Pure science

As summarized by William Saletan (h/t gogol’s wife):

A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another.

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What you know….to be real

Freddie’s post touched on the myth that dominates that American political discourse: the idea that soft-headed liberals refuse to acknowledge the inferiority of black people. There are two great conservative storylines—strapping young bucks buying T-bones with their welfare checks and liberals needing to be “mugged by reality”—and this is where the lines meet.

It doesn’t matter that speculation about this or that race being genetically deficient is almost always completely unscientific, it’s still bold, gutsy, the kind of tough-minded look at reality that liberals refuse to take, just as it doesn’t matter that Paul Ryan’s budget numbers are garbage, the budget is still bold, gutsy, etc.

That’s just how things work. Eventually, they will change, but probably not in my lifetime. James B. Stewart and William Saletan and the rest may die before I do, but their kids will likely be the next wave of Villagers. And the NRO crowd will keep fucking that chicken until the big meteor hits, maybe longer.

Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight this, but don’t expect it to end anytime soon.

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Sorry, Larry

Anne Laurie was speculating on the World Bank pick earlier today, and I think it’s good news it wasn’t you-know-who after all:

President Barack Obama startled handicappers by selecting Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim as the U.S. candidate to lead the World Bank rather than the reported front-runner Larry Summers, Obama’s former National Economic Council director.
The Korean-born Kim is a medical doctor, anthropologist, and MacArthur fellow, best known for his pioneering work to fight HIV and tuberculosis in the Third World. Kim helped develop treatments for drug-resistant TB, and then successfully pushed to reduced the cost of anti-TB drugs. He is close associate of Dr. Paul Farmer, the lead founder of Partners in Health and subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
While Third World leaders had pushed for an alternative to Summers, Kim was a total surprise. The appointment is a two-fer in the sense that it gives the job both to an American and to an Asian, as well as a welcome breakthrough in that the presidency goes to someone with on-the-ground work fighting poverty and disease as opposed to an international dignitary or economist.
Jeffrey Sachs, who audaciously threw his own hat into the ring, can take some credit for this surprise choice, since his own move created some pressure for Obama to think outside the box. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also reportedly favorable to the Kim selection. For Summers, this ends a winning streak of falling upwards.

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Qu’est-ce que c’est?

It would be irresponsible not to speculate about what Bobo is trying to tell us:

Serial killers are often charming, but have a high opinion of themselves that is not shared by the wider world. They are often extremely conscious of class and status and they develop venomous feelings toward people who do not pay them sufficient respect.

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Lifestyles of the rich and famous

These are some of the people who like to lecture liberal elites for being out of touch:

David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet The Press, and Bret Baier, host of Fox News’s Special Report, are among the latest applicants to the Chevy Chase Club, the historic social club that has catered to Washington’s wealthiest for over a century.

[....]

The Chevy Chase Club was founded in 1892. As recently as 1976, it did not accept Jewish or African-American members, according to a report in the New York Times. And despite reforms, some who have visited the club believe it has maintained an atmosphere reminiscent of earlier days.

“Order a cocktail at the Chevy Chase country-club and you’ll step back into ante-bellum Savannah,” one British reporter for The Telegraph observed last year. “The blacks wait on Wasps, showing all the deference expected of them. You won’t find many Cohens either, lounging on the well-kept lawn.”

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Ah, but Did He Watch This with His Pipefitter Buds While Drinking a Domestic Brew from a Can?

Actual tweet from Charles Murray:

IMDb’s description of the documentary:

The collar awarded to the winners of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Craftsman in France) is more than the ultimate recognition for every pastry chef—it is a dream and an obsession. The 3-day competition includes everything from delicate chocolates to precarious six foot sugar sculptures and requires that the chefs have extraordinary skill, nerves of steel and luck. The film follows Jacquy Pfeiffer, founder of The French Pastry School in Chicago, as he returns to France to compete against 15 of France’s leading pastry chefs. The filmmakers were given first time/exclusive access to this high-stakes drama of passion, sacrifice, disappointment and joy in the quest to have President Sarkozy declare them one of the best in France.

