How Are Things Changed?

By Dave

Marc Ambinder, at The Atlantic, sums up today's retirements:

Colorado is a tough state for Democrats. Senate incumbent Michael Bennet has an even chance, at best, of retaining his seat, and Ritter has suffered from an erosion of his base support at a time when he's been forced to  make unpopular budget decisions. Democrats may fare better if ex-House Speaker Andrew Romanoff decides to run for governor and not challenge Bennet in the Senate primary.

On balance, Republicans today gained a foothold in North Dakota, and Democrats increased their likelihood of keeping their Senate seat in Connecticut. Privately, senior White House officials have communicated to Dodd their belief that his position was untenable. A sinecure or administration position is likely.

Bottom line: from a micro perspective, the GOP gains nothing from today. From a macro perspective, anytime three major Democratic party figures retire...ain't good for that party.

No, it is not....

Bad News Day for Democrats

By Dave

Today saw a number of high-profile retirements within the Democratic Party including Sen. Dodd (D-CT), Sen. Dorgan (D-ND). And just recently Colorado's Governor Ritter announced he will not seek re-election. According to The Denver Post, he is stepping down to spend more time with his family. 

This news comes as a shock. Clearly the polling indicated that the race would have been a bruising battle, and it's not a good time to be an incumbent anywhere in this country. But I think Ritter would have had a decent shot at reelection. He's done a great job on the green energy front, has governed consistently as a moderate, and has done a pretty admirable job facing the State's budgetary mess.

This all opens the door for a lot of speculation about who will run in Ritter's place. I've heard Hickenlooper's name thrown about. He's very popular in Denver but I'm not sure how well he can carry the rest of the State. Ken Salazar is also a possibility but Salazar's got a pretty cushy job as head of the Interior. Would want to leave it for a chance at being Governor? If he did, he's well liked in CO and would probably have a decent shot. Andrew Romanoff's name is also being mentioned. I actually think he's a good choice but he's pretty invested in his Senate run.

Any other names come to mind?

Are Term Limits Bad?

By Dave

Ezra Klein thinks so:

The product of this verges on the comical. As a California budget-watcher pointed out to me, when you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room with the leadership of the Senate and Assembly, Schwarzenegger has the most budget and legislative experience in the room. A guy who was starring in Terminator films as recently as 2003 is now the most seasoned elected official during one of the worst crises California has ever had. Term limits are one of those ideas that sound good in theory but are madness in practice. You wouldn't want to go to a hospital filled with medical residents or stock a sports team with an ever-changing cast of rookies. Legislating is hard. We need to give people time to learn how to do it.

In the mind of the public, term limits are a way to flush the political system. But Ezra's right, it takes time to learn the ins-and-outs. Another unintended consequence of term limits is that they give more power to career lobbyists. This happens in a couple of ways.

First, term limits transfer institutional memory away from elected people and to the lobbyists. While your representative will only keep their job for a few short years, a career lobbyist will have been there for a long time. If they're good at their job, they will have made in-roads with the staffers and behind-the-scenes players, and chances are they will be pretty well liked and generally respected. More importantly, they will know the issues inside-and-out in way a newbie politician couldn't. When their issue comes up, that lobbyist will have much more influence than if they were dealing with a seasoned politician.

Second, term limits change the incentives for an elected official. If elected life is no longer a potential career, the incentive is to leverage your elected years into another job. This shouldn't be a surprise. Everyone does this with their job. Politicians do this by trying to turn one elected office into a higher one. But if you're a Senator, who has no chance of being President, and term limits are going to push you out of office, where is there to go? Well, the incentive will be to leverage your influence into a high paid job when you are done. This is another win for lobbyists who can promise these jobs in return for legislative favors. If you think this a problem now, wait until term limits are instituted.

Lobbyists aren't evil people, even though we tend to vilify them. That aside, legislative power cannot and should not rest with them. It should be with our elected officials. The danger is the more we chip away the more we expose the system to unintended consequences which may actually produce worse results.

