JustOneMinute

Yet Another Judge Thumps ObamaCare

A Florida judge joined the Virginia judge in voiding the individual mandate.  However, citing the lack of severability language, the judge then pitched the whole act.  I assume this will be stayed pending appeal.

On to the Supremes!

The New USDA Guidelines Are Out

The USDA has released their 2010 dietary guidelines.  Naturally we are fascinated because we have been obsessing about Gary Taubes new book, "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It".

Here is coverage at the USDA website, WebMD and the NY Times.  From the Times:

The latest nutrition guidelines released Monday by the federal government reiterate much of the advice from previous years: eat less salt and saturated fats, eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains.

Yeah, yeah.

But there is a startling difference. This time, the government suggests that Americans also just eat less.

More specifically, the guidelines urge Americans to drink water instead of sugary drinks like soda, and it suggests that they avoid fatty foods like pizza, desserts and cheese (albeit deep in the report).

WebMD includes a pictorial of the new Nos, which include salt, saturated fat, solid and trans fat, added sugars, fast food, and refined grains.

What is this, the Dietary Legion of Doom?  Instead of a clear message identifying a villain we have this muddled soultion cobbled together by a committee, with so many bad guys that the public won't have any idea who the real dietary villains are.

And to compound the puzzlement, check out this ignorance from the Times reporter:

And given the level of obesity in America, some question if anyone is paying attention.

Yike!  The whole point of the Gary Taubes book is that back in the 70's and 80's the medical establishment coalesced behind the idea that dietary fat led to fat in the bloodstream, and from there to heart disease.  Here is TIME magazine in 1984 and the NY Times very own Jane Brody in 1987 ranting against cholesterol.  (And FatHead has a great riff on Ms. Brody's own struggle with cholesterol.)

And, per Taubes, people did listen, at least enough to embrace the message that carohydrates are heart-healthy.  Let's hear from Ms. Brody (my emphasis):

To bring cholesterol levels to within desirable limits, most people do not have to give up such favored foods as red meat and cheese. Moderation, not exclusion, should be the guiding principle, with a focus on leaner versions and smaller and less frequent servings of cholesterol-raising foods. At the same time, much more of the ''harmless'' foods can be consumed -fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other starches, as well as fish of all kinds.

Ooops!  The case (based both on biology and anthropological history) is strong that excessive consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates overloads the body's insulin system.  Since insulin regulates both the intake of blood sugar by muscles, organs and fat cells and the release of stored fat energy reserves by fat cells, having a dysfunctional insulin system can lead to grim results. 

For example, muscle cells can become resistant to insulin, and take up blood sugar only reluctantly, prompting the release of more insulin; fat cells, seeing all that insulin, respond to the signal by grabbing all the blood sugar they can and refusing to release any fatty acids back into the bloodstream as an alternative energy source.  The result - a person on a carb-overloaded diet has constantly starving muscles sending out hormonal signals of hunger while the fat cells grow and hoard their energy reserves.  The nearly-inevitable result is both lethargy and excess weight, with obesity as the end-point. [Here is a 2007 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article with a real explanation.  The gist - if you want your body to burn fat, eat fat.  Yikes!  The medical establishment is having coronaries!]

But all of that has escaped the Times, so we get their uncritical embrace of the new government advice to eat less and exercise more.  That is defensible advice for the one-third of US adults who are neither overweight nor obese. 

However, two-thirds of adults have been consuming a diet that has probably (based on the mere fact of their excess weight) degraded the ability of their body to manage fats and carbohydrates.  Telling a person whose body no longer releases appropriate amounts of energy from stored fat to "Eat Less!" won't prompt the body's hormones to come back into balance and send the signals that prompt the release of stored fat reserves. Much more likely is that the exhortation will result in a hungry, tired (and still fat) person.

What is needed for overweight people is dietary advice that restores their bodies to their natural, proper functioning; telling them to suck it up and show some character by walking around hungry has a long, well-documented record of failure as a method of producing weight loss.  Hmm - I wonder how effective a cancer treatment it would be to tell cigarette smokers to moderate their smoking a bit and try to get a bit more exercise?  Cancer is treated as a breakdown in the body's ability to regulate cell growth; why is obesity treated as a failure of character rather than a failure of the body to manage fat and carbohydrates?

Well.  The USDA punted (as expected) and the Times neither knows nor cares.  This is an astonishing story of a Big Government Fail, so the Times won't touch it.

Let me close by recyling the comment on the proposed USDA guidelines made last July by Dr. Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health; I have added emphasis to point 6, which denounces refined grains.

The report has made positive changes but has some shortcomings (see attachment). Positive changes: stronger recommendation to reduce sugary beverages; greater emphasis on sodium reduction; and much less emphasis on the percentage of energy from total fat, which is correctly described as not related to weight gain, obesity, or any other major health outcome.

Shortcomings:

(1) Total fat is still recommended to be less than 35% of calories, and there is no basis for setting an upper limit on total fat.

(2) The recommendation for three servings of milk per day is not justified and is likely to cause harm to some people. Prospective studies and randomized trials have consistently shown no relation between milk intake and fracture risk, yet many studies have shown a relation between high milk intake and risk of fatal or metastatic prostate cancer.

(3) The recommendation for high intake of lean meat is worrisome: There is substantial evidence that high heme iron intake may increase diabetes risk; red meat consumption has been associated with incidence of colorectal cancer; and there is some data that red meat consumption during adolescence and early adult life is associated with higher risks of premenopausal breast cancer in women.

(4) The report seems relatively silent on vitamin D, even though there is strong evidence that blood levels are not optimal for 2/3 of Americans. Vitamin D supplementation is probably the safest way to increase levels, and it has been shown to reduce risk of fractures in randomized trials if the dose is 700 IU per day or more.

(5) The report does not reinforce adequately the CDC recommendation that women of reproductive age who might possibly become pregnant should take a supplement of folic acid, which is most conveniently done as part a multiple vitamin.

(6) The report still suggests that having half of grains as refined grains is healthy. Refined grains have adverse metabolic effects and provide many empty calories and minimal benefits.

The obesity epidemic in this country is primarily due to excessive consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates. The rest is waltz music played by the USDA to avoid admitting their past sins.

A Man, A Plan, A Canal

Chris Matthews scours the globe to find comedy gold.

To quote a friend of mine - "A man, a plan, a canal - eerie."

Back In Egypt

It may be water over the dam, but - back in October 2004, as John Kerry battled George Bush down to the wire, Mohammed El Baradei, then head of the IAEA and now the Nobel laureate trying to lead Egypt, tried to meddle in the US election with hyped-up charges about missing explosives at Al QaQaa.

Obviously time has passed, Bush is long gone (although his policies live!) and a worldly Dem has replaced him.  Still, it might be nice to know whether El Baradei was just anti-Bush or anti-America.

Reversing Cause And Effect, Or, Imagine Thinking Of Obesity As A Disease

A new report is catching some attention.  The investigators identified a statistical association between rising obesity and rising thermostat settings, and I am intrigued by their sense of cause and effect.  Here is MSNBC:

Lowering your thermostat may reduce not only your spending, but also your weight, a new study suggests.

Researchers suspect that rising indoor temperatures in British and American homes may have contributed to the obesity epidemic. The theory is that we burn fewer calories when our bodies don’t have to work as hard to stay warm, according to a report published in Obesity Reviews.

“Research into the environmental drivers behind obesity, rather than the genetic ones, has tended to focus on diet and exercise – which are undoubtedly the major contributors,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Fiona Johnson, of the UK Health Behavior Research Centre at University College, London. “However, it is possible that other environmental factors, such as winter indoor temperatures, may also have a contributing role.”

Obviously, correlation is not causation and both obesity and may be attributable to some third factor (e.g., rising wealth makes both food and warm homes relatively cheaper.)

However, I am struck by the seeming inability to consider obesity as a disease.  Alcoholism and drug addiction are considered by many to be a disease, although one might consider them to be simply a reflection of weak character.  Similarly, diet researchers are focused on a simple energy-balance model - the energy in the food we eat is either used or stored as fat, so all an overweight person needs to do is eat less or burn more and the pounds will melt away.  As if! 

But imagine for a moment that obesity is simply a symptom of a breakdown in the body's internal energy management.  Food we eat is meant to fuel our muscles, power our organs (that big old brain of yours is an energy hog!), and maintain our body temperature.  The adipose fat cells (around the abdomen, for men) are meant to serve as a short-term energy bank to store energy between meals (and they routinely carry people on the long march from dinner to breakfast.)  Various hormonal signals are sent amongst the muscles, the heat-generating organs, the fat cells and the brain in order to coordinate the intake, storage and use of food energy.

In a healthy person, food is eaten and the muscles organs and fat cells replenish themselves.  As muscles and organs need more energy they send signals urging the fat cells to release some stored fatty acids, which circulate through the bloodstream and are burned as fuel.  Over the course of the day energy consumed equals energy burned and the person neither gains nor loses weight.

But suppose the signaling mechanisms breaks down.  Insulin is the key hormone regulating the fat cells; insulin also is the dinner bell that tells muscles cells and organs that energy is available, and enables them to refuel on circulating blood sugar.  Many people have developed insulin resistance, so the muscle cells do not respond appropriately; after a meal the fat cells respond to the dinner bell by scooping up the passing calories but the muscles do not.  A short time later, the muscles are sending signals wondering where dinner is and asking for more energy but the fat cells are now running a very greedy energy bank - the signaling that the muscles ignored is telling the fat cells not to release any fatty acids to the other organs and muscles.

The net result for a person whose internal energy regulation has gone awry is that after a meal, the fat cells gather more than their share of the calories, store them, and don't receive (or respond to) signals to release them.  Consequently, despite a hearty meal the person will feel hungry, his muscles will be weak and, since it takes energy to heat the body, he will feel cold.

And my hypothesis is that people who feel cold turn up the thermostat.

So in the "obesity as disease" model, turning up the thermostat is not a cause of obesity (contra the researchers cited above); both obesity and an increased thermostat are symptoms of a failed internal energy management system.

