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"When you allow the debate to shift so far to the right, you lose the politicial space to end up in a..."

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:11:15 +0000

“When you allow the debate to shift so far to the right, you lose the politicial space to end up in a safer, more productive middle. You look at the health care debate [of 2009]. That could have and should have been a debate between a single-payer system and some market-driven reform things on the right end. Instead you got market-driven reforms on the left and death panels on the right. And so we ended up in the middle. Better than zero, but not nearly the positive impact we could have had if we had a healthier set of boundaries to begin with.”

- Baratunde Thurston on Melissa Harris-Perry (via alexch)

"But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen..."

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:31:40 +0000

“But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations. ¶ First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t. ¶ Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.¶ Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they ‘have not used a government program.’”

- Paul Krugman’s article “Moochers Against Welfare” from his op-ed column in the New York Times. Krugman has an openly liberal bias, but the questions he raises about why working-class Americans appear to be acting against their best interests deserve more consideration on both ends of the political spectrum.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? has an informative entry on Wikipedia.

"Europe’s richer nations, led by Germany, resist institutionalizing any substantial flow of money..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:19:24 +0000

“Europe’s richer nations, led by Germany, resist institutionalizing any substantial flow of money toward Greece apart from a modest amount of development aid long made available to Europe’s poorer regions for specific projects. In Germany, the notion of a so-called transfer union, which many economists see as essential to any enduring common currency, is still firmly resisted. […] As in the euro zone, there are questions even within Britain about the value of its union. But they are driven more by political and cultural divisions than monetary ones. The Scottish national leader Alex Salmond is pushing for a vote that might provide Scotland independence from Britain, while remaining vague on whether the Scots should then abandon the pound to adopt the euro.”

- “The Welsh Economy Slips, but London Cushions the Fall” by Landon Thomas, Jr. in the New York Times. The article discusses why monetary union appears to work well within Great Britain, but doesn’t work well in Europe.

"‘Much of the politics we have today is strident and polarized and mean,’ says Lee..."

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:46:20 +0000

“‘Much of the politics we have today is strident and polarized and mean,’ says Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic House member who now runs the Center on Congress at Indiana University. ‘The fundamental problem, of course, is we do not show respect to those who are involved.’ Hamilton points out that while everyone pays lip service to the idea of civility, few will castigate a politician for being impolitic. Instead, the media always show some love for confrontation, while constituents may well reward a politician for taking an aggressive stance against another politician they don’t like.”

- Alan Greenblatt’s story “The Public Respects Civility, But Rewards Rudeness” on the NPR website

"Glad tide is turning on SOPA: don’t need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:03:00 +0000

“Glad tide is turning on SOPA: don’t need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits of open net. Speeding is illegal too: but you don’t put speed bumps on the motorway.”

- Tweets from Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, head of the Digital Agenda for Europe

"Iowa Republicans, after two weeks of trying to decide who won the caucuses they held earlier this..."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:10:00 +0000

“Iowa Republicans, after two weeks of trying to decide who won the caucuses they held earlier this month, announced Thursday that they simply could not tell.
At a news conference in Des Moines, we were told that Rick Santorum appeared to be 34 votes ahead, reversing the outcome that favored Mitt Romney on the morning after caucus night by eight votes.
It seems that eight of the precincts (out of 1,774) were not fully able to report on the preferences of those who showed up to participate on Jan. 3. Something happened to the records of who was for whom.
‘Maybe a door was open and they just blew out,’ said one Republican in Des Moines, perhaps only half in jest.”

- Ron Elving’s NPR blog on how Iowa Republicans don’t really know who came out first in their caucuses.

"What the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan revolution never happened...."

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:29:27 +0000

“What the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan revolution never happened. It was a campaign slogan. Government wasn’t reduced; taxes were cut marginally, but the basic functions of the federal government didn’t change.”

- David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director quoted in the NPR story “Will The Real Ronald Reagan Please Stand Up?”

SOPA and media industries' failure to innovate

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:40:41 +0000

SOPA and media industries' failure to innovate:

Just keeping in mind some of us in the media industries can’t afford to innovate as much as we’d like, this is an interesting collection of facts with some structure that helps underline what happens when the world of intellectual property changes completely in a handful of years.

You can’t blame everything on the film industry, though, and people who take without giving anything back can do so much more effectively when they leverage technology, but the film industry as a whole has made it hard to give them a fair price via the best and most convenient distribution channels in existence.

Monetization is the answer. Instead of shutting everything down, why don’t they propose some legislation to get some of the money that’s being made through all this downloading?