Really? Now that his new book about reminding the proles of the moral benefits of manual labor is slipping off the bestseller list, the heroes of Murray’s moral universe are guys who make chocolate swans (or whatever the hell this is)?

I confess I actually like this kind of thing—I’m a regular Chopped and Top Chef viewer, and foodie food is an occasional splurge. But I thought that made me evil in Murray’s eyes. I thought he’d regard the very existence of foodie culture as an abomination. Guess not.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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The masquerade is over

I believe there are people who are not conservative ideologues who vote entirely on the basis of their opposition to reproductive rights. Likewise, I believe that there are people who are genuinely libertarians, not just conservatives who smoke pot. I also believe that there are white southern conservatives who are not racists.

Let’s be clear, though: much of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy consists of people who aren’t “pro-life” so much as they are right-wing ideologues. Reproductive rights are just a tool for them to turn force the Catholic Church to act as Republican political PAC. Many, many “libertarians” economics bloggers are just hateful wingers:

Some supposedly libertarian bloggers have let down their guard, coming out in favor of the vile Virginia probe lawand the Rush slut attack, and revealing in the process that all that reasonableness was just a facade.

And a large proportion of southern Republicans are insanely racist:

... PPP asks Republicans in Alabama, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?” Guess how many say Christian? 14%! Among the remaining 86%, “Muslim” slightly leads “not sure,” 45%-41%. (“Not sure” may by the demographic Rick Santorum is reaching out to when he accuses Obama of peddling a “phony theology.”)

But the Alabama Republicans are a thoroughly trusting lot in comparison with their Mississippi brethren. Among Mississippi Republicans, just 12% say Christian, 52% say Muslim, and 36% aren’t sure.

I guess the good news is that the internets make it harder and harder for all of these people to pretend to be decent, principled proponents of smaller government, or whatever it is they try to sell themselves as.

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Let’s Review: David Brooks Really Is a Boil on the Body Politic

I’ve pondered the mystery of why Gail Collins bothers to rise to “civil” in her exchanges with David Brooks, much less why she affords him a dignity he does not deserve – that of treating him as someone capable of sustaining the logic of his own argument long enough to be worth engaging.

I’m guessing she’s either a much nicer person than I ever hope to be—or  else she’s running a year-over-year longitudinal experiment to see just how long Brooks can sustain the pretence of independence as he trundles to his pre-selected conclusions.  Seriously—has anyone here been suprised by the last couple of grafs of a Brooks column, no matter where each piece began?  Anybody?

Thought not.

So, on to today’s text and exegesis.  (Hey, it is Sunday, right?)

From the March 3 Brooks – Collins Opinionator column, we learn that both of our pundits think Romney’s turned himself into a joke, a conclusion few of us, I’m guessing, would dispute.

Brooks begins badly as he contemplates the campaign to date, “My first emotion is pity, and the tremendous ocean of it I feel for Mitt Romney.”

Pity?  For a man who’s single campaign competence lies in spending his friends’ money on destructive ads, while lying about his own and his opponents’ words?

Brooks too must have reserves of the milk of human kindness I lack; or else a brain softened by years of trying to unlearn that which would make more difficult the task of comforting the comfortable.

Me, I just hope that Romney discovers just enough self-awareness to condemn him in the coming decades of an increasingly irrelevant existence to ponder the degree to which his father would be ashamed of him.  I wish Mitt a long life—make no mistake about that.  A miserable one, but long.

But I digress…

Brooks goes on to give his man some sage advice:

If I were Romney, I’d spend the next period of the campaign reading the Stoics, maybe Marcus Aurelius: “Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.” Or perhaps Epictetus: “Difficulties show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.”

I was going to break in here and call Brooks the intellectual pseud and poser he clearly is, when I realized that perhaps Collins is not quite so forgiving as she appears:

Gail: I do love the way you throw Epictetus in when I’m least expecting it.

