Here’s a love song for Valentine’s Day. Remember this key piece of advice [nsfw] if you’re going out.
Archives for February 2012
Goldwatering All Over Himself
Mitt Romney’s new anti-Detroit-bailout Op Ed in the Detroit News includes bonus union bashing to prove the severity of his conservatism. Since 62% of Republicans in Michigan oppose the bailout, versus 36% of the overall population, Romney has to double down on bailout bashing in a desperate effort to erase Santorum’s 15 point lead in that state.
We all know that Santorum is toxic as a national candidate, but the problem for Romney is the only way to beat Santorum is to adopt the same anti-gay, anti-woman and anti-progress positions in the primaries and bet that he can somehow reverse course this Fall. The longer the contest draws out, the more Romney has to pander, and the more he turns himself into the Goldwater-like candidate that the Republican establishment is desperate to avoid. There are two more debates before Super Tuesday and Mitt’s going to have to be pretty fucking severe if he hopes to keep up with the new front-runner.
Speaking of self-administered Goldwater, does Chris Christie really think that vetoing gay marriage is going to look smart in 2016? My guess is that he’ll look like a reactionary pandering to an ever-shrinking minority–in other words, just like Barry G.
The Moral Calamity of Serving in Congress
Reader Annette wrote to ask whether Congressional health plans cover contraception. Good question. According to the bracingly accurate FactCheck.org, our representatives in Washington pick their insurance from the same system used by all other federal employees. And, according to the more accurate Guttmacher Institute [pdf], this insurance covers contraception:
Additionally, federal law requires insurance coverage of contraceptives for federal employees and their dependents; it includes a limited but seldom used exception for religious insurers. In December 2000, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made it clear that an employer’s failure to provide coverage of contraception, when it covers other prescription drugs and preventive care, is a violation of protections against sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; those protections for employees’ benefits include no exemption for religious employers.
In other words, for a dozen years, every Member of Congress has probably purchased contraception coverage, and it’s been mandated by the EEOC of all employers who provide insurance, yet for some reason, the Bishops have decided to freak out about it now. Perhaps some journalist will ask some of those freaking out, like Marco Rubio, if he’s on a federal plan that includes contraception, and if he’s willing to follow his own advice:
If an employee asks for birth control, that worker could pay for it themselves or choose to work elsewhere.
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Because We Haven’t Had A Good Second Amendment Imbrolgio Around Here Lately
I know that I’ve been even more than usually AWOL around here lately — and that’s not going to change very much for the next while, given the awesome comprehensiveness of the ass-kicking my day job is giving me these days. It’s hard, really, because the more or less total collapse of the GOP primary field is turning some of my favorite media star-hacks into clattering, gibbering, addled parodies of what were pretty much cartoons to begin with. What we might call a target-rich environment. (A singularly poor choice of image, as you will read in a moment.)
But there you go. Astonishingly, those who pay me daily expect me to respond daily. The nerve!
And thus it is that I drop in just to offer up this, which isn’t funny at all.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Authorities say the daughter of a pastor was accidentally shot in the head at a church in St. Petersburg.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office was called to the Grace Connection Church Sunday at about 12:24 p.m. Sunday.
Investigators say Moises Zambrana was showing his gun in a small closet to another church member – the victim’s boyfriend, according to CBS affiliate WTSP – who was interested in buying a firearm. Zambrana reportedly took out the magazine of the Reuger 9mm weapon but did not know there was a bullet in the chamber. …
The gun went off and fired through a wall, striking 20-year-old Hannah Kelley. She was transported to Bayfront Medical Center to undergo surgery and remained in critical condition late Sunday.
“There is a big level of concern ’cause she may or may not survive. But we’re all praying for her and, right now, I guess that’s the best we can do,” church member Tony Diehl told WTSP.
Deputies said Zambrana has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
No charges have been filed. [CBS/AP via th]
Y’all may recall that I’m no fan of guns — I think a gun is a damn stupid thing to have around the house, and I especially disdain the notion that a more heavily armed society is safer than one less well strapped…
….Still, I wouldn’t say that no one should have a gun.
I’ve shot at targets before and enjoyed it, and I come from a couple of generations of career gunners in the Royal Artillery, so it would be hypocritical (as well as insufficiently filial) to suggest otherwise.
But I do think we are lax in the demand of absolute responsibility of those who choose to own guns. I’m a strict liability kind of guy in this area. If you decide to own a gun, you own all of it. It’s your job to secure it — if someone steals it and uses it to cause harm, that’s at least in part your problem. You fail as utterly Mr. Zambrana did, you should have criminal and civil liability to deal with…and so on. A gun is a tool that is designed to apply deadly force at a distance. Owning such a tool should carry the most rigorous obligations with it. Anything less is disrespectful of the machine itself.