But don't take it from me - let's hear from Dr. Lee Kaplan of Harvard:

While a simple energy balance equation (‘energy in’ in the form of calories vs ‘energy out’ in the form of physical activity) is commonly used to explain weight changes, current scientific evidence indicates weight and satiety regulation involve far more complex systems. Communication pathways allow the central nervous system to respond to feedback from the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, liver, muscle, and adipose tissue and stimulate food intake, energy expenditure, and nutrient handling. Adipose tissue, once thought of as merely a storage depot, regulates appetite through a number of secreted proteins, such as leptin, a peptide hormone neurotransmitter. In addition, genetics as well as developmental and environmental factors can impact each step in weight regulation. Also, the brain contains numerous regulatory centers, such as the circadian rhythm generator, emotional reward center, stress response center, and sleep center.

...A powerful set point defends against starvation and is inappropriately overactive in obesity.

Well.  The simple "calories in - calories out" model is on display in the WebMD coverage of this story:

Our bodies must work to stay warm when it’s cold, which means we expend more energy or calories. "Our love of warmth may be reducing our expenditure and contributing to the obesity 'epidemic,'" she tells WebMD in an email. "The less time spent in the cold means less time when the body is burning energy to stay warm."

Accepting for a moment that this statistical association is real, I wonder which way the cause and effect really flows.  Oh, well - maybe another study will show a positive association between binge drinking and aspirin sales, and these doctors can fret about whether we need to regulate aspirin more carefully.

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING:  Regular readers know I am channeling my inner Gary Taubes; more on insulin and obesity in the LA Times.

BRAIN LOCK AT THE TIMES: Put Roni Caryn Rabin of the NY Times among the science writers who would rather parrot than reflect and report.

Winning The Future In Egypt

Let's have an "Egypt - WTF" thread.

The NY Times Lede blog is updating frequently.

I do like this, from a story on their internet shutdown - by one theory, people got out of their pajamas and took it to the streets:

The shutdown may actually be creating more unrest, said Prof. Mohammed el-Nawawy of the communications department at Queens University of Charlotte. Professor el-Nawawy, a native of Egypt who has been studying its blogging culture, said he had been talking by land line to activists in the country who told him that people who might have otherwise expressed their frustration on blogs or Facebook were heading outside instead.

“The government has made a big mistake taking away the option at people’s fingertips,” he said. “They’re taking their frustration to the streets.”

He added: “Blogs are not important right now. Things have moved beyond that point.”

WELCOME BACK CARTER:  Obama needs to be sure that he is not tied to Mubarak the way the US was tied to the Shah in Iran.  I would guess that his speech yesterday was appropriate, but what do I know?

 

Ropes Don't Hang People, People Hang People

Here in the new Age of Civility I deplore this use of a banality:

Amidst a national dialogue about softening political rhetoric, members of an Obama-affiliated organization are threatening to hang Granite State Republicans in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, according to a news story in the Citizen of Laconia.

“They’re going to hang themselves,” said Belknap Democratic Chair Ed Allard of Republicans. “And we’re going to help them.”

Allard’s threat came during a meeting of despondent Democrats in Belknap County on Thursday evening. The meeting was hosted by President Obama’s Organizing for America.

"Allard's threat"?  Geez, call the coppers, or DHS!

Let's have a bit more context:

Allard [the chairman of the Belknap County Democratic Committee] said he was unimpressed by the so-called Republican wave, many of whose members ran on a platform of creating jobs and stimulating the economy but who since taking power on Jan. 1, have seemingly, at least in the House, repeatedly been prone to embarrassing missteps that have alienated them from many citizens and future 2012 voters.

"It's almost like watching clowns spill out of a Volkswagen," Allard said, of the GOP guffaws. "They're going to hang themselves and we're going to help them."

"Guffaws"?  What I am doing right now is a guffaw (and feel free to attempt it at home.)  I presume the reporter's SpelChec was looking for "gaffe".

If I Could Bring Two People Together...

Michelle Obama needs to meet Gary Taubes.  Here we go:

FORT JACKSON, S.C. – First Lady Michelle Obama said Thursday that the military's push to turn recruits into health-conscious warriors could be a model for making people across the U.S. more focused on fitness and nutrition.

Obama, who has made battling childhood obesity one of her signature causes as first lady, visited the Army's largest training post at Fort Jackson outside Columbia to see what the Army has done, from more rigorous training drills to fat-free milk in its mess halls.

Fat-free milk?  Ahhh!

Gary Taubes, author of "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It", would love to chat with Ms. Obama about how the medical community backed the wrong pony forty years ago when they decided dietary fat was the health problem vexing America.  The message the public took away was 'You won't get fat if you don't eat fat', and we can look around and see how well that worked out. 

And lo these many years later, the medical establishment finds itself up a tree from which they can't gracefully climb down - rather than risk their credibility, they continue to promote dietary fat as a problem, as illustrated by the skim milk at the Army base.

But Ms. Obama needn't listen to Gary Taubes, a vastly talented science writer who has been obsessing about this topic for more than a decade.  For someone with impressive establishment credentials she could turn to Dr. Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health.  Here is his comment from last summer on the revised 2010 USDA dietary guidelines, due out on Jan 31:

The report has made positive changes but has some shortcomings (see attachment). Positive changes: stronger recommendation to reduce sugary beverages; greater emphasis on sodium reduction; and much less emphasis on the percentage of energy from total fat, which is correctly described as not related to weight gain, obesity, or any other major health outcome.

Shortcomings: (1) Total fat is still recommended to be less than 35% of calories, and there is no basis for setting an upper limit on total fat.

If dietary fat is not the problem, fat-free milk is not the answer.

As to what the problem is, let's turn to Dr. Willett again - this is from the LA Times last December:

But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

If a mere science writer isn't convincing (and that may be the case for people who focus on credentials rather than evidence), take it from the Harvard guy.

And let me add this - Michelle Obama is not part of the medical establishment.  She ought to be much more invested in popularizing the correct message than in covering the (ever-widening) rear areas of the doctors who have been backpedaling from their own bad advice for forty years.

So where will she go from here with her "Let's Move" program?  She can deliver the same old blah blah that has gotten us to our current grim predicament, or she could listen to some of the well-credentialed skeptics, host some informal hearings, commence beating the drums against carbs, let the insurgents in the medical community push their research under her aegis, and be the woman who saved America and her husband's health care plan (the estimated cost of the obesity epidemic exceeds $100 billion per year).

I am resigned to more blah blah, but here's hoping! 

TO RAISE THE STAKES:  I kid you not, if she actually starts seriously trumpeting a "No sugar or refined carbs" message I will vote for her husband in 2012.  Unless he steps aside and asks the party to nominate her, and then she gets my vote directly.  Currently she is exhorting us to make better choices (swap fruits and veggies for candy - no kidding!) and follow the USDA food pyramid.  That pyramid is opaque, but it does recommend grains, half of which should be whole grains.  As if - that is a mixed message that won't get through.

By way of contrast, here is the Harvard food pyramid.  It's still a mixed message, but refined grains are clearly set aside at the top in the "Use Sparingly" category; refined grains are down in the foundation.

That is more clear and straddles the same problem faced by the USDA but not individuals - what a doctor might recommend for his patients may be quite different from what the Surgeon General would recommend, because the United States (and certainly the world) need wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes to find enough calories.

Now, a bit of hope for the planet - there is a possibility that fructose (found in table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, as well as sweet fruits) is the trigger for insulin resistance and the descent into obesity and diabetes.  If so (IF!), that could help explain why some Asian countries that have diets high in rice but low in sugar don't have an obesity problem. 

Further implications - the current cohort of overweight (and especially, obese) Americans are past the trigger point and would have to give up the list of carbs noted by Dr. Willett.  However, healthy folks here and in the rest of the world would be free to eat wheat, rice and potatoes to their hearts content as long as they stayed away from sugar.  That is good news for feeding the world, and perhaps for the political palatability of the low-carb solution to the obesity crisis.  (Yes, the gluten protein in wheat is problematic for a lot of people for different reasons, but enough, already.)

Outsourcing Stupid

Fortunately it is not just our own TSA that runs amuck; here is a story from Britain:

Airport bans toy soldier's three-inch rifle from plane... because it's a safety threat

Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun - because it was a safety threat.

Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a 'firearm'.

The Canadian tourist and his wife had bought the toy, which holds a replica SA80 rifle, during a visit to the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp in Dorset.

But when he tried to take the £135 keepsake through Gatwick Airport in his hand luggage it triggered a security alert at the scanners.

Presumably the airport security team had seen "Toy Story" one too many times.

Eventually the couple were able to mail the weapon home, showing bold and creative risk-taking on the part of the Briish mail service.  Neither rain nor snow nor three inch replica guns shall stay them...

The Minuteman Gets Results!

One of the faces in the SOTU crowd that flickered by was Mikayla Nelson, during the Science Fair portion of Obama's speech.  Ms. Nelson was featured last fall at the DoE website and was mentioned at this blog during a vitriolic denunciation of Obama's reflexive racial bean-counting.

SOTU Post Game

That last thread is way long, so let's keep it going here.

SOTU Open Thread

The National Journal broke the embargo; here is the text of the speech.

THAT WAS NICE...

Having seen the speech, I thought Obama did a nice job of praising America and its can-do spirit (Yes, it's sad that we doubt out President's skill and will on the topic of America's greatness, but there it is).  He also did a nice job of pretending to be open to reason and compromise on, for example, some of the finer points of ObamaCare, or on medical malpractice reform.

However - did I really hear him suggest that Congress ought to tackle immigration reform, Social Security reform, and tax simplification?  Any one of those agenda items looks like too much for Washington to process just now.

Maybe the strategy is to throw out an impressively ambitious agenda, hide behind Harry and the Senate if the House Republicans actually take him up on any of this, blame a dysfunctional system when nothing get done, and ask voters to send him some Democrats to help him in Congress in the 2012 election.

I Feel A Song Coming On

Jake Tapper and AllahP tackle the emerging Chinese patriotic song controversy.  From ABC News:

White House Says Chinese Folk Song Played During State Dinner Was Not An Insult; Experts Divided

Ivories that were tickled last Wednesday night at the White House are, to some conservative media, no laughing matter.

At the White House State Dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao, pianist Lang Lang played, among other ditties, the song “My Motherland.”

That song was written for a 1956 propaganda flick boosting China and its glorious victory (alongside its heroic North Korean partners) against the imperialist running dog Americans at a battle during the Korean War.