How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:52:36 +0000

How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece:

In her piece “How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece”, Chana Joffe-Walt describes the efforts of Diomidis Spinellis to retrieve taxes owed to the Greek government, the lack of which has forced Greece into its current debt crisis. This article shows an excellent example of how technocrats are hampered by factors outside of the domain of the problem they are addressing. You can create accountability, but without a sense of responsibility coming from local culture, this approach is doomed to fail.

"There is an easy, conservative argument to make about taxes — and even about the 47 percent...."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:25:56 +0000

“There is an easy, conservative argument to make about taxes — and even about the 47 percent. Our code is a block of swiss cheese, with $1 in holes (tax expenditures) for every $2 in cheese (revenue). We can lower rates and raise revenue — for my conservative friends, I will say: “moderately!” — by exchanging lower tax rates for lower tax giveaways. Instead of this, some Republicans, having spent three decades demanding lower taxes every single election, are still professing utter shock and disgust that these tax cuts have helped the poor avoid income taxes … while simultaneously proposing one of the largest tax cuts ever for the rich.”

- Writer Derek Thompson in his article for The Atlantic “The GOP’s Weird Obsession With Poor People Not Paying Enough Taxes“

To his credit, Romney hasn’t been going after the poor.

"By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who..."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:46:42 +0000

“By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side.”

-
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch on the National Defense Authorization Act, Section 1021.

Law to stick it to US tax evaders means hardship for US expats

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:34:00 +0000

Overseas Exile caught this one in his writeup of a provision that was slipped into a jobs bill at the end of last year. The New York Times writes

Legislation meant to help the United States government locate overseas assets of American tax cheats created little stir when it was quietly slipped into a jobs bill last year.

But the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, as it is known, is now causing alarm among businesses outside the United States that fear they will have to spend billions of dollars a year to meet the greatly increased reporting burdens, starting in 2013. American expatriates also say the new filing demands are daunting and overblown.

As pointed out by the above, this will likely mean that foreign banks will simply not deal with US citizens as a result since the costs of maintaining accounts will be too high due to the costs of compliance and potential penalties.

Teenage girl spends three years in prison before her police-coerced confession sets her free

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:04:53 +0000

NPR details the case of a teenage set free after a coerced confession when she was 16 years old:

Homicide detectives are often required to confront the people they question. But in the case of a teenage girl whose baby has been dead for 27 hours and who pleads and cries through much of the interview, Truong’s attorney, Ed Ryan, says this is psychological torture.

“Their interrogation was designed not to determine the truth, not to get at the facts,” says Ryan, who wasn’t present for the interrogation, when Truong didn’t yet have a lawyer. “Their intention was designed to force her to confess to doing it in the way they figure she did it. They are the ones that force-fed her the word ‘suffocation.’ “

It seems like the way this confession was extracted deserves more investigation into the methods used by these detectives.

Here’s a link to the entire article, with audio at the top.

A merit-based pay system for teachers that has a real payoff

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:18:00 +0000

During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.

That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.

“Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay,” said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. “I know they value me.”

That is exactly the idea behind what admirers consider the nation’s most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers. This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises.

Cuban embargo doomed by demographic shift

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:29:03 +0000

Cuban embargo doomed by demographic shift:

Newer economic Cuban emigrants are starting to outnumber the anti-Castro political refugees, and they are pushing for more ties to Cuba.

"They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there for them to change,..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:48:18 +0000

“They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there for them to change, to elaborate on, to add to, to improve, to do whatever they want with it. They don’t see this as a subversive act. They see the Internet as a collaborative community and everything on it as raw material.”

- Stephen Frailey, head of the undergraduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan quoted in the New York Times.

"The Media's Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Campaign Coverage"

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:09:47 +0000

"The Media's Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Campaign Coverage":

The Atlantic: The media has deaf, dumb, and blind in covering the GOP nomination race http://t.co/aO9qrYNI

Some GOP presidential nomination candidates are saying things so far outside of the mainstream that we are left questioning where the mainstream actually is.

"Block That Metaphor!"

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:58:00 +0000

"Block That Metaphor!":

Steven Pinker reviews Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff

"When Cognitive Science Enters Politics"

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:57:00 +0000

"When Cognitive Science Enters Politics" :

A rebuttal to Steven Pinker’s review.

It’s probably important to know that in Linguistic science, there are two major schools—the old Generativist school, centred on the work of Noam Chomsky and whose intellectual home is MIT, and the newer Functionalist school, which is represented by George Lakoff.

"Lies, Damned Lies and Politifact"

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:56:00 +0000

"Lies, Damned Lies and Politifact":

The Atlantic: Lie, damn lies, and #Politifact http://t.co/yJidOafj

People have opinions and Poltifact is staffed by people, so they end up being pundits just like everyone else.