graison hensley-chapman

Moving

2009-05-08T15:44:00.001-07:00

I'm going to TypePad and never coming back. Comechucka--

Poem of the day

2009-05-07T02:08:00.000-07:00

Today's work under consideration is truly a beast--authored by yours truly on an energy drink hangover, instead of doing my Chalk post.

(Poem since removed.)

Oh my. Credit for effort, right? I've heard it gets better from here.

Tab dump

2009-05-04T20:53:00.001-07:00

I read two stories today that caught my attention more than most do. (I suppose when the majority of your day is spent perusing Politico and the Daily Dish, these kinds of things stand out in comparison--no offense, Andrew.) Anyway, I wanted to archive them, so instead of saving the text to my hard drive or something like that, I decided to post them here. Isn't that neat.

Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo - NYTimes

Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press - NYTimes

The irony of the pro-torture argument

2009-04-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

From New York Magazine's Who Defends 'Torture'? page:

"Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV. We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells. Then we're the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet." - New York Post editorial

That the authors of the editorial can invite comparison between terrorists and the United States without any shock value on the reader's part illustrates better than anything, I think, why so many around the world see America the way that they do. I hardly ought to have to mention how tragic of an irony that is, but then again, there's too many people who seemed not to have figured it out for themselves.

And I don't mean to channel Shep Smith here--Lord knows there's only one Shep Smith--but the Shining City on a hill does not get compared to terrorists. It just fucking doesn't. Each of the commentators on that list would do well to think about that.

Quote of the day

2009-04-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

Today's winner comes from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who, aftaer uttering this bit during the debate over the constitutionality of student strip searches, made the entire court room laugh.

“In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day [. . .] We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

Maybe I still have a shot at the Supreme Court, after all.

(H/T: NYT)

Poem of the day: Rock, Paper, Failed Capitalist Society

2009-04-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

From today's Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, a poem that makes up for it's dearth of subtlety with a unique (unfortunately, it really is unique) outlook on work and worth.

Paper, Scissors, Stone

by Tom Wayman

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.

And, a geologist's hours with stone
nets more than a teacher's with paper
and definitely beats someone's time in a garment factory with scissors.

In addition: to manufacture paper
you need stone to extract metal to fabricate scissors
to cut the product to size.
To make scissors you must have paper to write out the specs
and a whetstone to sharpen the new edges.
Creating gravel, you require the scissor-blades of the crusher
and lots of order forms and invoices at the office.

Thus I believe there is a connection
between things
and not at all like the hierarchy of winners
of a child's game.
When a man starts insisting
he should be paid more than me
because he's more important to the task at hand,
I keep seeing how the whole process collapses
if almost any one of us is missing.
When a woman claims she deserves more money
because she went to school longer,
I remember the taxes I paid to support her education.
Should she benefit twice?
Then there's the guy who demands extra
because he has so much seniority
and understands his work so well
he has ceased to care, does as little as possible,
or refuses to master the latest techniques
the new-hires are required to know.
Even if he's helpful and somehow still curious
after his many years—

Without a machine to precisely measure
how much sweat we each provide
or a contraption hooked up to electrodes in the brain
to record the amount we think,
my getting less than him
and more than her
makes no sense to me.
Surely whatever we do at the job
for our eight hours—as long as it contributes—
has to be worth the same.

And if anyone mentions
this is a nice idea but isn't possible,
consider what we have now:
everybody dissatisfied, continually grumbling and disputing.
No, I'm afraid it's the wage system that doesn't function
except it goes on
and will
until we set to work to stop it

with paper, with scissors, and with stone.

Yes, please

2009-04-20T01:35:00.001-07:00

From 101 Cookbooks, the Whiskey & Wheat Berry Salad:

And now I have a project. (Yes, for me it's a project.)

The existential angst of Jon Arbuckle

2009-04-19T14:33:00.001-07:00

Garfield Minus Garfield. I wish I could be that clever.

Sage words from Glenn Beck

2009-04-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

From a HuffPost link to an AP story:

"If Charlie Rose was the way to get your point across, Charlie Rose would have higher ratings," Beck said in an interview less than two hours after putting away the gas can. "Just because you are funny or make your point in an entertaining way is no reason to dismiss that point."

Wouldn't this be similar to saying "If eating a balanced diet made you healthy, people would be doing it instead of eating junk food"?

[If you're confused by the bit about the gas can, click here.]

My first story

2009-04-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

My first article for the Chicago Maroon, the U of C campus newspaper, ran today. It's not a groundbreaking piece of reporting or anything, but I'm proud of it. Yay me.

Let's go a-Republican bashing

2009-04-13T20:25:00.001-07:00

Paul Krugman goes back to word-whipping the GOP after spending his last several columns critiquing the Obama administration financial rescue plan.

*Points for the Shakespeare fan who can guess the line that inspired the post title. (:: Hint ::)

Finally

2009-04-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

Internet comment of the day

2009-04-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

In response to Melanie Reid's Times Online column advocating the continued presence of the chaplaincy in hospitals, a reader posted:

I'm unemployed. I really dont need God. Unemployment has given me a lot more time to think about what nonsense religion and god is. We do need a common value system but religion is the ultimate Ponzi. Invest now get returns in eternity.
Michael, London, UK

I'm not sure why it caught me, but it did. It's oddly poetic, and for me, as a Christian, a bit unnerving. And not just because the reader sees religion as something akin to investment.

Nobody messes with Joe

2009-04-08T04:48:00.000-07:00

Before I hit the studying grindstone of James Joyce's Ulysses, I can't resist my baser urges as a partisan hack and put up this video of our Vice President in his element:

That's just fun to watch*. Go Joe.

*And, of course, it's nice to know that we're safer due to the new administration's watch.

Meghan McCain makes the regrettable descent into punditry

2009-04-08T03:50:00.000-07:00

I knew that Meghan McCain's latest Daily Beast column would be a rough job in reading before I even got to the first sentence. On the Beast's front page, next to McCain's byline, read "What I Learned From the Democrats: The mistakes liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are making can teach Republicans how to regain power--and how to hold onto it."

Here we go. It seems that McCain has finally made the jump from reflecting on party issues and challenges from her unique vantage point of being John McCain's daughter--which she has done pretty well, having written some spunky and insightful columns--to pontificating about issues on which she has much less, if any, authority. She's written a column, in other words, in the mold of a traditional pundit. She even cited an easily-accessible (and thereby easily fact-checkable) quote out of context! That's a quick learner.

But I ought to give McCain some credit for this column--it could be much worse. She concludes "If Republicans are going to gain power again, and more importantly, remain in power, we must recognize the value of centrism—instead of turning to extreme right-wing members of the party like Rush Limbaugh". Even if it's a tired line with little to back it up, at least she's pushing the sounder course. She's already much more helpful--or, failing that, much less harmful--to her party than Bill Kristol or Ann Coulter has been. (And an aside: lest you think, dear reader, that my tone is beginning to sound like a pundit itself by claiming such a thing, here's some corroboration--a helpful tool in argument.) And for that reason, maybe I should complain less.

Or maybe I shouldn't. The Republican party and the larger conservative movement needs fresh voices and new ideas more than ever. McCain would be blowing a huge opportunity to stop what she's been doing and get comfortable right now. And because the health of democracy relies on principled engagement between different views, it isn't just her originality as a talking head that's at stake if she and others like her fail.