Oh, snap! More »

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The entertainer

A dispatch from Real Murka (h/t):

I have written a couple comments about my daughter regarding this birth control issue. She is on birth control and has been for almost a year now- not for sexual activity and pregnancy prevention, but even if that were the case so what? No, instead beantown girl suffers from menorrhagia and secondary dysmenorrhea.

[...]

My daughter took a trip with the school band for 5 days just a week and a half ago. Any student on prescription medication had to have a form filled out and signed by the prescribing physician turned in before the trip. The day of the trip, the prescription medication was given to the doctor who was traveling with the students. He would hand out the medication as prescribed. For beantown girl, this was every morning after breakfast. She never thought a thing about it- neither did I. They returned from their trip…

[....]

They lined up behind my daughter to get their lunch tray and started in on her. “Birth control whore”, “I told my mom you were on the pill and she said you were nothing but a little tramp” “My mom said some guy she listens to on the radio was just talking about girls like you- he even said you were a slut!” “Yeah, my mom said the same thing, said it’s about time people spoke up and weren’t afraid to tell the truth”! They laughed, they harassed, they said so many things my daughter couldn’t begin to remember it all- she walked back to her table without food and told her friends what was going on. She cried through lunch and through the rest of the day. She said she almost went to the office to call me to come get her but she was trying to be strong and not let them win! The last class of the day, however, was the final straw- it’s her history class and 2 of these little monsters are in the class with her. They start the class off by talking about current events. One of the little witches brought up Rush Limbaugh and the (male) teacher said that he was an American Icon- sometimes he says things that can be construed as insensitive but overall, he was one of the few people left in today’s media who was not afraid to speak the truth!

They are we who we thought they were.

But what about that time the anonymous MoveOn member used “Hitler” and “Bush” in the same sentence? Both sides do it, and you all deserve Moore Award nominations if you suggest otherwise. The true heroes are the Olympia Snowes of the world, who dare not criticize a great American icon like Rush Limbaugh.

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Just another failed ideology

I’m enjoying reading what “reasonable conservatives” say about the latest Rush Limbaugh episode. The always clueless Young Conor:

What confounds me most about it is that Rich Lowry and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon, Glenn Kessler of The Claremont Review of Books, Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute, Edwin J. Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, fellow talk-radio host Bill Bennett — none of these people would ever dream of going before a national audience and calling a female law student half their age a slut and a prostitute. None of them would ever dream of joking that if she wants her health insurance to cover birth control she should put a sex tape on the Internet. If a deranged gunman held a loved one hostage and forced them to make those remarks, as if of their own volition, they’d feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed doing it.

Tebow Fucking Christ, Conor spends half his day reading what these douchebags write and he’s still “confounded”. It’s simple: sociopathic movement hack is sociopathic. Every last one of these fuckers would strangle a baby if they thought it would help the conservative cause. And then the others would defend the baby strangling.

Doug Mataconis is better:

It shouldn’t be hard at all, really, for any decent human being to say that Rush Limbaugh is a low-class jerk for calling a woman a slut because she takes a policy position different from one that he happens to take. It should be easy to say that any 61-year-old man that says that about a young woman doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously on any political matter. It should be simple to demand an apology from the man. How would these people react if Sandra Fluke was their daughter and the same thing was said about her? The fact that so many people are being so silent, and making so many excuses for what is perhaps one of the more disgusting things I’ve heard come out of the mouth of a public figure in a quite some time is a pretty sad indictment of what American conservatism has turned into thanks to the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Read between the lines and he’s saying that “Rich Lowry and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon, Glenn Kessler of The Claremont Review of Books, Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute, Edwin J. Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, fellow talk-radio host Bill Bennett” aren’t decent people.

And he’s right.

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Open Thread: BoBo {Hearts} Lugar, But…

According to the Media Village, it is supposed to be very poignant about Dick Lugar, the “Longest-serving Senate Republican in fight of his life“. In a report from home ground, Doghouse Riley explains for David “Possum” Brooks, why the withers of at least one of Lugar’s constituents remain unwrung:

... Fifty-some years in politics and Lugar absolutely freaked to be opposed by some nobody Teabagger. This tells you all you need to know. It certainly tells you more than Brooks’ column, excepting the unintentional revelations.

