Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I think I figured out why some people are outraged at the infamous Miley Cyrus picture in Vanity Fair. The Wall Street Journal editorial page tells me that coastal elites in “Manhattan or Hollywood” (does the Bay Area count?) are totally OK with 15 year olds who are seen on TV every day by millions of people having a not-very-revealing picture of them published in a magazine. That’s because we coastal elites go to the beach a lot. And at beaches people wear swimming attire.  And surely even the salt-of-the-earth folk at the Journal know that this swimming attire leaves a lot of skin exposed. But I guess in “Buffalo, Charlotte or Iowa City,” they don’t have beaches and so they expect 15 year olds wear their niqabs until they’re 18.

But seriously, what’s there to be outraged about? The picture itself is almost impossibly tame. And it’s not like she was sitting by her pool and some papparazzo snapped a candid shot. The photo shoot was overseen and the subsequent photos approved by Miley and her parents. So what are they apologizing for? Sure, she’s 15, but she’s also a 15 year old with more national exposure, power, influence and money than most adults can ever dream of. If she’s a victim of anything, it’s her and her parents own ambition.

I mean, seriously, have you been to a high school dance before? A high school? A gathering of 15 year old girls outside of the FLDS compound? Sheesh. But I guess I’m a coastal elite, so I don’t have the “ordinary wisdom” of “Small Town USA” and can’t grasp the “photo’s essential vulgarity.”

PS – If you look at the behind-the-scenes photos that Vanity Fair released, it’s even more clear that nothing untoward was going on. But wait, the photographer, Annie Leibovitz is a lesbian! A ha! Now we know what this was all about!

The last six or so minutes of the first half in the Suns-Spurs game really demonstrates why teams would be stupid to avoid the hack-a-shaq. Shaq right now is shooting 5-14 from the line, 36%, which translates to an expected points per possession of .72. The Suns’ PPP during the regular season was 1.095. So there’s no reason why Gregg Popovich should abandon the hack, especially towards the ends of halves. Not only does it reduce the number of points the Suns score, it was also able to stop their momentum. This is especially important for a team that plays in a run-and-gun offense. When you take away the possibility of getting up the court and scoring easy buckets and force Shaq to get points at the line, it’s nearly impossible to maintain the pace and energy that the Suns best offense requires. It also forced D’Antoni to take Shaq out of the game in the last 2 or so minutes.

And it wasn’t even that bad to watch! Sure, it was kinda annoying to see Shaq get up there and brick free throws every possession, but the Spurs were still playing offense and they took Shaq out soon enough, and it was all back to normal.

But more importantly, the last six minutes of the half were a great example of why it would be impossible to coordinate the collective action problem that is enforcing a “no hack” norm. There’s just too much to gain by defecting.

Another non-trivial point in defense of the hack-of-shaq. There’s no reason why a star player shooting 36% deserves any protection from his inability to make the easiest shot in the game

So Andrew Sullivan, after Jeremiah Wright’s concerted effort to destroy the Obama campaign, throws down the gauntlet at his preferred candidate:

I reiterate that I think Obama has to make clear again that he vehemently opposes the use of race to divide and separate and inflame ancient grievances; that he wants to get beyond the racial politics of the Vietnam era; that he is dedicated to overcoming race and offering hope – not obsessing about race in order to foment anger and bitterness. Parts of the message Wright gave today were not just alien to Obama’s stated views – but actively hostile to them. Obama cannot explain that often enough.

What else does Obama need to make clear, that he opposed the Iraq War? I mean, this is just surreal coming from Sullivan, who’s been trumpeting Obama’s ability to heal festering wounds and “put an end to all that” for almost a year. I don’t know about everyone else, but I think Audacity of Hope, his 2004 convention speech, his first campaign announcement speech and the Philadelphia speech can all assure us that he isn’t a fan of “obsessing about race in order to foment anger and bitterness.”Why I think it would be good politics to, at this point, considering giving Wright the full Sistah Souljah, there’s really no need for pundits to say that he has to. Anyone with more than a few brain cells knows that Obama isn’t black nationalist firebrand, or even someone who really wants to make his campaign about race.

Mori Dinauer doesn’t think so:

although North Carolina went for Jimmy Carter in ‘76, I think we can safely consider that an aberration (before that it was 1964 as well). Now it’s true that voters are registering Democratic in record numbers in places like North Carolina, but this doesn’t necessarily point to a red-blue shift in these states. Rather, it seems that Democrats, or Democatic-leaning voters are excited about their choice, and that means high turnout and registration. But the jury’s still out on whether all these new potential Democratic votes will be enough to flip these states in the general election. Also read Holly Yeager’s take from last week on the main site.

Dinauer is certainly right that Democratic enthusiasm and registration in traditionally red states like North Carolina and Indiana is quite high, but I think she’s wrong to totally take North Carolina off the map. Rasmussen released a poll on April 12th showing McCain and Obama in a dead heat at 47% each and McCain leading Clinton by 11 points. And although this could be attributed to the attention Obama is showering on North Carolina, it still indicates that even if Obama can’t win in red states like North Carolina or Virginia, he can still make McCain fight for them, thus spreading his resources thinner and making it so he can’t spend as much time in swing states. Spreading the map liket his can be a valuable asset – just imagine if Kerry had been able to spend all the resources that he put into Pennsylvania at the end of the 04 campaign into Ohio. Clinton, while being stronger in big swing states like Ohio and Florida, doesn’t have the ability to even feign at expanding the map like Obama can.

