Later On

A Fox news analyst has to fake a "breaking news" spot to get away from a pummeling. Watch it:

Fox host Trace Gallagher seeks a lifeline — in the form of a made up "breaking news" story about shark week on Discovery Channel — after Debbie Stabenow rips apart his arguments against the popular "Cash for Clunkers" program.

A good collection of the lies being spread by GOP opponents of healthcare  reform. They really cannot make a case against healthcare reform on the merits, so they’re reduced to disrupting town hall meetings and lying about the program. I guess that’s the way they think: win at any cost regardless of the issue, but don’t win by proposing something better, just spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Yet some people have great respect for the GOP. Go figure.

The story, by Mike Madden at Salon.com:

Turning America socialist apparently wasn’t enough for him — now President Obama is trying to make old people kill themselves, callously deny important medical procedures, funnel tax dollars to abortion clinics and wiggle the government’s way into every doctor’s office in America.

At least, that’s the sense you might have about the healthcare reform proposals Congress is considering from listening to opponents describe them. Already, conservative activists have erupted against the plan, with protesters hanging Democratic lawmakers in effigy and disrupting town hall meetings [and making death threats – LG].

As both the House and the Senate clear out of the Capitol for the month, expect the viral buzz — and the TV battle  — about what’s in the bills to grow louder and louder. The White House finally seems to have realized that the administration can’t win the policy debate without addressing some of the attacks from the right. Aides recently released a video rebutting some of the claims about what healthcare reform would and wouldn’t do. An administration official told Salon Wednesday that the White House will soon launch a Web site modeled on the "Fight the Smears" site Obama’s campaign ran last fall, where voters can find — and debunk — some of the rumors about the reform proposals, and the White House is already collecting chain e-mails at "flag@whitehouse.gov," an address Obama aides set up to receive them.

But the administration might already be behind the curve. Over the last few weeks, opponents have managed to get out their spin on the bill through talk radio, blogs, chain e-mails and other channels. And their talking points depend on a notably elastic approach to the truth. Here’s a fact check of some of the more alarming claims that the right is making about healthcare reform, claims that are already hardening into myth.

Myth 1: Democrats want to kill your grandmother…

Continue reading.

I live about a 10-minute walk from Pacific Grove, and I thought you might enjoy scrolling through the photos on Strongrrl’s blog. Take a look.

Interesting post at Mind Hacks:

There’s an excellent article in the Boston Globe about ‘grit’ – the ability to stick with a task and persevere over a long period even when the going gets tough.

The article riffs on the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth who became interested in what attributes outside of intelligence contribute to success.

“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”…

After developing a survey to measure this narrowly defined trait – you can take the survey at www.gritstudy.com – Duckworth set out to test the relevance of grit. The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score.

As the article notes, this concept of grit is not just perseverance, it’s also about keeping relevant long-term goals in mind.

When psychologists have researched ‘goal-directed action’ in the past, they’ve almost always been thinking about the here and now. Reaching, immediate problem solving and short-term achievement.

This is slowly starting to change and some cognitive scientists are now attempting to understand the psychology and neuroscience of what we might call ‘life goals’.

There’s an interesting neuroimaging study in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that looked which brain areas are active when we’re thinking about future events that are not personally relevant, compared to those that the individual holds as a personal goal.

The study extends previous work that indicates that our ability to imagine the future uses similar brain networks as our ability to remember the past, to the point where patients with dense amnesia have drastic impairments in picturing future events.

In the case of personal goals, it seems a similar network is involved, with the addition of the ventromedial and posterior cingulate areas, both frontal lobe regions previously linked to coding the emotional weight or value of an experience.

I’ve long suspected that 90% of real-world intelligence is motivation and a similar message seems to be emerging from the research.

Combine grit with a growth mindset and you’ve got a powerhouse.

From the Center for American Progress:

"Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion." The commitment may "irk some of the administration’s Congressional allies who have an eye on drug companies’ profits as" a way to pay for reform.

