative and surveillance power on the ground that such powers posed intolerable threats to our liberties."

He criticized Bush for expanding presidential powers, saying: "It has long been clear that there is nothing remotely 'conservative' about this Administration, at least in the sense that conservative ideology has stood for a restrained Federal Government which was to be distrusted."

In 2005, he wrote about Scooter Libby leaking information on CIA agent Valerie Plame: "It is illegal to disclose classified information to individuals who are not cleared to receive it. Period." Now he considers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange heroes. He has "blinding contempt" for Adrian Lamo, who turned Manning in to the FBI. If someone thinks wrongdoing has occurred, why is it heroic to go to WikiLeaks but horrid to go to the FBI? Why do Assange fans tell writers that we must assume he's innocent, and yet, talk about Manning exposing "war crimes," even though no one has been convicted, to my knowledge?

Greenwald has accused the government of torturing Manning, but at least the government didn't make him eat his own vomit, as Max Hardcore did to women in porn videos. I realize that sounds flippant, but it underscores what gets called torture. For example, plenty of men beat and rape their partners, and restrict their movements, but the media rarely calls that torture. This story is an exception because authorities used the word.

The Reclusive Leftist wrote about Greenwald's defense of Max Hardcore and torture porn. (Here's what I wrote.) She linked to the Feminist Law Professors, in which Ann Bartow criticized Greenwald.

"You’re the one who is drowning in misogyny and contempt for women," he responded, because he thinks women who say they consented should be believed. But Ann and others noted that fear and financial need may influence what porn actresses sign and what they say. A woman may give consent initially, but change her mind later. Would Greenwald want us to assume she consented, even if she's struggling and crying? The right to consent to certain sex acts, but not others, and the right to withdraw consent are at the crux of the sex-crime accusations against Assange.

In 2006, Greenwald criticized Austria for imprisoning David Irving for denying the Holocaust in print.

I know from debating these issues that there are handfuls of people on the Far Left who will defend free speech restrictions of this sort on the ground that the right of people to be free from feelings of "intimidation" or "discomfort" outweighs the rights and virtues of free expression. And there are people on the Far Right who favor their own pet restrictions on free expression, whether it be prosecuting people for burning flags or prohibiting the expression of ideas they claim are "pornographic" or "obscene."

But outside of these fringes and aberrational viewpoints, the notion that the Government can define a set of ideas which is criminally prohibited, and which can serve as a basis for criminal prosecution, is sharply distasteful and even infuriating to most Americans.

[Indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens is] at least as repulsive to core American political values as imprisoning people for expressing prohibited ideas. Very few Democrats have actually tried to make Americans aware of these matters, and to the extent that this case has been made at all, it’s been made most potently by conservatives.

Two Articles on Apple

It's an awkward juxtaposition, to say the least. First the New York Times writes about the treatment of Chinese workers who assemble the iPhones, iPads and so on:

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

Then these news:

Apple Inc. has Wall Street’s full attention after hinting at plans for the company’s $100 billion cash pile that may lead to stockholders receiving a dividend.

Apple is “actively discussing” uses for its cash, including a dividend, buyback, acquisitions and supply chain investments, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer told analysts and investors yesterday in an earnings conference call.

The comments were a welcome sign for investors who have called for a dividend as Cupertino, California-based Apple has added to its balance sheet. Apple’s $97.6 billion in cash and short- and long-term investments is larger than the market value of all but 26 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. The total could reach $150 billion by year-end without giving money back to shareholders, said David Rolfe, chief investment officer of Wedgewood Partners Inc., an Apple investor.

Misery Bear And Writer's Block

This applies to most any deadline, not just writer's block.

What Was He Thinking?

Mark Cenedella wants one day to be a U.S. Senator from the state of New York. This is the groundwork he has laid:

Marc Cenedella, a Republican businessman laying the groundwork for a possible run for a United States Senate seat in New York, said on Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for blog posts about sex, women and drugs that have drawn criticism.

...

The entries had headlines like “Sexy vs. Skanky,” “Dating Advice for Girly Girls,” “He Stole My Weed” and “High Quality Dope,” according to the article.
In an entry titled “A New Holiday for Men,” there was a link to a separate site that designates March 14 as a special occasion on which women are encouraged to offer steak and oral sex “to show your man how much you care for him.” Another entry linked to a site that purports to provide biblical justification for a man’s having more than one wife. “I wasn’t so sure about all this Bible stuff,” the entry accompanying the link said, “but I’m starting to cotton to it.”

Mr. Cenedella can't seem to decide who it was who wrote those posts. It could have been all sorts of posters from his old site, it could have been spam or it could have been Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand (whom he wants to beat)! I wish he made up his mind.

But nowhere do I see anything about him apologizing for those posts.