Lane Kenworthy has a fantastic series of graphs showing how nearly all of the incrase in inequality has been due to the top 1% having a huge increase in income – both pre and post tax. Even though the difference between post tax income as a portion of pretax income has grown from 70% to 84% since 1960, Kenworthy shows that even if we had the same high marginal tax rates of the 60s and 70s – up to 70% on the richest – we still would have seen a huge leap in inequality:

Kenworthy takes these results to mean that if the next president wants to address inequality, he or she will have to do more than tinker with tax rates. While this is certainly true, what I take form Kenworthy’s data is that inequality, per se, is not all that important. When liberals talk about the economy, they always talk about inequality, but they seem to spend more time on the “middle class squeeze”, rising health care costs, lack of health insurance for 40 million people and stagnant median wages. Even though one can make a good rhetorical case that is all part of one eternal golden braid of conservative economic malfeasance, it’s also true that one could address all the aspects of our current economy that are substantively bad (lack of health care, financial insecurity, middle class squeeze) without substantially lowering inequality. Sure, even implementing the full Robert Reich agenda would involve raising marginal tax rates on the rich pretty substantially, but no one is suggesting a return to full on 1970s level tax rates, and even if they were, Kenworthy suggests that it wouldn’t affect inequality all that much.

So could we learn to live with high inequality if we just taxed those very rich people to fully finance the social welfare state of liberal dreams? I think so, and especially if Democrats – after realizing they can’t do much about inequality per se – turn to an agenda focused on social mobility. This focus would probably work better politically, because Americas are generally not resentful or jealous of the rich and instead want to be rich themselves. But they also tend to be concerned with fairness and equality of opportunity, and so low levels of social mobility ought to be a good issue to organize around.

The US fares no better on mobility as they do on inequality. Most Scandanvian and Western European countires have higher rates of income mobility than the United States. But it’s also true that income mobility and inequality appear to be related. But despite the date on inequality and mobility – which is pretty solid – from a policy perspective, I’d rather see a focus on mobility that would then result in some reductions in inequality than policies that went the other way (reduce inequality and then also get some increases in mobility).

Michael Barone claims that when you look at key rust belt states (and Florida), Clinton is more electable than Obama:

There are states where Obama runs stronger than Clinton. They include most of the West — notably Colorado, a state Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 but which has trended their way since. They include states in the Upper Midwest, like Minnesota, and New England states like Connecticut and New Hampshire, which Democrats won in 2004 but where Clinton seems weak.

But Clinton seems to run stronger than Obama in the industrial (or formerly industrial) belt, running west from New Jersey through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Michigan and Missouri. Obama’s weakness among white working-class voters in the primaries here suggests he is poorly positioned to win votes he will need to carry these states in November. This is not a minor problem — we’re talking about 84 electoral votes.

Obama has also fared poorly among Latino and Jewish voters in every primary held so far. This is of consequence most notably in Florida, which has 27 electoral votes. In 2000, Al Gore won 67 percent of the vote in Broward County and 62 percent in Palm Beach County — both have large Jewish populations. In this year’s Florida primary, Obama lost those counties to Clinton by 57 percent to 33 percent and 61 percent to 27 percent. No Democrat can carry Florida without big margins in Broward and Palm Beach.

Obama’s weakness among Latinos and Jews could conceivably put California’s 55 electoral votes in play. Los Angeles County delivered an 831,000 vote plurality for John Kerry in 2004. Most of that plurality came from areas with large numbers of Latinos and Jews.

Let’s just document the silliness here. Here’s one thing that Barone ignores when he makes the baffling claim that a Democrat could possibly lose New Jersey, Michigan or Pennsylvania. These are states that Kerry won by 7, 3 and 2.5 points respectively. Considering how generically bad the environment looks for Republicans, to think that Democrats will lose ground in any of these states – especially core blue states like New Jersey or Michigan – is just BS concern trolling. As for Missouri, Obama won that state and has the support of its popular senator Claire McCaskill. While it would certainly be a stretch for either Obama or Clinton to flip it (Bush by 7 points), if anyone could, it would be Obama. So, among those four core industrial states, Clinton or Obama will both win New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while either them could (but probably won’t) win Missouri. So it’s a wash.

Florida, of course, is trickier. While this is a state that Obama will have a harder time flipping than Clinton, it won’t be because of the Latino vote. The first thing that should be obvious is that those Latinos who heavily support Clinton are Democrats who voted in a Democratic primary, so it’s quite a jump to say that they’ll support McCain if Obama is the nominee. Latinos have always been a Democratic leaning group, and especially considering the increase in xenophobia among the Republican base and McCain’s abandonment of comprehensive imigration reform,  Latinos should be voting for any Democrat in record numbers in 2008. Jews are a bigger concern for Obama, but even so, it’s not clear if he really needs their support. Barone is right to be concerned about the Jewish vote. Considering that there’s been such a successful stealth campaign to convince hawkishly pro-Israel Jews that Barack Hussein Obama is somehow soft on Israel, I won’t be surprised if he gets the lowest margin among Jews in quite a while.

But leaving all that aside, Obama doesn’t even need to win Ohio or Florida to win the general election. Here’s how. If Obama (or Clinton, for that matter) can flip Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, he or she will get 273 electoral votes and win the election. So can Obama do it?