From the Center for American Progress:

In an interview with Bloomberg Radio yesterday, Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), rebuked congressional criticism of the health care industry. "[People] don’t want to be rejected because of preexisting conditions, and they want to make sure they have continuity of care," she said. "We’ve committed to that. That’s what our industry is doing. We are one of the first to step up and offer real change that affected our industry."

Despite Ignagni’s assurances, the industry continues to be on the offensive. Talking Points Memo has obtained a leaked e-mail from Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based pharmacy benefit manager, that both condemns the "rush to pass legislation that could fundamentally alter our current system" and calls on its employees to "take action" against health care reform by contacting their elected officials. In 2004, Express Scripts was found guilty of defrauding the state of New York of $100 million and eventually settled by paying a multi-million dollar fine.

Additionally, during congressional testimony last June, executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and Wellpoint unequivocally refused to commit to ending the practice of rescinding coverage after an applicant files a medical claim. A House subcommittee found in an investigation that those three health insurance companies have rescinded policies for nearly 20,000 policyholders and avoided paying over $300 million in medical claims over the past five years.

The subcommittee also found a number of underhanded tactics the companies used to rescind coverage to policyholders, including rescissions based on a failure to disclose a medical condition their doctors never told them about and rescissions of coverage for all members of a family based on a failure to disclose a medical condition of only one family member.

They really don’t want members of Congress to talk to their constituents. Interesting idea of democracy. Rachel Slajda for TPMDC:

Angry teabaggers and other opponents of health care reform are heckling members of Congress at their town hall meetings back home in an effort to sway the debate and drown out reform supporters.

This weekend, a group of teabaggers showed up at a town hall in Philadelphia with Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. They shouted and booed to drown out remarks from both officials and questions from the audience. The Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots reportedly brought 40 people. Watch:

In Austin on Saturday, protesters followed Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) out of a forum at a grocery store, chanting “Just say no!” after he told the crowd he’d vote for a health care reform bill even if his constituents opposed it. Watch.

These aren’t the first incidents of this kind, but we think it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll continue and intensify throughout August.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) has suspended town hall meetings …

Continue reading. Also note this:

Make sure to check out the teabaggers’ strategy memo obtained by Think Progress.

Kevin Drum has an excellent post on California’s prison disaster—lengthy, with charts, and somewhat depressing. It begins:

A couple of weeks ago I described California as "a penal colony with a nice coastline."  The coastline is still nice, but a three-judge panel has finally ordered the state to get off its ass and do something about our wretched and overflowing prison system:

California’s prisons are so overcrowded that the state is violating inmates’ constitutional rights, three federal judges ruled today in a decision imposing a cap on the prison population that will force the state to release nearly 43,000 prisoners over the next two years. The 185-page opinion also accused the state of fostering “criminogenic” conditions, compelling former prisoners to commit more crimes and feed a cycle of recidivism.

A combination of dumb drug laws, dysfunctional parole policies, "three strikes" laws passed by initiative, an endless procession of tougher-than-thou politicians, and a famously thuggish and politically powerful prison guards union has gotten California into this mess.  James Sterngold wrote about it for us last year:

California’s archipelago of 33 prisons houses more than 170,000 inmates, nearly twice the number it was designed to safely hold. Almost all of its facilities are bursting at the seams: More than 16,000 prisoners sleep on what are known as "ugly beds" — extra bunks stuffed into cells, gyms, dayrooms, and hallways. [Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger has referred to the system as a "powder keg."

….Even as Schwarzenegger has promised reform, the corrections budget has exploded during his term, from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2004 to nearly $10 billion in fiscal 2007, or about $49,000 for each adult inmate.

….For more than three decades, California has been trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle where putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has become the answer to every new crime to capture the public’s attention — from drug dealing and gangbanging to tragic child abductions. Spurred on by a powerful prison guards’ union and politicians afraid of looking soft on crime, corrections has become a bottomless pit, where countless lives and dollars disappear year after year. And now that it has metastasized to the point where even a tough-guy governor and the guards agree that the prisons must be downsized or else (see "When Prison Guards Go Soft"), every attempt at change seems stymied by inertia. The sheer size of the system has become the biggest obstacle to finding alternatives to warehousing criminals without preparing them for anything more than another cycle of incarceration. "The public believes the prison population reflects the crime rate," says James Austin, a corrections consultant who has served on several prison-reform panels in California. "That’s just not true. It’s because of California’s policies and the way it runs the system."

