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Santorum compares my wedding reading to 9/11

Reading through a great list of "The Most Terrible Things Rick Santorum Has Ever Said" on TNR, I came across this gem-

Santorum, responding to the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision approving same sex marriage:

“This is an issue just like 9/11. We didn't decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”

Note - Santorum is comparing a decision allowing people to marry other people they love to 9/11. An excerpt from this court decision (Goodrich v. Department of Health), was among the readings at my wedding, and has some of the most beautiful language about marriage that I've ever read:

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations....Without question, civil marriage enhances the "welfare of the community." It is a "social institution of the highest importance." ... Marriage also bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family.... Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition.

That Santorum thinks that this is the equivalent of madmen turning passenger planes into human-filled missiles speaks volumes about his hatred and fear, and his manifest unfitness to be anywhere near the presidency.

I'm not sure whether this says more about Romney, Santorum, or how stupid it is to let a handful of voters decide who gets to be a candidate

Slate's David Weigel, in NH, talking to a NH voter:

Over 24 hours, I watched Santorum, Huntsman, and Gingrich sell themselves to New
Hampshire voters. It wasn’t fair. Winning (or almost winning) one of the early
states makes a candidate Serious. In Tilton, I stop into a pizza place near
Santorum’s event and meet Joe DiBiase, a nice guy with a Bluetooth headset who
has just heard the Gospel of Santorum.
“I don’t like Romney,” he says. “I
like that guy who came in second in Ohio, or whatever it was.”

Somalia bans delicious samosas

Somalia's new ban on samosas because the triangle shape is "too Christian" and hence incompatible with their strict version of Islam shows in a nutshell why autocratic theocracy is a really stupid form of government.

Did nobody vet the "blood libel" video?

As has been widely reported already today, in a video posted to her facebook page, Sarah Palin used the term "blood libel" to refer to criticism of her previous speech:

“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. Especially within hours
of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood
libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport
to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

As the Times pointed out in an article on the matter:

The term blood libel is generally used to mean the false accusation that Jews
murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, in particular
the baking of matzos for passover. That false claim was circulated for centuries
to incite anti-Semitism and justify violent pogroms against Jews. Ms. Palin’s
use of the phrase in her video, which helped make the video rapidly go viral, is attracting criticism, not least because Ms. Giffords, who remains in critical condition
in a Tucson hospital, is Jewish.

Now, I understand if this had been an off-the-cuff speech, where Palin had just misspoken, and had heard the term blood libel but didn't know or mentally misplaced the historical baggage. However, this was a video, that was presumably written and vetted by her staff before posting it.

The big problem that I see in this is not that Palin is anti-semitic - I'm guessing she didn't realize the nature of the term "blood libel." No, the problem is that not a single person around her had any idea that it was a problem to use the term, or if they did felt unable to warn her. That speaks to the lack of historical literacy in those surrounding her, and an incredible lack of the basic qualification for her team. Anybody who has run for the vice presidency and is a top contender for a major party nomination for the presidency in less than two years has to have somebody on the team who knows some history, or somebody who has enough confidence to shut down a video like this before it gets posted. Palin has Todd and a bunch of hacks who have little to recommend them except their personal loyalty to her. A Palin presidency would be like a replay of Warren Hardings, except his wife and loyal hacks had the good sense to not let him talk in public.

Quintessentially American

Charles Murray writes a piece this weekend in the Washington Post that, pushes the Tea Party line that modern elites are totally out of touch with "mainstream America."

Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody's business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn't get America, there is some truth in the accusation.

This article makes the mistake made by Sarah Palin and many others in elevating niche, regional American subculture(s) to "mainstream America," and then excluding everyone who doesn't participate in the subculture from "real America," even though this really defines the majority of Americans as somehow less than American.

Murray writes:

With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering. Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows -- "Mad Men" now, "The Sopranos" a few years ago. But they haven't any idea who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right." They know who Oprah is, but they've never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.

Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

They can talk about books endlessly, but they've never read a "Left Behind" novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans).