Poem of the day

2009-04-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

"Spring Haiku" from Wendell Berry's Given: Poems (2005):

One wild young plum tree,
White in the bare woods, a bride
Among wedding guests.

Oh, spring. Please come soon--and stay.

International Pillow Fight Day - Chicago

2009-04-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

I think this picture captures the madness best out of the ones that my pillow-war ally took.

What a wonderful expression of the human condition.

Cassette tape art

2009-04-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

I've linked the picture to the artist's site. And now I've got some Desolation Row listening to do. It's that kind of afternoon.

(H/T: Sullivan)

John Cornyn (R-Minnesota)

2009-03-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

Enough douchebaggery to serve

two states

It seems that Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee head and first-class douchebag John Cornyn has implicitly volunteered his office to fill the gap left by the currently unseated Al Franken. From my good friend at Boom Shocka Locka:

Today Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said that Minnesota’s senate race could take “years” to finalize and is threatening “World War II” (what’s up w/ Repubs and treasonous threats these days?) if Franken is seated before Norm has exhausted every option. Thus, since Republicans would prefer our lovely state to have unequal representation in the Senate, MNpublius is suggesting we take our concerns to Cornyn’s office:
So, tomorrow, or later this week or any time until we get two Senators I think that we should call Senator Cornyn’s office with our constituent needs. Highways need repairs? Call Big John! Issues with the IRS? BIG JOOOOOOOOHHHHHNNNNNN will rustle up the help you need. Want to call someone about a piece of legislation in the pipe? The soothing southern drawl on the other end of the line may not sound like us, but gosh darnit if John Cornyn is going to keep us from having two Senators, then he and his staff should pick up some of the slack.
John Cornyn’s office website can be found here, and you can contact him here, or call his office(s) at 202-224-2934 (DC), 806-472-7533, 972-239-1310, 512-469-6034, 210-224-7485, 956-423-0162, 713-572-3337, 903-593-0902. Or heck, you can call all of them.
And remember, when you call and some nimrod intern from Texas Asinine and Mediocre University wonders why someone from Minnesota wants something from their Senator, just say Big John sent you.

Poem of the day

2009-03-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted as "Saturday Poem" on 3quarksdaily.)

“Some people never worked a day in their life,
don’t know what work even means.”
–Bob Dylan, Working Man’s Blues

What Work Is
Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

It's called the Wall Street Journal for a reason

2009-03-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

How the WSJ sees the world: From left: A potential unionization

threat; a crusader for private enterprise

For being a newspaper that focuses especially on business, the Wall Street Journal seems to forget that a business is not solely the management thereof. Take the following bit from the paper's own Daniel Henninger in a recent column:

True socialists at least think about markets so they can criticize them. The Democratic Party's leadership doesn't stir to even that level of engagement. In the House, Senate and some corners of the Obama White House, the party is acting as if the marketplace was the world of an alien tribe, which it has to control through intimidation or demands for protective tribute (read: campaign contributions).

Our poor correspondent is either woefully imperceptive or hopelessly elitist. No other explanations can be offered for his apparent belief that members of Congress, most acting in excessively theatrical fashion to mollify the very real anger of their constituents, distrust the very private enterprise to which the senders of the angry emails, letters, and phone calls belong. So we'll just have to forgive him for either (1) failing to wrap his head around the details of the relevant Congressional proceedings; or (2) equating the marketplace exclusively with Wall Street executives rewarding themselves for losing billions of dollars in wealth. For my part, I'm guessing it's elitism and that those groups which comprise a large private sector firm apart from top management--manual labor, clerical workers, lower and mid-level management--don't fall under Mr. Henninger's lexical entry for private sector. They instead fall under his entry for "unionization, at risk of", among others.

But our Mr. Henninger doesn't stop there. To save myself some sleep, I'll focus on just one more of my favorite absurdities from his snarkfest:

Put it this way: Imagine any of this generation's Democratic establishment taking a job at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as a middle-manager responsible for a division of employees and its annual profit and loss. It is wholly inconceivable. Or helping an owner of an auto-parts company manage through a real crisis. They wouldn't have a clue.

Is he really making me do this?

Eric Cantor: "not that innocent"

2009-03-25T19:25:00.001-07:00

I'm gleefully imagining the reception this will get from the Blue Dogs.

Hiatus v.2

2009-03-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Friends-

This blog of mine, at least until further notice, will be on a hiatus of indefinite length. In the meantime, I'll be deciding how best to regularly divert my creative energies in new, hopefully exciting ways.

Hiatus

2009-03-13T00:57:00.001-07:00

Expect resumed rumination sometime in the next couple of weeks or so.

One month in

2009-02-23T08:54:00.001-08:00

Oscar schmoscar

2009-02-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

The Economist on why this year's Academy Awards are less relevant to the average viewer than ever:

Most people have not seen the films nominated this year. It is likely that many have not even heard of them. Had the Academy nominated a popular film and then given the award to something else, television viewers could have found out that, at least in Hollywood’s opinion, there is a film even better than “The Dark Knight”. Instead, they will perhaps learn that a film about some Indian guy, which they did not see, is better than a film that has Kate Winslet in it. They did not see that one, either. But wasn’t Ms Winslet in “Titanic”?

I'm not on board with their view--I just posted it because I thought it was funny and admired its word economy. Their use of the English language is on an entirely different level than ours. Man.

Joe Scarborough serves it up to HuffPost commenters

2009-02-20T09:15:00.001-08:00

Morning Joe: Notwithstanding his hissier comments on the stimulus, a decent morning show

And duly so, I'd say. People are people, and liberals as well as conservatives have the same propensity, when things get contentious, to recede amongst themselves into groupthink. So while I do not categorically agree with Mr. Scarborough's post--commenters are never the cream of the reader-crop and shouldn't be taken as representative of readership--I commend his efforts to root out the evils of groupthink where he sees it, as I would with anybody else.

It's hard to quote an excerpt that catches the gist of his column--it's kind of a rambler--but this one boils down his beef with the commenters quite nicely:

Weeks back, I sent a post into this site describing the pride I felt seeing Barack Obama sworn in as President of the United States. Even though he was not a member of my party, he is the president of my country.

I spent the rest of that week blasting Republicans for their refusal to celebrate in the historic moment. I hardly think it conservative to cheer against a president's success.

That positive post about the new president was greeted with vitriolic responses and personal attacks from Huffington Post readers who called me everything but Adolf Hitler and a latter-day Ted Bundy.

Hmmm. Okay.

As I understand it, this is the first of what will be a weekly column by Mr. Scarborough. His series will be titled The Loyal Opposition. I think HuffPost will be the better for inviting him on.

Face of the day (kind of)

2009-02-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

From HuffPost linking via BoingBoing: a Japanese chef has sushified the likeness of our 44th president.

"Obama's skin is small shrimp," the chef says. "Hair is black sesame, fish paste teeth."