Bush won Iowa by a mere .67% in 2004 and Obama is leading by 9 points there compared to McCain. Also, it has a minuscule black population, putting it on the left hand side of David Sirota’s race chasm. Considering the generic Democratic advantages going into this race as well as Obama’s specific popularity there , Iowa should be in the bag.

New Mexico was another state Bush barely won in 2004, with only a .79% advantage. Once again, the general popularity of Demcrats, not too mention Bill Richardson’s Obama endorsement, should easily put him over the top.

Colorado is a state Bush won more handily, with a 4.7% advantage. But it’s one that has been trending seriously Democratic since 2004. Since 2004, it went from being a state with two Republican senators and a Republican governor to having a split delegation and a Democrat in the state-house. Democrats also hold the majority in the Colorado State Senate as well as in the State Assembly. This a state that has gone from red-tinted purple to almost solidly blue. Obama is also very strong in the Mountain West. This is a very winnable state for him.

So there you have it, Obama (or Clinton!) can win the 2008 election without winning Florida or Ohio. In fact, Obama is exceptionally well positioned to secure the nomination without those two states. Sure, Ohio and Florida are almost totemic in the minds of many Democrats, but the map has changed considerably since 2000 and even more since 2004, and so we shouldn’t be stuck in thinking that we have to win these states, when we pretty clearly don’t.

*Also, Barone is hitting the pipe pretty hard if he thinks there’s even a remote chance that Obama could lose California. I’m sorry, but a twenty point swing for the Republicans in the largest, most liberal state in the country? I don’t think so.

Via Jeralyn at  Talk Left, who of course takes Barone’s tenuous claims at face value.

Milton Friedman once said that “”there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Whether this is true as a normative claim is up for debate, but it certainly is (and if you’re a stockholder, you better hope so) from a positive claim. In the long run, corporations will do (or least will try to do) what is best for its stockholders.

So what happens to companies that volunteer to reduce their carbon footprint? Some new research by Karin Thornburn of Dartmouth indicates that their stock prices go down:

Specifically, we studied the stock market’s reaction when companies joined Climate Leaders, a voluntary government-industry partnership in which firms commit to a long-term reduction of their greenhouse gas emissions. Importantly, when the firms announced to the public that they were joining Climate Leaders their stock prices dropped significantly. Controlling for general market movements, the average abnormal stock return was -0.9% over a three-day window and -1.5% over a five-day window around the announcements. For the 46 sample firms that joined Climate Leaders, the total loss in market value was $16 billion. The stock price decline was smaller for firms in carbon-intensive industries, where regulatory action is more likely (and thus partially anticipated in the stock price), and greater for high-growth firms, suggesting that the green investments crowd out growth-related capital expenditures.

Firms joining Climate Leaders conduct a careful inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions before they subsequently announce a reduction goal. The average firm in our sample set a goal to cut its total emissions of greenhouse gases by 17%. Interestingly, the stock price plummeted even further (on average -1.3%) when the greenhouse gas goal was announced, and the more aggressive the goal, the greater the price decline. The study also included 22 firms joining Ceres, a network addressing sustainability challenges whose principles are adopted by its members as an environmental mission statement. Stock returns were largely unaffected by the Ceres announcements, perhaps reflecting—in contrast with Climate Leaders—the lack of specific environmental investment commitments in Ceres. In addition, we looked at portfolios of industry competitors, but found little movement in stock prices when their rivals joined an environmental program.

Of course, we all knew that only coordinated, mandatory action could ever convince corporations to reduce their carbon footprint, but it’s nice to have some empirical data showing that voluntary action will never work.

Yglesias notes the weirdness of Bill Simmons claiming that Rajon Rondo has experienced some vast improvement as a player, when in fact his stats have been mostly stable since last season and the only real change is the fact that he’s on a vastly better team and so has the opportunity to take better shots and contribute meaningfully to wins, rather than to the series of blow outs and debacles that typified the Celtics 2006-2007 season. So Rajon Rondo probably hasn’t, in some pure Platonic sense, turned into a better player. I doubt his trade value is that much higher, or that much higher than could have been expected last year. But what about Doc Rivers?

Doc Rivers, as anyone who read Bill Simmons last year could attest to, was the worst coach in Celtics history, the destroyer of a great franchise, a total embarrassment, a tanker etc. Has anything changed in the last year? Has he gotten any better at coaching? Of course not. Like Rajon Rondo, instead of being on a team where a discouraged and oft-injured Paul Pierce was the best player, he’s now coaching a team with the best core three players in the league. For all we know, he’s still the same, mediocre coach as always.

This, of course, brings up the question of what makes a good coach. There aren’t any statistics for coaches, because any of them would just be aggregate totals of their players performance. Of course, wins shouldn’t be the best metric for coaches. Wins can oftentimes be determined by general managers who assemble the teams. So what value added can a good coach provide? This is a very hard question to answer, and I don’t pretend to know. If anything, a coach can add, or detract, from a team’s performance on the margins.

Just look at the career of Phil Jackson. Sure, he’s won all those championships, but he’s also been able to coach the most talented teams of their respected eras. And when the Kobe-Shaq relationship finally deteriorated, he was unable to do much about it. But, on the other hand, there’s someone like Don Nelson. Nelson hasn’t been able to coach teams as good as Jackson’s, but most would say that he’s a good coach from a tactical and motivational stand-point. As far as tactics and strategy goes, he has consistently been able to innovate. He invented the point forward when he was with Milwaukee, introduced the hack-a-shaq with Dallas and brought the run-and-gun offense to suit his undersized Warriors. But how could we measure the contribution of someone like Nelson? I guess the best way to look at coach contributions would be to compare team records and stats with a certain coach to the year before without that coach, assuming that the roster remained the same. But it’s really rare for a team to significantly improve without new talent. Sure, Don Nelson was the coach of the 06-07 Warriors team that made the playoffs, but that’s also the team that jettisoned Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy and acquired Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington. There are just too many confounding variables to isolate Nelson’s contribution.