They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn't be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapagos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo.

Here's the thing - The Price is Right gets 5 million viewers a week. Seven million people a year go to Branson. By Murray's own admission, 29 million people read Harlequin romances (worldwide). There are 300 million people - so each of these things that Murray cites as an element of "Mainstream America" is actually only something that a tiny fraction of Americans do. And really - "The Price is Right" Harlequin novels and cruises? It seems like, for Murray, Mainstream America = retired southerner ladies.

On the other hand, I'll submit my experiences and those of my friends and co-workers--urban New Yorkers in their late 20s and 30s who mostly have graduate degrees from "fancy schools". I can tell you that almost all of the guys, and most of the girls, watch the NFL (which averages 16.6 million viewers per regular season game), and we all know the Jimmie Johnson on the Fox pregame show. Most of us have been to Disney World (30 million visitors per year). We watch the same reality TV that the rest of the country does - American Idol, Teen Mom, Top Chef,* and almost everyone I know saw Avatar and Dark Knight.

Murray makes a really bold, and incorrect, claim that certain types of experiences, the kinds that tea-parties have, are "quintessentially American" while others are not:

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn't count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don't count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn't count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.

However, let me rewrite the paragraph above:

There are so many quintessentially American things that few members of the Tea Party have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Bar Association or bought food from a CSA, or lived in a neighborhood where they weren't part of the racial majority. They are unlikely to have used mass transportation (shuttle bus to the rental car lot doesn't count). They are unlikely to have taken a philosophy class (college or grad school does count). They are unlikely to have taught at a school where most of the kids had an income of less than twice the poverty line. They are unlikely to have a close friend who is a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist. They are unlikely to have worked on a trading floor or software design team or know what a derivative or Ruby on Rails is.

At the end of the day, America is a really big place, with room for many types of quintessentially or mainstream American experiences. I'm willing to grant Murray and the Tea Partiers that going to Branson, taking a cruise, joining Kiwanis and watching The Price is Right are authentically American, even though though these are things are niche activities undertaken by relatively small numbers of Americans.

I don't pretend to say that my experiences are like those of everyone else, or even most people, and I don't say that they're necessarily better, but I do think they're just as American, and I'm just as American, as Murray or the Tea Partiers.

*I will note that Murray has a point where scripted TV is concerned. I've never seen an episode of NCIS and have never heard anyone talk about it, and I only saw Two and a Half Men once on a plane (although, to be fair, it was a flight to Milwaukee so I think I should get some "real America" credit for it).

Harvest

I'm on vacation in the Sonoma Valley and did some wine tasting and vineyard touring yesterday. One of the interesting things we learned from the guide was that, depending on rain levels, an entire crop of grapes may have to be harvested in just one or two nights (yes, nights- for reasons having to do with keeping the grapes from getting crushed in the baskets, they're harvested at night when they're colder and firmer). And this wouldn't just be at one vineyard either, if it's early November and rain is on the forecast, the whole region needs to harvest at once. Also, the better wineries (basically anything that comes in a bottle as opposed to a box or jug) harvests by hand, which is really labor intensive.

I lay all this out to point out that this work would be impossible without migrant labor. Although growing grapes and making wine takes manpower, the workforce in Naps or Sonoma needs to grow exponentially at harvest time, which means that those workers need to have other work at other times of the year in other places, because you wouldn't want people justsitting around on unemployment for the whole non-harvest season. As American citizens have not shown much interest in itinerant agricultural labor, this job is being done by immigrants, mostly undocumented because the US doesn't give out nearly enough agricultural labor visas to bring in legal workers, and because migrant workers often move between the US and Mexico depending on the growing season. If people who want to conduct mass exportations were taken seriously we would it would destroy the wine industry (and probably most of our vegetable farming as well) in the US and basically put mistaken of the US citizens who live in central California out of work. Since nobody is going to let that happen, its best to remember that people advocating full deportation are not in fact to be taken seriously, and that we should look to some kind of real solution for regularizing the status of undocumented workers.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.2

An unnecessary provocation

A group opposing the Cordoba House just won permission from the New York MTA to place ads opposing the project on busses citywide.