Poem of the day

2009-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

Piggy, by Daniel Polikoff

Like most everything here, she's
free-ranging. Calais
fell in love with her when she was
pink and small
at a nearby ranch, but
look!--she's
six hundred pounds
and growing. Still, rooting
for tender shoots
by the creek willows, she remains
beloved, and in her sunny
disposition returns the favor. It was
a wonder, after all--she'd
been shaved for the knife
already--eighty
young pigs in auction pens, and Calais' mom
couldn't tell them apart.
But the brown-haired little girl
with slow speech
found her straight off, and neighbors
pitched in with cash
for the bidding.
Now Piggy, stroked and petted by the children,
goes her way on down the direct track,
at least as blessed
as Isaac.

Euphony: Volume 7, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2007)

Metaphor of the day

2009-02-17T07:27:00.000-08:00

It was invoked a couple days ago, but I'm a humanities major, so this stuff is always gold to me. From a Politico article on lessons Democrats ought to take away from the battle over the stimulus:

One Democrat likened Obama’s desire to score even a single GOP defector to Abraham’s pursuit of a “single virtuous man” in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sorry if that disappoints. It caught me the right way, is all. And that isn't to say it is entirely true--because it isn't. The president's attempts at bipartisanship from this last round will, in time, pay dividends--especially once Republicans realize their echo chamber is not America and become more amenable to compromise. So while the President probably played Abraham at moments, in the end, it looks like John Boehner (along with Eric Cantor and the rest of the House GOP caucus) will be the one to end up, like Lot's wife, turned into salt.

*Also: That same Politico article mentioned above is fantastic reading in its own right. The one all Democrats--both legislators and activists--can take to the bank no matter what: message, message, message (lesson number 7, page 2).

Proof of the Black Jesus

2009-02-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

Larry Wilmore provides us with some sound reasoning on why Jesus is of, as he calls it, a "homey heritage." Some of my favorites follow:

Clue #3: His cousin had the first hip-hop name: John the Baptist.

This is a good 2,000 years before Cedric the Entertainer.

Clue #8: He fed 5,000 with two loaves and five fish.

There is only one way to do this: Make gumbo. I’ve seen brothas who started with less feed more than 5,000.
Clue #13: He had street cred.
Yeah, he was born poor. Yeah, he didn’t have a job. Yeah, he had a white girlfriend. But Jesus never really took off till one of his posse betrayed him and had him killed. Instant street cred.

Clue #17: He rose from the dead in three days.

Why not two, or one, or instantly? Obviously, he was on cp time.

An expectations game

2009-02-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in the back and forth over models, projections, graphs, and the like, some folks forget about the psychological liquidity the stimulus stands to inject into the economy. Such injections can be quick and small in volume, such as a jump in the Dow after a good jobs report, while others--like President Obama's announcement that if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is passed, the Caterpillar corporation will re-hire some of the twenty thousand employees it has laid off in recent weeks--slowly but surely, piecemeal, build up the confidence of the firms, investors, and consumers (read: us) that will allow things to turn for the better.

Regime Change We Can Believe In?

2009-02-09T02:36:00.000-08:00

Juan Cole discusses the prospect of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami re-winning his old post in elections expected this June. A little bit on Khatami from the post:

Khatami was head of the Islamic Center in Hamburg and a counselor for Iranian students in Germany in the 1970s and while there learned German and studied the thought of sociologist Jurgen Habermas. He later applied Frankfurt School critical theory to his analysis of the need for a more open society in Iran. He also called for a "dialogue of civilizations," and set in motion such dialogues under the auspices of the UN. He was influential with Shiite liberals in Iraq who supported democratic elections in that country.

He also discusses, among other things (it is a long, detailed post--Cole, a renowned scholar of the region, provides valuable context that newspapers scarcely do), the missteps made by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran's current president, that may cost him the election. Can a girl have hope? Here's to the best--

Email of the day

2009-02-08T23:34:00.000-08:00

It's hard not to feel good after receiving this email--even if the person maintaining the Twitter account is an office staffer and not His Holiness himself.

Hi, Graison (graisonhc).

Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Dalai Lama's profile here:
http://twitter.com/OHHDL

Best,
Twitter

Sunday vent

2009-02-08T15:02:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times report on the reemergence of the "W-word":

Sponsors of this spending call it a humane response to soaring hardship and an economically productive one; giving money to the poor stimulates the economy, they say, because poor people are quick to spend it. Conservatives have argued that poverty programs undermine work and marriage, and some see the stimulus bill as a stealth expansion of the welfare state.

It would undermine work? Where is this work? See, because the BLS is putting out crazy numbers about 600,000 jobs having been lost last month, among others. Maybe, instead of deriding the president's plan to help people lift themselves up after losing their jobs, their homes, and their retirement security, Republicans ought to just tell Departments Labor and Commerce about the wonderful new opportunities that these strapping young bucks have all somehow been too lazy to find.

Oh, wait--they don't know of any new work? They're just race-baiting and partisan-hacking against the popular majority because they have a rump caucus and a governing philosophy that has been disproven time and again in the last thirty years? In other words, they're out of options and digging into the public goodwill fostered by last year's historic election just to buy time and to kill the only ideas being posited to help Americans out of this recession? Oh, okay.

Oh, so now he recalls

2009-02-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

The man with no memory.

Alberto Gonzales takes potshots at Attorney General Eric Holder in a new WaPo story:

Gonzales, who resigned as Bush's attorney general in 2007 under a cloud of scandal, said on National Public Radio that he disagreed with testimony from Eric H. Holder Jr., who said the CIA interrogation technique called waterboarding is torture.

Holder, who was confirmed this week as attorney general, "needs to be careful in making a blanket pronouncement like that," Gonzales said, because it could affect the "morale and dedication" of intelligence officials.

I won't comment on what our former Vice President had to say about the new administration, except to say that if, on the off chance you wanted to read some remarks that are unwarranted, inappropriate and--using one of Mr Cheney's favorite terms--undermining of national security, look no further than the article linked above.

So I guess that's a little bit of a comment. Oh well. He's an asshole.

Poem of the day

2009-02-06T17:07:00.001-08:00

Whiskey River, by Johnny Bush

Whiskey River, take my mind
Don't let a memory talk to me
Whiskey River, don't run dry
You're all I got, take care of me
I'm drowning in a Whiskey River
Bathing my memory's mind in the wetness of its soul
Feeling the amber current flowing from my mind
To warm an empty heart you left so cold

Don't worry--it isn't the Friday night blues. I just bought Shotgun Willie, is all.

Limiting executive pay: a pathway to reform (?)

2009-02-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

James Surowiecki says yes:

if the bailed-out companies want to pay executives more than half a million dollars a year, they’ll have to pay them them in restricted stock, which means shares that the executives won’t be able to sell until the companies have paid the government back all of the money it invested, with interest. In other words, it’s only if a company performs well over an extended period of time that its executives will be able to collect what’ll amount to a bonus. Performing well for a quarter or even a year won’t do the trick: these executives will have to sustain that performance over time in order to cash out those shares. And this goes at least part way toward remedying what’s probably been the biggest problem on Wall Street, which is the fact that individuals have been able to make huge amounts of money while pursuing strategies that looked good in the short term but were terrible in the long term.

(Hat Tip: Guess Who.)

Mental health break: "99 Problems," Cookie Monster remix

2009-02-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

And just in case you haven't seen the Martin Luther 95 theses remix: here.

