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April 30th, 2010

drill baby drill

This is perhaps the worst man made dissaster ever:

Ten days ago, after an explosion occurred on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig off the Gulf Coast, the initial word from the Coast Guard was that there was no oil spill. That soon changed as the government announced that 1,000 barrels of thick oil per day were spilling into the ocean.

Then, in a dramatic shift on Wednesday evening, the government changed its 1,000 barrels estimate to 5,000 barrels per day. BP initially rejected the new estimate about the spill, which experts now believe could be worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

We’re sure to learn more in the coming months and years about what the government and BP knew about the scope of the disaster, when they knew it, and whether they responded appropriately.

The only “appropriate” response to this would be a ban on off-shore drilling, it obviously cannot be done in a safe manner.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 3:31 PM UTC

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April 26th, 2010

Offshore drilling is completely safe

Hopefully this will make the “drill baby drill” crowd, including our president re-think offshore drilling.

Coast Guard officials said Monday afternoon that the oil spill near Louisiana was now covering an area in the Gulf of Mexico of 48 miles by 39 miles at its widest points, and they have been unable to engage a mechanism that could shut off the well thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The response team was trying three tacks to address a spill caused by an explosion on an oil rig last week: one that could stop the leaks within hours, one that would take months, and one that would not stop the leaks but would capture the oil and deliver it to the surface while permanent measures were pursued

Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:52 PM UTC

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April 25th, 2010

It’s called bad faith

Thomas Friedman thinks the tea baggers can be useful and Steve Benen disagrees:

Thomas Friedman has a column today suggesting Tea Partiers strive to “become something more than just entertainment for Fox News.” Specifically, the columnist recommends that these activists start taking energy policy seriously and endorse “a $10 ‘Patriot Fee’ on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

To Friedman, such an approach seems consistent with the Tea Party’s purported goals — taking a progressive approach to energy policy would help lessen our dependence on the Middle East, lower the deficit, improve our security goals, leave future generations with a better environment, etc.

Friedman isn’t entirely naive. He concedes, “Yes, I know, dream on. The Tea Party is heading to the hard libertarian right and would never support an energy bill that puts a fee on carbon.” And to be sure, on a substantive level, his suggestion has merit.

But I think Friedman, like many establishment observers, doesn’t fully appreciate how ridiculous the Tea Party effort really is. John Cole summarizes the situation nicely.

They don’t care about the deficit. They care that a Democrat (and a black “Muslim,” to boot), is in the White House. They don’t care about fiscal restraint, they care that a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t, as some foolishly pretend, care about the Wall Street excesses. Certainly Cenk Uyger is not the only one who has noticed that the tea party bubbas could all be shipped to protest HCR, but the big money boys aren’t running the buses to protest Wall Street. They care that there is a Democrat in the White House.

This is the point I keep trying to make about Nicholas Kristof and the religous groups in Africa, they don’t want to stop the suffereing as people who are in pain are easier to convert, and it is easier to take natural resources from desperate people, but they can’t admit that, so they pretend to help when in reality the religous groups in Africa are happy to see AIDS orphans.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 8:06 PM UTC

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Crazy conservatives are better than the alternative

Matt Yglesias might be missing the point on what makes a good conservative while discussing David Frum:

What makes him a reasonable interlocutor with things worth saying on a variety of topics is precisely that he does care. Conservatives who care about the issues—whichever issues it is they care about, and whatever their substantive views on those issues—aren’t going to spend their time on nonsense inquiries into the nature of Obama’s plot to throw grandma in the Gulag or on fantasizing about the idea that Sarah Palin would make an effective president or state-by-state efforts to ban big government microchip

The country is better off if the leaders of the conservative movement focus on making money for themselves, like Sarah Palin, and saying things to be popular on FOX news, rather trying to enact real conservative policies like invading every country because they might might attack the U.S one day.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:52 PM UTC

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The creepy mom blog

I found this post when I was looking for something else, but OMG what a sad women:

My daughter and I almost made it through Mother’s Day without screaming at each other. Unfortunately, as I was driving Katie back to her Dad’s house to pick up some homework, she refused to put on any shoes. (Not even her flip flops…!)

