Read This Now - Down Goes DOMA

I'm not pleased with how everything shook out in the recent SCOTUS rulings (frankly I'm giving the Justices murder eyes over their gutting of key previsions in the voting rights act - doing away with the protections that helped allow a black Mayor to get elected in Selma because Selma now has a black mayor is just a nutso argument.) but they got the DOMA ruling right and I'll give them some credit for that.  Even if it was about as open and shut as you can get in my opinion.

I thought President Obama's statement on the end of DOMA was a really good one, good enough to not make you click through to read it:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

June 26, 2013

Statement by the President on the Supreme Court Ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act

I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.  This was discrimination enshrined in law.  It treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people.  The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it.  We are a people who declared that we are all created equal – and the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. 

This ruling is a victory for couples who have long fought for equal treatment under the law; for children whose parents’ marriages will now be recognized, rightly, as legitimate; for families that, at long last, will get the respect and protection they deserve; and for friends and supporters who have wanted nothing more than to see their loved ones treated fairly and have worked hard to persuade their nation to change for the better. 

So we welcome today’s decision, and I’ve directed the Attorney General to work with other members of my Cabinet to review all relevant federal statutes to ensure this decision, including its implications for Federal benefits and obligations, is implemented swiftly and smoothly.

On an issue as sensitive as this, knowing that Americans hold a wide range of views based on deeply held beliefs, maintaining our nation’s commitment to religious freedom is also vital.  How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions.  Nothing about this decision – which applies only to civil marriages – changes that.  

The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts:  when all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.

The ending lines really sum it all up, don't you think.

Read This Now - Heritage Just A Tank

You may have guessed that I would tend to disagree with much (if not all) of what the Heritage Foundation and now former Senator Jim DeMint have to say. I don't think that either of them do anything to raise the level of discourse in the country or around Washington and I certainly have my doubts about any whether they do any real thinking.

Ezra Klein has a good run down on DeMint's appointment as the head of Heritage and the death of Think Tanks...

To state the obvious, you don’t name Jim DeMint head of your think tank because you’re trying to improve the quality of your scholarship. You name DeMint head of your think tank because you’re trying to become the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

There’s much that DeMint can bring to his new job as president of the Heritage Foundation. Deep connections with lawmakers. Genuine respect from the Tea Party. An immense talent for fundraising. A keen political sense. He might make the Heritage Foundation, which is already an able and effective advocate, a much more powerful force in Republican Party politics. But he will not make it a more respected force in the world of ideas.

There's the kernel of a great idea behind the notion of Think Tanks, that they could develop new and innovative solutions to policy challenges that the nation faces and that politicians in office don't have the time, knowledge, or courage to work on or propose.  Instead they seem to operate more like well staffed SuperPAC's these days and it's a shame.  Read the whole piece above for a quick look at the situation, it won't take you long.

There are good ideas out there and we need them.

Read This Now - Mitt's Mendacious Tax Plan

Bloomberg has the simplest, most straight forward break down of why Mitt Romney's tax plan won't work...

Mitt Romney’s tax plan has three key planks. He cuts personal income tax rates by 20 percent across the board; he eliminates deductions, exclusions and credits so that the deficit does not grow; and he doesn’t make the tax code any less progressive. Unfortunately, as the Tax Policy Center has shown, only two of these planks can co-exist.

Conservatives have reacted aggressively against the TPC report. It seems that Mitt’s plan should be viable: If you cut tax rates proportionally across the board, and eliminate tax deductions proportionally, it seems progressivity should be unchanged. In fact, if you eliminate tax breaks starting with the wealthy, as Romney says he would, it seems he should be able to make the tax code even more progressive.

The idea is intuitive, but wrong. And it’s wrong because of something people don’t realize: The tax preferences that exist today overwhelmingly benefit people with lower and middle incomes, not the wealthy. While tax rate cuts reduce income tax burdens proportionally, as TPC notes, there aren't enough tax preferences for wealthy people to offset Romney's cuts at the top.

Read the whole thing for the details (you've already read almost half of the original post if you've gotten this far, why stop now).

(via BOTM)

Read This Now - The NFL Refs And Labor Union Struggles

Brad Plummer has a good quick look at how the locked out NFL Refs are just like every other labor union fighting for a better deal for it's members...

In many ways, however, the NFL referee feud is perfectly representative of modern labor battles playing out in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In this case, one of the biggest sticking points, as Dave Jamieson explains, involves pensions. The league wants to replace the defined-benefit pensions for referees that have been in place since the 1970s with riskier and stingier 401(k)s. The referees, by contrast, point out that the NFL hauls in $9 billion per year and can afford to provide generous retirement packages.

If you read the whole thing, and you should, you'll be left wondering if Scott Walker knows the real refs are union guys.

