Later On

Steve Benen:

In about two hours, the Senate Democratic leadership will try to bring a bill to the floor on Wall Street reform. The goal, of course, is to start the debate. If the threats are accurate, every Republican in the chamber will vote this afternoon to block the debate from getting underway, and since there will "only" be 59 votes out 100 to get the process started, the GOP obstructionism will have its desired effect.

Efforts to find a bipartisan compromise continue — by all accounts, there is broad agreement on most of the key elements of the proposal — but in the meantime, Republicans now have a new strategy in mind.

Senate Republicans are working to finalize their own version of legislation to tighten regulation of the nation’s financial system, and aides said their version could be put forward as a rival to the Democrats’ proposal if a bipartisan deal is not reached before an important procedural vote on Monday afternoon.

Republicans, including Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, have said they would use the procedural vote to block the start of debate on the Democrats’ bill unless the Democrats agree to make substantial changes in it. But in a political climate of public impatience and anger at Wall Street, it was not clear how long the Republicans could hold ranks in delaying the bill.

The development of a Republican alternative suggests that party leaders are determined to draw contrasts between their preferred approach to policing Wall Street and that of the Democrats.

Let’s pause to acknowledge an often overlooked detail. The Senate has a mechanism — it’s called a floor debate — which is actually pretty useful in a situation like this. Senators can present their ideas to their colleagues, in an entirely open and transparent process. Amendments can be proposed, considered, and voted on. Language can be altered. Provisions can be improved or eliminated. It’s all part of how the process was designed to work.

Once the debate is complete, senators can vote for or against the bill, and support or oppose a filibuster.

But Republicans have a different approach in mind — they don’t want to even start the debate. Despite all the talk of the last year about transparency, GOP officials insist that all work on Wall Street reform occur behind closed doors, and the ideas that could be debated on the floor are instead hashed out in secret, in between Republican fundraisers with representatives of the very institutions affected by the legislation.

This is ridiculous. As Matt Yglesias explained this afternoon, "On financial regulation, over the months I’ve heard a number of Republican Senators say reasonablish things about the bill, or about problems with the bill. But it’s time to put up or shut up. If you’re concerned the bill doesn’t address something, then write an amendment to address it. If you think the bill is too tough in some respect, then write an amendment to weaken it. There’s no good reason to insist that everything be done in a secret Shelby-Dodd negotiating process."

Instead of Republicans crafting their own version of the same bill, why don’t they just bring those ideas to the floor as part of the debate? Why are they so afraid of having a public discussion about bringing some safeguards and accountability to a financial industry that nearly destroyed the global economic system?

Jill Laster at the Chronicle for Higher Education:

The owner of a new Web site wants his search engine to become an easy way to comb through the open courseware of many colleges.

About 1,800 courses, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are indexed on OCW Search for starters, says the operator, Pierre Far. Polling on the Web site, which went online this week, will determine what courses to add next; those at Stanford University are in the lead, and Mr. Far plans to add them in the next few days.

Mr. Far, who is not affiliated with a college, said he created OCW Search after looking for  online material for statistics. He browsed open-courseware Web sites and downloaded some courses, finding some that were useful and others that weren’t.

"This combination of having to browse each university’s course collection separately and then having to read through the contents of each course before finding those directly relevant is why I thought a search engine would be helpful," Mr. Far said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.

OCW Search downloads the contents of each course and indexes its text. That allows for descriptions more detailed than those available through Google searches.

Other ways to sift through open courseware are also out there, including OCW Finder, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and the Online Education Database collection.

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog:

What’s really disturbing is that the feds claimed that this is standard procedure.

A Valley man says he was pulled over Wednesday morning and questioned when he arrived at a weigh station for his commercial vehicle along Val Vista and the 202 freeway.

Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.

Both were born in the United States and say they are now both infuriated that keeping important documents safely at home is no longer an option.

Jackie says, “It doesn’t feel like it’s a good way of life, to live with fear, even though we are okay, we are legal…still have to carry documents around.”

A representative at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returned 3TV’s calls after researching the incident and she said this was standard operating procedure.

The agents needed to verify Abdon was in the country legally and it is not uncommon to ask for someone’s birth certificate.

If you vacation in Arizona and you’re a US citizen, better take along your birth certificate. If you have one. (Some born in the US don’t have them.)

I have to say that I don’t like countries that act like this.