I lost my temper. “You’ll step on glass!” I yelled. “You’ll make the carpet dirty! You’ll get pin worms!” Needless to say, Katie screamed her dislike of me right back into my face, and we had a lousy Mother’s Day moment.

Now, you may be thinking, who cares if children wear shoes all the time? Let them go barefoot. (After all, my children live in Florida with their Dad.) Or, perhaps it should appear obvious to me that Katie was trying to initiate a conflict with her mother because she is a teenager and seeking her own authority? Or, maybe you understand that Katie’s 13 year-old brain is drowning in hormones, so rational behavior is not something that I should expect on a consistent basis?

And then there is this gem:

It’s this last question that I want to address. Recently, I took Katie to get a thyroid test from her pediatrician to rule out the possibility of unstable thyroid levels explaining her exhausted, moody behavior. (Her thyroid was normal.) My pediatrician, who has a 15 year-old daughter, seemed to understand my anxiety. She just rolled her eyes toward heaven when I raised the question about what quantity of mood changes are ‘normal’ for teenagers.

It never occurs to this women that maybe she needs to pick her battles, or just let some things go, she just assumes everyone around her has mental problems.
She ends with this: “Next time Katie goes barefoot, I’ll pack the tweezers…” in other words she is hoping her daughter steps on glass so that she(the mom) can right. I am not sure what this proves in the bigger picture but I really feel sorry for this ladies kids.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:25 PM UTC

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April 24th, 2010

More chicken’s for Check-ups

I know I haven’t talked about this before, but I am assuming everyone has heard about the latest big republican health care idea, which is to go back to a barter economy. Paul Krugman explains why that won’t work:

Everyone’s having fun with the chickens for checkups story, in which Sue Lowden, the leading Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, expressed a desire to return to the good old days in which people who wanted a checkup from their doctor would offer a chicken in exchange. And she’s not backing down!

But I think even the mocking critics are missing the main point. Sure, it’s funny to see a 21st-century political candidate pining for the days of a barter economy. But her remarks would have been breathtakingly ignorant even if she had called for payments in cash.

The key fact about health care — the central issue in health care economics — is that it’s all about the big-ticket items. Checkups don’t cost much; neither does the treatment of minor illnesses. The money that matters goes to bypasses and dialysis — costs that are highly unpredictable, and that almost nobody can afford to pay out of pocket. Modern health care, if it’s going to be provided at all, has to be paid for mainly out of insurance.

Conservatives don’t like this; if few of them propose paying in chickens, there is nonetheless a constant refrain of calls for making the market for health care more like the market for bread, with consumers paying out of medical accounts and engaging in comparison shopping. There is, for example, vast romanticizing of things like Lasik and cosmetic surgery, which are held up as models for health care as a whole — even though they’re actually very poor models. (They’re discretionary and fairly cheap — not at all like the procedures that dominate health costs in the real world.)

Why this preference for cash? Because even conservatives know in their hearts that insurance markets are deeply imperfect, which means that standard free-market arguments become very weak once insurers are involved. And so they pretend that we don’t really need all that insurance.

The business with the chickens adds an additional level of absurdity. But Ms. Lowden’s perspective is ludicrous even without the feathers.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:43 PM UTC

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More Goldman Sachs

Looks like Goldman Sachs knew the mprtgage market was going down and positioned themselves to make some money out of it, I guess the issue is whether or not they misled investors as to what they believed was going to happen. I am stillof the opinion that betting against the mortgage market was not a complete no-brainer when they did it and really was a gutsy move. Sure it should have seemed obvious that housing prices had to come down but apparentely it wasn’t obvious to the “smart” people that run investment banks. As these e-mails show Goldman thought they were going to make some money:

Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts,” Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said in an e-mail dating from November 2007.