Brooks on the Daschle withdrawal

2009-02-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

In column-conversation with Gail Collins:

Passing legislation is hard, especially on something as tricky as health care. There are very few people who have the human capital to do it, and now those people are being wasted because of some hyper-Swedish standards about who is pure enough to serve in public office. This is like firing General Grant in the middle of the Civil War because he was known to have a few drinks.

I'm with Davey on this one. Sticking with his defense-by-analogy, I'd say this is the equivalent of letting go your MVP because he was pulled over with some dope in the glove box. Is the consistency upheld by cutting him, though, worth not having the best person possible running your offense when the playoffs come around? Let's hope so.

Get Your War On withdrawal

2009-02-04T20:49:00.000-08:00

Many have guessed what would become of the sarcastic liberal icons that were forged in the years of the Bush Administration. Once the Obama team started running DC, conventional wisdom speculated, commentators like Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, and David Rees would be out of a job. And that might still be proven true (though the rump GOP minority seems to be picking up the slack). But the conventional wisdom forgets that as with all illnesses, the pain from the neocon years takes time to heal. And so, at least in the meantime, it is appropriate to dust off gems like these:

Who's more guilty? ...

2009-02-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

Blago or ex-Senator Norm Coleman? (Oh, that feels so good to say.) TNR's Jonathan Chait drops some knowledge:

In Coleman's defense, he's currently just a subject of an FBI investigation, while Blagojevich has been voted out of office. And, of course, Coleman hasn't been caught boasting about his scheme. On the other hand, Coleman is accused by a Houston businessman of having actually accepted illicit funds, while Blagojevich is merely being accused of harboring an intention to sell his Senate seat.
[. . .]
But, of course, this is just my point: These scandals are as much a function of perception and mass psychology as anything to do with the underlying merits. Coleman benefited from his race against Al Franken, whose very candidacy struck many people as a joke (unfairly, I think). Coleman, a pro-Bush Republican running in a blue state, based his campaign on Franken's characterological unfitness for office and managed to acquire the trappings of the good-government candidate.

Nobody is defending Rod Blagojevich. But why do others like Mr Coleman, who are inarguably just as guilty (or moreso), remain unscathed by media and political apparatuses? Perhaps it is just the unfairness of disparities in context and so on. Or perhaps it is only a matter of time before we get to see old Norm led out of his house, handcuffed, in front of the cameras. After all he's done for himself at the expense of Minnesotans, one can only hope for such an outcome.

Layoff blues

2009-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

It's not easy for the boss, either:

We had to lay people off to keep the company healthy, but you start second-guessing yourself. You wonder what you might have missed. It’s easy in a market like this to tell yourself it’s not your fault. Some of the best-known companies and managers are making the same decision. That might be true, but it seems like a flimsy excuse.

It would be fantastic if Wall Street and Big Three management held similar values and mindset.

Blago wins?

2009-01-29T23:32:00.000-08:00

TNR's Michael Crowley on the the IL Senate vote and the end of the Blago era:

Unanimously. And now, I'd bet, for the big trashy book contract that will bring him the cash pile he always wanted. Mission accomplished, sort of.

Poem of the day

2009-01-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

From a tweet by Jacquelyn Whitworth:

I'm way overdue for a psyche explosion cuz this life is a stagnant motion thru some ends that we abide by

Change--you can believe it.

2009-01-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of hours ago, President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, legislation that makes it easier for women and other groups to sue employers for pay discrimination. The landmark civil rights bill was the first he signed into law.

I uncovered an embarrassment of U.S. military security and all I got was a free mp3 player!

2009-01-28T02:40:00.000-08:00

An odd story to end the night (or, if you are not on paper-writing hours, to start the morning).

Worst person in the world award (and some good news, too)

2009-01-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

Today's award is a collective one, and it goes to the opponents of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The bill, which just passed the House and is on its way to President Obama's desk (the President strongly supported it as Senator and invited Lily Ledbetter, the bill's namesake, to come on his pre-inaugural whistle-stop tour), makes it easier for women, minorities, and any other group that suffers wage discrimination to sue offending employers. The objections of the bill's opponents--primarily Republicans--are summed up in the above-linked New York Times article:

the legislation would gut the statute of limitations, encourage lawsuits and be a boon to trial lawyers. They also argued that employees could wait to file claims in hopes of reaping larger damage awards.

Um, excuse me? Are we really having this debate? Is this what the bill's opponents are positing as a reason for their stance: the potential for victims of wage discrimination--people who have systematically been stolen from and who likely have little knowledge of legal processes, let alone the intricacies of federal labor policy--to wait it out after an employer's offense to get more money in a lawsuit? Really? I'm pretty sure Ms Ledbetter, who was denied tens of thousands of dollars that she earned, would have been satisfied with the equal-day's pay that she deserved.

Thank goodness we have honest leaders to fight against these injustices. But just because we're under more hopeful leadership today, let us not forget that there are still some in power beholden to special interests to the extent that they would vote against legislation ensuring fundamental equality for your neighbor, your mother, your grandmother. And so today's worst persons in the world are the Nay voters on the Lebetter Act. Their last names follow below (access their online offices here):

Aderholt
Akin
Alexander
Austria
Bachmann
Barrett (SC)
Bartlett
Barton (TX)
Biggert
Bilbray
Bilirakis
Bishop (UT)
Blackburn
Blunt
Boehner
Bonner
Bono Mack
Boozman
Boren
Boustany
Boyd
Brady (TX)
Bright
Broun (GA)
Brown-Waite, Ginny
Buchanan
Burgess
Burton (IN)
Buyer
Calvert
Camp
Campbell
Cantor
Cao
Capito
Carter
Cassidy
Castle
Chaffetz
Childers
Coble
Coffman (CO)
Cole
Conaway
Crenshaw
Culberson
Davis (KY)
Deal (GA)
Dent
Diaz-Balart, L.
Diaz-Balart, M.
Dreier
Duncan
Ehlers
Emerson
Fallin
Flake

Fleming
Forbes
Fortenberry
Foxx
Franks (AZ)
Frelinghuysen
Garrett (NJ)
Gerlach
Gingrey (GA)
Gohmert
Goodlatte
Griffith
Guthrie
Hall (TX)
Harper
Hastings (WA)
Heller
Hensarling
Herger
Hoekstra
Hunter
Inglis
Issa
Jenkins
Johnson (IL)
Johnson, Sam
Jordan (OH)
King (IA)
King (NY)
Kingston
Kirk
Kline (MN)
Lamborn
Lance
Latham
LaTourette
Latta
Lee (NY)
Lewis (CA)
Linder
LoBiondo
Lucas
Luetkemeyer
Lummis
Lungren, Daniel E.
Mack
Manzullo
Marchant
McCarthy (CA)
McCaul
McClintock
McCotter
McHenry
McHugh
McKeon
McMorris Rodgers
Mica

Miller (FL)
Miller (MI)
Moran (KS)
Murphy, Tim
Myrick
Neugebauer
Nunes
Olson
Paul
Paulsen
Pence
Petri
Pitts
Platts
Poe (TX)
Posey
Price (GA)
Putnam
Radanovich
Rehberg
Reichert
Roe (TN)
Rogers (AL)
Rogers (KY)
Rogers (MI)
Rohrabacher
Rooney
Ros-Lehtinen
Roskam
Royce
Ryan (WI)
Scalise
Schmidt
Schock
Sensenbrenner
Sessions
Shimkus
Shuster
Simpson
Smith (NE)
Smith (TX)
Souder
Stearns
Sullivan
Terry
Thompson (PA)
Thornberry
Tiberi
Turner
Upton
Walden
Wamp
Westmoreland
Wilson (SC)
Wittman
Wolf
Young (FL)

The one-billion person network

2009-01-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

More than one in six people globally now use the internet, the Economist reports. And while what first comes to mind in response is the astounding fact that one-sixth of the world now uses a technology that is functionally just fifteen years old, the second is the realization that those with internet use (read: you and me) probably don't think that often that five billion people do not have access to the tools which have so drastically improved our lives. Now, then, it ought to be the mission of us--and "us" is the group represented in the graph below--to make sure that our five billion unconnected neighbors someday have the chance to use this technology as we do.