Interesting post by Paul Krugman on his blog:

There’s been a huge outpouring of blogospheric discussion about “epistemic closure” on the right: a complete refusal to look at evidence or arguments that don’t come from the like-minded. I don’t have much to say about all that aside from the fact that it’s obvious, and has been going on for years.

But I think it’s worth pointing out that something similar has long been true in macroeconomics. And like the political version of epistemic closure, it’s not a “both sides do it” issue. It’s a fresh-water phenomenon; salt-water macro isn’t subject to the same problem.

Here’s what I mean: ask a grad student at Princeton or MIT, “How would a new classical macro guy answer this?”, and the student can do it; classes at saltwater departments teach real business cycle theory, and good students can tell you what it says even if their professors have a different view.

But students at freshwater schools — or, alas, many of their professors — can’t return the favor. It’s been painfully obvious since the crisis broke that people at Minnesota, or even many people at Chicago, have no idea what New Keynesian economics is all about. I don’t mean they disagree, or think it’s garbage, they literally have no idea what the concepts are. And that’s why they reinvent 80-year-old fallacies when they try to discuss the subject.

It’s interesting to ask why this sort of cocooning is a feature of the right but not the left. But it’s very real, and has a dire impact on economic as well as political discourse.

Update: A macroeconomist emails:

Your blog today, Epistemic Closure In Macroeconomics, is painfully true. I’ve in fact so many times for the last few years thought exactly the same.

What’s been even more disturbing for macroeconomists of my generation is that lots of these guys have started controlling the journals — with just the same fanaticism as the political right– which has created pretty seriously perverse incentives. So they won’t even read certain stuff, while people on the other side are open minded. I think this must be pretty unique for macro.

…

With perhaps some exaggeration … editors at four out of five top journals simply refuse even to read papers which feature nominal rigidities! With the promotion criteria of way too many departments being simply counting publications in top five journals anybody can pretty much guess what sort of incentive structure this has created in the profession …

This is a very cool column by Steven Strogatz on probability computations:

Have you ever had that anxiety dream where you suddenly realize you have to take the final exam in some course you’ve never attended?  For professors, it works the other way around — you dream you’re giving a lecture for a class you know nothing about.

That’s what it’s like for me whenever I teach probability theory.  It was never part of my own education, so having to lecture about it now is scary and fun, in an amusement park, thrill-house sort of way.

Perhaps the most pulse-quickening topic of all is “conditional probability” — the probability that some event A happens, given (or “conditional” upon) the occurrence of some other event B.  It’s a slippery concept, easily conflated with the probability of B given A.  They’re not the same, but you have to concentrate to see why.  For example, consider the following word problem.

Before going on vacation for a week, you ask your spacey friend to water your ailing plant.  Without water, the plant has a 90 percent chance of dying.  Even with proper watering, it has a 20 percent chance of dying.  And the probability that your friend will forget to water it is 30 percent.  (a) What’s the chance that your plant will survive the week?  (b) If it’s dead when you return, what’s the chance that your friend forgot to water it?  (c) If your friend forgot to water it, what’s the chance it’ll be dead when you return?
Although they sound alike, (b) and (c) are not the same.  In fact, the problem tells us that the answer to (c) is 90 percent.  But how do you combine all the probabilities to get the answer to (b)?  Or (a)?

Naturally, the first few semesters I taught this topic, I stuck to the book, inching along, playing it safe.  But gradually I began to notice something.  A few of my students would avoid using “Bayes’s theorem,” the labyrinthine formula I was teaching them.  Instead they would solve the problems by a much easier method.

What these resourceful students kept discovering, year after year, was a better way to think about conditional probability.  Their way comports with human intuition instead of confounding it.  The trick is to think in terms of “natural frequencies” — simple counts of events — rather than the more abstract notions of percentages, odds, or probabilities.  As soon as you make this mental shift, the fog lifts.

This is the central lesson of “Calculated Risks,” a fascinating book by Gerd Gigerenzer, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.  In a series of studies about medical and legal issues ranging from AIDS counseling to the interpretation of DNA fingerprinting, Gigerenzer explores how people miscalculate risk and uncertainty. But rather than scold or bemoan human frailty, he tells us how to do better — how to avoid “clouded thinking” by recasting conditional probability problems in terms of natural frequencies, much as my students did.

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This is repugnant:

Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 23, 2010

The PBS television program Frontline selectively edited an interview with a single-payer health insurance advocate, and film footage of people protesting in support of single-payer, to make it look as though they were advocating a public option instead.