And what does it mean today?  Well, the lyrics are mostly quite peaceful and do not specifically mention the US, so it might be taken by the Chinese as much more of a China-booster than a US basher (Does anyone in this country consider "The Star-Spangled Banner" to be bashing Britain?  I have no idea whether we play that in the presence of the Queen or visiting Brits, but maybe!)

However, if the pianist had really wanted to find common ground with his hosts he might have tried this perennial favorite from the Chinese Patriotic Songs playlist:

Socialism Is Good

Socialism is good, socialism is good!

In socialist nations, the people have high status.

Overthrow the reactionaries. Imperialism flees with its tail between its legs.

The entire nation is in great unity and has raised the socialist construction to a new height, to a new height.

The Communist Party is good! The Communist Party is good!

The Communist Party is a good leader for the people.

It holds its promises and works of any heart for the people.

Firmly anchored to the Communist Party, it is necessary to complete, complete the construction of our great fatherland!

I assume that is even more danceable in the original.

BREAKING NEWS:

My inside sources tell me they were going to play "Socialism is Good", but they scrapped it when they found it impossible to keep Barry in his seat during rehearsals.

Ouch.  Well, he was only standing up so he could slide towards the center.

 

His Image Is Safe

Jack LaLanne has passed away.

I remember seeing his show as a mere child back in the 60's; I had no idea his television show ran into the 80's.

And he went out strong:

Mr. LaLanne promoted himself and his calling into his final years, often accompanied at events by his wife, a physical fitness convert but hardly a fanatic. He brimmed with optimism and restated a host of aphorisms for an active and fit life.

“I can’t die,” he most famously liked to say. “It would ruin my image.”

MORE:  Glenn provides a link to a YouTube clip of Jack LaLanne giving nutrition advice.  The gist:

Breakfast:  Fresh fruit, eggs or a meat patty, whole wheat toast and honey, skim milk or coffee.

Lunch:  Big raw vegetable salad and meat, fish, or low-cal cottage cheese

Dinner: Big vegetable salad, two undercooked vegetables (steamed), and meat or fowl, and fresh fruit with yougurt for dessert.

That advice holds up well and I guess America wasn't listening.  For comparison, here is the Harvard Food Pyramid.  Walter Willett, the chair of the Harvard Nutrition Department, is on the anti-refined carbs program but is OK with whole grains.  As a practical matter, any plan to feed the planet will have to include wheat, corn and rice, so focusing on refined products may be shrewd for countries, if not individuals. 

Another guy who would like the Jack LaLanne diet is Gary Taubes, a science writer playing Galileo to the Ptolemaic view of the nutrition establishment that dietary fat is a health problem.  Taubes would argue that refined grains and sugar are the bane of the Western diet, and have been the bane of native populations wherever they are introduced.

OK, back to Jack - the Times includes this:

“He was perfect for the intimacy of television,” Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, told The San Jose Mercury News in 2004. “This guy had some of the same stuff that Oprah has and Johnny Carson had — the ability to insinuate themselves in the domestic space of people’s lives.”

It is possible I am having a 60's flashback, but watch this clip and see for yourself whether Jack LaLanne drips charisma.

And let's get some fire and brimstone from Jack on the subject of sugar.  Now you're fired up!

Sunday Morning Open Thread

Away we go.

Saturday Morning Kick Off

Have at it.

The New Civility Claims Its First Victim

Keith Olbermann announces he has done his last broadcast for MSNBC.  I infer that the backstory is murky.

Unconvincing

Timothy Egan of the Times Opinionator makes a point I agree with and then goes astray.

His topic is the Tucson shooting.  I accept his point that this specific incident does not support the case that an armed citizenry and permissive concealed carry laws will reduce gunplay:

“When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim,” said Arizona state representative Jack Harper, after a gunman had claimed 19 victims.

“I wish there had been one more gun in Tucson,” said an Arizona Congressman, Rep. Trent Franks, implying like Harper that if only someone had been armed at the scene, Jared Lee Loughner would not have been able to unload his rapid-fire Glock on innocent people.

In fact, several people were armed. So, what actually happened? As Zamudio [an armed passerby who was leaving a drugstore] said in numerous interviews, he never got a shot off at the gunman, but he nearly harmed the wrong person — one of those trying to control Loughner.

However, in the specific case of Jared Laughner, he got his shots off quickly. And no state is likely to have concealed carry laws even more permissive than Arizona.  However, I dispute this:

It defies logic, as this case shows once again, that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer. For one thing, these kinds of shootings happen far too suddenly for even the quickest marksman to get a draw. For another, your typical gun hobbyist lacks training in how to react in a violent scrum.

To which I say, Va Tech:

BLACKSBURG, Va.  — Local, state and federal investigators scoured a university campus in Virginia for clues to what set off the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history after a gunman shot two people to death in a dormitory Monday morning before making his way to a classroom building where, silently and coolly, he killed 30 more people before turning his weapon on himself, authorities said.

At least 15 other people were wounded in the shootings, which took place over 2½ hours at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Some of them were injured as they leapt to safety from the windows of their classrooms.

Now, I will admit that if several students had drawn guns and tried to be the good guy while the killer stalked the halls being the bad guy we might have had a different body count as the good guys shot each other.  Or not.

Or go back to 1993.  Colin Ferguson spent three minutes shooting in a LIRR passenger car.  Plenty of time for an armed New Yorker to shoot back, had there been any.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that the Tucson incident is just one example.

Resistible Force Dines With Movable Object

Obama and Hu - neither exactly commanding the stage in their home countries.  Maybe their meeting will give each new luster.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Bleeding Heart Wonks?

In the course of blasting Greg Mankiw, Ezra Klein explains why Harvard (and other employers) offer health insurance:

That's easy for him to say, I think, given that Harvard University offers insurance to its employees. They do that because their employees, like Professor Mankiw, would be quite angry if they didn't. They don't think of insurance as an absurd extravagance or a billion-dollar check from the sky. They think of it as something much more like a necessity, something that their workers wouldn't be willing to go without.

Uh huh.  And that also explains the Harvard Food Bank, the Harvard Car Service, and the many Harvard gas stations dotting the Cambridge area - after all, food and transportation are also necessities without which the Harvard faculty would get "angry", yes?

Or no.  Health insurance enjoys a special status under the tax code - employers can deduct the insurance expense without creating any taxable income for the employee.  Offering health insurance allows both the company and the employee to benefit from a government tax break.  Food and fuel do not receive so generous a treatment, or we probably would see Harvard gas stations and food banks as another way to boost employee's net after-tax lifestyle.  This tax treatment simply cannot be news to the WaPo's health reform sage, so why the dumbed-down explanation?

And FWIW, on the question of "angry" employees - many economists claim that their employer does not determine how much they get paid; they determine where they choose to work.  Maybe that is not so true for bleeding heart wonks.

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year

Glenn has a copy of Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" in the mail.

Let me say this - my understanding is that this is a restated and simplified version of his 2007 tome, "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health" (Chapter by chapter summary here).  Read as a book on nutrition it is interesting.  However, it is fascinating as a story of how science can run off the rails.  Mr. Taubes does not attempt to politicize his views, but our national obesity epidemic can certainly be told as a story of an Epic Big Government Fail.  Back in the 70's the political and medical establishments more or less united around the view that dietary fat was the cause of a national uptick in heart disease and obesity.  Taubes makes a compelling case that the real culprit was (and is) refined carbohydrates and sugar.

For right-wingers who want more red meat, one can cast a bit of blame on hair-shirt environmentalists who noted (probably correctly) that an American diet high in beef and meat is not sustainable and achievable for the whole world.  From the other side, lefties can cite Big Sugar, Big Corn (and its high fructose corn syrup) and Big Wheat as the enemy; why Big Meat and Big Dairy were outmuscled puzzles me.

The grim story is summarized very nicely in this LA Times article from last December.  Some highlights:

Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.

But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

Think about that - the obesity epidemic is estimated to cost America upwards of $100 billion per year, it may have been caused by a misguided government program in the 70's  and we have an answer in sight!  However...

It's a confusing message. For years we've been fed the line that eating fat would make us fat and lead to chronic illnesses. "Dietary fat used to be public enemy No. 1," says Dr. Edward Saltzman, associate professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University. "Now a growing and convincing body of science is pointing the finger at carbs, especially those containing refined flour and sugar."

Back in the 70's the government experts decided that dietary fat was the problem (eggs were bad, remember?).  Now they need to redirect their message without grinding the gears, or their own credibility.

Let's detour through the science:

All carbohydrates (a category including sugars) convert to sugar in the blood, and the more refined the carbs are, the quicker the conversion goes. When you eat a glazed doughnut or a serving of mashed potatoes, it turns into blood sugar very quickly. To manage the blood sugar, the pancreas produces insulin, which moves sugar into cells, where it's stored as fuel in the form of glycogen.

If you have a perfectly healthy metabolism, the system works beautifully, says Dr. Stephen Phinney, a nutritional biochemist and an emeritus professor of UC Davis who has studied carbohydrates for 30 years. "However, over time, as our bodies get tired of processing high loads of carbs, which evolution didn't prepare us for … how the body responds to insulin can change," he says.

When cells become more resistant to those insulin instructions, the pancreas needs to make more insulin to push the same amount of glucose into cells. As people become insulin resistant, carbs become a bigger challenge for the body. When the pancreas gets exhausted and can't produce enough insulin to keep up with the glucose in the blood, diabetes develops.

Insulin signals the muscles to pick up blood sugar.  However, it also triggers fat cells to do the same, and fat cells do not seem to become nearly as insulin-resistant as muscle cells.  As the insulin system starts to break down the body become very good at storing excess calories as fat but not so good at releasing them.

As to what happens next in the public policy sphere, in the 2007 book Taubes explained that the nutrition establishment has had a hard time pivoting to a new message (I likened it to the battle between Galileo and Ptolemaic astronomy in this recent post.)  However, the notion that sugar and refined carbs are a problem has a wide following.  Harvard Medical School (home of the Dr. Willett quoted by the LA Times) recommends whole grains in preference to refined ones.

And there are many sources on paleolithic diets, where the logic is that we should eat what our forebears got by on for the first 500,000 years of human development and eschew this new-fangled stuff.  I like Mark's Daily Apple, personally.  And I should add that unlike Harvard, Paleos won't endorse grains, which are relatively modern.