So that we in Indiana are now entering our third? seventeenth? month of Dick Lugar campaign ads which run something like this: I’m Dick Lugar, and I hate that black guy in the White House as much as you do! And I’ve been as dilatory and obstructionist about it as anyone! Pipeline!

This is Dick Lugar, The Oldest Surviving Scam in the US Senate. And what’s more, it’s the real Dick Lugar, Dave. The “respected and thoughtful” Lugar is a canard, and the “independent” Lugar is a Fucking Lie. He moved to the Senate from being Nixon’s Favorite Mayor. That only qualifies one as a “moderate” by today’s whacked-out standards. He’s voted the party line for forty years. Absolutely reliably. One of his Obama-bashing ads—which is, come to think of it, the only kind he has, other than the one that bashes his Teabagger opponent for daring to question him—says he “Sponsored a Balanced Budget Amendment Seventeen Times.” Yeah, and voted for deficit spending thirty-five times.

Dave, if it gives you a sad to see Dick Lugar, Octogenarian Wingnut Fellator, you either haven’t been paying attention, or you’ve lost whatever ability to tell reality from fantasy you began with…

Really, all this time as a “principled” “conservative” who winked at the rabid racists of the base at election time, secure in the knowledge that you weren’t actually one of them, all those Burke weekends dreaming up snappier slogans to get the rabble to Vote Aristo, and now you’re beginning to realize that actions have consequences? And now you wanna know why your brand of well-born party official didn’t take on Rush Limbaugh earlier? The way you did: the measured snark that none of his listeners would ever hear, or get if they did? They at least have jobs to lose; you’ve got a sinecure. When did you speak honestly and openly about the culture wars (oh, you’re sort of for gay marriage and reproductive rights, provided the wind blows your cloudy pronouncements just right), let alone speak sense about global climate change, energy policy, banking reform, campaign reform, or any of the other crackpot schemes you “reasonable Republicans” need to keep the spigot turned on? Fer chrissakes, you don’t like the Rabid Right, now that it may cost you an election? You gotta set the Wayback Machine for a lot earlier than five years ago to kill it in its cradle.

Speaking of unintentional self-disclosure, I’m thinking about using “David ‘Possum’ Brooks” on a regular basis, because if there’s anyone who fits the description “tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right”, it would be DougJ’s least-favorite NYTimes columnist.

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Pulling One Snowe-ver On Us

Jon Chait argues this morning that Sen. Olympia Snowe’s surprise announcement that she’s quitting the 2012 race is really nothing the Dems should be cheering, because all indications are that the real reason behind her bowing out is that Americans Elect and their Sensible Centrist shenanigans are afoot, judging from her outro statement.

This sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric emanating from Americans Elect, the third-party group that believes that both parties should put aside partisanship and come together to enact an ever-so-slightly more conservative version of Barack Obama’s agenda. Moderate retiring senators often deliver lofty, vacuous paeans to bipartisanship on their way to a lucrative lobbying career. But Snowe’s statement seems unusually specific (“unique opportunities to build support for that change from outside the United States Senate”) about her intent to do something.

I suspect it may not be coincidental that David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and oil industry lickspittle, came out for Americans Elect today. The group is set up so that its presidential and vice-presidential candidates need to come from opposing parties. The process is set up to, at least putatively, allow the voters to choose the ticket. But Americans Elect and its well-heeled funders have maintained tight control over the proceedings to ensure their envisioned ticket pairing establishmentarian insiders can prevail over candidates like , say, Ron Paul who might be able to actually win an open vote.

Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for. Is that the plan?

Americans Elect is definitely designed to take votes away from one candidate and give a “less than 50% popular vote but 270+ electoral vote” situation, which will faithfully be interpreted by the Village as a “you don’t have a mandate so you’d better listen to us” win.  That would be more effective if used against Barack Obama, but I’m not entirely convinced that the Americans Elect ticket would hurt only the President, especially given Romney as the GOP nominee.