“Sounds like we will make some serious money,” said Goldman Sachs executive Donald Mullen in a separate series of e-mails from October 2007 about the performance of deteriorating second-lien positions in a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO

I think the issue might have more to do with how out of touch most investment bankers are with what goes on with the money they manage and less to do with Goldman Sachs actually having a little bit of a clue.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:25 PM UTC

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April 23rd, 2010

Tim Tebow: “I am a victim”

I just listened to the Tim Tebow press conference, here in Denver it is all Tebow all the time. A reporter asked him why he thought he was picked so late? His response was that he felt people held his beliefs against him.
Could it maybe have something to do with his performance in the senior bowl? Maybe his bad mechanics, that until a few weeks ago he said were fine? No people avoided him because he has bust written all over him. The only reason he was picked at all was his beliefs, if he wasn’t a very vocal Christian I doubt he would have been picked until much later. Although perhaps if he wasn’t a Christian he might have spent more time becoming a NFL caliber quarterback and less time making bad commercials.
I wonder what is going on with Colt McCoy who seems to be falling really far in the draft. My guess is that he is sort of Micheal Vick without the talent. I am basing this opinion on an interview he did with Mike and Mike on ESPN where he talked about how much he enjoyed shooting dogs. McCoy called it “spotlighting” I call it messed up.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 8:43 PM UTC

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April 22nd, 2010

Maybe we can start calling Republicans the princess party

Obama hits on the real issue with republican obstructionism:

In this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess, it’s been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines,” Obama declared. “It was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out, and asked you: ‘Why didn’t you do it faster — and why do I have that scratch on the fender?’ And you want to say: ‘Why don’t you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push?’ That’s what we need, is some help.”

My guess is most republicans are scared to get their evening gowns dirty and worry that their high-heels will get stuck in the mud.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:58 AM UTC

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April 20th, 2010

Everyone saw the crash coming?

I really am starting to think the case against Goldman Sachs is kind of weak:

The SEC’s complaint against Goldman Sachs alleges that it defrauded clients by conspiring with hedge-fund manager John Paulson to create collateralized debt obligations on subprime mortgage bonds that were almost certain to go bad. Paulson made $1 billion shorting these toxic assets. And who was foolish enough to buy them? The German state-owned bank IKB was one major victim, promptly losing $150 million, according to the SEC. The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel calls IKB “hapless.” Apparently nobody ever thought “Achtung!”

At the time no one thought house prices would collapse, so these securities probably didn’t look so bad. In some ways this suit seems like an attempt to cover for a market failure, after all the masters of the universe who run Wall Street could never be wrong, unless of course someone defrauded them.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:44 AM UTC

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April 19th, 2010

Is it fraud or good business?

The case against Goldman doesn’t seem totally open and shut.

But in 2006, some inside Goldman began to worry about the fragile state of housing. Daniel L. Sparks, the Texan who ran the mortgage unit, sided with those who believed the market was safe. Two of his traders, Joshua S. Birnbaum and Michael J. Swenson, had placed a big bet that mortgage bonds would rise in value.

But this camp clashed with Goldman sales staff who were working with hedge funds that wanted to bet against subprime mortgages. Mr. Birnbaum told the team to stop promoting bets against some mortgage investments since such trades were hurting the market and Goldman’s own position, according to two former Goldman employees.

But a few desks away, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Egol were quietly working on the Abacus deals.

They were, former colleagues say, something of an odd couple. A slight man with a flair for salesmanship, Mr. Tourre joined Goldman in 2001, after coming to the United States to study business operations at Stanford. At Goldman, he courted investors like European banks and big hedge funds.