What seems to be happening is that people are re-packaging the "refined carbs are bad" message in ways that don't directly flout the established "fat is bad" message.

BONUS BLOOD PRESSURE INCREASE:  If science can go so awry on a topic such as our national diet, how much confidence do they deserve on a topic such as global warming, hmm?  An obvious rejoinder would be "Waddya mean, 'they'?  Surely these are different scientists using different tools and facing different issues".  Well, yes, and stop calling me 'Shirley'. 

I'm just pointing out that not all bubbles have been in finance, where the eventual market correction becomes blindingly obvious after the fact.  As another example, we had a recent Greenpsan bubble - NO, not the hosuing bubble, and not the tech bubble - the bubble in belief that central bankers knew what they were doing.

 

Michelle Obama And Steve Jobs Want You To Die!

WMAL hate talk radio gets all excited about a new safety report:

WASHINGTON -- The Governors Highway Safety Association says pedestrian deaths increased in the first half of 2010 and the First Lady's program to get Americans to be more active could be partly responsible.

Governors Highway Safety Administration spokesman Jonathan Adkins told 630 WMAL that Michelle Obama is "trying to get us to walk to work and exercise a little bit more.  While that's good, it also increases our exposure to risk."

Hmm, they are quoting a spokesman - why do our nation's governors hate Michelle?

James Joyner shifts the focus from Michelle to Steve Jobs:

Via Dr. Google, I see “The Governors Highway Safety Association says in the report that 1,891 pedestrians were killed in the first six months of 2010, up from 1,884 in the same period in 2009 — a 0.4 percent increase. ”  Now, I don’t know the historical variation in these things, but I’d say offhand that this is a statistically insignificant swing.   Regardless, a variety of factors — alcohol, technology, and road design among them  – seem to be considered possible explanations for the slight reversal in trend.

Well - here is the news release and the official report (14 page .pdf).  Let's clip this chart of the "trend" - basically, there was no trend from 1999 to 2005; subsequently, the Safe Route To School program is credited with reducing deaths among kids walking to and from school.

As to why the improvement flattened off from 2009 to 2010, the full report is hazy.  They are not blaming Demon Rum:

The role of alcohol in pedestrian fatalities has not changed over the past ten years. In both 1998 and 2008, 42% of fatally-injured pedestrians had a positive blood alcohol concentration (BAC) (NHTSA, 2009b, Table 4). Sixteen states believe that drunk or impaired pedestrians are not an increasing problem while only three states believe that they are.

Steve Jobs is implicated:

Several current lifestyle trends may affect pedestrian crashes and fatalities. Both drivers and pedestrians are increasingly distracted by cell phones and other portable electronic devices.

Michelle is implicated but not directly named (my emphasis):

A focus on liveable communities, or “get moving” health and fitness programs may increase walking and pedestrian-vehicle conflicts, as noted by Florida, Indiana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Texas. If pedestrians or motorists are distracted, the potential for crashes increases.

Society is indicted - we may all be more homicidal, or experiencing a reduced will to live:

Similar broad social and economic factors also affect total traffic fatalities. It’s possible that the turnaround in pedestrian fatalities – the end of four years of decreases – suggests that the same will be true for total traffic fatalities. Pedestrian fatalities began their four-year decrease in 2006 (Figure 1), the same year that total fatalities began to decrease (NHTSA, 2009a, Table 2). NHTSA’s early estimates are that total traffic fatalities increased by 2.5% in the third quarter of 2010 compared to the same quarter of 2009: the first quarterly increase after 17 consecutive quarters of decreases (NHTSA, 2010a).

It seems ridiculous to blame Michelle for highway deaths; I blame Barack, although others will blame Sarah.

The report emphasizes that their statistics have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny, so their suggestions as to causes amount to informed speculaton. 

A chart is included which shows pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2009 and 2010 by state.  FWIW, the biggest upswings (on an absolute basis) were in Arizona and Florida; that ties in to the "get moving" retirement community theory. Of course, it would make a lot more sense to look at proportional changes and it would be even better to know something about the age of the victims.  One hopes that time will tell.

Bus as a last thought, maybe we ought to be blaming Joe Biden - careful inspection reveals that Delaware had 4 pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2009 and 12 in 2010.  That increase of eight exceeds the entire national increase of seven.  Hmm...

MORE:  Brain lock at the Daily Caller, which tells us that

Pedestrian deaths increased sharply during the first half of 2010, according to the GHSA

"Sharply"?  Otherwise, their story does add that the GHSA spokeflack claims to have been misquoted, or at least misunderstood:

UPDATE: Governors Highway Safety Association Director Barbara Harsha says she was misquoted in a story alleging she blames a rise in pedestrian deaths on Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity program, according to the Atlantic.

“I was misquoted, said Harsha. “We in no way oppose Ms. Obama’s program.” She said she was trying to make a broader point about pedestrian awareness and safety. If Obama’s program is getting more people to walk, “they need to be aware of their surroundings and do so in a safe manner.”

Here is the Washington Examiner article in question.  If Ms. Harsha was misquoted, maybe the official report which cited "get moving" health and fitness programs has an extended typo.

WHEN IS A QUOTE NOT A QUOTE?  A quote is not a quote when it is read by a partisan hack at Mother Jones.  Kate Sheppard tells us this, with my emphasis:

A new report from the Governor's Highway Safety Association is getting lots of press today because some reporters, rather bizarrely, have tried to blame the increase in pedestrian deaths in 2010 on First Lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign.

Yes, you read that right. See the original piece in The Examiner and the followup in the Daily Caller.

The reporters in question posit that perhaps the increase in the number of pedestrians struck by cars last year, after four years of decline, is because people are out exercising more, choosing to walk when possible instead of hopping in the car.

Sorry, Ms. Sheppard - the reporters weren't positing anything; they were quoting two different spokespersons for the GHSA.  Or misquoting one of them, if we believe her backpedaling (maybe the press flack is a former porfesional athlete - they are always misquoted, no matter what they said.).

Palinoia, Brain Destroyer

James Taranto puts the Palin-haters on the couch.  Isn't he encroaching on Krauthammer's turf?

ERRATA:  I have my own thoughts as to what was most interesting and surprising about this column, but I would be curious to hear from others.

Waiting For Obama To Cowboy Up

Geez, when Ezra Klein is calling for you to show some stones, well...

House Repeals ObamaCare

In a bipartisan display the House repealed ObamaCare:

The House voted on Wednesday to repeal the sweeping healthcare law enacted last year, as Republicans made good on a central campaign pledge and laid down the first major policy marker of their new majority.

The party-line vote was 245-189, as three Democrats joined all 242 Republicans in supporting repeal.

...The three Democrats who voted for repeal were Reps. Dan Boren (Okla.), Mike McIntyre (N.C.), and Mike Ross (Ark.), all of whom opposed the law last year. Seven other Democrats who opposed the original law also opposed its repeal. Only the hospitalized Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) missed the vote.

It's on to the Senate, where not much will happen but maybe a few Dems will be put in an awkward spot for 2012.

 

Pump Some Iron And Smarten Up (You Dirty Rat)

Scientists have felt confident that aerobic activity improved brain function.  Now, new studies indicate that pumping iron can also improve the brain:

Aerobic exercise causes a steep spike in blood movement to the brain, an action that some researchers have speculated might be necessary for the creation of new brain cells, or neurogenesis. Running and other forms of aerobic exercise have been shown, in mice and men, to lead to neurogenesis in those portions of the brain associated with memory and thinking, providing another compelling reason to get out at lunchtime and run.

...Since weight training doesn’t cause the same spike, few researchers have thought that it would have a similar effect. But recent studies intimate otherwise. Several studies involve animals. It’s not easy, of course, to induce a mouse or a lab rat to lift weights, so the experimenters have to develop clever approximations of resistance training to see what impact adding muscle and strength has on an animal’s brain.

And one result has been smarter, stronger, muscled-up rats.  Great - I am putting my cats on a weight program ASAP.

Oh, Let's Not Say "Right" And "Wrong"

Glenn Greenwald bemoans Dick Cheney's endorsement of Obama's adoption of the Bush/Cheney war on terror.  In the course of a good reprise of Obama's folding up like a cheap suitcase we get this:

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama's behavior.  First, it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong.

Well, let's not say "right" and "wrong" as though there will be a definitive answer.  This is not a controlled natural science experiment.  Sometimes (I am thinking of pro-lifers and pro-choicers here), folks with alternative views must simply co-exist, secure, perhaps, in their own self-righteousness but with no final proof of "The Truth" available.

However - Obama's total flip-flops do create the impression that he was a lying, opportunistic, unprincipled poseur during the years he positioned himself as the liberal champion of Hope and Change who would deliver America from the oppression of the Bush years.  I almost feel sorry for Greenwald (almost!), who writes this:

But Obama's impact in this area extends far beyond that.  Dick Cheney is not only free of ignominy, but can run around claiming vindication from Obama's actions because he's right.  The American Right constantly said during the Bush years that any President who knew what Bush knew and was faced with the duty of keeping the country safe would do the same thing.  Obama has provided the best possible evidence imaginable to prove those claims true.

...Obama has won the War on Terror debate -- for the American Right.  And as Dick Cheney's interview last night demonstrates, they're every bit as appreciative as they should be.

Well, we're still going to do our best to vote Obama out.

One Of These Is Not Like The Other

Barack Obama, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, ties himself to the great progressive tradition:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

I will go out on a limb here and predict that in fifty years (or maybe even fifty minutes) people won't be including credit card fee regulation on any short list that includes child labor laws and the clean air act.

Which leaves one to wonder - if it survives repel and the courts, ObamaCare will certainly belong on such a list of Big Government undertakings.  So why did Obama decline to cite his obvious bid for history?  It's fun to think he doesn't believe it works as an example of a "common sense rule[] of the road that strengthen[s] our country" and which won't interfere with growth of the economy, but my guess he is just doesn't want to induce coronaries amongst the WSJ readership.

More evidence that he is concerned about the health of the WSJ readership comes in the next paragraphs:

Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.

Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance.

"Strke the right balance"?  I sense the deployment of the healing power of laughter.

