Archive for 2012
September 27, 2012
THE COMEBACK KID: U.S. Senate hopeful Republican Todd Akin is mounting an impressive comeback campaign since his “legitimate rape” comment a couple weeks ago that caused some Republican leaders to plead him to drop out of the race. Yesterday, Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) endorsed Akin, saying “If Republicans are to win back the Senate and stop President Obama’s liberal agenda, we must defeat Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri.”
IN THE MAIL: UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Coming Crisis to Make Japan’s Lost Decade Look Like a Cake Walk. “Like the U.S., Japan has long had access to cheap funds—not, as with America, because of the yen’s status as international currency of choice, but because of a massive aging population whose savings mostly go directly or indirectly into Japanese government debt. And now that the government needs to borrow funds more than ever, the well threatens to run dry. . . . Unfortunately the root causes of Japan’s problems are common: social insurance programs and entitlements that made sense when lifespans are relatively short and each new generation is larger than the old one no longer make financial sense as lifespans extend and families shrink. In the US, we still have time for change before the worst becomes inevitable, but so far we seem pretty committed to wasting whatever time we have.”
JAMES TARANTO: Madonna and Obama: Both of them deliver incoherent messages about freedom.
Madonna–the mononymous musician, not the martyr’s mom–delivered an odd and perhaps backhanded endorsement of President Obama Monday night. Fox News describes it: “Madonna, 54, . . . stripped down to her bra to reveal ‘Obama’ stenciled in big letters on her back, before promising (or warning?): ‘When Obama is in the White House for a second term I’ll take it all off.’ ”
Here is an opportunity for Mitt Romney to make a Pascal’s Wager-like appeal to independent voters. You may be uncertain as to whether Romney will be a good president, but what you stake is finite, whereas the alternative is the infinity of the infinitely horrible.
Heh.
IN LAW & LIBERTY, MICHAEL S. GREVE SCALPS ELIZABETH WARREN. “Senator Brown has targeted Mrs. Warren’s phony claims of ‘Indian’ heritage; her $350,000-plus salary at HLS; her work for an insurance company in matters involving (yikes) asbestos; and other trivia. What he hasn’t said and probably won’t say: she is a nag. A scold. An ideologue. An advocate of a nanny state beyond a Swedish socialist’s wildest imagination. A bureaucratic Bruegel who paints an America of victims—pathetic figures in a landscape of unremitting hostility. Also, Professor Warren is an economic idiot.”
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Home Appliances.
SHOCKER: Health Care Cost Growth Speeds Back Up: No, Obamacare hasn’t saved us from rising health care inflation. I mean, who could have seen that coming?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus Employment Stagnates. But note this: “While the number of for-profit employees fell, the number of employees in the executive/administrative/managerial category actually edged up a bit.”
Naturally.
SEX AND THE SUPERBUG: The Rise of Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea. “In January, 2009, a thirty-one-year-old prostitute visited a clinic in Kyoto, Japan, for a routine checkup. Because sex workers are so likely to acquire sexually transmitted diseases, many have themselves checked for infections even in the absence of symptoms. Indeed, although the woman displayed no outward signs of gonorrhea, her lab test came back positive; she carried the gonococcus microbe in her throat, a common reservoir. After a second visit, doctors at the clinic gave her an injection of ceftriaxone, an antibiotic considered by infectious-disease experts to be the definitive treatment for gonorrhea. It didn’t work; two weeks later, when she returned to the clinic, a throat culture again tested positive. She was given another dose, but it, too, failed, and, at first, doctors assumed that she had been newly infected. Now, however, public-health experts view the Kyoto case as something far more alarming: the emergence of a strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to the last drug available against it, and the harbinger of a sexually transmitted global epidemic. . . . ‘This is what we have feared for many years.'”
I sound like a broken record, but we need new antibiotics, and, even more, new therapies that aren’t based on antibiotics at all. Why aren’t we seeing more action on phage therapy?
A NOD FROM DRUDGE IS AS GOOD AS A WINK: Dan Riehl ponders the semiotics of the Drudge Report.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America.