I guess the question is whether or not anyone in the company knew what the other side was doing? Maybe someone who reads deadissue can explain this to me, but from my perspective it looks like Goldman Sachs simply made sure that they would profit whether the market went up or down and then sold both positions aggresively. I am pretty sure that is not a crime, but I am certainly open to arguments about this situation.

Update: Looks like some other people are wondering about this case as well:

I got a query earlier today as to whether I’d want to talk about the SEC’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. I averred that I’m always happy to play political pundit (the suit and the revelations it contains highlight the need for strong regulatory reform!) but that I don’t actually know anything about securities law or have any idea as to whether or not the SEC’s case has legal merit. For the record, the guy who writes the Economics of Contempt blog is a lawyer working in the relevant field and thinks the SEC’s case is weak and the only real issue is whether the PR cost of a long, nasty fight is higher than the cost of just settling.

Back with my pundit-hat on, I note simply that when it comes to fraud the real scandal is very often what’s legal. There are all kinds of nonsense non-financial scam products out there (I saw an add for this over the weekend) along with the various quick fix miracle cures and all the rest. A lot of this stuff, along with the tarot card readers and all the rest, is “fraud” in the ordinary-language sense but not necessarily the legal sense

Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:30 PM UTC

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Nicholas Kristof: sell the sizzle

Nicholas Kristof tours Africa and seems to get the wrong message, starting with this missive about everyone needing a helicopter:

We humans are suckers for certain kinds of wildlife, from lions to elephants. I hadn’t known I was a zebra fan until I drove my rented car into a traffic jam of zebras here. My heart fluttered.

As for rhinos, they’re so magnificent that they attract foreign aid. Women here in rural Zimbabwe routinely die in childbirth for lack of ambulances or other transport to hospitals, and they get no help. But rhinos in this park get a helicopter to track their movements.

I really don’t get what he is trying to say here, my guess is that in order to stop poaching the park rangers need to be able to track the Rhinos. One helicopter probably wouldn’t make much of a difference to the human population but it can make a huge difference to the Rhino population. He then comes up with this:

Then there are animals that don’t attract much empathy. Aardvarks. Newts. And, at the bottom tier, African wild dogs.

Wild dogs (which aren’t actually wild dogs, but never mind that for now) are a species that has become endangered without anyone raising an eyebrow. Until, that is, a globe-trotting adventurer named Greg Rasmussen began working with local villages to rebrand the dogs — and save them from extinction.

It’s a tale that offers some useful lessons for do-gooders around the world, in clever marketing and “branding,” and in giving local people a stake in conservation. For if it’s possible to rescue a despised species with a crummy name like “wild dogs,” any cause can have legs.

He has a point about giving local people a stake in the conservation but after that he has it completely backwards. You don’t need good marketing you need a true passion to help, and a clear idea of what will help. The wild dogs, or painted dogs, need habitat a food source, and protection from poaching, you give them those things and they will thrive.
The problem for the people of Africa is that none of the groups over there to “help” have any passion for the African people, the helpers mostly want to increase markets for western goods and services, perhaps exploit the natural resources of Africa, or save the souls of Africans, but they have no interest in what happens to the local human population. Some people can understand the intrisic value of wildlife(obviously not Mr Kristof) but there does not seem to be anyone that understands the intrisic value of the African human population and until that changes the plight of people in Africa will continue to worsen.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:16 AM UTC

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April 18th, 2010

Sunday’s edition of who does Jesus hate now

Nicholas Kristof is a smart man but I think he kind of misses the point when he talks about Catholic groups in Africa:

But there’s more to the picture than that. In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

The problem is that the good deeds and hard-work of one group promote the dogma and hatred of the other group; in the end all these good deeds only make-up for a small percentage of the damage done by the church in the third world, it is time for the people who claim to care about the third world to stop promoting the archaic and hateful religion that leads to most of the problems in places like Africa.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:45 AM UTC

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April 16th, 2010

Maybe he liked Canadian health-care

A Lynx relocated to Colorado went all the way back to Canada, only to be killed by an asshole:

It was an extraordinary journey of 1,200 miles – from Silverton, Colorado to Nordegg, Alberta, Canada.