The public option proposal would have offered individuals a government-run health insurance program as an alternative to the mandatory purchase of private health insurance — a completely different proposal than universal, single-payer health insurance.

The Frontline report shows footage of single-payer advocate Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program, and a group of people protesting in favor of a single-payer plan. Flowers is heard saying members of her group were shut out of a Congressional hearing, but the program never mentions the single-payer concept.

Instead, viewers are led to believe that Flowers and the protestors were referring to a public option concept, since that was the only progressive proposal discussed in the program.

Frontline effectively made it look as though single-payer advocates did not even exist.

It’s not the first time Frontline has pushed single-payer out of the debate, either. When they did the same thing last year and were called on it, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler attributed the omission to a tight deadline and called it a "missed opportunity."

Great post by Tim Wise, pointed out by Constant Reader:

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters – the black protesters – spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that …

Continue reading. There’s lots more.

Take a look.

Take a look.

Interesting post at Transform:

Back in February This blog reported on an interesting page stumbled across on the UN Office of Drugs and Crime’s website Youthnet pages. Coming from one of the bastions of prohibition this was an almost alarmingly sensible page about cannabis use, risks and laws. The section on laws was particularly striking as it was an unambiguous critique of the failed enforcement approach to managing cannabis risks, and made a rational and eloquent argument for the decriminalisation of the possession and use of cannabis.

Disappointingly, just two days after we blogged about it, the entire section on cannabis law reform disappeared from the page, despite having sat unbothered (and, one assumes, unread) since 2007 (the deletion blogged here). This seemed a little churlish in light of the fact that numerous member states have already adopted the approaches suggested in the text, for the very reasons it outlined so clearly – indeed Canada is given as a case study. Somewhere within the UNODC machinery a different – more hard-line old-school prohibitionist view clearly held sway, one that is curiously intolerant of any dissent from the most punitive interpretations of the conventions. They made sure the offending passage was removed, in effect, censored.

Even this was rather fumbled, with a reference to the now deleted section four on cannabis laws remaining in the opening paragraph, until it was spotted by a Transform blog commenter, at which point it too disappeared the following day.

Now, however, the contentious section four on cannabis laws has reappeared but, in a rather troubling development, it bears no resemblance to its previous incarnation. In a rather audacious bit of textual revisionism, all discussion of the merits of decriminalisation have been excised (references, authors, and all), with a call for proportionality in sentencing and alternatives to custody, the only vague nods in the direction of reform. Instead we now have an INCB-style argument for maintaining the criminal status of users, along with some stern warnings about the ‘multiple negative health and social consequences’ of cannabis use (that notably doesn’t sit easily, in its tone or content, with the more measured risk analysis in the preceding three sections).

Thanks to the excellent Internet Archive Wayback Machine we can now bring you all three versions of the page:

• Original Page (23.02.10)
• Page with section 4 deleted (25.02.10)
• Current Page with ‘revised’ section 4 re-inserted (accessed 30.03.10)

Calls to UNODC have failed to produce an account of why the decision was made (any explanation would still be welcome).

In many respects this episode is somewhat trivial, but it does point to something more important.What are they so concerned about that they should feel the need to resort to this sort of censorship and revisionism? It certainly isn’t the Transform blog, so one can only assume it is born of a more fundamental concern. Decriminalisation, despite the fact that it is happening across the world, from the US and Canada, South and Central America, Australia, Israel, and much of mainland Europe, is a direct challenge to the fundamental punitive tenets of prohibition, at least in the quasi-religious formulation of some key hardline voices. For them, evidently, this means that dissent (even rational discussion or evaluations of alternative approaches) is a heresy that must be stifled. And if that means rather lame Orwellian rewriting of obscure pages of official websites, so be it.

The revised text follows, but first here is the original text of section 4 ‘The effect of the cannabis laws’ as it read before we blogged about it. The text considered too dangerous for delicate UNODC web readers (that didn’t make the revised version) is highlighted in red [see original post for the red text – LG].

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Sullivan:

New York’s cover story convinces Josh Green that Palin isn’t running:

Palin’s prospects in the Republican Party are a good deal dimmer than her star wattage suggests. She’s tallied middling performances in early straw polls and shows no inclination to embark on the grassroots work required of a presidential candidate. More to the point, this article makes clear that, were there any doubt, her preoccupying concern is "building her brand"–less in a political sense than a financial one. Palin may yet make a bid for the White House. But all evidence suggests that when the time comes to choose between earning money and running for president, Palin will choose money.