All of which brings us back to Doc Rivers. Maybe he wasn’t such a horrible coach after all, maybe it was just that he was coaching a terrible team. But even so, his coaching abilities haven’t greatly changed over the last year.

Bill Simmons is really angry about the revival of hack-a-shaq:

Name me one good/fun/useful thing that comes from hack-a-Shaq. You can’t. It’s not entertaining, it ruins the flow of the game, it’s dirty pool, and it sucks to watch. How have they not fixed this loophole? Really, it’s OK to bear-hug someone as they’re running up the court? Why can’t we give officials the leeway to say, “Look, you did that intentionally, even if we can’t technically prove it, and we are penalizing you for it”? I just hate it. I hate it. I really, really hate it. If I were coaching the Suns, I would be fouling Bowen and Duncan every time and turning it into an “Eff-You” free-throw contest so David Stern had to break away from exchanging late-night e-mails with Clay Bennett to act like a commissioner for 10 minutes and fix this unforgivable tainting of a fantastic series that could have been headed for the Pantheon if not for such a garbage turn of events. That’s not basketball. I can’t stop shaking my head.

(Two people I’m disappointed in: First, Gregg Popovich, the best coach in the league and someone who’s much, much better than this. Shame on you, Pop. And I mean that in the most condescending way possible. And second, Shaq for not telling the refs as well as the Spurs bench, “If this foofer Oberto tries to bear-hug me one more time, I’m just warning you right now, I’m going to run him over like a mack truck and send him to the hospital for the rest of the playoffs.” Come on, Shaq, you have four rings. Make a statement. Don’t put up with this crap. As you can tell, I am passionate about the evils of hack-a-Shaq.)

As someone who saw $250 evaporate before my eyes due to Memphis’ inability to shoot free throws, I should be sympathetic to Simmons’ argument, but I’m not. The hack-a-shaq debate gets to the heart of a key division between those who participate in sports and those who watch them. Those who actually participate (say, Gregg Popovich and the Spurs) care about one thing: winning games. Now, some fans share this desire – Spurs supporters, of course, are thrilled with the hack-a-shaq, but on the whole, it’s not clear why Popovich (or any other coach whose team is playing the Suns) should care about Simmons’ aesthetic preferences.

The NBA as an organization, on the other hand, is supposed to be concerned with the overall appeal of the game and making sure its an appealing product for the players and the fans. So what are they supposed to do? They already made it so off-the-ball fouls with under two minutes get punished with a free throw and possession, thus ending the embarrassing hide-and-seek spectacle that Wilt Chamberlain was forced to endure late in every game. But that was more than 40 years ago. They could do what the NCAA does and make obviously intentional fouls, like the Shaq bear-hug, result in a free throw and possession, but anyone who watched Memphis play this season knows that won’t stop a hack-a-fest.

Other teams could just wrap up Shaq when he shoots, pull at his jersey, push him in the low post or do just about anything. If Simmons watched any college games, he’d know that having a rule against intentional fouls doesn’t prevent intentional fouling. Just look at baseball. Let’s say they banned “intentional walks” and made it so there was some punishment for having the catcher actually stand up, and catch a pitch 10 feet wide of the plate. Well, anyone who watched the Giants play in Barry Bonds’ prime knows perfectly well that he got “unintentionally intentionally walked” all the time. And there is no reason to think that it would be different in basketball.

Simmons suggests that even if the NBA couldn’t make a rule to get rid of hack-a-shaq, they could informally enforce a norm that late-game hacking of a poor free throw shooter is something that’s totally unacceptable. Could an informal norm enforced purely by players and coaches work? The two best comparisons are the “unwritten rules” of baseball and what soccer teams do when a player gets injured.

The unwritten rules of baseball are informal norms that are enforced reputationally and occasionally by things like intentionally hitting batters on the teams that break these rules. The two most notable unwritten rules are not bunting and not stealing in late innings when one team has an insurmountable lead. The reason this rule exists is because bunts and steals are “unnatural” plays that are essentially trying to “force” through runs with base advances and steals as opposed to more “natural” ways of getting runs like simply hitting and advances the number of bases that you can without doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. And while this norm, from a crude cost-benefit standpoint, is worse for the team that’s up a bunch of runs, it’s ultimately one that is easy to enforce because it is reciprocal. Because the baseball season lasts 162 games, there will be a handful of games for every single team in which they get blown out. And so they know that if they don’t break these norms when they’re up, they can reasonably expect that they will get a similar treatment in a blow-out.