Conservatives Love/Hate Avatar

By Wade

Was reading this article from the LA Times, and could barely contain my eye rolls when I read the following excerpts from conservative bloggers:

...conservative commentator John Podhoretz called the movie's clash between heavily armed humans and an indigenous tribe of aliens as "anti-American, anti-human."

...A headline on a piece by John Nolte, editor of Andrew Breitbart's conservative Big Hollywood site, declared the movie wasn't for Heartland America: "'Avatar' Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy."

...On the Drudge Report, the headlines made clear the film was viewed as a misguided stealth missile of liberal rhetoric, not a popcorn entertainment.

This last comment infuriates me the most. The idea that mainstream cinema ought just be mindless and banal, entertaining enough to get the most buttcheeks in the most chairs chomping the most popcorn is so perfectly in line with some conservative viewpoints that I have to wonder whether or not they're just screwing with us. It reminds me of a conversation a friend of mine told me about, where he was at a party where there happened to be several older conservatives involved with public education. One of them imparted the wisdom that "students need to just pick something and get through college, there's no room for that finding yourself bullshit, we have to keep up with China and India." A wonderful sentiment that seems to span across industries. Don't bother with individuality or what you really think, screw all that stuff, just do whatever makes the biggest numbers pop up in your bank account. Remind me who hates freedom again.

It seems even with the conservative high council making a stink over Avatar, their constituents don't care. Over a billion dollars and still going, and I know I'm going to see it again. Of course, Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard has to justify just how out of touch he is by insulting the intelligence of, well, Joe Six-pack.

One reason for the disconnect between the bloggers and the box office may be the simple fact that the movie about big blue aliens didn't feel all that connected to modern-day politics once the spears and dragons started flying. "A lot of people see 'Avatar' as a 22nd-century story and they don't analogize it," Podhoretz said in an interview. "They see that the guy turns into a 10-foot-tall blue guy. Whatever political message in it sails over their heads...If [average] people come out and say this is really vile and disgusting and defames our military and defames our country, that would have a different effect. But no one's really saying that."

Get over it, dude. Avatar's a great movie. It may have cliche archetypal characters, it may be predictable, and it may be ham-fisted with its politics, but goddamn is it pretty. I really think that a lot of what these conservatives are pissed about is that Cameron does point out some significant issues that we're facing today. I find it laughable that Podhoretz believes there are people who would be able to miss the message when it's three stories high and three-dimensional. What a twerp.

Dave Foley Knew!

By Dave

Did Dave Foley somehow see into the future and predict the rise of Glenn Beck? Or is Glenn Beck just doing an extended Kids in The Hall skit?



H/T The Agitator

Old-Fashioned Racism

By Dave

Clearly, as has been stated by like a million Republican's, opposition to the President is in no way based on racism. I mean, so what that Joe "You Lie" Wilson also liked to defend confederate flags and was part of a Pro-Confederate group with wacky leaders, or that Rush Limbaugh sings "Barack the Magic Negro", and who cares that Teabaggers like to carry signs like this and this and this and this. And come on, does the fact that someone recently hung Obama in effigy in Georgia really mean that people are racist?....

...Yes. It does.

I acknowledge that people have legitimate policy differences with the President but the undercurrent of anger within the Republican party as well as the veiled threats of violence, and yes, racism are a problem. Honest Republican's and conservatives are responsible for calling this behavior out before it becomes too extreme.

Grasping at the Shortest Straws

By Dave

Well if you were going to say anything, I guess you could say conservatives never miss an opportunity to feel 'outraged.' What's the latest unforgivable sin perpetrated by Obama. Well did you know he blinked while talking to Joe Biden... and someone took a picture! Also he looks good in a tux...or something... I don't know you figure it out.

Improve Your Psychic Abilities!

By Dave

I love Everything is Terrible! There are just so many awesomely bad commercials, infomercials, self-help videos, and PSA's, that this will never get old for me. This one's an instant classic



H/T Everything is Terrible

The Best Worst Movie of 2010?