Read This Now - Use It Or Lose It

It should be a fairly common sense acknowledgement that walking more is good for your overall health.  So the flip side of that notion being true shouldn't really come as a surprise either; sitting around all day can kill you (more or less)...

"Those who were sitting more were substantially more likely to die," Blair says.

Specifically, he found that men who reported more than 23 hours a week of sedentary activity had a 64 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than those who reported less than 11 hours a week of sedentary activity. And many of these men routinely exercised. Blair says scientists are just beginning to learn about the risks of a mostly sedentary day.

"If you're sitting, your muscles are not contracting, perhaps except to type. But the big muscles, like in your legs and back, are sitting there pretty quietly," Blair says. And because the major muscles aren't moving, metabolism slows down.

"We're finding that people who sit more have less desirable levels" of cholesterol, blood sugar, triglycerides and even waist size, he says, which increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and a number of health problems.

NPR has the rundown on the research and some tips for moving around more (from a year and a half ago no less).

It isn't that hard to walk a little more each day; take the stairs instead of the elevator, park a little farther away, get off the bus a stop early, go out for a spin around the block at lunch or in the afternoon, walk over to your co-workers' desks instead of calling them, and so on and so forth.

Basically just do what the man says...

Read This Now - Obama & Romney On Science Issues

Scientific American asked the Presidential candidates 14 questions on the top science issues of the day and you should check out what they had to say.  Remember that a huge amount of the funding for scientific and technological research and development comes from the federal government and that funding may well hang in the balance of the upcoming election.

Here are the questions; click through to read the candidates responses...

1. Innovation and the Economy. Science and technology have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII, when the federal government first prioritized peacetime science mobilization. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?
2. Climate Change. The Earth’s climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change—and what steps can we take to improve our ability to tackle challenges like climate change that cross national boundaries?
3. Research and the Future. Federally funded research has helped to produce America’s major postwar economies and to ensure our national security, but today the UK, Singapore, China, and Korea are making competitive investments in research. Given that the next Congress will face spending constraints, what priority would you give to investment in research in your upcoming budgets?
4. Pandemics and Biosecurity. Recent experiments show how Avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from emerging diseases, global pandemics and/or deliberate biological attacks?
5. Education. Increasingly, the global economy is driven by science, technology, engineering and math, but a recent comparison of 15-year-olds in 65 countries found that average science scores among U.S. students ranked 23rd, while average U.S. math scores ranked 31st. In your view, why have American students fallen behind over the last three decades, and what role should the federal government play to better prepare students of all ages for the science and technology-driven global economy?
6. Energy. Many policymakers and scientists say energy security and sustainability are major problems facing the United States this century. What policies would you support to meet the demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?
7. Food. Thanks to science and technology, the United States has the world's most productive and diverse agricultural sector, yet many Americans are increasingly concerned about the health and safety of our food. The use of hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, as well as animal diseases and even terrorism pose risks. What steps would you take to ensure the health, safety and productivity of America's food supply?
8. Fresh Water. Less than one percent of the world’s water is liquid fresh water, and scientific studies suggest that a majority of U.S. and global fresh water is now at risk because of increasing consumption, evaporation and pollution. What steps, if any, should the federal government take to secure clean, abundant fresh water for all Americans?
9. The Internet. The Internet plays a central role in both our economy and our society. What role, if any, should the federal government play in managing the Internet to ensure its robust social, scientific, and economic role?
10. Ocean Health. Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are in serious decline, habitats like coral reefs are threatened, and large areas of ocean and coastlines are polluted. What role should the federal government play domestically and through foreign policy to protect the environmental health and economic vitality of the oceans?
11. Science in Public Policy. We live in an era when science and technology affect every aspect of life and society, and so must be included in well-informed public policy decisions. How will you ensure that policy and regulatory decisions are fully informed by the best available scientific and technical information, and that the public is able to evaluate the basis of these policy decisions?
12. Space. The United States is currently in a major discussion over our national goals in space. What should America's space exploration and utilization goals be in the 21st century and what steps should the government take to help achieve them?
13. Critical Natural Resources. Supply shortages of natural resources affect economic growth, quality of life, and national security; for example China currently produces 97% of rare earth elements needed for advanced electronics. What steps should the federal government take to ensure the quality and availability of critical natural resources?
14. Vaccination and public health. Vaccination campaigns against preventable diseases such as measles, polio and whooping cough depend on widespread participation to be effective, but in some communities vaccination rates have fallen off sharply. What actions would you support to enforce vaccinations in the interest of public health, and in what circumstances should exemptions be allowed?

It isn't quite a science debate, but it's a lot better than not addressing these issues.

(via kottke) 

Read This Now - Ryan Breakdown

Sally Kohn (wikipedia) isn't exactly your mainstream Fox News contributer, but it's still a gas to see the most robust breakdown of Paul Ryan's recent RNC speech come from a Fox News outlet...