Internet Misogyny For The Day

This is such fun! I somehow got on a weird site, barstoolsports.com, and found this:
Remember that Saudi Chick Who Was Protesting The Fact It Was Illegal For Women To Drive. She Died. In a Car Accident.

The writer continues, after slurs aimed at Rosa Parks:

But Manal al-Sherif just haaaaaad to get behind the wheel. Just had to show the world that a set of tits doesn’t mean you’re a terrible driver. Wrong! I bet she was putting on makeup and eating PinkBerry and tailgating the other drivers too. Fucking chicks, can’t do anything. Am I right, guys? Am I right?! Someone give me a high five.

The link on that crummy site is to the UK Telegraph which tells us that women who drive can get into car accidents! Of course women who are passengers in cars can also get into car accidents.

Here's the hilarious bit! The woman in that accident is not the same Manal al-Sherif at all:

On Monday, a woman in Saudia Arabia, where women are banned from driving, died in a car accident and was mistakenly identified as a famous activist. The event was a tragedy for those involved, but for news sites around the world it was a chance for cheap, inaccurate irony.
The story appears to have started with an Agence France Presse story that was published on Monday with a slightly over-sold headline "Saudi Female Driver Defies Ban, Has Fatal Accident." No names were given for the victims, but something happened as other news sites rewrote the story and suddenly it was reported that Manal al-Sharif, the head of a Saudi female driving campaign, had died. Considering the international headlines her campaign for women's right to drive merited, that would be a huge news story. Except for one problem: Manal al-Sharif is alive and was not involved in any car accident. She revealed the little detail to The Guardian on Wednesday.

Cheap and inaccurate irony, indeed. It tells us a lot about how some news writers really think.
---
Added later: Information on accidents by gender of the driver and other related questions can be found here. This is one field where irrational prejudices tend to be very strong. And note the impact of the stereotype threat in the first linked article.

From The Twilight Zone Archives

I quote TPM:

An Oklahoma Republican is pushing a bill to outlaw the use of human fetuses in food, because, as he says, “there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.”
State Sen. Ralph Shortey introduced a bill on Tuesday “prohibiting the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.”
Though he has allowed that he is not aware of this occurring in Oklahoma, or anywhere for that matter, Shortey cited research he did on the internet that claimed that some companies use embryonic stem cells to help develop artificial flavoring. “It would be a public relations nightmare for a company to use” aborted human fetuses for R&D, Shortey told KRMG Radio, so when asked they usually say something like “we strive to do things ethically.”
“I’m not entirely sure if there are any” companies doing this, he continued. “But the fact is that there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors. And if that is happening — because it is a possibility — and if it’s happening then I just don’t think it should even be an option for a company.”

Soylent Green.

How Much Is That Appendectomy? Consumer-Based Market Strategies

Do you know what would really lower the prices of health care in this country? According to Peter Orszag it would be people shopping around for the best price, going to sales, looking for spare knees on craigslist and so on.

Let me hasten to say that making health care prices more transparent, as he advocates, is a wonderful idea. Wonderful. But it would have at most a very limited impact.

Why? Let me count the ways!

First, a considerable chunk of health care spending takes place at emergencies or when a person is critically ill. There is no time for shopping around, assuming that the patient is either conscious or has someone working on those price comparisons.

Second, price comparisons are meaningful only if they are for the same product and the same amount and quality of that product. It's pointless to try to deduce anything from the price differences of one pound of Idaho potatoes and a gallon of orange juice. It's even pointless to try to deduce anything from the price differences of one pound of fresh Idaho potatoes and one pound of very tired sprouting Idaho potatoes.

That looks a bit preposterous, right? But it truly is pretty similar to many choices in health care. Suppose two providers give you different diagnoses and recommend different treatments for those diagnoses. Are you going to decide on the basis of price?

Third, suppose your hip hurts a lot and you go to a physician who tells you an artificial hip is needed. Will you then just go out and compare the prices of hip replacement surgery in various nearby hospitals? But what if the initial diagnoses was all wrong and you have been given the script for a pound of potatoes when what you really need is a gallon of orange juice?

The problem here has to do with the fact that we go to the providers not only to get the treatment but also to be told what is wrong with us. Proper price comparisons require not only second and third opinions of the usual kind, but actually going to several physicians with the same symptoms to make sure that a hip replacement is the recommended treatment by all.

Fourth, quality comparisons matter when judging prices. Orszag argues that quality is not terribly correlated with price. But would that still be the case if consumers indeed were somehow made to be extremely price conscious?

I doubt that very much, because the easiest way to get prices lower is to cut back on some aspects of the treatment. This would not necessarily lower quality of actual care (in terms of health outcomes) because the current system may have incentives to over-treat. But it would certainly provide incentives for lower quality treatments, too.

The real problem with quality concerns in health care is this: Patients do not have the information to spot when wrong treatments are taking place and the consequences of poor quality care can be devastating. Without some sort of quality safeguards an attempt to judge by price alone leaves patients very vulnerable.