The second widely enforced, informal norm that would be somewhat comparable to what Simmons is proposing is what happens in soccer when a player gets injured. Because there are no time-outs in soccer, the only way to stop the game and allow for a substitution is a foul, goal or for the ball to go out of bounds. This is tricky when a player gets injured and needs to be substituted out. If the team with the injured player has the ball, they will stop play by kicking the ball out of bounds and making the substitution. But there’s a problem: now the other team has possession, purely by virtue of one of their players getting randomly injured. So, an informal norm has evolved whereby the team that originally had possession when the injury occurred will kick the ball out of play, and then on the subsequent throw-in, will get the ball back. The reason this norm can be followed is that injuries are fairly random and are pretty evenly distributed, so that no one team is likely to have way more injuries than other teams, and so following the norm will ultimately break even for everyone involved. Also, it resolves the short-term, long-term cost/benefit problem of having an injured player on the field. Of course, it’s best to get an injured player off the field as soon as possible, but if that means sacrificing possession in the short term, it’s a choice a team would rather not make. By establishing the “give back possession” norm, teams can switch out players as soon as possible to the benefit of everyone involved.

So, why has no norm against the hack-a-shaq evolved, even though we know it’s possible to enforce such norms in sports? The most obvious reason is that it works. And more importantly, it works in a limited number of cases in close games. What’s important about the baseball bunting and stealing norms is that they don’t actually affect the outcome of the game, just the margin of victory. The Hack, on the other hand, can really help teams win games by reducing the Suns expected points-per-possession from 1.14 to something approaching 1.06 (which would be the Suns points per possession if every possession ended in Shaq shooting a two). Also, as Simmons points out, the hack-a-shaq can force the Suns to take him out in late game situations, which is a huge advantage for the opposing team. Because the hack can actually change the outcome in games, most players (with the exception of those who get hacked) and coaches (including Mike D’Antoni) don’t have a huge problem with it. Teams are unlikely to adopt norms if their widespread violation will have very specific advantages to most teams and only will disadvantage a few. Awful free throw shooting is not as widespread, nor as random, as soccer injuries, and so there’s no reason for a team with decent free throw shooting to enforce a norm that only advantages team who can’t hack it from the line.

There is, of course, a simple solution to the hack-a-shaq. Players could shoot 60% from the line. If every player could hit 60% of their free throws, making a team’s expected points for every two shots at least 1.2, teams wouldn’t hack unless they were down with under 2 minutes left. And considering that they get paid millions of dollars to play in the NBA, this isn’t an unreasonable expectation. Sure, it’s harder for a 7 footer to shoot free throws, but plenty big men are able to do so. Just look at Vlade Divac, Dirk, Rasheed Wallace, Hakeem and Amare Stoudamire, all of whom have career averages above 70%. And even more infuriatingly, Shaq doesn’t seem to care about his free throw shooting. He even said “I don’t care about my [free throw shooting] percentages. I keep telling everyone that I make them when they count.” He worked with a free throw shooting coach and was able to average above 60% in the 02-03 season. He since abandoned his coach and now is back to shooting in the low 1950s.

To put it simply, atrocious free throw shooting is not endemic to basketball, the same way injuries are to soccer or the occasional blow out is to baseball. Professional basketball players should be able to shoot at least 60%, and if they don’t, they should not complain about getting hacked.

When I first criticized Michael Gerson for trying to hold up the Catholic Church’s spiritual, absolutist approach to human dignity as better than his strawman of relativistic, secularist materialism, I focused mostly on the logical and philosophical problems with his comparison. I made a passing reference to the Church’s not-exactly-fantastic-history when it comes to actually promoting human dignity universally, but I made no reference to the Church’s current policies. But as Dana Goldstein points out, the Church exercises a whole lot of influence over its adherents in the developing world, so that means it’s strictures against condom use and generally reactionary approach to family and reproductive health is doing real damage to the lives of its parishioners:

In practice, the Vatican’s rejection of both contraception and divorce can act as a death sentence for young women in the developing world. Writing in Commonweal magazine, an opinion journal edited by lay American Catholics, Dr. Marcella Alsan described her experience tending to AIDS patients in Swaziland:

…

This is the reality: A married woman living in Southern Africa is at higher risk of becoming infected with HIV than an unmarried woman. Extolling abstinence and fidelity, as the Catholic Church does, will not protect her; in all likelihood she is already monogamous. It is her husband who is likely to have HIV. Yet refusing a husband’s sexual overtures risks ostracism, violence, and destitution for herself and her children.

In poverty-stricken societies where prostitution is commonplace, women have few recourses to protect themselves sexually. By clinging to a contraception ban at odds with the realities of modern life, the Catholic Church bolsters misogynistic cultural norms that say women don’t have the right to refuse sex or insist upon having it safely…

Catholic organizations provide about 25 percent of the HIV/AIDS relief available worldwide. For that, the Church should be commended. But until Pope Benedict XVI and the entire Catholic hierarchy embrace the role of condoms in fighting AIDS, Catholic compassion will be limited by ideology. Faith leaders working on the ground have accepted that contraception saves lives. Isn’t it time for a brave American politician to ask the pope why he won’t do the same? To do so would not be disrespectful to either Benedict or American Catholics. Rather, it would recognize the Vatican’s unique power to influence the lives of its followers around the world.

So yeah, nice universal commitment to human dignity ya got going there Benedict XVI…

I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified by this, but it’s pretty cool either way. As I write this post, I’m actively using three different instant messaging applications: AIM, Google Chat and Facebook Chat. Sure, I could do my AIMing and G-chating both through g chat, but that wouldn’t be very sporting. But I’m still having some trouble sorting out the significance of this. Could it be the first step to everyone merging into the noosphere or could it be – along with the laser-armed Japanese robots – a harbinger of Sky Net seizing power and enslaving us all.

And even if it isn’t representative of some great technological or historical trend, it sure makes doing homework more difficult.