Secretary of Badassedry

2009-01-27T00:17:00.000-08:00

I have no worries about Iran nor any other rogue state with Secretary Clinton representing America abroad. Take a look at how she handled Senator John Cornyn after he delayed a vote on her confirmation last week. And that's just for delaying a vote--forget flouting sanctions or violating the terms of an accord. I think I heard Mahmoud Ahmedinejad yelp all those miles away.

David Brooks loosens his necktie

2009-01-22T22:58:00.000-08:00

Oh Davey, you rascal!

And makes a real joke! It gives me hope that when I, like Mr Brooks, finally graduate from the U of C, I might, if I try really hard, maintain something resembling a sense of humor. From a blog-conversation with Gail Collins:

I was the one running the prompter for Chief Justice Roberts: Do you, Barack Faithfully Obama, Promise to Hussein execute the office of Faithfully President of the United States, for richer and poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, and to defend the Constitution, for which it stands, one nation, under faithfully, to the best of your ability, so help you God?

It went pretty smoothly I thought.

Homestate pride

2009-01-22T16:59:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Senator Amy Klobuchar, the newest addition to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here's to a rising star of the Senate.

Covering the big news

2009-01-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

The cover of this morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

I just checked--they endorsed Obama. I was hoping that wasn't the case, though--better for them to be biased against the President than to be incompetent enough not to feature one of the biggest stories of the last couple of centuries on their morning paper. Because if they can't follow that lead, I don't want to think how they could mangle a city council story. And they say that newspapers are still useful for their standards of reporting.

(Hat Tip: Wonkette)

Benediction of the day

2009-01-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

I can't get over how Rev. Joseph Lowery, in delivering today's inaugural benediction, managed to simultaneously be so profound and maintain his trademark humor. A servant of the Lord, truly:

On the inaugural address

2009-01-20T13:44:00.001-08:00

Clark S. Judge, a speechwriter and staffer to Ronald Reagan, had a good take on the texture and depth of our president's address earlier today:

President Barack Obama delivered a deeply American inaugural address. He called for putting aside old rivalries and hostilities, as did Abraham Lincoln in both of his inaugurals. He put forward his view of the current crisis and the principles he will follow in meeting it, as did Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan when they were first sworn in. Like John F. Kennedy, he addressed one by one others in the world, warning adversaries of our fortitude and affirming to friends our faithful alliance.

Using the words of George Washington, he invoked the spirit of patriotic purpose and endurance. As have all new presidents, he affirmed the American experience and our national ideals, doing it with particular force and grace. Finally, in subtle notes, he entwined the African-American experience in his portrait of the nation’s legacy and its destiny. It was a marvelous address.

Also: Timothy Egan of the New York Times also had a good write-up.

Poem of the day

2009-01-20T10:27:00.000-08:00

Inaugural Poem - by Elizabeth Alexander

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

WhiteHouse.gov

2009-01-20T09:58:00.000-08:00

Two and one-half hours remain

2009-01-20T06:01:00.001-08:00

An cocktail party interview with Gen. Jim Jones

2009-01-18T20:53:00.001-08:00

It's not often you get a candid interview like this from a National Security Adviser (-designate or sitting). And while there isn't a whole lot in the revealing-substance department in the three minutes of tape, I thought it was fun to see the personal side of one of the men who has our President-elect's ear on issues of national security.

Worst person in the world

2009-01-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

Keith Olbermann doesn't broadcast on Sundays, so I'll assume his duty and dole out today's award, knowing full well he'd make the same decision.

No news here: today's (and yesterday's, and the day before's) worst person in the world is Ann Coulter. Some of her best moments on camera follow:

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

High-speed snapshots of exploding things

2009-01-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

Hat tip: Guess who

Nate Silver takes on George Bush's legacy

2009-01-17T17:03:00.001-08:00

He concludes that while the jury is still out on the younger George Bush's two terms, he wouldn't be putting money on him being remembered more kindly by history than he is by current opinion. But I'd say it's more worth reading for his analysis of modern presidents' legacies using the same metrics. You can get the gist of his work from these two graphs:

Happy weekending

2009-01-16T16:57:00.000-08:00

Start it off with the Economist's farewell message to President Bush. The article's header:

George Bush's legacy: The frat boy ships out

A telling Prop 8 story

2009-01-14T17:52:00.000-08:00

A reader of Sullivan sent this in:

Wow....that Google map of Prop 8 donors in California was like a gut punch to me. I was raised LDS and I have family scattered throughout the Golden State. To a person, all of them have been extremely loving and kind toward me and my partner of 15 years. On a lark, though, I zoomed in on the cities and neighborhoods where my relatives live. What do I find but that one of my own aunts, in San Diego, contributed $200 to the Prop 8 cause last summer. This same aunt, a good person I honestly believe, has even invited me and my partner to stay with in her family's home. Call me naive, but I'm kind of having trouble wrapping my brain around this seeming contradiction.

I have members in my family that would do the same thing. And so the lines of the debate are muddled.

Bad news for your rights

2009-01-14T17:19:00.000-08:00

Today the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 ruling, considerably narrowed the scope of the exclusionary rule, the provision which bars illegally-obtained evidence from use against a defendant. Long story short: the police now can arrest and detain citizens on false and expired warrants; and the procedural framework which safeguards our civil liberties from the police has been significantly muddled. The New York Times has a good summary of events leading to today's decision here.

The new Republican populism (and it's not bigotry!)

2009-01-14T15:35:00.000-08:00

I just watched a segment of CNN's Situation Room on the growing Republican criticism of Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner. The story featured comment from Senator Jim Demint, a Republican of South Carolina who had previously favored Geithner's nomination.

Asked why he was now "leaning no" on the decision, Demint explained that as a small businessman, he was concerned that Geithner didn't know how to create wealth, but only how to trade it and manipulate it from the top down. I hadn't known that about Senator Demint, so I decided to check out what kind of small business he ran. From Wikipedia:

Prior to entering politics, DeMint worked in the field of market research. In 1983, he founded his own research firm, the DeMint Group. He was president of this corporation until 1998.

I'll let him politick on that populist cred all day long.

On Obama's dinner at the Will household

2009-01-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

From Michael Crowley on the The Plank:

As one friend emailed me tonight: "These guys can stir up a lot of right-wing rancor over the stimulus--and over health care, iraq, energy/environmental reform down the road. He's not going to win them over on most of this stuff, but if he just takes the edge off and makes them think twice about the dishonest attacks they'd otherwise feed the Fox News crowd, then mission accomplished." Agreed.