Fifth, the demand in health care can be very price inelastic, meaning that consumers are not just very price sensitive when it comes to seeking relief from pain, discomfort and certainly from life-threatening conditions. Combine this with local markets which are often highly concentrated, and what you get is a setup where price competition will not happen without something as "ominous" as, say, an outside agency which monitors prices and quality and outcome data.

But that's not what Orszag has in mind in his article. He's advocating that consumers actually shop around, learn humongous amounts of medical science and then construct carefully thought-out treatment strategies for themselves to use in price shopping. All this while possibly suffering from a debilitating disease.

Sixth, and finally, most consumers still have insurance. Insurance decreases price sensitivity, because the total payment will not be coming out of the consumer's pocket. Orszag notes that this problem will be gone in the future!

In the future, though, health-insurance plans are likely to shift toward a defined-contribution model -- in which the employee is given a set contribution toward buying an insurance policy -- and, in that setting, price transparency could become more effective. After all, when people bear more of the financial risk associated with their own health care, they are likely to become more responsive to information about price and quality.

Mmm. If you are not covered you will become more price sensitive! Whether that is seen as an advantage depends on whether you think that health insurance is a nifty idea or not.

But all the earlier problems I stated would still apply. The final consumers' ability to affect price competition in health care is minimal, and the reasons for that are in the basic attributes of the product, the lack of information consumers have when it comes to complicated treatments and the unusual aspect of medical care where the seller of the product also serves as the buyer's informant about how much to buy.

Having said that, it's obviously true that greater price transparency would be a good thing. It would help consumers to choose among certain standard packages of care such as basic checkups or routine dental care. But otherwise its impact would be very limited.

Now what would be nice is if we had something like a government agency which monitors the prices and the quality of medical care and then reports on that to consumers and providers! Such a third party agency (independent of both the consumer and the producer side) would not suffer from the limitations consumers of medical care have and could focus on studying the marketplace full time. It could make the prices more transparent and it could also take care of the price collusion Orszag refers to:

A 2008 Congressional Budget Office report, published while I was director of that agency, noted the same concern for health-care price transparency: “The markets for some health- care services are highly concentrated, so increasing transparency in such markets could lead to higher, rather than lower, prices because higher prices are easier to maintain when the prices charged by each provider involved can be observed by all the others.” The best way to mitigate this concern is aggressive antitrust oversight. But it would also help to make prices more transparent to consumers, but not providers.

On that last sentence: There's no way in hell that prices would not become known by the other providers under Orszag's scheme. No way. All they would need is one consumer's information.

But sure, apply aggressive antitrust oversight. Preferably with that price monitoring agency I mentioned above. Just don't expect consumers to to be the engine of price competition in health care.

Economic and Framing Comments On The 2012 SOTU

Which I watched, all the way, through! Do I hear applause?

Whether the speech deserves applause depends on what its intended audience might be. Not the so-called liberal/progressive base, in any case, though it had many good parts, sure. Still, I noticed that the president has adopted several Republican frames without perhaps noticing that he has done so. Examples:

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.

Businesses don't have magic wands which they use for creating jobs. Unless consumers are there with money to buy things with, few businesses will create jobs. Jobs are created by the whole system, not just the corporate system.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

Mmm. Except that the US corporate tax rate does not reflect the taxes companies actually end up paying, what with the gigantic number of allowed deductions. The actual corporate tax payments in the US are among the lower ones inside the OECD.

Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Now that one sounds like something George Walker Bush would have said! Purely Republican framing with that "tax relief" and "tear down regulations."

Of course tearing down regulations worked so wonderfully well for both the housing industry and the financial industry and is one of the reasons (perhaps the main reason) for the current global recession. But yes, sure, let's make a joke about farmers and the dangers of spilt milk as Obama did. To make regulations look even less important.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

That, too, is pure conservative framing. A bit odd coming from the guy who right now owns Washington.

And this is the bit of conservative framing which I want to analyze in more detail:

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

There's something very odd about those particular pairings: Competition with basic education and competition with health care. What might that oddness be?

This: When economists look at which products and services are best supplied via profit-making firms and which are not, education and health care are always presented as the ones with most problems in a market-based distribution system.

Why? Because lack of information and the imbalance of information between the buyers and sellers are the greatest in those two industries. If the buyers cannot really tell the quality of what they are purchasing (because it is embodied, dependent on cooperation between the buyer and the seller and also sometimes only verifiable years later), the price of that product becomes meaningless and the ways of cheating customers a legion. Historically, education and health care (of the institutional type) have never been offered by for-profit firms as the main organizational form.

Instead, the dominant corporate form in these industries has always been the not-for-profit firm. And there's the problem: The arguments about how efficient markets are, how low they can drive prices and so on do not necessarily apply to not-for-profit firms because they don't have the profit motive.

