What I'm reading ed. 100209

The news really doesn’t stop, does it? And I didn’t even touch the Toyota recalls… Does anyone have any interesting topics they think I should read more about? As usual, highlights are in red.

Politics

• Bipartisanship at its finest (Fallows)
  

  I got this note from someone with many decades’ experience in national politics, about a discussion between two Congressmen over details of the stimulus bill:

  “GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

  “Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

  “GOP member: ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

  “Dem member: ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

  “I witnessed this myself.”

 

 

• Obama’s quiet political reforms
  

  Yet there is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for–but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions.

• Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress!
  
• Congress. Who spoke and about what. (interactive)
• Words fail me: 2010 DailyKos / Research2000 poll of self-identified republicans. (raw data)
  
• US Senate voting blocs via network analysis (slideshow)
• American (political) idiots
  

  “These figures highlight a massive failure of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats among the nation’s political elite,” Scott Rasmussen wrote in the analysis. “Given the amount of political chatter about the budget in recent years, it is almost beyond comprehension that neither party has seen fit to highlight the basics so that the American people can make reasoned choices on the fundamental issues before them.”

• Jon Stewart v. Bill O’ Reilly (FoxNews)
• Remember the post about how the government was broken? Now comes Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) putting a blanket hold on everyone. (TPM) (Definition: hold)
• An intriguing filibuster reform proposal
  

  1. Make them vote. Cloture is invoked with a vote by three-fifths of the Senate’s membership — the magical 60 votes now necessary for the Senate to do anything. That is why it does not matter whether Sen. Brown votes; anything short of 60 in favor of cloture is a failure.

  That is ridiculous. Filibustering Senators are the ones trying to prevent the Senate from voting. It would make more sense to require them, after some hours of debate, to assemble 41 votes to continue, rather than the other way around. Our compromise is to allow three-fifths of Senators present and voting to invoke cloture, making votes against just as important as votes in favor.

  2. Make voting easier. By itself, Step One would change little since attendance is generally high for cloture votes. That is because those votes follow elaborate buildup. Fairness requires that it be as easy to try to end filibusters as it is to start them.
  …
  3. Reduce debate times. Once invoked, cloture allows another 30 hours of debate before a vote occurs. Because the legislative process involves a series of steps, Senators can delay a bill by weeks by forcing multiple cloture votes on a single bill.

• Americans: politically childish (Slate)
  

  At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.

• Dare to brainstorm: an alternative to state representation in the senate
  

  But what if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?

  Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

• Profile of US Attorney General Eric Holder (TAP)
• Palin emails released
• Sarah Palin’s speech to the Tea Party (transcript)
  

Policy

• Commentary on the “Race to the Top” Education Reform Program
• On the 2011 Presidential Budget (CBPP)
• 2001 Budget Interactive Graphic (NYT)
• How each US agency is affected by the budget
• US budget forecasting: like trying to tell the future. Oh wait, it is trying to tell the future. (inforgraphic)
• How the budget crunch is affecting Colorado Springs
  

  This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

  More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops – dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

• Disproving the efficient markets theory (haha)
  

  An old joke. Two economists are walking down the street. One says: “Hey, there’s a dollar bill on the floor.” The other says: “Impossible. If it were real, someone would have picked it up by now.”

• Reducing the budget sounds great in theory, sucks in reality.
  

  Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), for example, lashed out at Obama for “the same old big government budget that will spend too much, borrow too much, and tax too much.” He said: “I’m feeling a lot like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.”

  But at the same time, Bond issued a statement criticizing Obama’s proposed cuts in the military’s C-17 aircraft program — cuts that happen to affect thousands of jobs in Missouri.

  “Despite the need for the proven, on-time, and on-budget workhorse, the President once again wants to shut down our nation’s only large airlift line in production,” Bond said in a statement.

• Impact of taxes on the economy (Baseline)
  

  If there’s one thing I’d like people to take away, it’s that any theoretical economic argument that can be stated in a sentence is as likely to be untrue as true in the real world, no matter how clever or intuitive it is.

• Unemployment: It’s going to be ugly for a long time… (Delong)
  
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen on DADT
  

  Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

• Killed by lobbyists: Whatever happened to the soda tax?
  

  Some commentary from MoJo

  For comparison, that’s nearly as much as the entire aerospace industry spends on lobbying for the entire defense budget each year. It’s five times more than the sugar lobby itself spends lobbying on all sugar-related issues each year. It’s about as much as organized labor spends on all lobbying activities for everything.

  That’s the kind of muscle that the business community can bring to bear when it cares to. As much as the entire annual lobbying budget of organized labor or the aerospace industry, all for one single piece of legislation that never really had a ton of support in the first place. That’s a lot of leverage.

• Agriculture subsidies, still unassailable
• Wall Street fights back, gives money to Republicans (NYT)
  

  But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
  …
  “The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,’ ” said a top official at a major Wall Street firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House. “We are not going to play that game anymore.”

  That official’s view of how politics should be run is so pathetic it’d be funny…if it weren’t for the fact that everyone thinks the same way.

• Bernie Sanders (I-VT): 10 million solar roofs, 10 million gallons of solar hot water act
  

  Sanders’ bill would authorize rebates which, along with other incentives, would cover up to half the cost of the 10 million solar power systems and 200,000 water heating systems. Non-profit groups and state and local governments also would be eligible.

