Compostable cutlery.

I encountered these cool things at a wedding in Ohio. Works just like a regular plastic fork!

Bonus US culture shock: The clerk who was excited about meeting someone from Canerica.

Ground Zero panders.

It's perfectly understandable that New York authorities wouldn't let Ahmadinejad visit Ground Zero to lay his wreath for "security reasons", although it frankly would have been brave and gracious to make an exception. What's galling is the outrage being ginned up over the supposed sacrilegious symbolism of Ahmadinejad paying respect to the victims of an American tragedy. Frankly, it's American cultural insecurity at its worst, and it's especially depressing to see Hillary Clinton playing along:

Several presidential candidates also condemned the requested visit. Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and Democratic front-runner, called the request "unacceptable." Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a leading Republican, called it "shockingly audacious."

A lot of things Ahmadinejad says and does are "unacceptable" and "shockingly audacious" (for example), but I really wouldn't think publicly lamenting the deaths of 2700 innocent Americans would be among them.

But of course, for stupid 911 posturing, Rudy always takes the cake:

Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor during the attacks and is now a Republican presidential candidate, branded Mr Ahmadinejad's request "outrageous" and described him as "a man who has made threats against America and Israel; is harbouring [Osama] bin Laden's son and other al-Qaida leaders; is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents; and is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons".

...Giuliani...said that "under no circumstances" should Ahmadinejad be allowed to visit the World Trade Center site.


The idea underlying all this outrage is that Ahmadinejad's concern for the victims of 911 is hypocritical, and that's true, judging by the information in this interesting piece from just over a year ago. Ahmadinejad says he's sorry about 911 but allows al-Qaida operatives, including Saad Bin Laden (who wasn't directly involved in the 911 attacks), to run around free in his country or at best sees them as possible pawns in US-Iran relations rather as criminals whose culpability rises above his own strategic concerns.

But hypocrisy over other nations' tragedies is pretty much a fact of diplomatic life, as might be surmised from the 0.2% of GNP that the US spends on non-Iraq-based foreign aid (about a third of which goes to Israel and can't really be considered humanitarian support). Isn't it better to have objectionable world leaders publicly siding with the victims of 911 over the perpetrators? Can't US politicians take empty diplomatic gestures for what they are? America isn't weak, so what exactly does it say that the dominant American political culture turns every goddamned thing into a referendum on its weakness?

What Craig hath wrought...

In a blip on the otherwise long-term positive trend in American public opinion on homosexuality and gay rights, an affirmative answer to the question "Do you feel that homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle or not?" fell nine points between May and September according to the most recent Gallop poll. I imagine a certain senator from Idaho had something to do with this. Ironically enough, the senator himself would likely claim that this is a positive fallout from his scandal...

Ideology and temperment.

At the end of an otherwise very good, long piece on Justice Stevens and the evolution of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Rosen gives some advice to liberals who want to perpetuate the Stevens model on the Court:

Identifying potential Stevenses in their 40s or 50s may not be easy: Stevens after all, hadn’t evolved into the justice he would become when he joined the court at age 55. But one way to identify future Stevenses may be to focus less on ideology than on temperament. Stevens’s successor should share his dedication to preserving the deeply rooted precedents of the past, and that dedication reflects his sensibility and character more than his personal politics. When we talked, I was especially impressed with Stevens’s character: his engagement, curiosity, combination of toughness and vision, strong internal compass and refusal to go along with the crowd, his decisiveness, analytical power, modesty (but not false modesty), devotion to the court as a steady institution and sense of wonder and gratitude for the remarkable opportunities that had come his way.


That's all very nice, but isn't the tendency for moderate liberals like Rosen to basically conflate good temperament with their own preferred ideology? I share Rosen's approval of Stevens' hyper-moderate and egalitarian jurisprudence. But that's because I'm also a moderate liberal.

Given how alien the view of the Court's movement conservatives, and the people who appointed them, are it's easy enough to see your own side as decent people holding out against conservative monsters like Scalia and flaky, sanctimonious divas like Kennedy. That's fine, but you ought to know that's what you're doing. A dedication to moderation on the Court, deference to legislative decisions when made within Constitutional and historical boundaries and a steadfast refusal to the let the Executive expand its own Constitutional and historical boundaries, are all part of Stevens' ideology, whether or not they're also evidence of a noble character. That ideology isn't terribly partisan, but only on the grounds that it was once associated with moderate Republicanism and is now associated with mainstream Democrats, something Stevens fairly obviously wishes were not true. Sure, tough but moderate ideology is probably highly correlated with tough but moderate temperament, but it's the former that matters, not the latter.

Yowsa.

The average life expectancy for players who make it to the NFL is 55 years, "more than two decades shorter than that of the public at large". Talk about blood sports!


Update: anonymous, in the comment(s) has an even more interesting fact:

Try rock stars:

Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University, led by Prof. Mark Bellis, studied 1064 British and American artistes who became famous between 1956 and 1999.

They compared the life spans of these rock stars to the life expectancy of the general population (matched for age, sex and ethnic background) up until 2005.