And although the life of the adventurous vagabond, a 9-year-old Canadian lynx given the scientific name BC-03-M-02, ended in a Canadian trap line on Jan. 28, researchers say the animal lived an amazing life and set a world record for distances lynx have traveled.

“It was an incredible trek,” said Gabriela “Gabby” Yates, the lynx project manager at the University of Alberta in Canada. “The fact of where this started, where it ended and the children this lynx had, it is really an incredible story.”

But the incredible story ended bacause one asshole wanted to make a fur coat for another asshole.

“It is an incredible demonstration of what these animals can do,” she said. “It demonstrates the incredible capacity these cats have.”

The male lynx, then two years old, was captured near Kamloops, British Columbia in 2003. He was released for reintroduction near Creede on April 16, 2003.

For the next four years, the Colorado Division of Wildlife kept track of the collared lynx. During that time, he fathered two sets of kittens, one set of two in 2005, and one set of four in 2006.

The litters were born near Silverton. DOW officials believe the male mated with the same female lynx for both litters.

The last time Shenk was able to find the cat was April 20, 2007, and then he disappeared.

The next human contact that anyone had with the lynx was on Jan. 28, when Bryan Anger, a trapper from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, found BC-03-M-02 dead in his trap line.

I get that what the trapper is doing is legal, but it is disgusting that anyone would want to destroy such an amazing animal for someone’s vanity.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 3:59 PM UTC

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April 13th, 2010

Why are the tea-baggers so angry

One labor leader thinks he has the answer:

I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people. I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred. There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis. Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other.

I am not sure I completely buy this, it seems like most the terrorist wannabe tea-baggers are retired indaviduals collecting social security, my guess is there anger is more from the idea that the country has a black president and most people don’t hate gays the way they do. He then goes on to say:

For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does. Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes.

And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization—everything got cheaper and easier.

But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different. It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped, there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one. Over the last decade, we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs—a million of them professional and design jobs. We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs. We’re losing high-tech jobs—the jobs we were supposed to keep.

My guess is that these jobs are gone and they are not coming back until Americans agree to work cheaper, and even if the jobs do come back they will probably not pay as well; which makes me think people are going to have to consume less, and perhaps look for meaningful work that doesn’t pay as well. I guess you can be angry about the situation but it might be better live in a smaller house, drive a smaller car and maybe have a smaller family and enjoy what life has to offer.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:17 AM UTC

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April 12th, 2010

Feel the Christian love

From Washingtonmonthly.com:

HUCKABEE, FAMILIES, AND PUPPIES…. Republican Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, former presidential candidates, and Fox News personality — hasn’t made much of an effort to hide his contempt for gay people. What’s interesting, though, is that as American culture becomes more respectful and tolerant, Huckabee seems to be moving in the wrong direction.

He chatted with the College of New Jersey’s magazine, The Perspective, about a variety of policy matters, including LGBT issues. Huckabee proceeded to compare marriage equality to drug abuse, incest, and polygamy.

Perhaps most strikingly, though, Huckabee denounced allowing same-sex couples adopting children or becoming foster parents.

“I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family,” Huckabee said. “And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults.”

“Children are not puppies,” he continued. “This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?”
Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about orphans and children who are often abused or neglected. Most decent people would think it’s in “the best interest of the children” for those kids in need to live with people who will love and care for them.

Christians seem to like the idea of kids in orphanages, I guess an orphanage is the best place to indoctrinate kids in christian mythology and it is a bonus that the sinning parents are dead. Plus, I guess it gives Christians a chance to pretend that they are helping people and for some of them it gives them access to more victims.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:46 AM UTC

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Bike Racing?