So the case for the markets is the weakest in education and in health care. I'm not sure why the president would pick those as his examples. But then he also said something quite muddled about markets:

Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

That "free markets" is another bit of conservative framing. Markets also cannot be both free AND regulated.

Meanwhile, in the New Egyptian Parliament

Women are less than two percent of the members. As the most important task of this new parliament will be to draft a new constitution, this constitution will be drafted by men. And by Islamist men.

Why so few women? One reason is that Egypt is a patriarchal country:

[W]e did a survey that was composed of only one question. Would you accept to see your president as a woman? One hundred percent of them said 'no.' This is what people think, it's OK to have democracy, but women are not in the equation of democracy.

Another reason has to do with the way the election lists were constructed:

Also, the women who ran on party lists were placed far down on those lists, meaning they had virtually no chance of getting into office. And that was true of all parties, Islamist as well as liberal.

"It really hurts so much when the same people you were with in that square that day, who are fighting against the regime ... are now turning against you," says Dalia Ziada, an activist who ran for Parliament. "It's like betrayal, betrayal from our companions."

It's not at all hard to predict that the new constitution will not give women equal rights.

Today's Totally Trivial Thought

To become an inspiring author an aspiring author must first spend years being a perspiring author.

Noli Me Tangere?

Rand Paul refused to be patted down at an airport:

The T.S.A. said that Mr. Paul had been screened by a version of its millimeter-wave body imaging device that uses a generic image of a passenger and, if it detects any anomaly, puts a yellow box on the body area that requires greater scrutiny. An alarm was triggered when he was in the machine, which – under administration procedures – required a “targeted pat-down” to see what caused it. But Mr. Paul refused to submit to the pat-down, the agency said.

He was en route to an anti-abortion event:

A posting on the senator’s own Twitter account shortly before the incident announced that he was headed to Washington to speak at the “March for Life,” an anti-abortion rally.

tweet avatar

@SenRandPaul Senator Rand Paul

Today I’ll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it. #ky

Digby has more on why this is all rather farcical:

Having said that, I cannot help but be reminded of the fact that his home state of Texas just passed a law that goes a good deal further: forced vaginal probes of women seeking an abortion.

Worth Noticing

This piece of military news from Afghanistan:

It was an unusual job even for the Seabees, the U.S. Navy’s construction forces trained to hold a hammer in one hand and a Beretta M9 in the other.
First, the team selected to build barracks high in the mountains of Afghanistan consisted of eight women, who are all stationed at Naval Base Ventura County. And second, the women completed the job far ahead of schedule.

I have promised myself (and you, my erudite readers) more good news and less the usual kind of wallowing in all the misery.

We shall see how it goes.

The Violent Ape. Today's Evolutionary Psychology Story about Men's Sex Drive As The Cause Of Wars

Today's evolutionary psychology study is most unusual. It applies the same story-telling approach to men as it normally applies to women:

Male sex drive is at the root of most conflict in the world, from football violence to world wars, scientists have claimed.
A review of psychological evidence concludes that men are shaped by evolution to be aggressive towards "outsiders".
The tendency, at the heart of all inter-tribal violence, emerged through natural selection as a result of competition for mates.
Today it can be seen in large-scale conflicts between nations as well as clashes involving rival gangs, football fans or religious groups, say the researchers.
Women, on the other hand, are said to have evolved to resolve conflicts peacefully. Natural selection has programmed them to "tend and befriend" to protect their offspring.

Mmm. How would "tending and befriending" work against predators or hostile strangers attacking the tribe? Anyone who has once been a teenage girl knows that the above description is at least partial bullshit. Weaker members of a group learn to use "tending and befriending," sure, but that's because they are the weaker members. It's not at all clear to me that some kind of hard-wired evolution is what is going on in here.

Besides, the study of violence in the history of human beings should also take into account the general way in which women and men are trained in that context. Women have traditionally been discouraged from using physical violence and from learning the use of weaponry. Men, on the other hand, have been pushed and prodded into those roles, to meet the needs of armies for the leaders.

But whatever the case might be, studies of this kind suffer from the odd fusing together of data and just one possible explanation: an evolutionary one. I find that approach ultimately a dishonest one because it suggests that only one story was supported by the data.

But it also appears to abstract away from the fact that the levels of violence in the society are not constant, that many people have lived through their natural lives without ever experiencing war, and that conflicts do have environmental causes such as shortage of food, potable water or land for farming. Thus, something that in fact IS variable in reality turns into a life-long sentence of violence and more violence for all humanity.

Why do these studies get so much publicity? The question is rhetorical, of course, because they are published to incite gender wars. Just read the comments here on this particular study to see what happens. But from a different angle these studies bring us no new knowledge. It's pretty obvious that most wars have been fought by men. Why that is the case is no clearer now than it was before this particular study was published.