This is the conventional view in Washington. I think it’s completely wrong, dangerously complacent, and out of touch with profound shifts in media, fundraising and politics. The political parties are weaker than they once were. The elites cannot control grass-roots Internet-driven phenomena. Look at Obama. He seems a natural president now, but Washington dismissed his chances – as they are now dismissing Palin’s – right up to the Iowa caucuses. And because Palin is such a terrifying – truly terrifying – prospect for the US and the world, I think such complacency, rooted in cynicism about Palin’s mercenary nature, is far too reckless.

Look: what we have seen this past year is the collapse of the RNC as it once was and the emergence of a highly lucrative media-ideological-industrial complex. This complex has no interest in traditional journalistic vetting, skepticism, scrutiny of those in power, or asking the tough questions. It has no interest in governing a country. It has an interest in promoting personalities and ideologies and false images of a past America that both flatter and engage its audience. For most in this business, this is about money. Roger Ailes, who runs a news business, has been frank about what his fundamental criterion is for broadcasting: ratings not truth. Obviously all media has an eye on the bottom line – but in most news organizations, there is also an ethical editorial concern to get things right. I see no such inclination in Fox News or the hugely popular talkshow demagogues (Limbaugh, Levin, Beck et al.), which now effectively control the GOP. And when huge media organizations have no interest in any facts that cannot be deployed for a specific message, they are a political party in themselves.

Add Palin to the mix and you have a whole new machine in American politics – one with the capacity, as much as Obama’s, to upend the established order. Beltway types roll their eyes. But she’s not Obama, they say. She doesn’t know anything, polarizes too many people, has lied constantly and still may have dozens of skeletons in her unvetted closets.

To which the answer must be: where the fuck have you been this past year?

It doesn’t matter whether she’s uneducated, unprincipled, unaware and unscrupulous. The more she’s proven incapable of the presidency, the more her supporters believe she is destined for it. It’s a brilliant little gig she’s devised. She may be ignorant, but she is not stupid. She has the smarts of all accomplished pathological liars and phonies. And this time, she will not even bother to go on any television outlets other than Fox News. She will be the first presidential nominee never to have had a press conference. She will give statements by Facebook. She will speak directly to the cocoon that is, at least, twenty percent of Americans. The press, already a rank failure in exposing her fraudulence, will be so starstruck by the chance to make money that we will never have a Couric-style interview again. it will be Oprah all the time. Because Palin lives in an imaginary world, the entire media world will be required to echo it or be shut out.

More to the point, creating a false narrative around a total phony and peddling her as a savior has no financial downside for the FNC/TalkRadio party. So this phenomenon will grow and grow. I mean: can you imagine Romney or Pawlenty inspiring this sort of fervor? Check this out in the New York piece:

Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty. Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans. Fifty-six percent make over $50,000 a year, according to a Times/CBS poll. Running for president is no doubt part of her business model. But forget elections (as many Palin supporters already seem to have done); she’s already the president of an alternative America—and also its CEO.

And with that power and that potential funding, how can someone who said she wanted to be president as long ago as 1996 resist? Josh can dream all he wants. She is the biggest political power after Obama in this country. And, unless the full truth emerges with such force it cracks even the FNC/RNC sealed universe, she will run against him in 2012.

Kevin Drum:

"Given the durability and predictability of the arguments involved," says Ross Douthat, "it’s hard to come up with something interesting to say on the question of Christianity versus the ‘new’ atheists." True enough. But he says David Bentley Hart has done it, and as evidence he points us to Hart’s recent essay in First Things about his weariness with the anti-God contentions of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Their arguments, he says, are just the same-old-same-old, delivered with too little reflection, too much bombast, and a way-too-healthy dose of contempt. And maybe so. Atheists can be as annoying as anyone else, after all.

Unfortunately, when it comes to annoying and stale rhetorical tropes, Hart shows that he’s no slacker either. This is perhaps my least favorite of all time:

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

You can almost hear Hart sighing, "Please Lord, deliver me from cretins." But his pretensions are, if anything, even more insipid than anything coming from the New Atheists: they are, like Jesus, at least trying to reach ordinary people in language that’s meaningful to them. Hart wants nothing to do with that. Here he is objecting to the New Atheists’ view that God is "some very immense and powerful being" who explains nothing because he, himself, then needs to be explained:

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

You can decide for yourself whether this string of words actually makes anything about God more understandable. I doubt it. But it hardly matters, because even if you like Hart’s formulation, this is simply not the lived experience of Christianity for most people. Hart would like us to believe that anyone who hasn’t spent years meditating on Aquinas and Nietzsche isn’t worth engaging with, but walk into any Christian church in America — or the world — and you’ll find it full of people who understand God much the same way Hitchens and Dawkins do, not the way Hart does. That’s the reality of the religious experience for the vast majority of believers. To call a foul on those who want to engage with this experience — with the world as it is, rather than with Hart’s abstract graduate seminar version of the world — is to insist that nonbelievers forfeit the game without even taking the field.