Their average life span was 35 years for European and 42 for North American stars.

Talk about blood sport :)

Happy anniversary!

The New York Times' article on the upcoming 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugs is a pretty standard offering in the liberals-gawking-at-conservatives school of journalism. The reporter tries his or her damnedest to take seriously and be objectively respectful about this whacked-out conservative icon on the grounds that all sorts of rich people love it, and Alan Greenspan takes it seriously, and the GOP keeps winning elections. Logic dictates, then, that there must be some deep, inexplicable merit to Ayn Rand novels, much like with Nascar. And maybe, if one conducts enough interviews, one of those wealthy Rand aficionado will say something intelligible about what exactly that merit is.

Which is to say, the piece is pretty painful. Except for this part, which is just funny:

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.


Long live John Galt!

Hillarycare redux.

Ezra has the low-down on the Clinton health care plan unveiled today, which turns out to be quite ambitious, similar to the Edwards plan. (One minus is that it does through tax credits what Edwards' plan does through subsidies. My view is that tax credits are fantastic for middle class folks like me who've been eyeing that $400 pair of shoes and find out - yes!!! - they don't have to donate that extra cash to Stephen Harper this year. For poorer people, typically without buffer stocks of saving, there's a much higher utility gain (or smaller current utility loss from being forced to purchase health care) from not having to pay as much in the first place than from getting money back as a refundable credit at some future date.)

One thing that strikes me with all these plans though is Ezra's observation that:

And if you don't go through the newly expanded FEHBP or the public option, preferring to keep your current insurance, you'll still be dealing with a heavily-regulated and reformed insurance industry, which can no longer price discriminate based on preexisting conditions or demographic characteristics, refuse you coverage, or deny renewal of your policy -- including if you change your job. So if you like your current insurance but quit your cubicled existence at MegaCorp, your insurer can't drop you. All this matters because it keeps the private programs from having too much capacity to undercut the risk pools of the other options. It also destroys the elements of the insurance industry's business model that rely too explicitly on screwing you over.


Doesn't it basically destroy the insurance industry's business model, period? How does a private insurer who can't deny anybody coverage, or charge anybody extra for their coverage regardless of their current condition or mortality, survive? Particularly if it has to compete with a public plan that can, and should, run at a serious operating loss?

I'm not Jonathan Cohn (or Ezra Klein), but it seems to me that either the Clinton or or the Edwards plan - introducing a heavily subsidized public option to compete with a newly regulated private market - is basically the death knell for widespread private insurance. Private plans can likely still appeal to the very wealthy and to those who want insurance for non-core services. But if they pass (and as a political note, I think Edwards is probably more likely and willing to go down swinging tyring to pass his plan that Clinton is) either plan as proposed is a gateway to socialized medicine.

Blast from the past

I just found my way (via LGM) to this old American Prospect article by Matt Yglesias and Mark Leon Goldberg from July 2005. I have to say, even with a wildly unpopular White House and Democratic majorities and the end of Lincoln Chafee, their conclusions are holding up pretty well:


It is only a small exaggeration to say that there are no moderate Republicans at all. There are grandstanders who enjoy the notoriety and media access that can be gained from the occasional off-message statement to the press. There are vulnerable Republicans who need to move to the left every so often in order to win elections. But there is no group of Republicans that, through real actions with consequences and meaningful policy engagement, makes any significant effort to block the conservative agenda or implement a centrist one. That people who say different things from their co-partisans but act the same when the votes are counted can acquire reputations as independent-minded mavericks says a great deal about the culture of our political media -- and very little about where the legislative balance of power lies.

The real reason all this matters so much is this: The myth of the GOP moderates has led the Democratic Party and liberal advocacy groups to accept an idea about them that is completely backward. Democrats and liberal groups tend to see moderate Republicans as precious models of sanity with whom they can work. Instead, given the districts and states the moderates tend to represent, Democrats and liberals should view the moderates as people who can be beaten, thereby building a Democratic majority.

I've come undone between zeros and ones...

Since I'm a big fan of the genre, I'll randomly note that my latest musical find, Eleventh Dream Day, has got to be the most Canadian-sounding American geek-rock band I've ever heard. Imagine Geoff Kelly with a PhD in computer science (actually Rick Rizzo has a degree in education, but whatever).

Abu G's long incompetence trail.

Alan Berlow's famous Atlantic piece on Abu Gonzales' clemency memos from when he was legal counsel to Governor Bush in Texas was recently freed from behind the subscription wall. It's just about what you'd expect:

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history...

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.


Probably most appalling is Bush's alleged hand-wringing and actual buck-passing over the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, an execution that didn't come close to meeting the clemency standards of the Bush governorship but was opposed by Pat Robertson and much of the religious right. Regarding Abu, though, the picture that emerges isn't so much maliciousness or hypocrisy. It's just the total cluelessness the rest of the country would come to know and love: a total absence of thought about the process; a willingness just to summarize court reports and be done with it; a complete lack of the sort of moral imagination that might lead to a sense of responsibility for other people's life and death.