On the other hand if you believe that there’s going to be a brokered convention leading to a crackpot wingnut non-Romney nominee however, Americans Elect is exactly the vehicle that could give that nominee the win in November.

On the gripping hand, Romney keeps winning the GOP primary voters whose motivation is solely defeating Barack Obama.  It’s also very possible that the anti-Obama vote will line up behind Romney, and with Americans Elect in the mix, it could be enough to put Mitt in the White House even with an otherwise depressed GOP base.

And yes, Snowe would have won re-election easily, unlike Arlen Specter or Evan F’ckin Bayh or Joe Lieberman.  She bailed for a reason, and Cohn’s argument as to why makes sense.

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How long ’til the point of no return?

I like this John Heilemann piece a lot, but something goes wrong at the end:

“If Romney is the nominee and he loses in November, I think we’ll see a resurgence of the charismatic populist right,” says Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and author of a biography of Barry Goldwater. “Not only will [the grassroots wing] say that Romney led Republicans down the road to defeat, but that the whole type of conservatism he represents is doomed.”

Goldberg points out that this is what happened in 1976, when the party stuck with Ford over Reagan, was beaten by Carter, and went on to embrace the Gipper’s brand of movement conservatism four years later. So who does Goldberg think might be ascendant in the aftermath of a Romney licking? “Sarah Palin,” he replies. “She’s an outsider, she has no Washington or Wall Street baggage, she’s electric—and she’s waiting, because if Romney doesn’t win, she will be welcomed in.”

But if it’s Santorum who is the standard-bearer and then he suffers an epic loss, a different analogy will be apt: Goldwater in 1964. (And, given the degree of the challenges Santorum would face in attracting female voters, epic it might well be.) As Kearns Goodwin points out, the rejection of the Arizona senator’s ideology and policies led the GOP to turn back in 1968 to Nixon, “a much more moderate figure, despite the incredible corruption of his time in office.” For Republicans after 2012, a similar repudiation of the populist, culture-warrior coalition that is fueling Santorum’s surge would open the door to the many talented party leaders—Daniels, Christie, Bush, Ryan, Bobby Jindal—waiting in the wings for 2016, each offering the possibility of refashioning the GOP into a serious and forward-thinking enterprise.

[...]

[I]n the long run, it might do a world of good, compelling Republicans to return to their senses—and forge ahead into the 21st century. Which is why all people of common sense and goodwill might consider, in the days ahead, adopting a slogan that may strike them as odd, perverse, or even demented: Go, Rick, go.

I don’t think this is totally wrong, I do think that if Romney loses badly in the general, that’s the end of the Scarborough-Huntsman wing of the Republican party. But is the light we see on our teevee screens during Morning Joe already just the light from a galaxy that died years ago?

Some Very Serious Conservatives dream of telling the Palinese Liberation Army to suck on this. But once the PLA become the majority of the Republican party—and they’re close to that already—how do the VSCs plan to accomplish this?

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Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not

Steve M. on what conservatives really want:

First of all, ask yourself why fifteen-year-olds say “Fuck you” at the dinner table to their parents. That’s easy: they do it because they know they’re stuck living with these people; the only way to make that bearable is to needle their parents by saying whatever pisses them off the most. Well, that’s how right-wing pseudo-intellectuals feel about us liberals and moderates—they have to live in the same country with us, and they hate it, so they become God-botherers and moralists because they think nothing could possibly annoy us more. I really believe that’s one of the primary reasons they do this—do you believe Brooks and Murray and Ross Douthat and William Bennett really have a deep, abiding love for God and a profound level of spirituality? I certainly don’t. Jimmy Carter really loves God—not these self-satisfied clowns. It’s all just a bird-flip disguised as a moral philosophy.

