Abortion rates drop when people are more prosperous. Barack Obama’s economic policies focus on the “betterment of average families and those living at the margins.” Q.E.D.
Category Archives: politics
Security theater
Under the guidance of security expert Bruce Schneier, Jeffrey Goldberg goes on a quest to see what he can and can’t take through airport security. It’s simultaneously funny, sad, and worrying:
… because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists … I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
The piece is a perfect encapsulation of how absurd airport security has become – all about making passengers feel like they’ve had a hard time getting to the plane, so we know terrorists would have to take their shoes off. Which would totally stop me, were I a terrorist.
via kottke.org
Paper trail
The Washington Post has copies of two secret memos in which the Bush Administration officially endorsed waterboarding. What forced the Administration to go on-record? The CIA wanted cover:
The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.
Prosecution, alas, remains an open question.
Via the Daily Beast.
The anti-rumor
You won’t hear it from the mainstream media, but Barack Obama is a really nice guy. Best part is, it’s true.
Having their cake and eating it, too
There’s been much coverage (on Public Radio, anyway) of today’s “Pulpit Initiative” from the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, in which a handful of pastors risk their congregations’ tax-exempt status by endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. The goal is to provoke the IRS into following the law of the land and revoking tax exemption, so that ADF has one or more test cases with which to challenge said law. The clergy’s free speech rights are at stake, is the argument – the Pulpit Initiative is only trying to get government out of the church house.
Except, of course, that government is already in the church, providing a subsidy in the form of a tax exemption. I don’t see any particular reason to think that pastors shouldn’t say what they want about politics in whatever forum they wish – but when they’re taking money from the government while they do it, something smells. Regardless of what the ADF boosters say, tax-exemption plus freedom to endorse is a recipe for corruption.
Mennonites in the marketplace
In this week’s Mennonite Weekly Review, my friend Steve Kriss muses about the religious offerings in the marketplace of ideas:
When considering that the U.S. religious reality is a marketplace of faith and ideas, it’s easy to think that it becomes a competition. …
But the marketplace also invites creativity, not just competition. I think of the markets of Morocco or the shops at Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Sure, what’s offered is largely the same — clothing, art, food — but it nourishes differently and uniquely.
Steve’s describing exactly the sort of interfaith relations that are key to a functional, multicultural, democratic society. But the thing about marketplaces is that everyone has to more or less agree on the rules that govern them. For different religious positions (including non-religion) to take part in a marketplace of faiths, every one has to consent to a certain level of mutual respect and civility, and everyone has to agree on some set of universal “goods” by which competing religions are measured. The separation of church and state is supposed to enforce exactly this idea – regardless of who is in the majority, be they Christian, Hindu, atheist, or whatever, society still works by a set of rules that everyone recognizes as good.
But I don’t know how many religious people are interested in playing by a set of common marketplace rules. To do so is to admit that there are some overarching ethical principles that are held in common by people with all faith positions – and that these common principles are more important to the way society works than the special revelation of any one faith or denomination. That’s directly opposed to the claims of most religions (and anti-religions), who are more interested in establishing a monopoly than trading ideas in the marketplace.
Like crack for politics geeks
FiveThirtyEight.com has taken up a lot of my internet-surfing time since On the Media interviewed its founder, Nate Silver. FiveThirtyEight (which takes its name from the number of votes in the US electoral college) takes a new approach to poll-crunching, using simulated election results drawn from current polling to develop what looks like (to my not-very-statistically-savvy) a Bayesian estimation of the electoral votes for Barack Obama.
The nuts and bolts of the simulation model aren’t completely exposed in the FAQ, but it apparently takes into account the past accuracy and biases of each poll used, as well as demographic similarities between states. There’s lots of data on display, including the probability distribution of possible electoral outcomes – which currently projects an Obama victory in 72.4% of simulations.
The best Maureen Dowd columns
… are not written by Maureen Dowd. Today, she has Aaron Sorkin guest-write a fictional meeting between Barack Obama and Jed Bartlett, the president from Sorkin’s excellent TV series “The West Wing.” I guess there’s pretty strong demographic overlap between Obama supporters and “West Wing” fans, both of which categories include me.
That’s why I’m voting Obama
Because, while his opponent is taking elaborate hypocritical umbrage over the word “lipstick,” he’s spending campaign funds to run this ad.
Democrats are better for the economy than Republicans
Slate has a new infographic that compares U.S. economic performance metrics under Democratic and Republican presidents from 1957 to 2007. On almost every measure, Democrats are ahead. This follows up on a New York Times piece from a few weeks ago that came to similar conclusions, including that income inequality tends to decrease under Democratic presidents:
It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now … Over the entire 60-year period [from 1948 to 2007], income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all.