The ads — which are scheduled to be printed and posted on city buses within ten days — feature an image of an “airplane headed toward the burning World Trade Center” next to a building that’s labeled as “WTC Mega Mosque” and the words “Why There?”

It's nice to know that those opposing the Cordoba House, who allegedly are worried that the mosque would be an "is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts." [sic (Palinese)] and inflame the grief of 9/11 survivors and families, think that those families are tough enough to see images of the burning world trade center drive by then on busses all day.

Test

I just got a new droid x and installed the mobile blogging software and I'm trying it out. Hopefully it will make it easier to post more frequently since I'll be able to post on the go.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.9

Justice

I have not yet read the whole of Judge Walker's decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, but the concluding paragraph is pretty powerful:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. ...Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

One other critical point in this decision, is that Judge Walker, operating as the "finder of fact" (the role typically played by the jury in a jury trial) issued a finding fact on a number of critical issues. This is kind of inside-baseball legal stuff, but it's really important. A court of appeals, even the US Supreme Court, must defer to the facfinder with regard to facts from the trial. The appellate court can say that the facts aren't sufficient to support the judgment, but they can't quibble with the facts themselves.

Ambinder has a rundown of the facts here:

1. Marriage is and has been a civil matter, subject to religious intervention only when requested by the intervenors.

2. California, like every other state, doesn't require that couples wanting to marry be able to procreate.

3. Marriage as an institution has changed overtime; women were given equal status; interracial marriage was formally legalized; no-fault divorce made it easier to dissolve marriages.

4. California has eliminated marital obligations based on gender.

5. Same-sex love and intimacy "are well-documented in human history."

6. Sexual orientation is a fundamental characteristic of a human being.

7. Prop 8 proponents' "assertion that sexual orientation cannot be defined is contrary to the weight of the evidence."

8. There is no evidence that sexual orientation is chosen, nor than it can be changed.

9. California has no interest in reducing the number of gays and lesbians in its population.

10. "Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital union."

11. "Marrying a person of the opposite sex is an unrealistic option for gay and lesbian individuals."

12. "Domestic partnerships lack the social meaning associated with marriage, and marriage is widely regarded as the definitive expression of love and commitment in the United States.The availability of domestic partnership does not provide gays and lesbians with a status equivalent to marriage because the cultural meaning of marriage and its associated benefits are intentionally withheld from same-sex couples in domestic partnerships."

13. "Permitting same-sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, have children outside of marriage or otherwise affect thestability of opposite-sex marriages."

Further costs of the "death panels" lie

Further to my earlier post on Atul Gawande's article about the fraught nature of end-of-life decisions and the importance of thinking and talking about them frankly and early... it turns out that Sarah Palin's death panels lie not only scotched the provision in the healthcare bill that would have reimbursed doctors for having these conversations with seniors, but it also leads a third of seniors to still believe that a "government panel" will make end of life decisions for them.

Beyond all the policy problems the death panels lie caused, the fact that people still believe it has the potential to cause all sorts of extra anxiety in the elderly who believe it. They may be less likely to talk to their doctors about end-of-life issues, or might seek to conceal symptoms to avoid being subject to the imaginary death panels.

I've said this before, but I think it continues to be important to point out that when people in power lie to make citizens afraid of the government, there are serious, serious consequences, almost none of which are borne by the liars or others in power. As a political "tactic," the death panels lie worked quite well for the right - it made it much harder to pass healthcare reform (and made the bill that passed less potent than it might ahve been), it clearly turned a number of voters away from Obama and the dems, but this comes at a cost - which may well be that some number of terminally ill people go untreated, or are incorrectly treated, or suffer much more anxiety and pain in their last months than would have happened if Palin and others had told the truth.