Agreed agreed.

Bioethics debate of the day

2009-01-13T17:04:00.000-08:00

Two academics, one from San Jose state and another from Wayne State, delve into the nuances of the consequences of the new Bush "right of conscience" rule. The executive order allows pharmacy employees the right to refuse to distribute medications that violate their moral code.

Poem of the day

2009-01-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

A sonnet on self-esteem from Garrison Keillor:

Life is absurd. A man can count on that.
Here I am on the front page, standing alone,
Refusing to hide my face behind my hat,
Which, in my case, I do not even own.
MAN, 66, NABBED FOR PUBLIC EXPOSURE.
All I did was go take a leak in the bushes.
I didn't run through the park with no clothes or
Flash anyone. Ridiculous. Absolutely atrocious.
The injustice! Some gumshoe at the P.D.
Was out to enhance his crime-stopping reputation
And now I am an outcast crying bootlessly
For the crime of emergency urination.
With fortune and men's eyes I'm in disgrace
But you still love me and I refuse to hide my face.

Mental Health Break

2009-01-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

From our President-elect during last Sunday's talk show rounds:

I don't want to be ambiguous about this [. . .] We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our constitution.

Yes, it's that refreshing.

Make that four (maybe five) retiring Republicans

2009-01-12T10:26:00.001-08:00

Ohio Senator George Voinovich to Retire in 2010 - NYTimes

Are we the next money-between-the-mattresses generation?

2009-01-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

If current economic turmoil has any impression, new data suggests it likely will trend that direction. From an Economist column:

Under identical market conditions, and controlling for age, people who had experienced lower stockmarket returns over the course of their lives put a smaller fraction of their money into stocks than people who had lived, on average, in times when stocks had done better.

And this phenomena is not limited to stock returns.

Part of the explanation appears to be that beliefs are disproportionately affected by lived experience.In ongoing work, Ms Malmendier and Mr Nagel [researchers from UC-Berkeley] also find that people who have lived through periods of high inflation systematically expect future inflation to be higher than those who have not experienced high inflation for themselves.

What else might my peers develop reflexes against? Comment.

Joe the Plumber reports

2009-01-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

Or something like that.

Mental Health Break

2009-01-11T22:37:00.001-08:00

The break is from Ari's Ethics, in case you were wondering.

Poll shows Minnesotans want Franken seated by a ten-point margin

2009-01-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, the poll was contracted by the Daily Kos. But the polling methodolgy of the firm, Research 2000, are standard and unbiased. The post contains a summary of results as well as the entire poll, in case you wanted to check my judgment of them.

Dumbest Person In the World Award

2009-01-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

If I were to give a daily award, much as Keith Olbermann does for truly egregious souls on his TV show, I think I would give the first award to this man, who apparently is not a fan of the U of C's new open housing policy (the next two would go to the commenters on the article).

Good advertising

2009-01-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

I'll actually post something with more writing than a caption one of these days, but for now you just get this scanned newspaper clipping.

Mental Health Break: Drunk Jeff Goldblum Edition

2009-01-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

Bob Dylan meets Allen Ginsberg

2009-01-08T16:08:00.001-08:00

Pre-emptive tab dump

2009-01-07T09:54:00.001-08:00

Most often these are done at the end of the day, I know, but I'll be busying myself throughout the rest of today's waking hours with other stuff, preventing me from getting my blogging fix until tomorrow. (Hat tip for the following tabs: Politico's Congressional Daily email and the Daily Beast.)

-Committee chairpersons hold the keys to unlocking President-elect Obama's agenda
-On Nancy Pelosi's claim to "govern from the middle"
-"New Voices in Congress Will Change the Tone of the Democratic Majority"
-Even after the election, Obama is still the Democrats' ATM
-GM might not need any more loans to keep afloat
-Truckers are hurting real, real bad

Norm Coleman: Defender of Democracy

2009-01-07T05:32:00.000-08:00

Don't you dare to try to undermine democracy. Norm is watching.

"Democracy is not a machine. Sometimes it's messy and inconvenient, and reaching the best conclusion is never quick because speed is not the first objective, fairness is." - Norm Coleman, answering reporters' questions about his challenge of Minnesota's senatorial election results

Unfortunately for the people of Minnesota, I'm afraid preserving democratic integretity is just about the last thing on Norm Coleman's mind as he launches his lawsuit.

MSNBC political department, Sullivan and NRO on Obama's intel picks

2009-01-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

From First Read, their department's email service:

Competence And Ideology: One reason why intelligence has become such a tough nut for Obama to crack: There's a lot of Democratic rhetoric on intel from the presidential campaign, and it's something that Obama is allowing the intellectual left to have veto power over. Obama finds himself caught in this first intra-party vise between his instinct to pick competence over ideology. His first rumored choices for CIA were competent picks -- but both would have been eviscerated by the intellectual left because of their anger at Bush over interrogation practices. He's allowing ideology to trump competence for the first time in one of his major appointments. Now, the pick of Dennis Blair to be DNI is a tip toward competence, while the Obama folks hoped Panetta was a compromise between competence and ideology (Panetta was praised as a smart manager during the Clinton White House years). But it looks like it ain't being received that way...

And from Andrew Sullivan:

The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the snub of these two was a deliberate signal. Their oversight of Bush's war crimes was pathetic. Ditto Harman. Obama is telling us he is serious about both improving intelligence and drawing a clear line - for the entire world to see - between the United States and the war criminals who will soon be leaving office, and those who enabled them. Meanwhile, more support from the smart right.

It's also worth reading Sullivan's link to the NRO's Corner Blog. It brings a little more light to the circumstances surrounding Obama's pick, as well as a little bit of background on CIA Director politics. Part of the interview in the linked post:

“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books. I asked him this morning what he thought of the Panetta pick and what Obama should be thinking about the CIA.

Q: Would Leon Panetta have been your CIA chief choice?

A: He’s an excellent choice because he will be loyal to the president first, not to the CIA. Mr. Obama needs someone who can be trusted, a person who will support him when the going gets tough.

A “safe” choice, viewed as inoffensive by the CIA’s top bureaucrats, would have been dangerous. Directors Tenet and Hayden were placid Washington civil servants of neutral loyalties, quickly coopted by the CIA’s bureaucracy. A military officer might have had good leadership experience but would have lacked sound partisan political connections.

The choice is a brave one because it can open Mr. Obama to charges of appointing a loyalist to a crucial post. But that is exactly what is needed at this time.

More 23/6--farewell to Alan Colmes

2008-12-31T00:03:00.001-08:00

My favorite part is when Dick Morris gets frustrated and starts yelling at him.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Poor Sully

2008-12-30T23:53:00.001-08:00

23/6 suggests five conspiracy theories on Tripp Palin's birth for the vacationing Andrew Sullivan upon his return. My favorite:

It's Andrew Sullivan's baby - Of course! Bristol is just Sully's surrogate mother! That's why he was so persistent in his allegations against the Palins, so we'd never suspect it! Remember, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

The Patrick Fitzgerald of pregnancy scams.