Andrew Sullivan argues, in response to Megan McArdle, that the Bush’s administration’s policy of torture, and prolictivity to commit war crimes more generally, is unique in our history:

I’m sorry but this is preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical. The United States has managed to go to war for two centuries without the president authorizing and monitoring the torture of prisoners. The Bush administration’s legalization of torture and withdrawal from Geneva is unique in American history. Yes, wars will lead to individuals committing war crimes in the heat of battle. Yes, it carries a horrifying logic. But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented. Bush really is uniquely awful as a president in this respect: an indefensible war criminal, who has permanently stained the country he represents and betrayed the soldiers who expect decency and lawfulness in their commander-in-chief.

Sullivan is right that, when it comes to agreements that mandate certain conduct in war (Geneva), the Bush administration has been egregious, but he ignores that America has committed plenty of war crimes, namely the pointless killing of civilians and waging of agressive war, in its history. And agressive war is, when it comes to war crimes, the most serious one there is. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, at Nuremberg, the main charge against Nazi war criminals was not the abuse of prisoners, torture or any of the things that Sullivan regularly writes about, but instead waging agressive war:

We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy . . . It merely requires that the status quo not be attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war. . . .

The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the Plan or Conspiracy to make aggressive war?

What’s troubling about our willingnesses to call John Yoo, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld and the like war criminals for their torture policy, is that it ignores the one key war crime: aggressive war itself. And more specifically, killing civilians and the perpetrating generalized horror on an entire country. When you think about it, compared to the hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilians killed and millions displaced, even the horrors of Abu Ghraib seem minor. But it’s rare that the act of war itself, especially among those who once fervently supported it, is called a war crime. This tendency is partially due to it being  hard to blame specific people – Yoo, Addington, Rumsfeld etc- for the perpetration of the war. After all, the war was the culmination of a popular policy that had been set in place since the Clinton administration. But considering that most Americans think that the war hasn’t prevented any attacks on us, made us safer, reduced terrorism, affected Democratic change in the middle east, or even helped out Iraqi civilians especially, we must ask, what did all these innocent Iraqis die for?

But instead of asking that question, we have become fascinated with torture, Abu Ghraib, and obsessively trying to discover if the orders to abuse prisoners came “from the top down” – all of which, often unwittingly, just helps to obscure the primary war crime. If you follow the logic that underlies the undue attention that Sullivan gives to Abu Ghraib and torture, as opposed to the massive war crime that the war itself was, you would think that the chief villains of Nazi Germany were Joesph Mengele and his coterie of sadists, as opposed to the leaders and generals who plotted and executed the wartime aggression.

Another effect of the huge amount of attention we give to torture is that it whitewashes other American wars of aggression, as well as specific war crimes, because we can say “but at least we followed the Geneva Conventions!” So Vietnam, instead of being seen as the pointless destruction of an entire nation in which hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese were killed, where we poisoned a generation or more with the likes of Agent Orange and unleashed wanton devastation on North Vietnam and Cambodia with naplam and bombing campaigns, is a war where the president didn’t authorize torture. There are also the civilian bombings of Japan and Germany, which served little military or strategic purpose, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even Robert McNamara, who helped plan the assaults on Japanese cities, described the bombings as war crimes. But, in American political discourse, this type of the war crime – the war crime that a) is the impetus for all other war crimes and b) is the offense for which we invented “war crimes” as a legal category – is often ignored, or even accepted as inevitable or laudable.

Just look at Senator Clinton. She talks about how she would restore the Geneva Conventions, shut down Guantanamo, and generally clean up the Bush administration abuses that a broad spectrum of people are worried about. But she also said that she would “totally obliterate” Iran (a country with no nuclear weapons, and according to the NIE, no solid plans to develop them) if they attacked Israel (a country with a second strike nuclear deterrent). Now, the probability of Iran attacking Israel with nuclear weapons is vanishingly low – even David Frum admits that it’s unlikely, and that if you look at the strategic considerations, entirely insane. So why would Clinton feel the need to threaten some 65 million Iranians with nuclear annihilation? And although there is a value to maintaining a credible deterrent and the like, it’s still disturbing to hear Clinton wax rhapsodically in the style of Buck Turgidson about nuclear war. But she would shut down Guantanamo and stop the torture!

What the Iraq War and the entire approach the US takes to foreign policy has taught(or should have just reminded) me that America has little appreciation for the horrors of war. Unlike Europe or Japan, which have had wars devastate their entire countries and populations, the US hasn’t had foreign troops killing civilians or occupying their country since 1812. The US has never had 161,000 men killed in a battle that only reproduced the status quo. As a nation, we are incredibly lucky. Our mass prosperity and preeminence in global affairs following World War II (as well as our victory in it) can largely be attributed to our being able to stay out of large conflicts until we had to get in, and could do so with decisive force. But today, in a world where we are the sole remaining superpower, our naiveté of the horrors of total war makes us all to likely to unleash them on others.

PS – Read Mike Meginnis on “war as a special case of peace.”

Nick Kristof makes the best possible liberal case for the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, noting that it would secure permanent duty free access to American markets for Colombians, thus increasing the wealth of poor Colombians working in export oriented industries. All of this is well and good, while the agreement would probably do little to either economies, on balance, trade liberalization and a steady regulatory environment are good things.