Monday Evening Open Thread

I hope everyone enjoyed their Martin Luther King day.

I'm Not "Re-Thinking" Anything

Shorter Byron York: Tom Maguire was Eeerily Prescient in bashing Obama's speech in Tucson.

OK, that is a lot shorter, and he didn't mention my name, and he boldly suggested the "OMG!  It's 'For The Children'" rant I considered but was too gutless to run, but still...

SINCE YOU MIGHT HAVE ASKED: Unless the NSA is recording my cellphone calls (possible!), my full 'For The Children' tirade is lost to the ether.  However, I am confident I made the following points:

Obama called for a level of political discourse of which the recently killed nine year old Christina Taylor Green could be proud.  Who was going to take the opposite side of that and argue that they wanted to be the politician or pundit who made nine years olds cry themselves to sleep?  (Don't volunteer Don Surber - he makes adults cry.)

Or, who wanted to step up and reveal that Christina, recently elected to her student council, had run the dirtiest campaign in the history of her elementary school and had actually smeared her opponent as anti-chocolate milk?

Well.  Let me add that my buddy mentioned the Amy Carter connection (Obama is looking Carteresque if his best argument requires him to hide behind kids) but I dredged up the Roger Staubach retort - again!

Maybe we could simply aim for a level of discourse of which adults could be proud.  Baby steps.

 

Have You No Sense Of History, Sir, At Long Last?

Matt Bai of the Times writes about the Tucson shooting and attempts a history of national turning points.  We are troubled by this:

Not all transformational moments entail violence. John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent cold war scholar and Yale professor, sees a national turning point in 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy testified before a Senate subcommittee in what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The interrogation of McCarthy by Joseph Welch, an Army lawyer — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — resonated throughout a country that was just then discovering the nascent power of television. Years of ruinous disagreement over the threat of internal Communism seemed to dissipate almost overnight.

“The whole McCarthy moment — the air just went out of it altogether,” Professor Gaddis says. “McCarthy was politically dead at that point and physically dead in three years.”

Hmm.  The biggest problem here is that McCarthy was not the witness being interrogated when the famous “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” exchange ocurred. In fact, Roy Cohn was being questioned by Army counsel Jesph Welch; Senator McCarthy interrupted him, leading to the famous exchange.

That said, the next witness called was Joe McCarthy himself, who was grilled by Sen. Symington.  That did not go well for McCarthy, either - we turn to Wikipedia:

Late in the hearings, McCarthy, after refusing to sign a document that he claimed had false statements in it, rebuked Senator Stuart Symington by saying, "You're not fooling anyone. I'm sure of that." Symington fired back with an angry but prophetic remark to McCarthy: "Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks. You're not fooling anyone, either."

Althugh it was overshadowed by the famous exchange with Welch, the NY Times highlights for the same day describe McCarthy refusing to sign a letter offered by Symington.  I have some excerpts below:

Bottom line: Matt Bai did Yale Prof. Gaddis no favors by tossing in the "Have you no sense of decency" line to jog our memories.  Welch interogated Cohn; Symington interrogated McCarthy.  My guess is that Prof. Gaddis knows this inside and out but Bai managed to muddle it up a bit.

More contemporaneously, I also question this from Bai:

Not even the terrorist attacks of 2001, which surely rank high among the most jarring events in American history, did much to unify the society in any lasting way. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers had immediate and significant consequences for the nation’s foreign policy, but any sense of common purpose had more or less vanished by the next year’s elections, when Republicans slammed their Democratic opponents —including Max Cleland, a man who lost three of his limbs fighting in Vietnam — as insufficiently patriotic.

Hmm, that loss of common purpose was all the Republican's fault?  The Democrats had insisted on civil service-level protection in the new Department of Homeland Security, figuring, perhaps, that wars on terror come and go but government union voters are Democrats forever.

The Democrats held up the DHS until after the election, when, having felt the heat, they saw the light.  I would infer that the "sense of common purpose" had dissipated at the point when the Dems decided to treat the DHS as a new source of campign contributions rather than when the Republicans attacked them for it.

Traditional Tone-Raising Sunday Open Thread

Death threats from one of the Tucson shooting victims directed at a Tea Party founder?

The theme of the event was "An American Conversation Continued" --  the idea being to continue the conversation that a madman's brutal rampage had interrupted.  So it was inevitable that the conversation would eventually turn to politics.   It did, toward the end, with Amanpour leading a discussion on a very touchy but obvious topic:  gun control.

That's where the atmosphere turned tense.   When Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries rose to suggest that any conversation about gun control should be put off until after the funerals for all the victims, witnesses say Fuller became agitated.  Two told KGUN9 News that finally, Fuller took a picture of Humphries, and said, "You're dead."

When State Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson) rose to explain and clarify current and proposed gun legislation in the state, several people groaned or booed her.  One of those booing, according to several witnesses, was Fuller.   Witnesses sitting near Fuller told KGUN9 News that Fuller was making them feel very uncomfortable.

The event wrapped up a short time later.  Deputies then escorted Fuller from the room.  As he was being led off, Fuller shouted loudly to the room at large.  Several witnesses said that what they thought they heard him shout was, "You're all whores!"

Fuller, age 63, is a political operative who specializes in gathering petitions for ballot initiatives.   Before the program began, he passed out business cards to people sitting around him that read:
"Signatures
"Expediting Initiatives since 2006
"J. Eric Fuller
"Political Circulator."

Earlier, Fuller had endeared himself to the left with his statement that "It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle, and the rest got their first target.”  From John Hayward:

Fuller’s emergence as a beeping smoke detector amid the right-wing haze of the “Climate of Hate” has already drawn praise from Soros operative Eric Bohlert, who issued a Twitter taunt to Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart: “Countdown to smearing wounded veteran from Tucson massacre begins… now.” 

Looks like Fuller activated his Auto-Smear app and ended the countdown.

To Unite The Country, Unite Congress

This may make for an even more interesting State of the Union - bipartisan seating:

A plan that would have Republicans and Democrats sit side-by-side during this month's State of the Union address has picked up support from nearly one-fifth of the Senate as well as a handful of House members, including a top House Republican.

Symbolically, this probably makes as much sense as anything else we are likely to get out of Congress in the next two years - if Congress is urging the rest of us to unite and be civil, they might want to lead by example.

That said, some thoughts.  First, do not attempt this at your high school cafeteria.

Second, just how do opponents plan to frame their objections?

And third, on balance I supect the President would prefer this new arrangment - rather than cheering from one side of the chamber and stony silence from the other, the cheering will be scattered.  Viewers will be left to guess by the volume wheter it is bipartisan and by quick camera scans (or their common sense) which side is cheering.  (A tip from the Psychic Help Hotline - when Obama announces his commitment to Afghanistan, it will be Republicans making whatever noise we hear; if he re-affirms his commitment to surrender pre-emptively begin troop withdrawals, the cheers will be from the Dems.)

Obama will get the benefit of looking like the whole chamber loves him, with only the volume of adulation varying.

Well - if this is a zero-sum exercise in which Obama benefits, one might guess that Republicans ought to object.  Tricky - pretending to be bi-partisan might help Republican Congressional leaders, and maybe the zero-sum losers are the Republican Presidential candidates.

Since you ask, the idea was put forward by a Democratic group:

The bipartisan seating plan was originally proposed by the centrist Democratic group Third Way [link]in a letter to congressional leaders this week.

Uh huh - a bunch of moderate House Dems want to hide among the Republicans, and who can blame them?

I Boldly Predict this will come to pass.

 

He Coulda Been A Somebody

NPR has a story on an intensive Secret Service study of political assasinations.  The gist - most assasins are losers making a play for fame rather than activisits pushing an agenda.

In the Secret Service Exception Case Study Project, they identified 83 people who had completed assassinations or made assassination attempts since 1949 — some cases known to the public, some not — and collected every document they could find. Fein and Vossekuil also went to visit many of these people in jail.

...The researchers asked prisoners how they chose targets, how they prepared. They inquired about their motives, every intimate detail of their process. After they asked these questions, they combined the answers with other sources and analyzed the information. In 1999, they published their results in The Journal of Forensic Sciences.

As to motivation:

What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, many of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives, which, the paper argues, was the true motive. They didn't want to see themselves as nonentities.

"They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided that rather than being a 'nobody,' they wanted to be a 'somebody,' " Fein says.

They chose political targets, then, because political targets were a sure way to transform this situation: They would be known.

...

And one thing Borum and Fein say about choosing a political figure — as opposed to choosing a show-business celebrity — is that the would-be assassins are able to associate themselves with a broader political movement or goal. That allows them to see themselves as not such a bad person. In this way, Borum says, assassins are basically murderers in search of a cause.

"People make decisions to act, and then from that, construct for themselves and potentially for others a narrative about why that is OK, or what the rationale would be, or how this could be justified," Borum says. "It's sort of a reverse pattern from what we would typically think."

 

Something For Everyone From Krugman And The Times

Have the inhabitants of Bizarro World finally broken through to Earth?  Krugman offers, with no apparent sense of irony, a column proclaiming the virtues of the modern welfare state and a Times magazine article explaining the collapse of the modern welfare state.  It's two Krugmans in one!

Let's start with the virtues, as described in "A Tale of Two Moralities" (that would be "good" and "evil", as everyone familiar wth Krugman's world view knows):

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

The compssionate versus the heartless - yeah, yeah.  I will come back to that, but let's press on to Krugman's article about Ground Zero of the modern welfare state, Europe itself.  The title is "Can Europe Be Saved?".  Yes, mind the whiplash!  It was only one year ago Krugman assured us that "Europe is an economic success", but time passes inexorably on:

Not long ago Europeans could, with considerable justification, say that the current economic crisis was actually demonstrating the advantages of their economic and social model. Like the United States, Europe suffered a severe slump in the wake of the global financial meltdown; but the human costs of that slump seemed far less in Europe than in America. In much of Europe, rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income. Europe’s gross domestic product might have fallen as much as ours, but the Europeans weren’t suffering anything like the same amount of misery. And the truth is that they still aren’t.

Yet Europe is in deep crisis — because its proudest achievement, the single currency adopted by most European nations, is now in danger. More than that, it’s looking increasingly like a trap. Ireland, hailed as the Celtic Tiger not so long ago, is now struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Spain, a booming economy until recent years, now has 20 percent unemployment and faces the prospect of years of painful, grinding deflation.