Tab dump

2008-12-30T23:27:00.000-08:00

-The drug lobby has self-imposed a moratorium on giving free pens, clipboards, etc. to doctors
-"Obama: The University of Chicago Democrat," by Cass Sunstein (TNR)
-The promising potential--but frustrating present--of evangelical environmentalism
-Why Obama has deferred to Bush on foreign policy but not on economics in the transition period

Recycling one of Sullivan's Mental Health Breaks

2008-12-30T16:31:00.001-08:00

This is too good not to share. I'm going to go exercise now.

Intrade's take on the Minnesota Senate race

2008-12-30T16:09:00.000-08:00


Al Franken


Norm Coleman



(Hat tip: The Uptake)

This man is crazy

2008-12-30T13:50:00.000-08:00

Look at his eyes!

Defying Senate promises to reject anybody he seats, this morning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris, a former Illinois Attorney General and state comptroller, to fill the vacancy left by Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Does anybody else have the feeling that somebody is going to turn this into an opera in five years?

Some thoughts on genetic testing and healthcare

2008-12-30T01:27:00.000-08:00

Source for the following: "The Evidence Gap" - The New York Times, 29 December 2008

Here's a fact that might startle those outside the healthcare community (it certainly shook me more than a little):

Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them.

Only half? Consumers are absorbing annual double-digit premium increases for drugs that only work half the time? Knowing this somber fact, the reader would likely welcome the seemingly more cheery fact that genetic testing, which can determine whether a particular drug has the chance to cure an illness, is on the rise. If testing was implemented on a wide scale, one might think, consumers could save billions in frivolous costs annually. Right? Sadly, not quite right. Here's the rub--actually there's three--that the New York Times laid out yesterday.

1. Drug makers don't like the idea of selling less drugs: allowing more tests--the primary purpose of which is to determine if a drug will work for somebody--will necessarily shrink their profits as less people use their products. (Though the shrinking may be more of a short-term trend as companies adjust their business models to push a more diverse array of drugs--not to mention that companies will also be refining existing drugs for better effect, as testing will force them to provide better evidence that their products work).

2. Insurance companies don't want to pay for the tests, which reportedly "can cost up to a few thousand dollars" per running.

3. There is a current dearth of any regulatory framework for such tests, which in some cases can bypass F.D.A. approval en route to the market.

Such difficulties lead some experts to predict that the rise of genetic testing, for all its recent technological strides, is likely to be a slow and steady one:

"It’s going to take 20 to 30 years for all this to fall into place,” said Dr. Gregory Downing, who heads efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services to spur personalized health care.

That's bad news. But what's worse: if genetic testing was widely available starting tomorrow, it would be the saddest Tuesday for the ill in a long time. Cheap tests would make it easy for insurance companies to screen potential policyholders even more thoroughly for preexisting conditions, rendering even more hopeless the situation of those afflicted with hereditary and other unpreventable diseases. It's an ironic potentiality: the more available and comprehensive tests that can winnow out false treatments and improve a patient's recovery are, the more easily insurance companies can deny treatment to many of those individuals before they even have a chance to get it.

The only conclusion I can produce after enumerating and then picking through all the aforementioned quandaries? President-elect Obama has a tough road ahead of him.

My apologies for the less-than-cheerful tone that the questions and statements in this post inspire. But it looks like I'm not the only one thinking about them.

TAB DUMP: Here's a more hopeful story on the use of information (specifically IT) to solve our nation's healthcare problems.

This post is dedicated to Alex Chen, to whom I promise the opportunity to write many posts like these--except much more insightful and thorough--in the near future.

Franken-Coleman recount: some facts

2008-12-29T18:45:00.001-08:00

FACT: Before the Minnesota Senate recount began and before the state canvassing board had reviewed all challenged ballots, the Norm Coleman for Senate campaign objected to the counting of 1,346 ballots identified by counties as wrongly disqualified.

FACT: Following the recount and the conclusion of the canvassing board's review of all challenged ballots, Al Franken had (and currently maintains) a 47-vote lead over Norm Coleman.

FACT: Today the Norm Coleman for Senate campaign suggested that nearly 700 of the wrongly disqualified ballots mentioned above be counted.

FACT: The ballots that the Coleman campaign suggested to be counted overwhelmingly come from rural and suburban areas--areas which are most likely to yield, once counted, votes for Norm Coleman; the remainder of the ballots come from urban areas such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, areas Franken carried by large margins.

OPINION: Your author does not think it is too difficult to connect the dots in this scenario. A certain sitting Senator is very afraid that he may be so sitting for only the remainder of this week and is seeking to bamboozle the recount process in any way possible--it is the only option
he now has.

Mrs. Coleman: the only reason I'm sad to see Norm leave Washington

I'm jealous of British humour

2008-12-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'm making it a goal of mine to win this award someday.

And some more:

Republicans and race

2008-12-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

Two nuggets from John Avlon's column on race and the Republican party and my thoughts upon reading them:

1. "the McCain-Palin ticket increased its vote totals only in a narrow band of districts stretching from Appalachia to Oklahoma, and demographically winning decisively only voters over age 60 and towns with populations under 50,000. The costs of preaching to a shrinking base of what Palin characterized as "real Americans" will only become more apparent in the future."

The preceding argument chronicled the forty years of dividends the southern strategy paid to the Republican party; Avlon's following argument implies that the same strategy is bankrupt with prospects progressively barren by the year. I agree. If Republicans stick with their schtick for the next two election cycles, their southern strategy bubble burst and its cleanup will take at least half as long as the period from Goldwater to Bush 43. And that's if Bobby Jindal and the ideas-women and men of their party do an exceptional job cleaning up and redefining. (Note: That doesn't mean that Jindal and company won't rise to prominence before then--it just means that there will be a tough and probably still well-funded old guard fighting their rise every step of the way. That means that instead of having the fall-into-rank primaries of old, where a candidate was anointed and subsequently confirmed within a few primaries, Republican nomination contests will start looking a lot more like Democratic ones. Get ready for David Brooks, Christopher Buckley and Bobby Jindal versus Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol and Sarah Palin. Let's hope Team 1 wins, expediting the ushering out of the last remaining bigots. **Note on a Note: Avlon seems to agree. He writes, "But such Hail Mary passes can't be expected to undo decades of damage overnight. The GOP must deploy its own version of the 50-state strategy and consistently recruit minority candidates." Indeed, there's a long hard fight ahead.)

2. "Conservatives who take good ol' boy pride in being politically incorrect are either unaware or don't care that they come off as being somewhere between indifferent and hostile to the full diversity of American life."

Let me tell you something. I know quite a few good ol' boys. I went to high school with some of them. And while they might be otherwise nice people, there is no question that the vast majority of their willfull anti-PCness is half-veiled (and sometimes not veiled at all) racism. The RNC members in question might have more money and come from different parts of the country than them, but I'd be happy to bet as large a sum that a college kid could that they are just as racist. And those people have no business having as much as a finger, let alone an entire hand, in the dialogue of a party which already has a troubled recent past when it comes to race. I hope there's not any disagreement on that. We have a lot further to go than I thought if there is.