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

You should really read the whole thing, it won't take you long and you'll probably find it either edifying or entertaining or possibly even both.

(via DB on fb)

Read This Now - The Death Star Just Isn't Worth It

Gregory Koger has easily the best piece on way over thinking the Death Star and applying real life theories and science etc to it's existence and use...

I have two thoughts to add. First, the Death Star is a bit misunderstood. It is primarily a tool of domestic politics rather than warfare, and should be compared to alternative means of suppressing the population of a galaxy. Second, as a weapon of war, it should be compared to alternative uses of scarce defense resources. Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.

If you have a liberal arts education or just like reading and thinking about things (and lets be honest, you probably wouldn't be here if you didn't) then you should read the whole thing.

Read This Now - Ending The Depression

The economy still stinks, and there are few signs of improvement these days.  The challenges appear to be largely political in nature at this point since, as Paul Krugman has been pointing out for some time we know how to fix things we just seem to lack the will.

Krugman has a new book out summing up his arguments on how to end the current depression and gave a good talk at Politics & Prose on the issue.  He also wrote this summation of the book for the NY Review of Books which serves as a cliffs notes of sorts...

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book^*—and show later in the data discussed in this article—is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

Read the whole thing, if you have time give the book a look as well, and if you aren't into reading P&P is nice enough to provide recordings of most of their author talks.

Read This Now - Our Political System Is Broken And It's The GOP's Fault

You know things are really starting to get out of hand when even the big guns from the AEI agree that the Republicans are to blame for the dysfunctional state of Congress and politics in general...

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

That's from this past weekend's WaPo piece from Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein who were also on NPR this morning to talk about the problem and their new book, appropriately titled It's Even Worse Than It Looks. Be sure to check out both stories in their entirety.

Read This Now - Guns In America

Americans love their guns, or at least a certain percentage of us do since, as Jill Lepore points out in her excellent recent article for the New Yorker, the US has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world even as the percentage of Americans who own guns has been declining. 

Lepore takes a thorough look at guns in America, historic shootings, the Second Amendment and its political and legal history, the NRA, and several recent shootings. Normally their would be a pull paragraph here, but this piece is so well done, so interesting, and so hard to sum up fairly with a single pull quote that you really do need to just go and read the whole thing (if you need the cliffs notes version check out Lepore's related blog post).

It's also worth noting that the NRA doesn't monolithically represent and speak for all gun owners or even for the majority of them.  Lily Raff McCaulou elegantly made this point recently in the NYT...

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that every N.R.A. member is also a hunter — which is highly unlikely, considering that the most comprehensive national survey of firearm ownership to date found that only 35 percent of gun-owning households say they hunt. Even then, the N.R.A. would represent only about one-third of all hunters in the United States.  

You should be sure to read her whole op-ed as well, it won't take long.

Read This Now - Why Austerity Does Not Work

I've been meaning to put something together on the wrong-headedness of the austerity binge as it drags Europe ever further down the economic drain, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Luckily Henry Blodget has; he succinctly explains why austerity doesn't work and why Keynes was right, or at least provided the least bad way to get out of a recession / depression...

The reason austerity doesn't work to quickly fix the problem is that, when the economy is already struggling, and you cut government spending, you also further damage the economy. And when you further damage the economy, you further reduce tax revenue, which has already been clobbered by the stumbling economy. And when you further reduce tax revenue, you increase the deficit and create the need for more austerity. And that even further clobbers the economy and tax revenue. And so on.

Basically, austerity puts you into a death spiral in which you keep trying to cut your way to prosperity, but all you end up doing is digging a bigger hole. And in the meantime, tens of millions of people are out of work, the economy is retrenching, and everything is generally miserable.

The whole thing is worth reading and will only take you a few minutes.

(via BDL)

Read This Now - An Impassioned Plea For Teaching Literature

Claire Needell Hollander made a great point, probably several of them actually, when she wrote about the importance of reading to middle school students and how our increasingly test and data driven education system is depriving kids of books...

We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them. 

Be sure to read the whole thing at the NYT site.

(via BYL)

Read This Now - Chris Christie Can't Handle The Truth

In rather unsurprising news a(nother) Republican politician is having trouble with the veracity of his statements.  NJ Gov. Chris Christie was apparently less than truthful in his explanation for pulling the funding for that tunnel to NYC last year.  It seems the cost hadn't actually risen like he claimed, but that he wanted to siphon off the money to prop up the state transportation fund so he could avoid raising gas taxes.  The GAO did the investigating and the NYT drops the dime...

...found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the 

project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs. 

Nice to see an article that does less hemming and hawing around the fact that a politician was lying to the public than normal, it could probably stand to be even more declarative though. Check out the whole thing for some of the other details and the potential impacts of the report.