The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent. But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter — to ignore warnings, which were issued right from the beginning, that Europe lacked the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.

As Ms. Thatcher noted, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.  The Euro was a brassy attempt by the European elites to defer that day.  

Now the Euro may go down as yet another Big Government fail.  That won't have any impact on the faith-based community of the left, which never saw a problem that a government program couldn't improve.

THREE KRUGMANS IN ONE:  From one year ago:

The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

Yes, its hard to keep up.

AS TO THE TWO MORALITIES:  Let's note that in this country at least, Krugman should be referring to the "post-modern" welfare state - the 1996 welfare reform undid some of the absurd incentives of the original Great Society program, which paid young women to have babies, then penalized them if they either got married or got a job.  One wonders whether libs were honestly surprised when they got what they paid for (more babies, less marriage, higher unemployment) or had always intended to create a huge dependent class that would reliably vote Democratic.  Krugman would consider the architects of the original program the good guys; Evil Newt Gingrich led the reform effort.

Today, Democrats want a generous social safety net and de facto open borders with occasional amnesties, with no real attempt to mask the political goal of creating a new class of Democratic voters.  Krugman admits that this puts a burden on unskilled native Americans, but hey - the Democrats are the good guys.

As a bit of personal history, back when I was choosing sides in 1980 and 1984, I saw a Europe that could not create jobs, could not absorb immigrants, and was free-riding on defense as well as medical and pharmaceutical innovation.  That did not strike me as a workable model for the United States and I did not then and do not now see the moral virtue in promoting an economic system that predictably leads to high unemployment, low growth, and dependence on the public sector.

Well, I am re-hashing a bit - Krugman puts on his skirt, picks up his pom-poms and cheerleads for Old Europe from time to time, and we always have fun.

MY STINT AS MORAL EDITOR:  I can't let go of Krugman's description of the good guys:

It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

More accurately, it's only right for the less affluent to force the more affluent to help them. Elsewhere, a person with the moral view that "it's only right" that an unborn child receive protection is out of luck - the penumbra of the Constitution protects the mother, don't you know?  Not all moral views are created equal.

UPDATING MY BELIEFS:  This article about the immigrant ghetto in Sweden is from 1998.  I am certain I blogged on this topic years ago, but can't find the evidence (I would promise I mentioned ring cities, 50% unemployment of Kurds, and noted that a lot of Swedish "immigrants" are from Finland and Norway.  I would further promise I mocked that heroic attempt at diversity by noting my own transition from New Jersey to Conecticut. Yet Google and Bing deny me.  [Hmm, seek and ye shall find, down in point 3.]

This AFP article from 2005 also paints a grim picture:

Sweden has welcomed immigrants with open arms for decades but now it is grappling with how to integrate them into society, especially in the southern town of Malmoe amid a massive influx of refugees.

Once a thriving industrial town with full employment, Malmoe has seen many of its plants shut down since the 1990s. That, combined with a never-ending stream of foreigners arriving, has led to rising juvenile delinquency and rampant unemployment.

Of the town's 280,000 inhabitants, a third are foreigners and 60,000 are Muslims.

 

As I Was Saying...

Kirsten Powers has the long, coherent takedown of Obama's speech that I only managed to hint at yesterday.  The lead:

Sure, the president provided his usual inspiration, but he failed to shut down the ridiculous media meme that right-wing talk radio was responsible for the Arizona shootings. And how are ordinary Americans to blame?

My soundbite from yesterday would be this:

So Krugman et al are wrong to blame the Tea Party and Sarah Palin but right that we all need to be more civil.  I don't think for a moment that the man who described his Republican counterparts as "hostage takers" includes himself among those who have lowered the tone, so I am reading this as a call to the right to pipe down.

 

Barrel-Fishing With Adam And Andrew

We are once again marveling at the utter brain-lock displayed when Andrew Sullivan and Adam Serwer team up to share their enlightement.  From Serwer, who naturally is bashing Sarah Palin, comes his deeply considered ruling on the appropriate use of "blood libel" as a metaphor:

Over at Greg's place, I explain why Sarah Palin's use of blood libel in the context of people accusing her of being responsible for the incident in Tucson is wrong, even if the accusations are unfair:

Blood libel is a term that usually refers to an ancient falsehood that Jews use the blood of Christian children in religious rituals. For hundreds of years, particularly during the Middle Ages, it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews in the street and their expulsion from entire countries. "Blood libel" is not wrongfully assigning guilt to an individual for murder, but rather assigning guilt collectively to an entire group of people and then using it to justify violence against them.

And he restates his point, lest we don't quite believe him the first time:

It's about using a falsehood to establish collective guilt in order to justify collective punishment, not mean things said about an individual person.

OK, so it is about group guilt, an interpretation picked up by Sullivan.  Fair enough.

It may be too much to ask, but have either of these clowns even read Sarah Palin's speech?  (Adam Serwer diligently refains from providing a link to her text at Facebook, which is the sort of juvenile behavior I expect from a lefty blogger, not someone using Greg Sargent's space at the Washington Post.)

Let me help:

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

Hmm - unless Ms. Palin is the only listener to talk radio, the only person at campaign rallies, and the only person who voted last fall, I would guess she is defending a group that goes well beyond herself.  But maybe we can find more clues as we press ahead:

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions.  And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Hmm, maybe she means that she personally shook hands with every surviving Democrat and then commenced a series of one-on-one debates around the country.  Maybe!  But I lean toward the idea that she is defending the entire Tea Party from the notion that they are are crazy, hate-filled racists who would rather shoot someone out of office than vote them out.

And why might I have that idea?  Well, here is Professor Hate's infamous blog post within a few hours of the atrocity:

A Democratic Congresswoman has been shot in the head; another dozen were also shot.

We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” list.

The "whole Tea Party was her enemy".  Is there something about that allegation that Messrs Serwer and Sullivan can't grasp?  Or is it possible that they are unaware that Ms. Palin is considered one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, and might feel an obligation to defend it?

Lest they doubt, they could re-read Professor Hate's "Climate of Hate" column from the Monday NY Times, which indicts right wing leaders and talk radio and only mentions Ms. Palin in the context of saying mean things about the crowds at McCain-Palin events.  Ms. Palin has a base in the right, that base was under attack, and she responded - only a liar or a fool could think her response was all about herself.

Well.  The fact of Adam Serwer's continued employment provides hope for all of us.  Clearly, nobody is so stupid that they can't get a gig at The American Prospect and the WaPo.

WHAT'S THAT?  What are you saying?  I should open my mind to the possibility that Serwer knows full well his argument is BS but he also knows there is an insatiable audience for it?  It's the old "he's not ignorant, he's dishonest!" defense.  OK, that might explain it.

MORE:  James Taranto is especially excellent on the cut-and-run Times:

As we have noted, the New York Times's response to last weekend's murders in Tucson was to instigate a witch hunt against Republican politicians and "particularly" against members of the independent (nonliberal) media. This appealed to what one might call the Manichaean wing of American liberalism: those who mistake political disagreement for enmity, who are so strongly prejudiced against conservatives as to regard them, in some sense, as less than fully human.

...And although President Obama, in his speech last night, did not go so far as to call it illegitimate, he did make his disagreement clear:

If, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy--it did not--but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

At which point:

The Times's response, in an editorial this morning, could hardly have been weaker:

It was important that Mr. Obama transcend the debate about whose partisanship has been excessive and whose words have sown the most division and dread. This page and many others have identified those voices and called on them to stop demonizing their political opponents.

The newspaper that seized upon a horrific crime to demonize its political opponents--and to demonize "particularly" those in the media who reject its worldview and its presumption of moral authority--is now applauding the president for being able to "transcend the debate" that it instigated with its yellow journalism.

An Interesting Diet Plan From Mickey Kaus

At 1:17 PM at this link (scroll down, and time is out of sequence) Mickey Kaus reflects on the spread of social sites and hits upon a diet plan I am really, really hoping does not catch on.  However, he may have a winner - my appetite is gone.

BONUS SCROLLING:  Brad DeLong thinks Paul Krugman is the stupidiest man alive?  I missed a wild New Year's Party, apparently.

The Politicization Of Everything

I deplore this politicization of the NY Times Dining Section!  An article on cool kitchen gadgets and the guy who makes them includes this:

“I didn’t set out to make cheese graters,” Mr. Grace, an engineer by education, said recently. In 1977, he moved south from Michigan to this town 75 miles northwest of Little Rock in search of a warmer climate and more favorable small-business taxes.

Oh, have mercy - a Times reader seeking a respite from the daily hubbub does not need a lecture on the impact of higher taxes on the business climate. 

But the Times does not relent:

Grace Manufacturing, which now employs more than 300 people at a manufacturing plant here and an assembly plant in Querétaro, Mexico, has in the years since helped establish a new segment of the housewares industry.

Oh, no!  Now we are being told that small businessman create jobs and sometimes outsource them?!?  What kind of newspaper is this that allows reality to intrude upon the reality-based so rudely?

Troubling.  The article then goes on about food preparation devices without ever calling for higher taxes on these leeches of the American spirit.  I would cancel my subscription if I still had one.

How Did You Love The Speech?

Obama gets some good reviews for his speech in the NY Times (and the sun rose in the east...).  Having read the speech, I am a bit of a non-believer - as with his condemnation of both Jeremiah Wright and his own grandmother or the criticism of left-winger Bill Ayers and offsetting righty Tom Coburn, Obama took his normal conciliatory tack of rebuking both sides and presenting himself as the calm man in the middle.

So to appease righties such as myself we heard Krugman seemingly tossed under the bus early in the speech:

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.  In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness."  Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
 
For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack.  None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.
 
So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy.  We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.
 
But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.  As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Which is fine.  Yet a bit later the President adopts Krugman's message:

And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

So Krugman et al are wrong to blame the Tea Party and Sarah Palin but right that we all need to be more civil.  I don't think for a moment that the man who described his Republican counterparts as "hostage takers" includes himself among those who have lowered the tone, so I am reading this as a call to the right to pipe down. 

The NY Times editors apparently heard it the same way:

It was important that Mr. Obama transcend the debate about whose partisanship has been excessive and whose words have sown the most division and dread. This page and many others have identified those voices and called on them to stop demonizing their political opponents. The president’s role in Tucson was to comfort and honor, and instill hope.

