So, I’ve known for some time that On the Media co-host Brooke Gladstone has a new book out, and that it’s a meditation on media in quirky graphic-novel form, but I didn’t really know I needed to read it until I saw this trailer. ◼
Category Archives: politics
Paying up
So one major credit rating agency has announced it has a bad feeling about the long-term value of U.S. government debt. Whatever could our government—which is to say, we, the U.S. public—have done to warrant that? How about refusing to collect revenue that could pay down existing debt:
(Via.)
Sure, government spending increases debt, and the U.S. government spends money to do lots of things I’d be happy to stop doing. But government does lots of things that any sane person agrees are necessary—paying for police and firefighters, building roads, preventing people from pissing in my drinking water—and even if we cut all those basic services to zero, we still wouldn’t have a balanced budget. (Non-defense discretionary spending for 2010 ≈ $530 billion; 2010 federal budget deficit ≈ $1,294 billion. Everyone can agree that 530 is not larger than 1,294 … right?)
When the government borrows, it borrows against tax revenue that it could, theoretically, collect to pay off the debt. Our collective decisions as U.S. citizens, expressed via elections—with admittedly varying degrees of accuracy and wisdom—have run up historically high national debt while driving the proportion of national income collected as taxes to a historical low. If you were loaning more and more money to a friend who kept working fewer and fewer hours a week, wouldn’t you start to get a bit edgy?
And if all this sounds a bit abstract, here’s a nice concrete number: the increased cost of U.S. debt associated with that credit rating agency’s bad feeling comes to about $322 per U.S. citizen. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a pretty big chunk of the refund I got back when the last round of big tax cuts took effect, ten years ago—and it’s just the start. ◼
This is my Senator
It’s nice to be living in a blue state. I just wish that it wasn’t necessary to move halfway across the country to finally acquire a Congressional delegation that actually reflects my values.
Pacifism as the conservative position
Via The Dish, which I haven’t read in ages: Bryan Caplan distills pacifism into a comparison of E[benefits of war] and E[costs of war]. That is, we know wars are expensive and awful, but we have much less assurance that they’re going to be worth it:
Of course, “Fight when it’s a good idea, make peace when it’s a good idea” counts as a philosophy. And you might think that this case-by-case approach has to yield better results than pacifism. But that’s only true with perfect foresight. In the real world of uncertainty, case-by-case optimization is often inferior to simple rules.
Which is why I tend to think of pacifism as a small-c conservative position: simple risk-benefit analysis, and a little honest evaluation of history.
So what does it take to strike Stephen Colbert speechless?
I’m super late to this one, but … holy blithering wow, man.
Dan Savage—nationally syndicated advice columnist, It Gets Better co-founder, serial contributor to This American Life, and all around alpha-gay—was on the Colbert Report to discuss the recent New York Times profile about his views on monogamy, which views may be briefly summed up as why ruin a perfectly good marriage by insisting on complete sexual fidelity? And about midway through said interview, Savage drops a line which, while requiring no censorious bleeping whatsoever, stops Colbert dead in his metaphorical and satirical tracks and had me just about on the floor in laughter and/or amazement. I’m frankly still a mite breathless, and in full-on Wallace-esque run-on mode as a result.
And, well, you probably don’t want to see it if you’re not particularly cool with Savage’s aforementioned feelings about monogamy, but if you are in fact generally on board or at least don’t get the howling fantods after reading my summary or obliquely contemplating what I shall delicately call the mechanics of love, and if you are even later to this than I am* you really ought to right now.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Dan Savage | ||||
|
||||
All of which is a rather long way to go to say, gods (or whoever) bless Dan Savage and Stephen Colbert.
————–
*Which probably means you didn’t have an internet connection till this evening, in which case let me take this footnote to say, welcome to the World Wide Web!
Testimony from the front lines, Exhibit B.
Via the Hairpin’s sister site The Awl this time: Queer students at the very Christian Harding University have published a ‘zine trying to explain themselves to the rest of the student body. It’s pretty damn’ hard to read, although maybe just because it sounds pretty damn’ familiar to me:
Our voices are muted, our stories go unheard, and we are forced into hiding. We are threatened with re-orientation therapy, social isolation, and expulsion. We are told stories and lies that we are disgusting sinnners who are dammed [sic] to hell, that we are broken individuals and child abusers. We are told we will live miserable lives and are responsible for the collapse of civilization. …. We are good people who are finished being treated as second-class citizens at Harding. We have done nothing wrong and we did not choose this suppression.
From the vantage point of someone for whom it got better, it’s hard not to see a certain amount of cognitive dissonance underlying the attempts to engage the intended audience with Biblical exegesis. But you know what, Harding University queers? Whether or not God hears your “cries for liberation from harsh oppression,” the rest of us do.
Naturally, Harding University has blocked access to the ‘zine website on its campus.
Testimony from the front lines, Exhibit A.
Over at The Hairpin, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs, Dolores P. explains why she is training to become an abortion provider. And, wow. It’s incredible from start to finish, but her accounts of specific patients’ stories will blow you away:
Couple days later one of our patients was a soldier from Afghanistan. Hey, I was just reading about you guys.
No contraception around (she was stationed pretty far out) meant that she got pregnant. “Regulations require that a woman be flown home within two weeks of the time she finds out she’s pregnant, a particular stigma for unmarried women that ends any future career advancement.” Ends any future career advancement. For my patient, that meant that she had to figure out how to make it back to the states on her own. Even if she had chosen to “go straight,” it wouldn’tve been much better: “Servicewomen who make the decision to have an abortion must first seek approval from their commanding officer to take leave from their military duty and return to the United States or a country where abortion is legal.” (Guttmacher.) Ask your boss if you can please take off a while for your abortion. And no matter what, she had to pay for it all herself. So even though she knew she was pregnant almost immediately, it took eight weeks to make arrangements, travel plans and raise all the money. That means by the time she walked in our door, she was beginning her second trimester, which is a way more expensive and invasive procedure. She also had to spend eight more weeks than she had to miserably pregnant. In Afghanistan. [Hyperlink sic.]
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is trying to eliminate Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, 100 percent of which goes towards services that help avoid abortions. You should go do something about that right now.
Public Broadcasting: worth every penny
Following the House’s vote to defund Public Broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting posted this video of Fred Rogers testifying before Congress in support of some of the earliest Federal funding for public television.
That do-it-yourself determination to harness modern media for the public good is still alive and well in shows like Frontline—which just released the best report I’ve seen on the Egyptian revolution of 25 January. It’s alive and well in NPR’s Planet Money podcast, which started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and is now the reason I (mostly) understand mortgage-backed securities. It’s alive and well in Radiolab, which is producing the best popular science reporting in any medium. And it’s alive and well in On the Media, where even the question of Federal funding for Public Broadcasting is up for debate.
Want to keep Public Broadcasting alive and well? The Senate hasn’t voted yet. And there’s a website to get you started.
Stop a proposed oil pipeline by … kayaking?
That’s the idea behind the Pipedreams Project. Concerned about a proposed pipeline that would connect Alberta tar sands oil fields to the British Columbia coast, a trio of British Columbians paddled the region that would be in danger in the event of a spill. Now they’re working on a documentary about the proposed pipeline, the trip, and the people they met along the way.
The Qu’osby Show
Every time I start to think The Daily Show might be losing its edge (admittedly, this usually happens whenever the show goes on hiatus for a couple weeks) along comes something like this: Aasif Mandvi’s take on the Cosby Show. Wow.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive – The Qu’osby Show – The Pilot | ||||
|
||||