So will the judges be able to make a dent in all this?  Hard to say.  Every attempt to date has failed, and the LA Times quotes a spokesman from the California Attorney General’s office saying, "This order doesn’t release anybody from prison, it just orders the state to come up with a plan.We have no immediate plans to appeal this particular order, but there would definitely be thought given to appeal any order that would ultimately order releases."

In other words, they’re going to keep stalling.  Mark Kleiman comments: …

Continue reading. Here’s one graph from his post that shows why we worry—and not just about California:

Very interesting. Take a read.

I was led to this by Kevin Drum, and it’s quite interesting. Rory Stewart is interviewed by Emily Stokes of Financial Times:

“I was thinking we should do questions first and chat later,” says Rory Stewart, 36 and director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School. I ask if the distinction is absolutely necessary; we are, after all, settling down for lunch, not preparing for a seminar.

“There might,” he says, “be a holistic theory that there’s no real distinction between interview and personal chat, just like there’s a theory that there’s no distinction between development, state-building and counter-insurgency, but I like to see things in categories.” He pauses to gauge whether I’m still following: “It’s like my belief that counter-terrorism is completely different from development.”

It is perhaps not surprising Stewart has no time for small talk. He has walked 6,000 miles across Asia; written a bestselling travel book at 28, and last year was chosen as one of Esquire magazine’s 75 most influential people of the 21st century.

Upon accepting the position at Harvard, he bought a huge house in Cambridge, where he now lives alone, filling it with furniture from his family home in the Scottish Highlands – evidence, perhaps, that he had renounced the life of an adventurer and charity director in Asia to settle down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ramesh Ponnuru is a conservative Washington Post columnist—I guess that’s now a redundancy—and he came up with this gem:

Congress seems set to expand one dubious bit of stimulus: the cash-for-clunkers program. The program’s economics are screwy. Shifting around car purchases from later to now doesn’t do anything for long-term growth, while deliberately destroying assets does harm. Making it harder for poor people to buy used cars does them no favors. And artificially encouraging the production of new cars isn’t good for the environment.

This program, while small in the scheme of things, seems as good an illustration as any of Obama’s domestic agenda: It’s wasteful, it has too many conflicting goals and serves none of them well, and it’s going to grow and grow. What do you think?

His take garnered quite a few comments—for example, this one from “logicaldoubtofhumansanity”:

Cash for Clunkers is one of the most useful programs the Administration has actually created this year. It is saving dealers from laying off people, keeping people in factories, laying waste to our legions of Hummers, revitalizing our auto industry, and giving Ford some breathing space to become truly competitive again. I have no idea why you are complaining. Allow me to debunk your points.

Shifting car purchases from later to now doesn’t stimulate long-term growth, but we right now need short term stimulus so our auto industry doesn’t just collapse. Collapsing auto industry = no long term growth. Keeping people in jobs, keeping our companies healthy, I thought that was the point. Or are you suggesting we should stop cash for clunkers and pray that somehow our auto industry can make cash out of trees?

Clunkers are NOT assets, they are liabilities. Cars depreciate once they are driven off the dealer lot, so I have no idea where you got the idea of clunkers as assets…

How does the Cash for Clunkers make it harder for people to buy used cars? Oh you want people to buy those cars that pollute the environment while pissing away our wealth to OPEC? Also, there are still plenty of used cars in the market, Cash for Clunkers does not destroy that supply—i.e., it is still there. What Cash for Clunkers does is increase demand for fuel efficient cars. People can still buy the used cars that are STILL sitting in used car dealer lots, the program just shifts the demand towards fuel efficient cars.