(via CP)

Read This Now - Making Music

The February 6 issue of the New Yorker has a great little piece by the pianist Jeremy Denk about the recording process and struggle.  He also does quite a bit about Charles Ives' "Concord" Sonata, but the most interesting parts are his thoughts about the differences between recordings and live performances and the goals and results therein...

In performance, at some point near the climax, I happily relinquish the prospect of playing all or any of these notes, and just let the fervor take over, preacher style.  In recording, this wonderful freedom seems a cop-out.  You must have all the notes; after all, it's a document.
...
Ultimately, editing turns out to be even more nerve-racking than recording.  In the moment of playing, the logistics of just hitting the notes distract you from the continuous choices you are making.  In the edit you have nothing but choice.  And you feel helpless, since everything has already been played.

Unfortunately the piece is behind the pay wall so you'll need a subscription or have to cough up a few bucks to read the whole thing.  There is a nice audio companion to the piece though with a lot of the same thoughts in an interview format and you get to hear some of the music that Denk is playing in the story.

Denk also has a blog that you might enjoy if you like the New Yorker piece.

Read This Now - Our Dehumanization

We are after all only human, which is at least part of the reason that we can succumb to collective dehumanization as a society so readily.

The recent youtube video appearance of US marines peeing on the bodies of taliban fighters in Afghanistan has brought appropriate statements of disgust and anguish over the reprobation but probably much too little introspection.

Sebastion Junger takes a look at how we got here as a culture and society and while he may not have a solution he at least gets closer to digging up the roots of the problem than most of the voices out there do these days.

There is another context for that behavior, though — a more contemporary one. As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed.

Read the whole thing, he does a good job with the piece and it's an important point that he makes.

Read This Now - What's Up With Burma?

It suddenly seems that Myanmar has caught a case of detente; long time political prisoners are being freed, Secretary Clinton is making visits, and the President is getting ready to appoint an ambassador.  I sure don't know what it all means but I'm willing to see it as an improvement over the status quo and the potential emergence of one of the most isolated regimes and peoples in the world today.

Joshua Hammer has a good run down on what's been going on and what it all might mean and how big of a grain of salt you should take these developments with...

[T]he new president was dismissed by many Burmese as the latest in a long line of opaque and isolationist rulers. Instead, after a tumultuous few months, some are already comparing him to Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. De Klerk: the ultimate party insider who is using his institutional power to lead his country in a progressive, and potentially revolutionary, new direction. 

That assessment of Thein Sein may be premature. But the sweep of change has so far been breathtaking.

Whether Sein is Myanmar's Gorbachev remains to be seen, but here's hoping things keep progressing.  Make sure to read the whole thing to get a handle on exactly what's been happening so far.

And now I have a craving for some Burmese food...

Read This Now - New Year, Same Crappy Political Reporting

It's far from new news that political reporting in the US is far from anything that aspires to be truly newsworthy or truthful, or to actually inform the readers or viewers etc etc.  With the GOP primary heating up with the advent of the Iowa caucuses George Packer does one of the best jobs that I can recall in summing up the problems with the state of our political coverage...

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there’s an endless appetite for stories about Santorum’s effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.

Read the whole thing for more details on the current scene in Iowa as well.

See also Greg Sargent's wrap up of Mitt Romney's Big Lie Strategy.

Read This Now - The GOP War On Voters

Ezra Klein has a good quick rundown of the various attacks on voters that the GOP has come up with over the course of 2011 in the course of shining a bright light on the hypocrisy that the Republican presidential primary candidates are now displaying after many of them failed to register to be included on the Virginia primary ballot...

The open secret of these laws is that they hurt turnout among Democratic constituencies such as students, minorities and low-income voters, which helps Republican politicians get elected. Virginia is just an odd case where restrictive ballot-access laws are hurting Republican politicians.

Read the whole thing for the details and links to other articles.  You could also take a look at this recent post from Charlie Pierce about Mitch McConnell's belief that democracy does not work.

Read This Now - Can I Get A Fact Check?

Actually, no.

Ezra Klein has a good rundown on the problem with fact checking organizations in today's political climate and partisan arena.  It boils down to the fact that they can't manage to stay out of the he said she said model of reporting that fact checking ostensibly should be immune to.

And that, ultimately, is the problem with the fact checker model. They have no actual power, so their only influence comes from the public’s sense of their legitimacy. And about half of the public leans towards one party and about half of the public leans toward the other. That means PolitiFact and these other outlets need to find some uneasy balance between the parties, too. But that just means the parties will have plenty of opportunities to decide that these are hackish, partisan operations. Conservatives got there a few weeks ago, and now liberals are following.

Take a look at the whole thing, it'll only take you a couple of minutes.

And remember everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.