I'm not the manliest man around,

2008-12-29T09:31:00.001-08:00

but this got the red meat part of me going. Behold the Multiple Kill Vehicle (yes, I'm not joking--that's its real name):

The lowdown from Very Short List (who also gets, as they do with pretty much everything interesting I've passed around in the last month, the hat tip for the video):

The Multiple Kill Vehicle is a frightening, hovering, trash-can-size robot that’s designed to counter today’s ballistic missiles — the kind that release multiple “threat clusters” containing warheads, decoys, and other obstructive countermeasures. The idea is to fit up to 20 inside a single antiballistic missile and deploy them to take out incoming threat clusters. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is set to test the device in 2009, when they plan to send some up in an antiballistic missile to intercept simulated arrays [. . .]

I'm going to go watch Die Hard and do some push-ups now.

Yikes

2008-12-28T23:02:00.000-08:00

One in eight public high school teachers believe in creationism, a recent Penn State survey of over one thousand such educators found. Moreover,

[. . .] most of them taught their students those views. Only 23 percent strongly agreed that evolution was a central theme in their teaching.

Scary stuff. Some humor to re-lighten the mood:

Brainy and pretty

2008-12-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

Kind of like that

Touré just put out a solid top-ten list of sex symbols for what he calls "the thinking man." I enjoyed thinking about his selections (whether I did so with my mind or brain is open to inferring).

Poem of the day

2008-12-27T22:41:00.001-08:00

Since I'm binge-posting, I might as well give the honor to Jack Kerouac. From his posthumous Book of Sketches (1952-1957):

"Subway Sensations"

Smell of burnt nuts
in the power of the
car & the aromatic
almond dusts of the tunnel--Growling
whine of the shurry
moveahead car as
it balls from one
station faster light-
flashing to another
till wasting the
brakes crash to
stop & the whine
amid knocks &

wheel bumps lowers, till
the stop, the doors,
the bump, the
restless churry churry
wurd wurd wurd of
the power as it waits
to resume--cars
swaying, vestibule sway-
ing--The switch point ta tap too boom
like a song crossing
another track on
bumpy parts of
track--The Mexico
cafeteria tile of
station walls-the
start-up again, the

growing whur of the
power to fly another
black halfmile with
smashing crossings of
posts & dark reel-
by of pipes, lights,
concrete curbs, darkness,
Egyptian mummy niches,
--till the station
again,
the "Quick
Relief Tums And
Indegestion" sign

The sun feels warmer now; the days seem brighter now

2008-12-27T21:50:00.000-08:00

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Blogging: On it's deathbed?

2008-12-27T21:35:00.000-08:00

As we know the medium today, the Economist argued in November, it quite likely is:

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. [Today] these tend increasingly to belong to conventional media organisations.

The rest of the article goes on to explain that newer, snappier platforms like twitter are filling the vacuum left by the increasingly big-show and commercial blogs. It concludes:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile.

Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

I don't believe I'm in much of a position to argue with the Economist staff on this one (I'm giving them the edge on journalistic issues). But I can't help but feel that their claim that blogging has lost it's potency as a subversive force doesn't quite ring true. For while it is very true that the highest-volume sites--HuffPost and Drudge are the first that come to mind--are professionally staffed, it can't be denied that small-team and individual blogs have to great effect, whether by catalyzing a story's breaking or by breaking a story itself, done a great deal to alter the landscape of a given issue. This may be truest of blogs covering a specific range of regional or community-wide beats, such as local politics. My home state of Minnesota's political blogging scene exemplified this trend last spring, when Republican and Democratic blogs broke respectively embarrassing stories about their challenging party's senatorial candidate. I won't labor for other examples--you likely have examples from your own community ring.

It also seems to me that more artistic and essayish blogs will retain their present eminence in the coming years, and for two reasons. The first is that artistic and scholarly blogs contain longer posts and are simply not able to be crammed into less than 140 characters. The Becker-Posner blog isn't switching from posts to tweets anytime soon. (Note: while it is true that a number of scholarly bloggers--Juan Cole among them--have twitter accounts, they most often use them to post article links or to draw attention to their main blogs) The other is that with more and more casual users--in other words, those who would post tweet-length posts on Blogger or Wordpress--switching over to twitter, Vox and comparable platforms, the scholarly bloggers will enjoy the medium increasingly to themselves (perhaps that is why, on the Gartner Hype Cycle of Social Software, blogging is moving up the "Slope of Enlightenment" portion of the curve). One final note on this. The only way the scholarly blogs would lose a share of their old market, it seems, would be for scholarly followers' previous interest in such blogs to wane. And I don't think anybody is expecting that to happen.

*A quick tab dump:

Andreas Kluth, a writer for the Economist, surveys some of his contacts in the new media (among them is the boss of Six Apart, the company that produces TypePad) to see what they think about blogging's future.

An example of what I think a "scholarly" or "artistic" or "intellectual" blog looks like, in case I failed to sufficiently elucidate above.

MPR in-studio performance: Nikka Costa

2008-12-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

Worth listening to. (Interview credit: Mark Wheat)

The fifty most powerful people in the world

2008-12-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

Guess who got number one

Newsweek gave it a crack in their latest issue (check out Jon Meacham's solid prefacing essay, too).

graison hensley-chapman

Moving

Poem of the day

Tab dump

The irony of the pro-torture argument

Quote of the day

Poem of the day: Rock, Paper, Failed Capitalist Society

Yes, please

The existential angst of Jon Arbuckle

Sage words from Glenn Beck

My first story

Let's go a-Republican bashing

Finally

Internet comment of the day

Nobody messes with Joe

Meghan McCain makes the regrettable descent into punditry

Poem of the day

International Pillow Fight Day - Chicago

Cassette tape art

John Cornyn (R-Minnesota)

Poem of the day

It's called the *Wall Street* Journal for a reason

Eric Cantor: "not that innocent"

Hiatus v.2

Hiatus

One month in

Oscar schmoscar

Joe Scarborough serves it up to HuffPost commenters

Face of the day (kind of)

Poem of the day

Metaphor of the day

Proof of the Black Jesus

An expectations game

Regime Change We Can Believe In?

Email of the day

Sunday vent

Oh, so now he recalls

Poem of the day

Limiting executive pay: a pathway to reform (?)

Mental health break: "99 Problems," Cookie Monster remix

Brooks on the Daschle withdrawal

Get Your War On withdrawal

Who's more guilty? ...

Layoff blues

Blago wins?

Poem of the day

Change--you can believe it.

I uncovered an embarrassment of U.S. military security and all I got was a free mp3 player!

Worst person in the world award (and some good news, too)

The one-billion person network

Secretary of Badassedry

David Brooks loosens his necktie

Homestate pride

Covering the big news

Benediction of the day

On the inaugural address

Poem of the day

WhiteHouse.gov

Two and one-half hours remain

An cocktail party interview with Gen. Jim Jones

Worst person in the world

High-speed snapshots of exploding things

Nate Silver takes on George Bush's legacy

Happy weekending

A telling Prop 8 story

Bad news for your rights

The new Republican populism (and it's not bigotry!)

On Obama's dinner at the Will household

Bioethics debate of the day

Poem of the day

Mental Health Break

Make that four (maybe five) retiring Republicans

Are we the next money-between-the-mattresses generation?

Joe the Plumber reports

Mental Health Break

Poll shows Minnesotans want Franken seated by a ten-point margin

Dumbest Person In the World Award

Good advertising

Mental Health Break: Drunk Jeff Goldblum Edition

Bob Dylan meets Allen Ginsberg

It's called the Wall Street Journal for a reason