Where Kristof goes a bit off base, however, is when he talks about the agreement’s broader implications for our place in the world as a cooperative member of the international system. Kristof says that “If the Colombia free-trade pact is rejected and the U.S. backs away from its commitment to expanding trade, that may be the Democrats’ equivalent of Kyoto, signaling a retreat from internationalism.” Kristof is right to say that pursuing trade agreements and liberalization is just as much a part of “internationalism” as arms control or any other multilateral international agreements, but C-FTA isn’t comparable to Kyoto, or even other trade agreements. That’s because the Bush administration has managed to push plenty of FTAs – Singapore, Jordan, CAFTA – and yet didn’t get any points for being trade internationalists. That’s because these trade agreements are negotiated on a bilateral basis in which the US doesn’t have to make many concessions and mostly gets to impose their intellectual property standards onto poor countries desperate to trade with the US. A key part of internationalism is making meaningful concessions to other members of the international community, which the administration is not particularly urgent to do – in any arena.

The trade liberalization that Kristof is talking about is one that the Bush administration has pointedly refused to pursue. That would the reduction of agricultural subsidies as part of pursuing some sort of treaty or agreement coming out of the Doha round. Bush has not done this. He hasn’t tried to reduce subsidies or approach Doha with anything resembling urgency. Instead, we’ve been signing these one-off trade agreements that don’t do much to eliminate the few remaining structural barriers to total trade liberalization. Compared to our progress on Doha, or the lack thereof, whether or not the Democrats torpedo C-FTA is really small potatoes*

* It’s worth nothing, however, that if Clinton or Obama were to follow up on campaign rhetoric and unilaterally demand renegotiation of NAFTA, that would be the type of bad global citizenship that Kristof would be right to criticize.

OK, so maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but the GOP senate minority did prevent cloture on the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have allowed for women to sue for pay discrimination within 180 days of any discriminatory paycheck, as opposed to 180 days after the first discriminatory payment, thus functionally overturning Ledbetter v Goodyear. Democrats, to their credit, all voted for cloture on the bill (with the exception of Harry Reid, who voted no for procedural reasons). As Josh Patashnik pointed out, Republicans facing re-election fights, with the exception of Ted Stevens, voted for the bill. I can’t help but agree with Mark Kleiman that this could easily turn into a effective attack on McCain, who opposed the bill. That’s because opposition to the bill is tantamount to opposing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and any substantive action to combat pay discrimination.

McCain and the Republican Senate have claimed that they support equality in the work place and the reason they oppose the bill is because of the lawsuits it could generate. This is a concern that has its place, but when discussing the Ledbetter Act, it’s totally incoherent. That’s because up until Ledbetter v Goodyear , the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had never interpreted Title VII to mean that a woman had to sue within 180 days of the initial discriminatory paycheck. As the Washington Post editorial supporting the Act said, the majority of the federal courts had gone along with this approach. So when John McCain says “I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation … opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems”" he’s trying to have it both ways. If he really had a problem with the lawsuits and the government having ‘too big a role’ in employment decisions, then he should just say that he opposes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; otherwise, he is in the weird spot of supporting the principle of Title VII, while standing idly by as its enforcement mechanism gets gutted. The “problem” of these supposedely frivolous lawsuits was around from 1964 until 2007. Where was McCain then?

So let’s be honest here. Every Republican who voted against cloture for the Ledbetter Act is substantively opposed to women being able to combat pay discrimination, and is by extension, opposed to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the principle that pay discrimination is wrong at all

When most people think of lab grown meat, they immediately think “eww.” After all, our meat is supposed to come from healthy, fat, happy, grass fed cows, not some industrial chemical laboratory in New Jersey. The disgust with the prospect of lab grown meat makes sense, until you consider the alternative.

I hardly want to regale everyone with the horror of industrial farming from an ethical perspective so I’ll just leave you be with the fact that animals, especially complex mammals like cows and pigs, can feel pain. I’m not saying that they should have “rights” the same way humans do, but I am saying that there should be some moral consideration for their protection against excessive harm. There are also other significant negative effects of industrial meat production. The animal waste from industrial pig farms poisons water supplies and the air, for just one example of the negative environmental effects of meat. And most importantly, meat production is a meaningful contributor to climate change due to the methane emitted by the livestock themselves, as well as the changes in land-use due to expanding pastures for more animals.

In an ideal world, a carbon tax would make meat more expensive so as to reflect its environmental cost, but that wouldn’t deal with the ethical issue. For that, we would need to see some sort of sea change in either our attitudes towards the morality of industrial farming or some sort of alternative. And hopefully, some day, lab grown meat can be that alternative.

When I wrote my long, meandering post about the history of Fair Pay and comparable worth as concepts and policy programs, I wrote about a bill – called the Fair Pay Act – that had been proposed in April of 2007 that was the closest thing we have to a modern comparable worth proposal. Although it doesn’t mandate the beaurcatization of the labor market based on governmental evaluations of how much each occupation is “worth,”  it would still allow class action lawsuits against employers who were accused of “pay discrimination” based on gender, sex, national origin or ethnicity between occupations. So if employees in  predominately female line of work, say nursing assistants in a hospital, were being paid less than plumbers in that same hospital, the nursing assistants could file a class action suit alleges pay discrimination.