By Dave

Hot Tub Time Machine seems like an early runner up. But on the other hand, I love Craig Robinson...and Rob Corddry...and John Cusack... so I'll probably see it...

Denver's Ready for Electric Cars

By Dave

Grist has a cool story on the infrastructure needed for electric cars and says Denver and Boulder are already leaders on this front:

One such city, Denver, has already begun this work.

As one of several partner cities on Project Get Ready—a Rocky Mountain Institute initiative that convenes city leaders and plug-in champions nationwide—Denver has assembled working groups to facilitate the move to electrified cars. By targeting concerns and perceived inconveniences related to the electric vehicle, these groups may achieve more than any car commercial, marketing campaign, or glitzy cocktail party could ever hope for.

The City and County of Denver has selected nearly 100 sites around the city at which public charging units could be installed. This will offer the public the first tangible look at how electric cars will operate in the city while assuaging fears over their driving ranges.

Woo-hoo! Way to go Colorado!

H/T Planetizen

Portraits of Poverty and Instability

By Dave

Foreign Policy has two heart-rendering photo essays on the Worst Slums in the World and on the World's Most Fragile States. Here is a snippet from the latter:

16. ETHIOPIA

Desperate thirst: Drought is one of many problems that continually afflicts the northern African country of Ethiopia. Lack of water not only kills crops, meaning starvation, but also causes violent conflicts over scarce vital resources. Inadequate sanitation has made water-borne diseases the No. 1 cause of infant deaths in the country -- where 300,000 children under age 5 die every year. Here, a boy near the town of Moyale drinks from a muddy puddle.

I almost had a chance to go to Ethiopia last year on a school project. I would have loved the opportunity to go make a difference. It is a country desperately in need of development. Jeff Sach's book The End of Poverty is a great read about development economics and talks a lot about the challenges facing Ethiopia and other African countries. I highly recommend.

(Picture From Foreign Policy: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/portraits_of_instability?page=0,15)

Need to Beef up your Nerd Cred?

By Dave

How about learning Na'vi? It's easier than French, cooler than Spanish, and sexier than Klingon. It's a sure-fire thing to impress the ladies....who really like Avatar....a lot...

Airline Safety

By Dave

Recently, Spencer Ackerman made a pretty excellent point: Since the data to pull Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was "very thin," the Christmas Day incident seems more like a policy failure than a intelligence failure. Essentially the policy worked as intended because it's designed to trade some security for liberty.

So the question is, I guess, is the policy what it should be? Do we need a better policy? Are the trade-offs what they should be? I've been thinking a lot about this but I haven't really come up with any answers, just lots of thoughts and questions. So I mostly present this as a kind of discussion topic.

The first question you have to answer is what what would be an acceptable level of safety be? How many false positives would we be ok with if it meant that we could be safer? By that I mean, what if we were more strict with who went on no-fly lists, just to be safe. We would be more confident that someone who posed a potential danger would be kept off the flight but we would also have to live with more innocent people being kept off as well. Yglesias uses Bayes's theorem to make this point:

...monitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.

So there's the rub. Even if we are really good at catching people, we still net more innocent people than bad. The more strict we make the requirements, the more innocent people harassed. This is a problem not only on moral grounds but also because harassing innocent people requires time, effort, and resources that should be going somewhere else. The problem is the system is better at punishing law-abiding people than it is at catching the bad guys because there are so few bad guys. However, bad guys are really good at causing disproportionate injury to society. On September 11, 18 guys with box-cutters were responsible for the deaths of thousands. So the costs of letting even a few people through the cracks can have disastrous consequences.

So how do we balance liberty and security? A econ-type might be tempted to say we identify where the marginal cost/benefit of being free equals the marginal cost/benefit of being safe. But the point at which these lines cross may not mean zero terrorist attacks. In fact, it's likely that there in an implicit level of insecurity people would be willing to live with if the trade-offs were made clear. But it's totally unfathomable that any policy maker would look the public in the eye and say that any amount of terrorism is acceptable. So where do you go from there?