But the argument that the only reason for wars lies in men's sex drive seems very odd to me. Violent raids and such may have been used to acquire women but surely they were most often about general resources and space? The researchers quote chimpanzees as the Comparison Animal Of The Day:

At a basic level, such ‘tribal’ aggression helped men in a group to obtain more females, increasing their chances of reproduction.
‘We see similar behaviour in chimpanzees,’ said Prof van Vugt. ‘For example, the males continuously monitor the borders of their territory.
‘If a female from another group comes along, she may be persuaded to emigrate to his group. When a male strays too far, however, he is likely to be brutally beaten and possibly killed.’

How did that male stray too far? Wasn't he supposed to be monitoring the perimeter of his territory? And who let that female out of her group? Note also that the cost of violent raids might be getting brutally beaten and even killed.

One problem with the way this story is told is that it looks at only one group of chimpanzees. If you add a second group to that you may get a situation where the females from both groups visit males in the other group and get impregnated by them. Some studies suggests that this is quite common:

Female ‘infidelity’ is also much more common than assumed. A few years ago, the first DNA paternity tests among chimpanzees showed that over half of the infants were sired by males outside the community - a fact the human researchers and probably also the dominant males had been totally unaware of (Hrdy 1999, 85).

In other words, the overall situation is quite a bit more complicated and might even be a reproductive draw. And what if we picked a different "promiscuous" primate species for the purposes of comparison? Say the bonobos:

To understand human mating we have to understand the mating system of our species. Chimpanzees and bonobos (who share around 99% of our DNA) have what's referred to as a multimale-multifemale mating system. Females have sex with multiple individuals in their troop and make positive choices about which males they're most interested in. The evolution of sexual jealousy is seen in nascent form in our evolutionary cousins when a low-ranking chimpanzee is caught mating with a female that a higher ranking male is sweet on. The forest isn't at peace for some time afterwards. In bonobos the situation is a little different. Females largely call the shots and have been known to harass males (and other females) for mating with their preferred partners.

In any case, I'm not at all convinced that the human mating system is a multimale-multifemale one.

Out of the Mouths of Children

A Finnish story asking a bunch of very young children their views on the photos of candidates for the next president of Finland (they have elections right now) is hilarious. The jury consisted of

Otto, 1, Saara, 3, Elsa, 5, Noora, 5, Elmeri, 7, Eemeli, 7, Veikko, 9 and Helmi, 11.

Otto obviously did not say much at all, but even Saara did! As an example of the kinds of comments, let's translate the assessments concerning the Center Party Paavo Väyrynen's electability among these very young judges:

Saara: His eyeglasses are too fancy, not good.
Elsa: No. His nose is really big, too big eyes, ears and a tall forehead. He also has a sad mouth.
Noora: Looks like a president but I don't want him because I like Biaudet. He looks boyish.
Elmeri: Looks ever so slightly good for a president.
Eemeli: Looks fine but not like a president.
Veikko: Not a good president, slightly abstract style in my view.
Helmi: Not quite the presidential type.

It's all meant as something fun and silly, of course. But that's not why I write about it.

The current president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, is a woman, and she is the only president these children remember. This gives us an opportunity to look at the impact of the environment/culture on gender roles in children's minds. And what do we find?

When asked about what the job of a president entails, Elsa, 5, answers: " The president is followed by men who carry her handbag. She decides on all Finnish stuff."

And when asked their opinions about Sari Essayah, a female candidate in the race, Noora, 5, states: "Yes, she could well be a president because she is a girl." To which Elmeri, 7, answers: "No, because we have already had a girl."

Blatant Racism

Newt Gingrich resorted to that weapon in his determination to win the South Carolina primaries.

The story began last Monday night at the Myrtle Beach Republican presidential debate. The following exchange took place between the journalist Juan Williams, moderating the debate, and Newt Gingrich. I quote the whole of the exchange so that you can get the full flavor of it. I have bolded Williams' comments below to make it easier for you to see what he actually says:

WILLIAMS: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?

GINGRICH: No. I don’t see that.
(APPLAUSE)
You know, my daughter, Jackie, who’s sitting back there, Jackie Cushman, reminded me that her first job was at First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Georgia, doing janitorial work at 13. And she liked earning the money. She liked learning that if you worked, you got paid. She liked being in charge of her own money, and she thought it was a good start.
I had a young man in New Hampshire who walked up to me. I’ve written two newsletters now about this topic. I’ve had over 50 people write me about the jobs they got at 11, 12, 13 years of age. Ran into a young man who started a doughnut company at 11. He’s now 16. He has several restaurants that take his doughnuts. His father is thrilled that he’s 16 because he can now deliver his own doughnuts.
(LAUGHTER)
What I tried to say — and I think it’s fascinating, because Joe Klein reminded me that this started with an article he wrote 20 years ago. New York City pays their janitors an absurd amount of money because of the union. You could take one janitor and hire 30-some kids to work in the school for the price of one janitor, and those 30 kids would be a lot less likely to drop out. They would actually have money in their pocket. They’d learn to show up for work. They could do light janitorial duty. They could work in the cafeteria. They could work in the front office. They could work in the library. They’d be getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.
(APPLAUSE)