What got me confused was the recent flurry of attention surrounding a new Fair Pay Act. This Fair Pay Act, originally called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, is much more limited in scope. It merely seeks to clarify Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to say that everytime a “discriminatory paycheck” is issued, it gives grounds for an employee to sue her employer for pay discrimination. In Ledbetter v Goodyear, the court ruled that Lily Ledbetter should have sued Goodyear Tires within 180 days of the initial paycheck that reflected discrimination. But because a) employees tend not to talk about their compensation and b) because, in Ledbetter’s case, the discrimination only became obvious when a pattern of not getting raises or promotions emerged over many years, the extremely narrow time horizon for filing a suit makes no sense, if you actually want to do anything about pay discrimination.

So let me be very clear: I support the bill that is up for a vote ( and will likely fail) in the Senate today. I do not support the original Fair Pay Act. Since they’re both called the “Fair Pay Act,” I will refer to the more recent one as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, or the Ledbetter Act for short.

There probably won’t be any blogging until Tuesday night or later, I’m going to be in Evanston visiting Northwestern until then.

Will Wilkinson wrote about this new metric developed by Lant Pritchett a while ago, and Tim Harford has the definitive run-down in Slate. The idea behind income-per-natural is one I’m deeply sympathetic with. Instead of calculating the average income of people who live within a country, you calculate the income of people born in that country, no matter where they live. Although in rich countries, the difference between income per natural and GDP per capita are trivial, in poor countries like Mexico or the Philippines, much of the wealth generated by Mexicans and Filipinos comes from immigration to richer countries. But because of the way Gross Domestic Product and other measures of national income iare calculated, a Mexican who immigrates to the US lowers average income of both countries, despite accruing great gains to himself. When we become obsessed with GDP and using the nation as our standard unit of economic and social analysis, you get all sorts of absurd commentary, like Robert Samuelson attributing poverty in the US to Mexican immigrants, despite the fact that those immigrants had gotten much, much richer.

The myopia of looking at nation-states as the fundamental economic unit is also exposed in discussions of Mexican immigration. We so often hear that the “solution” to the immigration “problem” is that we should try to develop the country of Mexico. John Judis, for example, proposed that the US adopt a policy along the same lines of the EU towards Greece or Portugal – preferential trade agreements and massive investments to jumpstart the economies so they could be eventually be on an equal playing field with their rich neighbors.

The problem with this approach – which accepts the normative assumptions behind GDP per capita – is that it ignores the needs and desires of Mexicans alive right now. Developing the Mexican economy will be a long, arduous task, and so it seems mighty imperious for America to, instead of opening the floodgates to immigration, insist on Mexicans staying in America. As James Suroweicki said in his review of Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, “What’s missing is a recognition of how mysterious the secret of economic growth remains, despite all the energy that economists have poured into solving it.” Although how to best promote growth of national level economies is indeed mysterious, how to promote the increase in personal well being is not. Immigration from poor to rich countries works. And so until we can think of something better, allowing unfettered labor mobility should be the primary tool to fight global poverty.

Although, contra Klein, I don’t think Forgetting Sarah Marshall is as good as Superbad, it’s certainly in the same class as 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up. I guess the one complaint I have is, like most every other Apatow movie, the female characters aren’t written that well. Although we get some depth in Mila Kunis’ character; until the very end, Kristin Bell’s Sarah Marshall is just really awful…and really hot. But I still think this criticism is unfair: it’s hard for male comics to write good female characters, and more importantly, to get people to play them.

It’s unfair that Apatow, because his movies are now the gold standard for the romantic comedy genre, is now expected to not only write realistic, sympathetic, hilarious male characters but also do the same for female characters. He can’t do everything, after all. Why can’t we just accept that Apatow has his limits and weaknesses, and focus on how good he is at doing what he does?

But even if someone wanted to make Apatowian comedy with a female lead, it would be incredibly difficult. The leads in all of the Apatow gang’s movies are not just men, but men who are quite unappealing in many fundamental ways. They’re usually emotionally stunted, childish, slovenly, not exactly the picture of physical perfection and so on and so forth. But the way our society and culture works, it’s acceptable to have Seth Rogen or Jason Segel as a romantic comedy lead. But if you look at the women in these movies – Katherine Heigl, Kristin Bell, Mila Kunis etc – they are all very typical actresses. It’s unfortunate that, to be an actress in a lead role, you have to look like one of those three. Not just because it promotes a sexist double standard, but because it limits the opportunities to have funny women in movies.

I’m not saying that women aren’t funny, they certainly are. It’s just that it is much harder to find women who can carry a comedic lead if they have to look like Mila Kunis or Kristin Bell(just look at Kate Hudson’s career). Exactly how we’re supposed to alter or eliminate this expectation, I don’t know, and maybe Apatow could try to be something of a trailblazer, but considering the societal constraints he’s working in, he and his gang of writers and directors are doing quite well.

Although I, like everyone else, thought ABC’s debate moderation was pretty shamtastic, I also think that this attempt to eliminate gotcha questioning could easily backfire. Because McCain has said and done plenty of things that could be the subject of “gotcha” questions (Shia and Sunni! Why Won’t Your Wife Release Her Tax Returns! John Hagee! Vicki Iseman! Keating Five! MLK!). And so, as Ezra commenter Boboo already predicted, McCain will be protected by his base:

Prediction: Sometime in the next few months, major press figures like Gibson will announce, deeply chastened, that “America has spoken: we will no longer engage in the ‘gotcha’ game that has so offended our viewers, and will focus on substance.” This will occur right around the time the press starts focusing on McCain. Further prediction: questioning McCain on his flip-flops, his inability to tell Shia from Sunni, his unintelligble views on taxes and the economy, etc., will now be considered “gotcha” questioning and will be off limits.

Sounds about right.