So: do the New Atheists recycle old arguments?

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Ed Brayton:

From the Washington Post last Thursday:

The Pakistani military is holding thousands of suspected militants in indefinite detention, arguing that the nation’s dysfunctional civilian justice system cannot be trusted to prevent them from walking free, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. . . .

Top U.S. officials have raised concern about the detentions with Pakistani leaders, fearing that the issue could undermine American domestic and congressional support for the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign in Pakistan and jeopardize billions of dollars in U.S. assistance.

Oh, there’s more:

U.S. officials say they worry that the detentions will further inflame the Pakistani public at a time when the government here needs popular support for its offensives.

"They’re treating the local population with a heavy hand, and they’re alienating them," said an Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "As a result, it’s sort of a classic case going back to Vietnam; it [risks] actually creating more sympathy for the extremists."

If those administration officials actually said those things with a straight face, we must have a hell of a training program for government workers to teach them to say the most incredible things without cracking up. The word "hypocrisy" isn’t strong enough to convey how ridiculous that criticism is. We need a new word that denotes the proper "you gotta be fucking kidding me" reaction one has when they read things like this.

Glenn Greenwald opts for sarcasm:

Let’s teach those Pakistanis that we’re not going to tolerate their lawless and tyrannical detention of people without charges and trials. We won’t put up with it. Especially not when it’s "justified" with the Orwellian claim that their real civilian courts can’t handle the prosecutions and they’re "afraid" that Dangerous Terrorists might be released if they give them due process because they’re unprosecutable. Kudos to the Obama administration for teaching them that countries that live under the Rule of Law simply don’t deny people trials based on such excuses. It’d be one thing if they were assassinating these people without any charges or trials — that, of course, would be understandable — but not detaining them. We’re the Leader of the Free World and we simply can’t be seen associating with or supporting regimes that would do such a thing. Besides, unlike the U.S., it’s not like Pakistan really faces an Existential Threat from Islamic radicals or anything, so (unlike us) they really have no acceptable excuse for doing these things.

He also notes that Pakistan is not the only target of our cognitive dissonance:

And the NYT today also reports that U.S. officials are demanding that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki investigate a now-closed, undisclosed secret prison in Baghdad where Sunnis were held without charges and tortured; Look Backward!, we demand, and impose accountability for such heinous crimes!

I’m running out of adjectives for this kind of craven, shameless hypocrisy.

Interesting column by Greenwald:

Ross Douthat, The New York Times, today:

In a way, the muzzling of "South Park" is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. . . . But there’s still a sense in which the "South Park" case is particularly illuminating. . . . [I]t’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all. . . .Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.  Except where Islam is concerned.

The New York Times, March 28, 2010:

A Texas university class production of "Corpus Christi," by Terrence McNally, below, has been canceled by college officials citing "safety and security concerns for the students" as well as the need to maintain an orderly academic environment, The Austin Chronicle reported. "Corpus Christi," Mr. McNally’s 1998 play depicting a gay Jesus figure, was scheduled to be performed on Saturday as part of a directing class at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Tex. But early on Friday, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst condemned the performance, saying in a press release that "no one should have the right to use government funds or institutions to portray acts that are morally reprehensible to the vast majority of Americans." Although Tarleton’s president, F. Dominic Dottavio, first defended the students’ right to perform a play he considered "offensive, crude and irreverent," university officials changed course late Friday night, canceling the performance after receiving threatening calls and e-mail messages, according to The Star-Telegram.

Dallas Star-Telegram, April 8, 2010 (h/t Queerty):

A Fort Worth theater that had agreed to show a student-directed play with a gay Jesus character has withdrawn its offer.  The board of directors of Artes de la Rosa, which runs The Rose Marine Theater on North Main Street, decided Thursday against offering the venue for the production of Corpus Christi, just one day after saying it would. A March performance set for a directing class at Tarleton State University in Stephenville was abruptly canceled after the school received threatening emails.