Yeah, they know who the bad guys are, so the President didn't need to sully his hands.  Please.

NEVER MOVE ON:  Lectures on civility from the guy who flipped the bird to Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the 2008 campaign.  Whatever.

 

And The Cat Shall Lie Down WithThe Dog

Alan Dershowitz defends Sarah Palin's use of "blood libel" in a metaphorical rather than literal context.  Yup, the "Blame Sarah" crowd has gotten that silly (although Jonah Goldberg thinks they have a bit of a point).

Jim Geraghty has an excellent recap of the use of "blood libel" a metaphor.  Frank Rich and Andrew Sullivan go gay; here is Rich:

Frank Rich, New York Times columnist, October 15, 2006: “The moment Mr. Foley’s e-mails became known, we saw that brand of fearmongering and bigotry at full tilt: Bush administration allies exploited the former Congressman’s predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It’s the kind of blood libel that in another era was spread about Jews.”

WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson goes ethnic:

Ann Coulter’s column, October 30, 2008:

His expert pontificator on race was The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who said the Pittsburgh hoax was “the blood libel against black men concerning the defilement of the flower of Caucasian womanhood. It’s been with us for hundreds of years and, apparently, is still with us.”

And he has many others (including a defender of Al Gore against "blood libel"), but Mr. Geraghty's list does not include this use by Ken Blackwell in The American Spectator:

The Blood Libel of the New York Times

...So, let’s see an example of what the Times calls civility. A leading Thoughtful Writer for the Times is Peter Steinfels. Steinfels writes on religious topics. Here’s a sample of his work in the form of a recent book review:

A Provocative Work About the Christian Right

By PETER STEINFELS The New York Times April 25, 2009
If you wanted a book title to speed the pulse of liberal academics, journalists and politicians, you couldn't do much better than "The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right." For many people that's a title akin to "The Winning Ways of Serial Killers."

...

I call attention, however, to that vile line: “…a title akin to ‘The Winning Ways of Serial Killers.’” If ever Rush Limbaugh’s term “Drive-by Media” applied, it applies here, in this libelous -- even blood libelous -- terminology.

Works for me.

THE MORNING AFTER:  Some reviews are good; I am irked, and I bet I will find others similarly situated.  I have a Post In Progress; my gist will be that President On The Other Hand seems to rebuke the lefties who laid the blame on the right, then adopts their message by calling on all of us to be more civil.

 

All The President's Teleprompters...

The WaPo and the NY Times st the stage for President Obama's address tonight from Arizona.  From the WaPo:

Obama is likely to deliver a speech about tolerance, a theme that could also be featured in his State of the Union address on Jan. 25.

However, with liberals and conservatives assuming their assigned battle stations over whether gun laws and partisan rhetoric are to blame, the White House is undecided about the exact message the president will send.

It is not clear whether ideology motivated the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, and Obama's advisers may conclude it unwise for the president to lecture the nation on mutual respect - which could leave him open to criticism that he is using the tragedy for political gain.

And the Times:

President Obama will focus his speech at a memorial service in Tucson on Wednesday evening on the victims of the attack and on the idea of service to the country, avoiding any overt commentary on the debate over violence and the nation’s political culture.

Instead, Mr. Obama, who was still working with his speechwriters on his remarks on Tuesday, will call for unity among Americans, while trying to honor the victims, including their service to government, as an example to all Americans. He will share the anecdotes about the victims that he has learned during private phone calls to the families, aides said.

...

But when Mr. Obama walks onto the basketball court at the University of Arizona at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday night, he will be facing both a challenge, to find the words and the tone that a horrified country will find comforting, and an opportunity, to appear as a leader first instead of a politician.

“The president needs to go to the highest ground here and really be a source of comfort and inspiration to the whole country,” said John Podesta, the head of the Center for American Progress, a policy group that has deep ties to the Democratic Party. “He should, as much as possible, personally stay away from anything that could possibly be accused of politics.”

Well, that is the plan.  And I assume they have reviewed Reagan's Challenger speech, Clinton's Oklahoma City speech, and Bush's address after 9/11.

But I still expect an Epic Presidential Fail.  I think asking Obama to not think about the politics makes as much sense as asking him not to breathe; more importantly, I think a guy who would describe his Republican counterparts as "hostage-takers" really has internalized the Huffington Post /Frank Rich / Paul Krugman world view that Republicans are evil, evil, EVIL.

In addition to those hurdles, President Me will have to avoid the temptation to weave his endlessly self-fascinating personal narrative into this story. 

We will see soon enough.  One would think it wouldn't be too hard for a President to unite the country aroud the ideas that mental illness is bad and violence is worse, but I don't see him doing it while successfully avoiding his condescending, professorial, on the other hand approach.  There shouldn't be another hand here, but Obama will instinctively look for one, and probably settle on criticizing those of us who raise our voices, or some such phrase that will be easily interpreted as a swipe at the right.

Time will tell.  It would be nice to be wrong, but you go to memorial services with the President you have.

MORE:  This is the passage from Clinton's Oklahoma City bombing that will tempt Obama's teleprompter:

To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life. Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness: Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind.¹ Justice will prevail.

Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

That made some sense in the context of a militia bombing,(although blaming Rush Limbaugh did not); it makes no sense whatsover in the case of a madman who saw an orange sky and blue grass.  But I expect Obama to try for something similar, becasue he and I believe different things.

Newsweek Acquired By The Onion!?!

In an unexpected merger of Old Media with Never Old Comedy, The Onion has acquired Newsweek.  I think so, at least - check this apparent parody piece mocking all the lefties who promoted the notion that the paranoid schizo gunman in Arizona was in some way a conservative:

The Missed Warning Signs

A 2009 study warned that the rise of right-wing extremism could spur violent attacks.  But the report was attacked by Republicans, including now-Speaker John Boehner.

Hmm - do they mean the DHS study that relied on "open source" intelligence, which is to say, their very own Google searches?  The one where they forgot to actually perform the Google searches and misreported stories?  The one that breathlessly reported some arrests from 1996 (which actually ocurred in 1998) as some sort of imminent threat?  The one that advised us to be wary of returning veterans, who might be armed and dangerous?  I guess they do, which means they are off to a promising comic start:

Two years before the Tucson massacre, the Department of Homeland Security warned in a report that right-wing extremism was on the rise and could prompt "lone wolves" to launch attacks. But the agency backed away from the report amid intense criticism from Republicans, including future House Speaker John Boehner.

Well, the report didn't mean "lone wolves" such as the Discovery Channel hostage taker, a wack-job who put the "mental" in "environmentalist".  Nor did it mean the "F*** the rich" arsonist operating in Cape Cod.  But surely the Newsweekers know that?

The report, which warned that the crippled economy and the election of the first black president were “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment,” described the rise of “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology [as] the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States,” according to a copy reviewed by The Center for Public Integrity.

Yes they do understand the report referred to right-wing violence, and we will stop calling them 'Shirley' as soon as they explain how the Arizona gunman was a right-winger.

In the wake of last weekend’s attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, which left six dead and 14 wounded, the report’s warning of a lone wolf attack from someone with extremist tendencies seems prescient.

"Extremist tendencies"?  Wait a minute - the report warned about "right wing" extremist tendencies; don't go all weaselly now.

But when the April 2009 report was issued, it was overwhelmingly criticized by conservative commentators and lawmakers, who derided it as political propaganda from the Obama administration. Some experts worry that its findings were ignored due to political blowback.

Wow - if they are going to argue that Jared Loughner would have been on the DHS radar except that Boehner squawked about a DHS report in 2009, they are mining comic gold.  Of course, they also overlook the fact that the Tucson police visited the Loughner family more than once; talk about "Missed Warning Signs" might better start there.

The report’s primary focus was the fear that if the economy continued its downturn, it could mix with racial and political opposition to the election of Barack Obama and the ongoing debate about immigration. The report was especially concerned that these factors paralleled those that led to several incidents of domestic terrorism during the Clinton era.

“The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers,” it said.

Yup - that report eerily predicted the rise of the Mind Controller with his new grammar and common currency, all right.  And his orange sky.  One might just as sensbily talk about a less-noticed DHS report assessing the prospects for left-wing violence, which warned about people who “embrace a number of radical philosophical components of anticapitalist, antiglobalization, communist, socialist, and other movements.”  And maybe mind-control. 

Eventually Newsweek admits they are pulling our leg:

While discussion has swirled around possible ties between accused gunman Jared Loughner and right-wing extremists, DHS on Monday said department officials “have not established any such possible link.” Levin doesn’t believe extremism was the sole driving factor. “This guy is a mentally deranged person first,” he said, and noted that the mentally ill often latch on to conspiracy theories to layer over their already “obsessive and aggressive template.”

Discussion has also swirled around the seeming attempt to smear the right by any means possible.

 

And Speaking Of Krugman And Double Standards At The Times...

OK, I am back in Arizona.  Pejman has a great piece on inflamed rhetoric which reminds me of this jaw-dropper - a Democratic Congressman who last fall said a Republican candidate for Governor should be shot has a guest piece in today's NY Times talking about civility.  I kid you not.

Here is the voted-out Rep. Kanjorski (D, PA) last fall:

"Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor] and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."

Here he is today:

Why Politicians Need to Stay Out in the Open

By PAUL E. KANJORSKI

...

Nevertheless, even in this post-9/11 world, the shooting of Ms. Giffords was especially shocking, because it was so personal. She was hunted down far from the symbolic halls of power while performing the most fundamental responsibility of her job, listening to her constituents.

As far as we know, her attacker had no grand political point; I doubt we will ever really understand his motives. What the shooting does tell us, however, is that it is impossible to eliminate the risks faced by elected officials when they interact with their constituents.

We all lose an element of freedom when security considerations distance public officials from the people. Therefore, it is incumbent on all Americans to create an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.

Geez - someone should put Kanjorski against a wall and... read him his public statements.  And the Times editors might want to reflect on just who they are turning to for advice on creating "an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation".

And let's not skip past the Krugman connection.  Yesterday Professor Hate told us this:

It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized...