Your mileage may vary. Have at it (and me).
Image: Antonia de Pereda y Salgado, Allegory, c. 1654
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Elizabeth Warren & the Metrics of Money
The (NYTimes– owned) Boston Sunday Globe had a front page childhood bio (with video!) on “A girl who soared, but longed to belong“:
… “I was in a high school where everybody was a click better off,’’ [Elizabeth] Warren recalled.
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“It’s not just that they had so much,’’ she said. “They were just confident. They had the assurance that it would always be there.’’
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Money, and the anxiety it can create for families like the one she grew up in, has consumed Warren ever since. It is the focus of her books about struggling middle-class families, her work at Harvard on bankruptcy law, her Washington service as President Obama’s consumer protection adviser, and, now, her campaign for the US Senate.
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The seeds of that worry, that fear of not having enough, were planted on the Oklahoma plains. Financial comfort has since come to her, along with professional success – her Harvard salary alone exceeds $350,000. But money has, in her mind, always been about much more than dollar bills. It has been shorthand for security, acceptance, and family stability…
Which reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to posting a link to David Bernstein’s Boston Phoenix column on Warren’s “Dr. Phil Years“:
… Between 2003 and 2005, Warren was the go-to dispenser of financial straight talk for TV’s daytime-talk-show host. Appearing on episodes with titles like “Going for Broke,” “Money Makeovers,” and “A Family in Crisis,” Warren comes across much as she does as a Senate candidate today. Dressed in bright-colored pants-and-jacket suits, she flashes her bright, toothy smile, then leans forward and gestures forcefully to deliver the blunt, terrible economic truth as she sees it.
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It was part of a deliberate decision Warren made 10 years ago, when she was already over 50, with a prestigious quarter-century academic career, to seek out a broader audience — not only on Dr. Phil, but by writing and promoting books for a mass audience, and by building relationships with political figures…
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At the time, she says, not all of her colleagues in the hallowed halls of academia were quite so impressed with her new direction. Many looked down their noses at her TV exploits. Some economists (Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, for one) publicly disputed her key arguments. Her name even vanished from the New York Times for five years, last appearing a month before her first Dr. Phil appearance, and not showing up again until Congress appointed her to a bank-bailout oversight commission in December 2008, according to an archive search.
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And you don’t have to be a Harvard fellow to find something mockable in her work from the time, which combines motivational-style cheerleading, tough-love lectures, and checklist-oriented advice…
Americans have always been prone to confuse the idea of money as a resource — the barterable counters that ensure “security, [social] acceptance, and family stability” — with money as a reward, the dick-measuring tool of which some people are deserving and others unworthy. Resource money, while vital, has limits; there’s only so much personal security, health, friendship, family ties that can be achieved by the raw application of dollars (as Steve Jobs, for instance, found out). Reward money, Monopoly-game dolla-dollas, are unlimited and therefore forever inadequate; if the only point is to have more than the guy in the next cube, the business across the street, the financier at the top of this year’s Forbes 100 list, there’s never enough chips to ensure one’s standing in the game. And if money is a “reward”, then not having money indicates a lack of social worth — social programs are not a safety net, but an encouragement to laziness and immorality.
Warren’s Senate campaign — and, it would seem, her career, “mockable” daytime-tv stints as well as academic research — is about resource money. To the legislators, lobbyists, and media enablers who’ve turned Congress into one more arena for reward-money gaming, this is a deeply alien, therefore highly suspicious, concept. But if we’re going to survive as a nation, we need (once again!) to start disentangling the resources we have in common from the rewards of “economic virtue” or “fiscal vice”.
It takes a nation of whiners to hold them back
I may never understand the alchemy with which the invisible hand of the free-market transmutates mooching, looting professors into Moon-mining, job-creating Galtian geniuses:
Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm is retiring as Vice Chairman of the Investment Bank at UBS. Perhaps no single person is more responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 and more representative of all that is loathsome about the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.
Interesting that the firm’s press release announcing his retirement doesn’t attach “former” to his former title of Senator. He was perhaps so instrumental to UBS in that former role that he kept the title at the firm.
Like Newt, Gramm was an obscure professor who became a principled, centrist Congressional leader and later a high-profile presidential primary flame-out. Both left Congress under reasonably disgraceful conditions and were soon rewarded with millions of hard-earned dollars by our meritocracy. When you hit the bricks, new whips, money ain’t a thing.
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Take a look at me now
Thanks to everyone who came to yesterday’s Balloon-Juice meet-up. Here’s some pics (that’s me in the back in first one with the trapper hat, as promised). That was a lot of fun, we should do another one soon.
Thanks especially to the people who emailed me to thank me for setting it up, especially the person whose email included a link to her fabulous McArdle-length review of Against All Odds.