It looks like Ross Douthat picked the wrong month to try to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice.  Corpus Christi is the same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of "anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally."  Both back then and now, leading the protests (though not the threats) was the Catholic League, denouncing the play as "blasphemous hate speech."

I abhor the threats of violence coming from fanatical Muslims over the expression of ideas they find offensive, as well as the cowardly institutions which acquiesce to the accompanying demands for censorship.  I’ve vigorously condemned efforts to haul anti-Muslim polemicists before Canadian and European "human rights" (i.e., censorship) tribunals.  But the very idea that such conduct is remotely unique to Muslims is delusional, the by-product of Douthat’s ongoing use of his New York Times column for his anti-Muslim crusade and sectarian religious promotion.

The various forms of religious-based, intimidation-driven censorship and taboo ideas in the U.S. — what Douthat claims are non-existent except when it involves Muslims — are too numerous to chronicle.  One has to be deeply ignorant, deeply dishonest or consumed with petulant self-victimization and anti-Muslim bigotry to pretend they don’t exist.  I opt (primarily) for the latter explanation in Douthat’s case.

As Balloon-Juice’s DougJ notes, everyone from Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield to Bill Maher and Sinead O’Connor can tell you about that first-hand.  As can the cable television news reporters who were banned by their corporate executives from running stories that reflected negatively on Bush and the war.  When he was Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani was fixated on using the power of his office to censor art that offended his Catholic sensibilities.  The Bush administration banned mainstream Muslim scholars even from entering the U.S. to teach.  The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats for daring to criticize the Leader, forcing them to apologize out of fear for their lives.  Campaigns to deny tenure to academicians, or appointments to political officials, who deviate from Israel orthodoxy are common and effective.  Responding to religious outrage, a Congressional investigation was formally launched and huge fines issued all because Janet Jackson’s breast was displayed for a couple of seconds on television.

All that’s to say nothing of the endless examples of religious-motivated violence by Christian and Jewish extremists designed to intimidate and suppress ideas offensive to their religious dogma (I’m also pretty sure the people doing this and this are not Muslim).  And, contrary to Douthat’s misleading suggestion, hate speech laws have been used for censorious purposes far beyond punishing speech offensive to Muslims — including, for instance, by Christian groups invoking such laws to demand the banning of plays they dislike.

It’s nice that The New York Times hired a columnist devoted to defending his Church and promoting his religious sectarian conflicts without any response from the target of his bitter tribalistic encyclicals.  Can one even conceive of having a Muslim NYT columnist who routinely disparages and rails against Christians and Jews this way?  To ask the question is to answer it, and by itself gives the lie to Douthat’s typically right-wing need to portray his own majoritarian group as the profoundly oppressed victim at the hands of the small, marginalized, persecuted group which actually has no power (it’s so unfair how Muslims always get their way in the U.S.).  But whatever else is true, there ought to be a minimum standard of factual accuracy required for these columns.  The notion that censorship is exercised only on behalf of Muslims falls far short of that standard.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:

Ah, spring. Flowers! Lawn sports! Baby birds! Lots and lots of snot. Yes folks, this year’s pollen counts, especially in the southeast, are through the roof, and as our intrepid reporter Kate Sheppard wrote between sneezing fits last week, a new study from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) suggests allergies will likely become even more fierce if the planet continues to heat up.

Researchers found that not only is spring coming earlier, making for a longer allergy season, but warmer weather allows hickory and oak, two of the most allergenic tree species, to thrive almost everywhere in the US. Another factor: Some plants, such as ragweed, are actually making more pollen as the environment changes. "As trees that use the wind to pollinate undergo stress from heat or lack of water, they begin to produce more pollen to compensate," explained NWF climate scientist Amanda Staudt. Scientists have already observed this phenomenon in cities, where C02 levels are an average of 30 percent higher than in suburbs and rural areas. "Cities are where we’re seeing increased pollen production," explains Demain.

Hayfever’s not the only allergic reaction that could worsen with climate change. Sometimes, pollen from certain plants can exacerbate food allergies to related plants, says Jeffrey Demain, director of the Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Center of Alaska. People who are genetically predisposed to fruit and nut allergies, for example, may find that increased exposure to birch pollen makes their food reactions worse. Similarly, more ragweed pollen could aggravate symptoms in people allergic to melon. Also on the horizon: more aggressive poison ivy. A Duke university study found that poison ivy plants exposed to CO2 produced more potent urushiol, the allergen that causes the famous rash.