WILLIAMS: Well…
(APPLAUSE)


(CROSSTALK)


WILLIAMS: The suggestion that he made was about a lack of work ethic. And I’ve got to tell you, my e-mail account, my Twitter account has been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.
You saw some of this reaction during your visit…
(BOOING)
… to a black church in South Carolina. You saw some of this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina, where a woman asked you why you refer to President Obama as “the food stamp president.” It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.
(BOOING)


GINGRICH: Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. There’s — the area that ought to be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built the road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything.
(APPLAUSE)
So…
(APPLAUSE)


BAIER: Finish your thought, Mr. Speaker.



GINGRICH: One last thing.


BAIER: Yes, sir.


GINGRICH: So here’s my point. I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness. And if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn some day to own the job.
(APPLAUSE)

Got it? Here's what Newt Gingrich said in yesterday's speech:

GINGRICH: I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.

Astonishing stuff. Note that there was nothing in the exchange that would support the reading that work for Juan Williams is a "strange, distant concept." Note, also that Juan Williams is a well-known and hard-working journalist:

Williams is the author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (1988),[1] a companion to the documentary series of the same name about the African-American Civil Rights Movement;Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (2000), a biography of Thurgood Marshall, the first black American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States; and Enough (2006), which was inspired by Bill Cosby's speech at the NAACP gala, and deals with Williams' critique of black leaders in America, and as he puts it the "culture of failure."[2] Williams has received an Emmy Award and critical praise for his television documentary work and he has won several awards for investigative journalism and his opinion columns.

So why did Newt imply that work is a strange and distant concept for Juan Williams?

Most likely because Williams is black. I cannot think of any other explanation.

Saturday Sillies: Voters Are Like Newt's Happy Wives!

One of the really big gag jokes in American politics is the Republican Party as the Values Party. You know, Hitler had values. Everyone has values. Whether other people like those values is a very different question.

But somehow we have been fed the odd message that Republican voters have good values and everyone else is just a slobbering satisfy-me-now beast.

Sexual morality is the linchpin around which the Republican value structure is created. Sexual morality, in turn, is a euphemism for controlling women's behavior. That's the way the actual contradictions in Republican politics can best be understood.

Such as this stupid post by the Fox News' tame psychiatrist which argues that Newt would be a good president because he managed to attract three different wives:

I want to be coldly analytical, not moralize, here. I want to tell you what Mr. Gingrich’s behavior could mean for the country, not for the future of his current marriage. So, here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages:
1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.
2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married. 
3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible. 
Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

This is silly on too many different levels* to tackle in a short post, so I shall limit myself to just asking you to do a gender reversal on that quote. Put some female politician in Newt's place, let her have Newt's marital history and then ask if anyone would ever write a post like that to defend her. Even a sorta Frankensteiny Fox psychiatrist.

She'd be called an unreliable slut. Of course she would never have managed to stay in the public eye as long as Newt did, with that sexual history, so even starting with that reversal is tough.

The Republican values are always bendable. They apply to some people and not to others, and voters use them as whitewash to defend certain votes, even when the real reasons are something far back in their reptile brains.
----
*A quick summary of a few of those: 1. A candidate's private life may not be the best predictor how they do in politics though it does matter if it conflicts with their political message. 2. The post is there because it looks like Newt will win South Carolina, Fox News is a Republican megaphone and must therefore write positive things about him just in case he becomes the candidate. If Newt was a Democrat, the post would crucify him. 3. We are asked to identify with Newt's many wives, but only at the point when they become his wives, not at the point when he leaves them and why. 4. We are not asked to remember that losing interest in a wife would also apply to losing interest in presidenting if the initial argument that there's something to learn from Newt's amorous history applies. And so on.

Possibly Good News About Contraception Coverage

Lindsey Beyerstein sums up the issues well:

The Obama administration has rebuffed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious lobby groups seeking greater leeway for religiously-affiliated insurers to deny birth control coverage.

The existing exemption for churches will stand, but the feds will not expand the exemption to cover church-affilitated schools, hospitals, or universities.

Lindsey also points out that the fight is nowhere near over.

As I have written before, it makes little sense to define religious rights based on how someone with a certain religion may treat those of other religions or no religion at all, and that's what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops essentially demands when it wants to have a say over what the employees of Catholic schools, hospitals or universities get in their coverage.