• 6 Republican ideas already in the health care bill (Klein)
• Interview w/ Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto (Salon)
• Rep Paul Ryan’s healthcare proposal (Klein)
  

  That’s not mere press release braggadocio. CBO agrees. Under the CBO’s likeliest long-term scenario, deficits are at 42 percent of GDP in 2080. Under Ryan’s proposal, we’re seeing surpluses of 5 percent of GDP by that time.

  But Ryan’s budget — and the details of its CBO score — is also an object lesson in why so few politicians are willing to answer the question “but how will you save all that money?”

  As you all know by now, the long-term budget deficit is largely driven by health-care costs. To move us to surpluses, Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security gets guaranteed, private accounts that CBO says will actually cost more than the present arrangement, further underscoring how ancillary the program is to our budget problem.

• Interview w/ Rep Paul Ryan (R), of the aforementioned budget and healthcare proposal (Klein)
• Eric Holder and the trial of Kalik Sheikh Mohammed
  

  “Values matter in this fight,” he said. “We need to give those who might follow these mad men a good sense of what America is, and what America can be. We are militarily strong, but we are morally stronger.”

Society

• Affirmative action, gender-gap style
  

  In recent years, several college leaders have admitted that their institutions give a boost to male applicants to maintain gender balance on campus. Most students of either sex, they point out, prefer such balance. If Vassar accepted equal percentages of each sex, women would outnumber men by more than 2 to 1.

• Interview with Bill Watterson
• Embedded in the Green Berets (CBS – 60 min)
• Who’s in a union?
  
• 5 Credit Card usage myths (WaPo)
• 7 myths of the American Revolution (Smithsonian)
• Yes, if you make over $250,000, you are rich
• Community planning: the free market does not exist in a vacuum (Yglesias)
  

  I think this captures the slightly pathological incoherence of our discourse around these issues. It’s true that if we keep policy on auto-pilot that we’ll get endless reproduction of car-dependent sprawl. But that’s not the same as saying that car-dependent sprawl is the result of “market forces” that are “left to their own devices.” Rather, the issue is “tax codes, zoning, community boards” and a system of “financing” in which the government (through the FHA, Fannie Freddie, etc.) is deeply involved.

• Poems of the Homeless
  

  Homeless, that’s that they call us
  They say we have no home
  Because we live out on the streets
  And choose to drift and roam.
  ~Cassie Sahler, 20

• College gender ratio imbalance: Are women getting smarter, men getting dumber, or is there some secret female cloning facility somewhere?
• Men, also not doing so well in the workforce. Women, keep up the good work.
• Why aren’t there more recognized female authors?
  

  Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.

• A day in the life of a Haiti Relief Worker
• School lunch a day project
• Free Range Kids
• Waterboarding claim retracted (FP)
  

  Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

  “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
  …
  Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

  “What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

  “I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

World

• Chinese Braille. I suppose it’s logical that it existed, but who knew?
• Kinshasa Symphony Trailer (photos)
  
• Arab society’s crunch points
  

  I want highlight four particular crunch points. I call them crunch points because they are areas where Arab society often tries to have it both ways but in my view will sooner or later be forced to make a decisive choice one way or the other. I’ll summarise them under the headings of knowledge, equal rights, secularism and citizenship.

• The Afghanistan power structure
  
• Good news on the Iraq elections: Sunni candidates reinstated (for now)
• New words from Moussavi
  

  “The majority of people believed in the beginning of the revolution that the roots of dictatorship and despotism were abolished,” he said. “I was one of them, but now I don’t have the same beliefs. You can still find the elements and roots that lead to dictatorship.”

• British Man eats Dog (NYT)
  

  I’m with these indignant protesters. I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

• Antibiotic resistant bacteria increasing in China
  

  “There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world.”
  …
  Particular alarm has been raised by resistance rates of MRSA in Chinese hospitals, which has more than doubled from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, according to Professor Xiao Yonghong of the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology at Beijing University.
  …
  “The guidelines are not being followed effectively,” added Professor Xiao, “over just the last five years, for example, our studies show the rate antibiotic-resistant E.coli has quadrupled from 10 per cent to 40 per cent.”

• The world can’t cooperate on global warming, so how about an oncoming asteroid?
  

  WASHINGTON, DC – One weighty decision that the world will need to make in 2010 is whether to support an idea raised by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, to launch an unmanned mission to redirect a large asteroid that might collide with Earth after 2030.
  …
  According to NASA, if Apophis hit the Earth, it could release more than 100,000 times the energy of the Tunguska event. Thousands of square kilometers could vaporize in the blast, but the whole Earth would suffer from the loss of sunlight and other effects of the dust released into the atmosphere. This danger explains why a Russian analyst has called Apophis a “space terrorist.”

Science

• The one-cubic foot biodiversity project
• Amazon River dam project moving forward.
• ATM Mounted Card Skimmers – be aware! (part 1)
• Autism-Vaccine Link paper retracted
• Gary Kasparov on Chess
  

  What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

• Who knew that the DoD funded the liberal arts?
• Trying your luck with ChatRoulette
  

  The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind.

• Science Channel Refuses to Dumb Down Science any Further: Punkin’ Chunkin’ (theonion)
• What happened to Microsoft’s innovation culture?
• Solar eclipse composite photo
• DARPAlabs: Immortal Synthetic Organisms
  

  The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

• Copenhagen: What the countries pledged (grist)

Photos

• Treasure trove of old school celebrity photos
• Travel during the Spring Festival in China (Photos)
• Powers of 10, flashstyle: Do you know what a Yottameter is?
• 6 Ninja Turtle concepts that didn’t make the cut.
• Architecture (photos)
• Snowstorm timelapse.