Glenn Beck's Gold Scam

If you follow Glenn's advice and buy gold from Goldline, you're getting so badly ripped off that gold would have to nearly triple in price just to make back your investment. The Big Picture explains here

As usual, Senators find "waste" in programs helping kids, no waste in defense

The New York Times reports that:

four senators this spring refused to approve a $425 million package of federal grants for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America after staff members looked at the organization’s tax forms as part of a routine vetting process and were surprised to learn that the organization paid its chief executive almost $1 million in 2008 — $510,774 in salary and bonus and $477,817 in retirement and other benefits.

The Senators, which include Republicans Chuck Grassley and Tom Coburn (the article doesn't list the other two), apparently are worried that federal dollars are footing the bill for the nonprofit's salary largesse. Of course, nobody seems to be concerned that the taxpayers are footing the bill when defense contractor Raytheon (where 90% of its income, or $22 billion, comes from government contracts) pays its CEO $15 million a year, or that Lockheed (70% of revenue, or about $35 billion, from government contracts) paid its CEO $24 million.

Of course, to members of a party that likes to mock things like nonprofits or community organizing, presumably any idiot can run an organization like the Boys & Girls clubs, which oversees 4,000 clubs with 50,000 employees and $1.4 billion in revenue. Of course "[a] nearly $1 million salary and benefit package for a nonprofit executive is not only questionable on its face but also raises questions about how the organization manages its finances in other areas", as Coburn said about the Boys & Girls club. But in real, old-fashioned "private industry" like defense contracting, it's important to have somebody who makes $24 million, or about 25 times what the Boys & Girls Club pays, running the show. You'd never have any question about how defense contractors "manage their finances," especially when Raytheon and Lockheed combined for over $9 million in lobbying congress in the second half of 2009 alone...

Lee not Custer

A heartbreaking, long, but incredibly important piece by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker (here) on how our current medical system excels at fighting disease but critically fails at helping terminal patients decide when to focus on improving the days they have left.

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

Gawande describes what doctors can do to help people through these decisions:

I spoke to an oncologist who told me about a twenty-nine-year-old patient she had recently cared for who had an inoperable brain tumor that continued to grow through second-line chemotherapy. The patient elected not to attempt any further chemotherapy, but getting to that decision required hours of discussion—for this was not the decision he had expected to make. First, the oncologist said, she had a discussion with him alone. They reviewed the story of how far he’d come, the options that remained. She was frank. She told him that in her entire career she had never seen third-line chemotherapy produce a significant response in his type of brain tumor. She had looked for experimental therapies, and none were truly promising. And, although she was willing to proceed with chemotherapy, she told him how much strength and time the treatment would take away from him and his family.

He did not shut down or rebel. His questions went on for an hour. He asked about this therapy and that therapy. And then, gradually, he began to ask about what would happen as the tumor got bigger, the symptoms he’d have, the ways they could try to control them, how the end might come.

The oncologist next met with the young man together with his family. That discussion didn’t go so well. He had a wife and small children, and at first his wife wasn’t ready to contemplate stopping chemo. But when the oncologist asked the patient to explain in his own words what they’d discussed, she understood. It was the same with his mother, who was a nurse. Meanwhile, his father sat quietly and said nothing the entire time.

A few days later, the patient returned to talk to the oncologist. “There should be something. There must be something,” he said. His father had shown him reports of cures on the Internet. He confided how badly his father was taking the news. No patient wants to cause his family pain. According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want.

The oncologist went to the father’s home to meet with him. He had a sheaf of possible trials and treatments printed from the Internet. She went through them all. She was willing to change her opinion, she told him. But either the treatments were for brain tumors that were very different from his son’s or else he didn’t qualify. None were going to be miraculous. She told the father that he needed to understand: time with his son was limited, and the young man was going to need his father’s help getting through it.

The oncologist noted wryly how much easier it would have been for her just to prescribe the chemotherapy. “But that meeting with the father was the turning point,” she said. The patient and the family opted for hospice. They had more than a month together before he died. Later, the father thanked the doctor. That last month, he said, the family simply focussed on being together, and it proved to be the most meaningful time they’d ever spent.