When are Americans going to wake up and realize that the 60s and 70s-era nostalgia for the “value” of a college degree is just that — nostalgia?
A degree does not guarantee you or your children a good job anymore. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee you a job: last year, 1 out of 2 bachelor’s degree holders under 25 were jobless or unemployed. Since the recession, we’ve lost millions of high- and mid-wage jobs — and replaced a handful of those with lower-wage ones. No wonder some young people are giving up entirely — a 16.8 percent unemployment rate plus soaring student loan debt is more than a little discouraging. Yet old-guard academic leaders are still clinging to the status quo — and loudly insisting that a four-year liberal arts degree is a worthy investment in every young American’s future. . . .
Really? In 2012, it’s the “tangible value” of four years of liberal arts that should be called into question.
Read the whole thing. It’s not like people haven’t been warned.
A RATHER NEGATIVE REVIEW OF HANNA ROSIN’S The End of Men And The Rise of Women.
To a Gloria Steinem feminist like Rosin, women are one side, men are the other, and you should always root for your team, especially when it comes to economic figures. She finds a town in Alabama where women’s median income is 140% of men’s. “After all these years,” Rosin writes, “we have located our feminist paradise in a small college town in the deep South.”
Here’s what happens where women win all the bread and men merely consume it. In another Alabama town, Rosin meets the “smokin’ hot” Shannon and Troy, the father of their child. In the last month he’s worked four days. She works full-time at Walmart, does most of the child care and earns extra cash as “an exotic dancer.” He stays home and smokes and drinks beer. Once he choked her till she passed out. Her income may be several times that of her mate’s, but this is neither feminist nor paradise.
In a strange chapter about the explosion of violent crime among women, Rosin keeps hinting that this is a sort of an advance — an implicit rebuke to “the notion of women as vulnerable.” Besides, she argues, maybe more female criminals means more women as corporate barracudas.
Yet a fancy degree and a high income are not the objects of existence. Happiness surveys going back four decades consistently show women growing less happy with their lives as the economic numbers continue to tick relentlessly higher. . . . Rosin is puzzled to discover that MBAs with rich husbands are increasingly opting to become stay-at-home moms. These fortunate few can do anything, and they choose to dial their lives back to a modified Eisenhower era.
That is a mystery.
September 26, 2012
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: Why I Refuse To Vote For Obama. “I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. Nope.”
Nah, they only care about that stuff when Republicans are in office — but then they care about it a lot, whether it’s actually happening or not, so that sort of evens things out, kinda.
It’s an adorable cross-eyed cat! Because life is about more than just politics. (And if I dressed even one of my cats in one of those outfits, I’d be dictating my books the rest of my life, because I’d no longer have fingers.)
ROGER KIMBALL: A short, bracing video Obama should see. Won’t fly. Doesn’t play to oikophobia.
Fran Tarkenton on What Is Wrong with the Koch Brothers: “Since their business began, the Koch brothers have been part of the value-creating class, not the crony class of business owners.”
Poll Madness on the Hugh Hewitt Show: Qunnipiac’s own Peter Brown admitted to me on August 2 that a 9 point Democrat turnout advantage “is probably unlikely,” but his latest poll didn’t correct for this absurd sample, which still has 9 point Democratic turnout advantages in their Ohio and Florida numbers and 11 points in Pennsylvania. So, like Zogby, Strategic Vision and the Minnesota Poll before them, Quinnipiac seems destined for the heap of ruined reputations when Ds and Rs vote in roughly equal numbers on November 6. The lefties out in defense of Quinnipiac were the same ones who were loving on the exit polls on Election Day 2004, and on the Research 2000 ginned up for Kos or the Strategic Vision polls of questionable validity. If pollsters cannot defend their sample, the warning flag is out. Stick with gallup and Rasmussen.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Facebook Stalking Your Ex is Bad for Your Health.
THE INTERNET HAS A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY: What Amazon.com’s first home page looked like in 1995.
UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Egyptian prosecutors refer a man to trial for ripping a Bible. If Egypt’s rulers thinks this sort of thing will placate Americans, they have a lot to learn.