So is there any chance we’ll adapt by becoming less allergic to all that pollen? Probably not, says Demain. "We don’t become more resistant to allergies with exposure, there’s evidence that we actually become more allergic. We’ve actually seen more and more people with allergies for the past 30 years." So what’s the solution? Ultimately, the only way to fix the problem is to cut our greenhouse gas emissions, says Staudt. In the meantime, since I’m not wild about the prospect of staying inside all allergy season long, here are three things we allergic people can do to sneeze less:

• If you have a garden, choose plants with bright flowers. These are usually pollinated by insects, not the wind, meaning the pollen is generally too big to get into our nasal passages.
• Urge your city officials to plant female trees, which don’t produce pollen.
• If you live in the city (especially one of those listed below), get out to the country every once in a while. (Some cities, like Albuquerque, New Mexico, have actually enacted ordnances against planting certain kinds of highly allergenic trees, though it’s not clear how effective these rules are in lowering the pollen count.)

Each year the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America publishes a list of the most allergenic cities. Here’s the top 10 from Spring 2010:

1. Knoxville, TN

2. Louisville, KY

3. Chattanooga, TN

4. Dayton, OH

5. Charlotte, NC

6. Philadelphia, PA

7. Greensboro, NC

8. Jackson, MS

9. St. Louis, MO

10. Wichita, KS

Later this week, watch for a Climate Desk piece on how climate change could send health care costs soaring.

UPDATE: Serious problems with the simple solution described below. Take a look.

Sometimes the solution is quite simple. A less serious problem: fairly dividing a piece of cake between two people. Solution: Person A divides the piece, Person B gets first choice. No one can (validly) complain.

The more serious problem: rating agencies. Paul Krugman:

… The e-mail messages you should be focusing on are the ones from employees at the credit rating agencies, which bestowed AAA ratings on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of dubious assets, nearly all of which have since turned out to be toxic waste. And no, that’s not hyperbole: of AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006, 93 percent — 93 percent! — have now been downgraded to junk status.

What those e-mails reveal is a deeply corrupt system. And it’s a system that financial reform, as currently proposed, wouldn’t fix.

The rating agencies began as market researchers, selling assessments of corporate debt to people considering whether to buy that debt. Eventually, however, they morphed into something quite different: companies that were hired by the people selling debt to give that debt a seal of approval.

Those seals of approval came to play a central role in our whole financial system, especially for institutional investors like pension funds, which would buy your bonds if and only if they received that coveted AAA rating.

It was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt — which increasingly meant Wall Street firms selling securities they created by slicing and dicing claims on things like subprime mortgages — could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job. It’s all too obvious, in retrospect, how this could have corrupted the process.

And it did. The Senate subcommittee has focused its investigations on the two biggest credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s; what it has found confirms our worst suspicions. In one e-mail message, an S.& P. employee explains that a meeting is necessary to “discuss adjusting criteria” for assessing housing-backed securities “because of the ongoing threat of losing deals.” Another message complains of having to use resources “to massage the sub-prime and alt-A numbers to preserve market share.” Clearly, the rating agencies skewed their assessments to please their clients.

These skewed assessments, in turn, helped the financial system take on far more risk than it could safely handle. Paul McCulley of Pimco, the bond investor (who coined the term “shadow banks” for the unregulated institutions at the heart of the crisis), recently described it this way: “explosive growth of shadow banking was about the invisible hand having a party, a non-regulated drinking party, with rating agencies handing out fake IDs.”

So what can be done to keep it from happening again?

Serious problem. Simple solution:

A proposal by Matthew Richardson and Lawrence White of New York University. They suggest a system in which firms issuing bonds continue paying rating agencies to assess those bonds — but in which the Securities and Exchange Commission, not the issuing firm, determines which rating agency gets the business.

And I think the SEC should use random selection so that no person makes the choice. Four rating agencies? Roll a tetrahedron that bears on each face the name of one of the four agencies. The face on which it comes to rest determines that agency that will do the rating. This will result in the four agencies getting approximately the same amount of business, so they share equally in the fees.

Irisch Moos makes a very fine lather, especially with the Rooney 2. I had to try the Pils on a two-day beard to see how it would handle it. No problem at all—the Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade is only on its third shave, and the Pils mowed right through the stubble. This is my third shave with the Pils, not exercising any particular care, and I have yet to get a nick. Very nicely designed head.

A splash of Booster Mosswood, and I’m off to my Nordic Track again.