One point - the health care reform bill included funding in Medicare that would reimburse doctors for the time spent having these conversations with patients. This provision was tagged by the right as the infamous "death panels" and was taken out of the bill.

National Debt and Global Power

Economist Tyler Cowen, writing about the US national debt, makes the following point-

At some sufficiently high debt-gdp ratio, it becomes a foreign policy issue and a big one. Postwar UK had a high debt to gdp ratio, and to this day it is a fine place, but that debt meant the end of England as a world power, for better or worse. The U.S. for instance used financial issues to push England around and they basically had to give up on their overseas commitments. A very high debt ratio here would mean the end of the U.S. as a global world power, again even if gdp does OK. A global power needs the option of spending a lot more, quickly, without asking for anyone's permission. Your mileage on a U.S. retreat from the global policeman role will vary, but it's the elephant in the room which hardly anyone is talking about.

This is a really critical point that I'm very surprised national security conservatives aren't making (possibly because most "conservatives" don't actually care about the debt or deficit, only about cutting taxes). It is generally accepted that good credit - the ability to borrow money quickly at reasonable rates - has been historically the single most important factor for countries that want to project power. It was the basis behind the expansion of the British empire in the 1800s, and conversely was a key cause of the implosion of the French monarchy in the 1780s.

The reason is pretty straightforward- most countries tax/spend systems are generally inequilibrium - you take in roughly as much money through taxes, fees, tariffs, etc. as you regularly spend on general operations. However, foreign crises often require quick, heavy expenditures of money- oftentimes double or more the regular cost of running the state. It's not feasible to get that money through taxes - you can't just double the taxload on your citizens in a year and not expect disaster- even very patriotic people who are totally on-board for the war are going to be unable to part with doubled taxes without succumbing to financial catastrophe. Consequently, you have to be able to borrow.

Some of that borrowing can come from a state's own citizens through the sale of war bonds, which are just loans by citizens to the government. Even during World War II, the very peak of war bond sales in a very widely supported war, my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that the government's sale of $185 billion in war bonds covered less than half the cost of the war.

Consequently, the government will typically have to reach out to financial institutions and the general credit markets for loans necessary to fight wars, and credit market participants (particularly those in other countries) will not make loans that they think will not be paid back.

In the event of an attack on the country or similar event, I can imagine a surge of patriotism causing defense contractors to operate on IOUs, or soldiers to fight without paychecks, but that will not work over a long war, and will certainly not work for an unpopular war.

All of this is to make the point that, if a government has bad credit, even if it's a large, rich country, it is very difficult to project power. The US's status as a superpower is to some degree based on its navy, airforce, and sizeable standing army, which historically has been generally paid for out of regular revenues. However, the real American power is the threat that, if necessary, we can greatly increase our military spending to put more people in uniform, and more vehicles and weapons on the ground and in the air - as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even now, with two ongoing conflicts, the US military numbers about 1.5 million troops. During World War II, we had 13 million in uniform. That kind of increase in scale would involve serious borrowing, which would not be viable if lenders didn't believe that the US would be able to pay back the loans - and a really high debt, like what's carried by, say, Greece, makes lenders very wary.

This is not to say that I support the deficit hawks' positions that we need to immediately freak out about the debt. The current national debt is only about half of US GDP - a far cry from the rates held by Italy, Greece, Japan, etc. However, it does have a couple repercussions-

1.) Americans, particularly those that care about the US remaining a global power, need to consider the effects of the national debt on our credible ability to borrow in the future to finance military operations.

2.) Given that much of our current military operations are funded by borrowing, which is adding to the debt, we need to think about military borrowing as a finite resource, like oil reserves, and we should weigh the value of adding to the debt to meet current foreign challenges against the need to have credit available for military operations in the future. Think of it this way - the national debt is kind of like a credit card with a limit - does it make sense to run up the card now on wars that aren't strictly necessary, when we might in the future need to use that card for something absolutely vital for our survival?