I think that’s some of it but some of it is I’m-a-special-snowflake. You’ll notice that a lot of media-world right-wingers like to call themselves “libertarians” (Murray, for example), as in you can’t call me a conservative because I support gay marriage/smoke dope/believe in legalized contraception. Megan McArdle takes it to an extreme, vegetarian who hates vegetarians, “libertarian” who’s uncomfortable with reproductive rights, economics blogger who can’t add numbers. You can’t pigeonhole her! That’s exciting. Today’s Kaplan has a classic example—an arty critic/poet/artist who’s really a tough factory worker and hates imaginary worker-hating liberals. Modulo his desire to be ruled by a strong Chinese leader, Tom Friedman’s positions are almost entirely standard Obot-fare, but he’s also a pimp for third parties.

It goes on and on. No one (excluding many of us here of course) wants to be a standard liberal, even if they support Democratic policies on every issue. You are all different. Yes, we are all different.

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Rick might want to check into customer feedback

Rick Santorum is apparently going to run on promoting for-profit colleges.

“This comes as a shock to some people, that the president would have a war on something. But this is consistent. He believes that private sector schools are somehow evil and they’re abusive, and his Education Department has done everything they could to make it harder for them to compete for loans and other things and to stay in business.”

Under the Department of Education’s “ Gainful Employment” provisions of 2011 for-profit colleges are cut off from federal student aid funding if more than 35 percent of former students aren’t paying off their loans and/or if the average former student spends more than 12 percent of his total earnings servicing student loans.

A study published earlier this month in the Journal of Economic Perspectives indicated that the average former for-profit student earned $19,950 a year in 2009. The average former community college student, in contrast, earned $24,795. Some 40 percent of former for-profit students were unemployed more than 3 months after leaving their programs.

The claim that President Obama is hostile to for-profit education is nonsense. As I’ve written here before my main problem with President Obama’s education approach is he is not hostile enough towards for-profit education in general, whether it’s colleges or K-12. It’s a big problem for me. I wish he’d occasionally defend or promote public education. For-profit education has more than enough lobbyists and sales people. We don’t need Obama’s Secretary of Education volunteering for those positions.

Rick Santorum is (allegedly) the rural, populist candidate on the Right, so I’m thrilled he’s going to be out there promoting for-profit colleges, because in my opinion, based on unscientific and unreliable metrics (the marked change in attitudes of the people who wander into this law office) for-profit colleges have created a vast pool of angry customers. I went to two public community colleges in this area, so when people come in and complain, we compare and contrast, thus allowing them to fully flesh out their rant. I’m more than happy to help gin up a little anger on this issue.

Further, there’s some indications that my anecdotal experience ove the last year or so may be more than anecdotal:

Enrollment at for-profit colleges has “plunged” in recent months, by more than 45 percent in some cases, the Wall Street Journal reports, as the empty promise of these “subprime schools” comes to light to potential students. The colleges “have pulled back on aggressive recruiting practices amid criticism over their high student-loan default rates,” and “many would-be students are questioning the potential pay-off for degrees that can cost considerably more than what’s available at local community colleges.” The Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan reports enrollment down 47 percent while large for-profit operator Corinthian Colleges Inc.’s stocks sank to an 11-year low. The schools receive millions in taxpayer subsidies via student loans, but often deliver a sub-standard education. For these reasons, the Justice Department has joined a lawsuit against the industry.

I think we could assemble 300 enraged former students of for-profit on-line colleges in this county alone, and there are about 30,000 people in this county. They are deeply in debt, they can’t discharge the debt in bankruptcy, they are making 9 dollars an hour after investing years and borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, and they are angry. Then there’s the whole ripping off veterans angle. Rick Santorum may not be aware that veterans were and are targeted by these places, but there are plenty of real live veterans who can tell him all about it. Rural areas were a more fertile field for marketing on-line for-profits, because they have fewer education choices and longer travel times.

Republicans need to run up huge margins in rural counties like mine in states like Ohio, to offset the numbers in the populous counties, where Democrats run up huge margins. I don’t think shilling for these places is a winning message.

My hope is public opinion has turned on for-profit colleges in a meaningful, ground level, word of mouth way, among the people who actually used them and pundits and conservative politicians just don’t know it yet.

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