Bill Dwyer in the LA Times:

I have never quite gotten the Pat Tillman story out of my system. Only now am I understanding why.

It has been six years and two days since he died, his head blown off amid a pile of rocks on the side of a hill in Afghanistan, killed by guys on his own team, other U.S. soldiers. After lying about it, the military eventually called it friendly fire and treated it as a mistake. Horrible, yes, they said. But a mistake.

He was a football hero, a star safety for the Arizona Cardinals. Before that, he was a free spirit linebacker at Arizona State, whose hair flowed out of his helmet and whose tackles left physical and mental imprints.

When he walked away from a fat pro contract to become a soldier, fighting in the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan, we all swooned. What a guy, what a hero, what a story.

We are so used to pro athletes being incapable of gazing beyond their own navels, unable to fathom anything of importance beyond their next contract and ensuing trip to the jewelry store, that we couldn’t get enough of Tillman. Journalism celebrates the unusual, and this sure was.

Like other writers in the West, I had a head start. I had been face to face with Tillman, had met him, had a feel for him. Once, after an otherwise unmemorable UCLA-Arizona State game, my postgame question, as we walked along, brought him to a stop. I had danced around something controversial and he did what no other athlete, before or since, has done. He called me on it.

"That’s not what you really want to know," he said. "Ask it again."

I did, this time straight to the point. He answered the same way. I was now a Pat Tillman fan. Veteran scribe learns from long-haired linebacker.

I laughed when he was taken near the end of the NFL draft and the babblers at ESPN assured all that he was too small to make it. They had likely never talked to him, certainly never been hit by him.

I loved the stories about him riding his bike to training camp and, when he drove, parking his junky old car next to the Beemers and Mercedes in the team lot.

When he died, …

Continue reading.

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review:

The Wall Street Journal does a terrible job today of covering the ratings-agency investigation news, which is a big deal (to state what should be the obvious).

A Senate panel released smoking-gun emails showing Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s fudging their criteria on CDOs to get Wall Street business, but here’s the Journal’s lede:

New documents from a congressional inquiry shows the tense relationship between credit-ratings firms and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as they structured risky deals like the one featured in the recent fraud allegations against the investment bank.

Okay—wishy-washy. Maybe the second paragraph is better:

Such debates between credit raters and issuing companies are commonplace.

Um, no. The third?

The newly released internal emails and other communications depict Goldman bankers tussling with analysts at Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Corp. over the process of rating mortgage-backed securities.

Is there an emoticon for “throwing my hands up”? No wonder the paper stuffs this news on C3. The news doesn’t even make the paper’s “ten-point”—the “What’s News” columns of blurbs on A1.

The New York Times is much better. Here are its first three graphs:

In 2004, well before the risks embedded in Wall Street’s bets on subprime mortgages became widely known, employees at Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, were feeling pressure to expand the business.

One employee warned in internal e-mail that the company would lose business if it failed to give high enough ratings to collateralized debt obligations, the investments that later emerged at the heart of the financial crisis.

“We are meeting with your group this week to discuss adjusting criteria for rating C.D.O.s of real estate assets this week because of the ongoing threat of losing deals,” the e-mail said. “Lose the C.D.O. and lose the base business — a self reinforcing loop.”

McClatchy, whose Kevin G. Hall, has done excellent work on this scandal, one that we’ve argued hasn’t gotten enough attention relative to its outsize role in causing the crisis, has the best lede of the three:

A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation’s financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.

That’s what it’s all about, no? How long until we see charges against these guys? Remember, investors like pension funds were dependent on these ratings—and they (and we) got hosed in bad faith.

Revisit that email the NYT put in its third paragraph, and look at another it quotes in its fourth:

In June 2005, an S.& P. employee warned that tampering “with criteria to ‘get the deal’ is putting the entire S.& P. franchise at risk — it’s a bad idea.”

The Journal doesn’t get around to quoting these damning emails until the tenth paragraph. Indeed, it quotes one in the fifth that doesn’t show anything:

“I am getting serious pushback from Goldman on a deal that they want to go to market with today,” notes one Moody’s analyst in an April 2006 email. The analyst was being asked by Goldman to give more favorable terms than the ratings firm was offering.

This kind of thing matters. The Journal is the nation’s business paper of record (yes, even though Murdoch has made it more of a general-news paper) and has a leadership role in financial news much like the Times has in national news. When it downplays or misses a story, it tends to make that story seem less important—not only to people in power, but to the rest of the press.

This is a big story.