Looks like that ostracism thing is strictly in Krugman's imagination.  The same guy who called for a Republican to be shot down is now lecturing the rest of us about preserving civility - in the pages of the Times!

 

What Are The Odds? Or, How Significant Was That, Really?

We are tearing ourselves away from Pima and thinking about ESP.  The Times has an intriguing article on a staistical fallacy that seems to permeate the social sicences and may explain the recent and controversial ESP paper:

In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception.

The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts.

Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.

By incorporating statistical techniques that are now widely used in other sciences — genetics, economic modeling, even wildlife monitoring — social scientists can correct for such problems, saving themselves (and, ahem, science reporters) time, effort and embarrassment.

“I was delighted that this ESP paper was accepted in a mainstream science journal, because it brought this whole subject up again,” said James Berger, a statistician at Duke University. “I was on a mini-crusade about this 20 years ago and realized that I could devote my entire life to it and never make a dent in the problem.”

Let me try to extract a cogent explanation:

Consider the following experiment. Suppose there was reason to believe that a coin was slightly weighted toward heads. In a test, the coin comes up heads 527 times out of 1,000.

Is this significant evidence that the coin is weighted?

Classical analysis says yes. With a fair coin, the chances of getting 527 or more heads in 1,000 flips is less than 1 in 20, or 5 percent, the conventional cutoff. To put it another way: the experiment finds evidence of a weighted coin “with 95 percent confidence.”

Yet many statisticians do not buy it. One in 20 is the probability of getting any number of heads above 526 in 1,000 throws. That is, it is the sum of the probability of flipping 527, the probability of flipping 528, 529 and so on.

But the experiment did not find all of the numbers in that range; it found just one — 527. It is thus more accurate, these experts say, to calculate the probability of getting that one number — 527 — if the coin is weighted, and compare it with the probability of getting the same number if the coin is fair.

Statisticians can show that this ratio cannot be higher than about 4 to 1, according to Paul Speckman, a statistician, who, with Jeff Rouder, a psychologist, provided the example. Both are at the University of Missouri and said that the simple experiment represented a rough demonstration of how classical analysis differs from an alternative approach, which emphasizes the importance of comparing the odds of a study finding to something that is known.

Well, now - having fired up my Binomial distribution in Excel, I can tell you that with a fair coin there is a 0.5874% chance of getting exactly 527 heads in 1000 tosses.

But what is the alternative hypothesis?  If I were worried that the coin was heavily weighted and would come up heads 90% of the time, then 527 heads is an absurdly low result (probability roughly zero).  If my only realistic alternative hypotheses are (a) the coin is fair, and (b) the coin will fall heads 90% of the time, then the result heavily favors the conclusion that the coin is fair.

But suppose I am concerned that the coin has been subtly weighted, but I don't know by how much (if at all).  In that case, the best guess as to the coin's bias (given we have already seen it fall heads 527 times in a thousand) is to imagine that in fact it is weighted to fall 'heads' 52.7% of the time.

With that as an alternative, the odds of such a weighted coin falling heads *exactly* 527 times are not high, but they are higher than for a fair coin. Our hypothetically weighted coin had a 2.5262% probability of falling heads exactly 527 times.  That is 4.3 time more likely than if it is a fiar coin (hence the article says "about 4 to 1").

So, imagine a social scientist faced only with the result of his coin flipping.  The hypothesis that the coin is weighted passes the 95% confidence test.  On the other hand, a betting man would love to be offered 19-1 odds as to the coins actually being weighted.

In the context of this ESP article, I suppose the alternative hypotheses were that (a) people have no pre-cognitive power and the results will be 50/50, or (b) people have a very slight precognitive power and the result will be something like 53/47.  If that was the hypothesis, it would take more trials to have a statistically meaningful distinction. 

By my handy calculation, doubling the number of trials to 2000 increases the odds by the square.  I.e., 4.3 squared is 18.49; in a trial of 2000 coin tosses with either a fair coin or a coin that comes up heads 52.7% of the time, a result of 1054 has an 18.49 to 1 chance of being due to the coin actually being weighted.  Hmm, I bet I am rediscovering stuff I missed in freshman stats class...

Still All Arizona

Eventually some other topics will emerge, but I am stuck in Arizona.

First, I am having a 1994 flashback, to the last time hate radio promoted an atmosphere of violence.  Just to refresh my memory as to the players, I want to rewind that Clinton classic about his election campaign... geez, what was the name?

Mother Jones has an exclusive interview with a frined of the gunman, who explains the obsession with Rep. Giffords that predates (gasp!) Sarah Palin.

Hot Air has the Truther angle (which was a righty/lefty shared wackiness) and picks up the occult angle, but misses the obvious Christine O'Donnell/Tea Party connection (her denials notwithstanding).

Still In Arizona

Prof. Krugman, who types at the speed of hate, blames the Arizona shooting on righties, natch.  But I love this:

I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report.

Indeed they did.  But they also debunked it - the DHS hyped incidents even when the facts were at odds with their target narrative.

Back to Professor Hate:

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

Well, it's hard for me to imagine that in October 2010 the Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee's capital markets subcommittee could have said this about a wealthy Republican candidate for the governorship of Florida:

"Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."

Kanjorski was subsequently ostracized by the voters, but I missed the round of condemnations from Krugman and the left. 

Almost done with krugman:

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Hmm, cites?  All I have is Google, which gives me this:

A 66-year-old man was sentenced Thursday to more than two years in federal prison for threatening Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.) in the aftermath of the healthcare debate.

...

The Tribune reported that when agents questioned Pidrman in April following his arrest, he expressed frustration over threats made against Democrats and said he probably thought, "Let me scare one of those righties."

Pidrman claims he was in an alcohol-induced black-out when he called the congresswoman's office in March and left a message saying, "Just wanna let you know I have 27 people that are going to make sure that this ***** does not live to see her next term."

"I'm terribly sorry that it ever happened," Pidrman said before his sentencing Thursday morning, according to the Tribune. "I very often watch the recycled news shows on MSNBC," at the time at which he made the call, he said.

Interesting - all this 'the righties are coming to shoot you' rhetoric actually provokes lefties into getting arrested.  Profesor Hate, take note!

Well.  In a much more fair and balanced column Ross Douthat mentions the Discovery Channel hostage taker, just one example of lefty violence Krugman overlooked.

Meanwhile, news of the occult from Arizona in the Daily News:

A sinister shrine reveals a chilling occult dimension in the mind of the deranged gunman accused of shooting a member of Congress and 19 others.

Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner's home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges.

What, the guy was into witchcraft?  That exonerates Sarah Palin and implicates Christine O'Donnell (her denials notwithstanding).

WHAT AM I SAYING?  My bad - the witchcraft angle implicates Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party, which further implicates Sarah Palin.  Obviously.  My neighbor's cat got stuck in a tree, which is... Sarah's fault (she has created a climate of fear among animals, don't you know?).

RIGHT, LET'S HEAR FROM THE NEGOTIATOR: The Times discusses the political ebb and flow, including this:

Mr. Obama was considering delivering a speech about the greater context surrounding the shooting, but advisers said it was premature to do so until Ms. Giffords’s condition stabilized and more became known about the gunman’s motives.

What, Obama doesn't want to get in front of the cameras and explain that he doesn't have all the facts but the Republicans acted stupidly?

Personally, I look forward to hearing the guy who promised to change the political tone back in 2008 and then compared Republicans to hostage takers a few weeks ago explain that we need to be more civil and respectful of opposing views. 

SORT OF NSFW (OR SAFE FOR YOUR STOMACH):  Michelle Malkin recaps a decade of Palin-hating, Bush-hating, and so on.  Pretty hard to take in at one sitting.  Well, for me - I imagine for a guy like Krugman it would be a pleasant remembrance of happier days.  Or if not happier, at least days when the anger was more focused.

Sunday Evening Open Thread

I think we are still all Arizona.

Glenn has a good WSJ column.

And as Byron York pointed out, if the Arizona gunman had shouted "Allahu Akhbar!" and left a YouTube manifesto proclaiming his intention to gun down a Congresswoman in pursuit of jiahd and in honor of Bin Laden, the media would stil be scratching its collective head as to his motivation.

But since he left jumbled lunatic ravings, they know Sarah Palin is to blame.

From which I infer what - that it is OK to categorize and demonize all right-wingers but not even extremist Muslims?  Puzzling.

Sunday Afternoon

The Arizona shooting is the only topic at Memeorandum.

Shooting In Arizona

I have to open thread the deplorable and disturbing Arizona shooting.  [The Captain has lots.]

However, no matter the darkness, the contemptible Paul Krugman can deliver a smile even while blaming the Tea Party and Sarah Palin for the violence - in an UPDATE to his post politicizing the shooting he delivers this insight:

Update: I see that Sarah Palin has called the shooting “tragic”. OK, a bit of history: right-wingers went wild over anyone who called 9/11 a tragedy, insisting that it wasn’t a tragedy, it was an atrocity.

Well, then, let's have a bit more history - this was President George Bush, addressing Congress and the nation on Sept 20, 2001:

I thank the Congress for its leadership at such an important time. All of America was touched on the evening of the tragedy to see Republicans and Democrats joined together on the steps of this Capitol, singing "God Bless America."

Now, that took me roughly one minute to find with Google (it is currently the third hit on the search for " 'George Bush' 9/11 tragedy".  So how much time did Krugman spend preparing his UPDATE and history lesson? My guess - he moved at the speed of reflexive hate.

As a bonus, the NY Times reporting is not going Krugman's way (but the night is young):

Another former high school classmate said that Mr. Loughner may have met Representative Giffords, who was shot in the head outside the Safeway supermarket, several years ago.

“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” the former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote in a series of Twitter feeds Saturday. “I haven’t seen him since ’07 though. He became very reclusive.”

“He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was ‘stupid & unintelligent,’ ” she wrote.

Well, the shooter was kicked out of school for being crazy, so evaluating his politics is really relevant only to the reflexive haters such as Krugman.

BONUS LEADERSHIP:  Is Krugman really writing in the Times that "it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers"?  Isn't this the same NY Times that just last week delivered a big wet kiss to outgoing House Democrat Alan Grayson, who (we were told) wore steel toed boots "the better to kick Republicans with, he jokes".  Ha ha!  Kicking funny, shooting tragic - I get it, but do the crazies?