Personally, I think the answer is technology. Especially if it means having shorter lines, fewer false positives, and more bad guys caught. If the airlines won't do it, the government s ultimately gong to have to step in on this. We need to invest in the liquid-explosive detecting machines. We should invest in better scanning technology. I personally don't mind the full body scan. I don't really care if some TSA worker get to see a vague outline of my nether-regions. Obviously, I get where the ACLU is coming from. But how about we make two lines: the quicker one where you get a body scan and move on, and the one where you get to take off your shoes, belt loose change, etc and mess around with all of your stuff . Let people choose which one they want.

Part of the problem is we haven't explicitly stated where our priorities are as a society. We haven't had an open conversation about where our priorities lie. Not that one could really expect to, in this polarized political climate, but still...

Any thoughts on this? Where do you come down? How would you balance liberty and security? What types of measures are acceptable for you and which are not?

Study says Going to Sleep on Time = Less Depression

By Dave

A new study shows that teens who go to bed on time are less likely to suffer from depression:

Of 15,500 12 to 18-year-olds studied, those who went to bed after midnight were 24% more likely to have depression than those who went before 2200.And those who slept fewer than five hours a night had a 71% higher risk of depression than those who slept eight hours, the journal Sleep reports.

My only thought is that I wonder if the study is actually capturing the effect of sleep on depression, or if the results are being biased by other factors. It could be just as likely that teens who are up late are different in other ways than kids who aren't. As an example maybe it's that teens who go to bed early are not engaged in the same activities that the teens who are up past midnight are involved in. Not to stereotype too much, since I was a kid often up past midnight, but it could be that teens who only getting 5 hours of sleep are more likely to be at parties where there is more underage drinking, or drug use, or teen romance, or any number of teen dramas that could be correlated with depression. Or maybe they are dealing with family illness, or broken homes or any number of things that would cause one to get less than a full night's sleep.

I guess I'm just thinking that the study, or at least the report on the study, doesn't do much to persuade us that sleep is really the factor linked to depression. It seems more likely to me that sleep is a proxy for some other factor.

Any thoughts?

New Year Predictions

By Dave

It's almost the end of the day, but I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year and welcome you all to a new decade. I've been thinking a lot about that last bit. It's a new decade. The Ten's, I guess. I have no predictions for the next decade. Well, no good predictions, anyway.  In fact, just trying to make a prediction highlights the futility of attempting those types of predictions. It's easy enough to predict that technology will continue to remake the world in new and exciting ways. It's a pretty safe bet that globalization will continue and that the combined force of new technology and trade will largely make the developing world better off, and as a result we will continue to see a rise of other nations and a world in which America's uni-polarity is challenged more frequently. These are pretty basic assumptions that anyone could make about any new decade. But life often gets in the way and changes things in ways no one can predict.

Who could have predicted at the start of 2000 that the 00's would be a decade shaped by national tragedy. And that, as a result, America would become engaged in two endless wars, and by the end of the decade we would be teetering on the edge of national insolvency? Or who could have guessed that America would elect it's first black president and that we would see the collapse of American conservative movement and begin an era of liberal ascendancy? No one. It would have been impossible, unless you were Nostradamus, but then no one would know what you were talking about.

Here's what I will say about the last decade: it was a great time for pop culture. The music was pretty good, the movies were great, and TV was surprisingly awesome, plus YouTube made it so that I could watch really funny videos, even if I missed them when they were new.

If anything, it seems like the big questions of the new decade will be how to deal with the all of the baggage of the last. When will the recession end? Will global trade get back on track? How will we end the wars we're still fighting? Is the liberal ascendancy a permanent feature of the political landscape or just a minor blip? 2010 will be an important year for that last question in particular. It seems like a given that Republicans will pick up seats. The question is can they get enough to undo the progress made by liberals in the last year. I know I'll be working to make sure that doesn't happen but, believe me, they are working just as hard to make sure it does.

Let's hope this new decade will be filled with peace and prosperity. Best wishes and best of luck to all of you.