A much more logical way of doing this would be for the Conference of Catholic Bishops to demand that no person who has put her or his religion down as Catholic can qualify for contraceptive coverage, irrespective of their employer's religious views. I'm not supporting that reading at all. Just pointing out that if we base all this on religious affiliation, it should be the religious affiliation of the insured person which matters.

Fixing Those Predatory Sluts!

This is a peach! A story about a UK Member of the Parliament wanting teenaged girls, and only girls, to have extra sex education over and above what all teenagers get, and that on the desirability of abstinence!

MPs will debate a controversial bill on Friday calling for teenage girls to be given lessons in sexual abstinence.
The bill, proposed by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, would require schools to offer extra sex education classes to girls aged 13 to 16 and for these lessons to include advice on "the benefits of abstinence".
In May, MPs voted 67 to 61, majority six, in favour of allowing Dorries to bring forward her bill. It is listed to receive its second reading on Friday morning, though it is unlikely to become law without government support.
The bill has angered feminists, humanists and pro-abortionists, hundreds of whom will be demonstrating outside parliament while the debate takes place.
Beth Granter, a socialist and feminist who has organised the demonstration, predicts that at least 300 will join it. Some 750 have shown their support on Facebook.
The bill has elicited considerable criticism from politicians in all three of the main political parties.

It's not gonna pass, of course. But it's a good reminder of that distorted mirror world view of the extreme social conservatives everywhere!

And Dorries is refreshingly honest in her views. If they were presented to my imaginary alien friend from outer space, it/he/she/they would conclude that teenage girls are the sex predators of this planet, always pestering everyone for sex. Why else single them out for more abstinence exhortations than the boys?

Today's Cartoon

HERE. It's dedicated to me! Thank you so much, Spay.

On This Reality Show. Or Yet Another Republican Debate.

That Republican presidential primaries are now on almost every night makes them into a television program. And the closest equivalent are Reality Shows.

Who will be voted off the island next? Who blurted out the most disgusting statement imaginable? And so on.

Watching the order in which candidates leave (or "suspend" their campaigns) is a fun exercise for social commentary. But it's somewhat scary that the finalists consist of these guys: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

Why scary? Because the United States of America is still a pretty powerful country, and we are watching something close to a reality show on who is going to challenge Barack Obama for the leadership of a sizable chunk of this world.

Things To Read

This Guttmacher report on global abortion trends.

The budget rumors. Liberals and progressives are forewarned that they won't like the budget.

This article from a week ago on breast implants. (If you happened to read the odd Slate piece on the return of the perky breasts, you need that for vaccination purposes. Or you could just read Kate Harding's funny take on it.)

Caitlin Flanagan's No-Boys Land

I have written quite a bit about Caitlin Flanagan and her opinions in the past, perhaps too much. But to understand her most recent arguments about "girlhood", it really is salutary to know what other things she advocates. Thus, here's a very old post by me on Flanagan's writings at the Atlantic Monthly, and here are a few other posts that might be of interest in this context: The Womanly Art of Self-Defense and Maggot Lace.

She has now written a new book, Girl Land, this time not about how housewifery is the only proper occupation for all women (save her), but on how to bring up girls in this corrupt culture (presumably to prepare them for proper housewifery). Emma Gilbey Keller reviews the book in the New York Times, and concludes:

I wish Flanagan had read less and listened more. Because real girls are absent from “Girl Land.” And so is their energy. Stereotypes don’t exactly bring a book to life. Nor do celebrities from the last century. Notwithstanding Flanagan’s stream of forceful assertions, “Girl Land” is a dusty, empty place, bearing little resemblance to your 21st-century daughter’s colorful, noisy, vibrant life.

Amanda at Pandagon has this to say:

Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:
*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy. 
*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it. 
*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman. 
And that's about it.

I took Amanda's advice and listened to the radio interview. Flanagan attacks Carmon personally, in a weird interchange which amounts to Flanagan arguing that the measure of a good adolescence for girls is to have a boyfriend. If you didn't have one, then your adolescence was wasted.

She also argues that adolescent boys only want sex and will do whatever it takes to get it. Hence the idea that adolescent girls should require to be taken out to a date a couple of times first, instead of just "servicing" boys with blowjobs. Because the price of sex has just increased, the girls will be happier? They now had a boyfriend? Who only wanted to have sex?

It's hard for me to address Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

It is girls she wants to protect from Internet p*rnography, not boys. Presumably boys can learn any weird concept of sex from pron and then go out to the world Flanagan wants for dating, equipped with what ideas about girls? And Flanagan wants girls to base their expectations on the idea of romance only. Imagine the clashes! In what sense is not knowing about p*rnography protective for the girls?

The most interesting part of Flanagan's argument has to do with the absence of boys from it. They don't need protecting at all! It's natural for them to just want sex and to do whatever it takes! And it looks like that definition of sex can even come from pron, as far as Flanagan is concerned.

A Tall Latte. Double Shot of Semen, Please.