There is no artificial creation of new cars as the program is intended to replace clunkers, not giving a check to Americans to buy fancy new cars (unlike GW Bush’s Tax credits). Again, if you raise this as an environmental concern, why did you bring up allowing people to buy fuel inefficient clunkers in the previous point?

This program is ingenious: one dollar spent here can stimulate jobs, increase US auto fuel efficiency as a whole, keep our auto industry afloat, and decrease our dependence on foreign oil. I thought all conservatives want a stronger America. I guess I am wrong?

More comments at the link.

Interesting development reported in Politico by Daniel Libit:

With the summer recess turning into a cross between election-year frenzy and an Ultimate Fighting Championship, the traditional town hall is looking less desirable by the day. The recent antics of “tea party” activists and “birthers” have provided incentives for members of Congress on both sides to seek a less vulnerable alternative to face-to-face communication. And there’s a good one:  technology.

A soon-to-be-released study of online town halls might persuade the most old-fashioned member to ditch the local armory for a “meeting” with constituents via the phone or computer. The study, slated to be published next month, shows a surprisingly large benefit to virtual forums, suggesting that pressing flesh may no longer be as important as it once was. The quaint, metal-folding-chair town hall continues, and will continue, to serve a necessary function in member-constituent relations. But the electronic version has a growing role, too.

“The satisfaction levels were unbelievable,” raves David Lazer, director of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University and one of the study’s authors.

Though politicians may not be ready to go all-Web all the time, many have been testing the waters with telephone town halls. President Barack Obama participated in his own last week, which was hosted by AARP. In May, the Republican Governors Association hosted one, titled “Tea Party 2.0,” in an effort to spur on the anti-tax activists.

The central benefit of conference-call-style meetings is that they allow a member to reach a significantly larger group of people than the in-person get-together. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) hosts monthly teleconferences with constituents in which his office robocalls 30,000 constituents beforehand.

Grassley tells POLITICO that 3,000 to 3,500 participants usually end up calling in, with 700 to 800 staying on the line for at least a half-hour.

But how effective are these? …

Continue reading.

Some sites have been proclaiming the Cash for Clunkers program a failure, for reasons that are unclear to me. Certainly the program’s immensely popular, and it does seem to be working in the way intended: stimulating car purchases while at the same time replacing low-mileage with high-mileage vehicles. According to this site, the most common cars turned in and purchased:

The Ten Most Traded-In Vehicles (vehicle’s EPA mileage)
1. 1998 Ford Explorer (14-17 mpg)
2. 1997 Ford Explorer (14-18 mpg)
3. 1996 Ford Explorer (14-18 mpg)
4. 1999 Ford Explorer (14-18 mpg)
5. Jeep Grand Cherokee
6. Jeep Cherokee
7. 1995 Ford Explorer (15-18 mpg)
8. 1994 Ford Explorer (15-18 mpg)
9. 1997 Ford Windstar (18 mpg)
10. 1999 Dodge Caravan (16-18 mpg)

The Ten Most Purchased Vehicles (vehicle’s EPA mileage)
1. Ford Focus (27-28 mpg)
2. Honda Civic (24-42 mpg)
3. Toyota Corolla (25-30 mpg)
4. Toyota Prius (46 mpg)
5. Ford Escape (20-32 mpg)
6. Toyota Camry (23-34 mpg)
7. Dodge Caliber (22-27 mpg)
8. Hyundai Elantra (26-28 mpg)
9. Honda Fit (29-31 mpg)
10. Chevy Cobalt (25-30 mpg

I don’t see how that’s a failure. Perhaps a conservative commentator will explain.

I’m not sure why the Jeep EPA mileage is not included. You can see it here.

Had to use my gold-laced black-onyx Elite Razor once more. I used my new Semogue 1305 boar brush, and I can tell it needs some breaking in. The handle is very nice: painted beechwood and very comfortable. I got a good lather from the Proraso Green Tea and Aloe shaving soap—which does indeed have some menthol in it. Three passes, taking the brush to the soap for each lathering, and a face wonderfully smooth. Then a splash of Proraso aftershave, and I’m ready for tea.