Apropos of my post concerning what opposing abortion (and even contraception) and opposing same-sex marriage have in common:

I argued that both of those serve to prop up the rigid gender roles of the traditional marriage. And here we get (via Eschaton) a glimpse into that world!

A high-level Corbett administration adviser resigned his $104,470 position Tuesday after questions were raised about his outside role as editor of a conservative faith-based journal.
Along with disclosing welfare adviser Robert W. Patterson's departure, the administration swiftly distanced itself from the views expressed in the journal he edits.
Patterson was hired in October by Welfare Secretary Gary Alexander as a special assistant to help set policy for services provided to millions of Pennsylvanians through the Department of Public Welfare (DPW).
Last week, The Inquirer began asking about Patterson's side job as editor of The Family in America, published by an Illinois-based research center that advocates for the "natural human family . . . established by the Creator."
In the journal, Patterson has weighed in on everything from what he called "misguided" programs that grew out of the 1960s War on Poverty - programs now administered by DPW - to what he described as a woman's ideal role in society: married and at home raising children.
For instance, he wrote about research that he said showed that if women wanted to find "Mr. Right," they should shun birth control pills; and if they wanted to improve their mood, they should not insist that their men wear condoms lest they miss out on beneficial chemicals found in semen.
Carey Miller, spokeswoman for DPW, said Patterson submitted his letter of resignation Tuesday.

Love that idea of the beneficial chemicals found in semen! All coffee bars should sell a semen cappuccino! Hold the cream, double-shot of semen on bad-hair days! Even men could order it, to take advantage of those beneficial chemicals. And think of the jobs we'd create!

More seriously, of course, there you have it, the conservative religious gender agenda in all three Abrahamic religions. Women belong in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Which is pretty odd, given that the Bible, for instance, says nothing about that.

Go Read Charles P. Pierce On Health Care

He is telling his own story about what it is like to have good health insurance in the US. Or one tiny aspect of that experience, but I bet it is an aspect many of you have also experienced. I certainly have.

A snippet or two:

Ultimately, after the nice pharmacist lady enters the proper launch codes, I wind up getting one of the two prescriptions I came for. ($600 co-pay, my arse, pal.). Today's scoreboard totals: almost four hours total, an hour or so on hold, four different companies, four different phone trees, 16-20 buttons pushed (I lost count), four different automated voices with which to chat, eight very polite but ultimately unhelpful purportedly live persons. One of two prescriptions filled.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. I can marginally afford to go through all this. I can just imagine what people on the low end of what is laughingly called a "system" must go through.

I mention all of this because, tomorrow night, the five remaining Republican candidates will get up on stage and they will promise to repeal even the tepid, insurance-friendly reform of the way we do health-care in this country.

....

Every single one of these Republicans will make the argument that, because of the entire morning I spent dealing with the preposterous way we do health-care in this country, that I am a "freer" person than are the people in Canada, or New Zealand, or Germany, or Finland. That I had to spend an entire morning mired in bureaucratic absurdity means I have retained my "freedom" as an American.

And of course Pierce's whole post is, as he writes, written by someone lucky. He can afford health insurance and he has the time, health and ability to fight the system though perhaps not to win that fight.

As I have written until boredom tears flow from my eyes, the market model is extremely problematic in health care. It simply does not work very well, and no country on this earth, not even the Wild West US of conservative dreams, can run a truly market-based health care system without very stringent regulations.

One very simple example of the ways health care markets fail is in the description Pierce gave us: The bureaucracy. Conservatives argue that it's the government which creates bureaucracy but nothing is as good at creating duplication and confusion and impossible-to-interpret clauses than the US private health insurance industry.

There are several reasons for that, but they ultimately boil down to two: The giant information problems which are inextricably tied to many forms health care services and the absence of economies to scale in the administration of the claims.

Though I must admit that Pierce's story also reminded me of the bank mergers in the 1990s when there were days I didn't know what my bank was currently called, and also the mortgage markets where the day's puzzle used to be "Who in the World Owns My Mortgage Today?" I'm not saying that these phenomena are the same in what caused them, though perhaps they are.

But they share in that feeling of increasing consumer powerlessness. You don't know who you are dealing with, you don't know whom to call, and the identity of the firm you signed your initial contract with has become utterly meaningless.

The Nazgûl Rule in Wisconsin May Be In Trouble

The petition to recall Governor Scott Walker is going pretty well:

Organizers of the petition drive to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker submitted what appeared to be more than enough signatures on Tuesday to force the first-term Republican to defend his seat in a special election.

The group United Wisconsin, which opposes the collective bargaining changes and other measures Walker pushed into law last year, said it gathered more than 1 million signatures to recall the governor by the January 17 deadline -- roughly double the 540,208 signatures required.

If you are not familiar with this particular Ringwraith, you can read more about him in my archives.