I have been trying to follow bike racing and it is very confusing, but this guy sounds pretty good:

ROUBAIX, France (AFP) – Swiss Olympic time-trial champion Fabian Cancellara won the Paris-Roubaix one day classic cycling race on Sunday to complete a rare double of the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Roubaix in the same season.

The 29-year-old – also the world time-trial champion and winning this event for the second time – is only the 10th rider to achieve the double and first since Belgian Tom Boonen in 2005.

The weird thing with bike racing is that it really is a team sport, at least when you get to races like the Tour De France, and it is hard to understand how that happens; for the really big races the team is just as important as the stars on it, but the stars, guys like Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contodor are the only one who gets recognition when they win.
This years tour De France is shaping up like an epic battle between Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contodor when it should perhaps be considered a battle between Astana and Radio Shack.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:29 AM UTC

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April 9th, 2010

Texas size regulations

Texas dosen’t allow people to get home equity loans that exceed 80% of the homes appraised value, essentially they have mandated that you must strive for 20% equity in your home; as much as I make fun of Texas this might be a model for national mortgage rules.
This sort of rule encourages people to see a home as home first and not merely as a vehicle to finance an extravagant lifestyle.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:23 PM UTC

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April 8th, 2010

More prom news

As somebody who saw prom as a hassle I am uniquely ill suited to talk back about it, but

A bunch of her classmates started a Facebook group called “Constance quit yer cryin” to ridicule her. The attitude of the students and parents who spoke up there was characterized less by overt homophobia than by a resentment of the effort, characterized as attention-grubbing and selfish, to upset local traditions and “force” the school to cancel the dance by demanding equal treatment. But then gay-friendly sites—including traffic behemoth Perez Hilton—began linking the group, bringing a tsunami of comments from people all over the world, in numbers vastly dwarfing the original membership. Almost all condemned the actions of the school and parents, and supported Constance. Not a few doled out their own hateful stereotypes, heaping scorn not just on the school, but on southerners or Christians on the whole, as inbred rednecks. Photos were posted, and much speculation ensued about which rack at Walmart various prom dresses had come off.

Contemplate how vertigo-inducing this must be. You’ve got a local community where a certain set of cultural norms is so dominant that it’s just seen as obvious and natural that a lesbian wouldn’t have an equal right to participate in prom—to the point where the overt hostility isn’t really directed at Constance’s sexuality so much as her bewildering insistence on messing with the way everyone knows things are supposed to be. They’re not attuned to the injustice because it seems like almost a fact of nature. Except they’re now flooded with undeniable evidence that a hell of a lot of people don’t see things that way, and even hold their community in contempt for seeing things that way. There have been thousands of “outside” posts in a handful of days, with more every minute.

One person who is different really sticks out in a small town, this might be an advantage to a good athlete or a good student, but if you are someone or something that people don’t approve of watchout.

Here is a link to the facebook page in case you are interested which I think was a pretty clear cut case of cyberbullying; especially the parents who posted on that site should be ashamed of themselves.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 9:54 AM UTC

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April 7th, 2010

Who would Jesus shun

Christain mythology is not only dangerous it is incredibly mean spirited.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:13 PM UTC

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April 5th, 2010

Magical thinking from the right

Steve Benen talks about the differences between left and right policy goals:

For the left, the goals relate to policy ends. We want to expand access to quality health care. We want to lower carbon emissions to combat global warming. We want to reform the lending process for student loans so more young people can afford to go to college. There are competing ways to get to where progressives want to go, but the focus is on the policy achievement.

So, to Krugman’s point, the liberal worldview is not about necessarily increasing the size of government or raising taxes; those mechanisms are only valuable insofar as they reach the desired end-point. Whether the government increases or shrinks in the process is largely irrelevant.

For the right, it’s backwards — the ideological goal is the achievement.

I think this happens because conservatism is mostly based on fiction by Ayn Rand and perhaps a misguided view that a strong government weakens the church; which given the number of scandals in churches may be a good thing. My main point though is that their is no proof that making government smaller does anything for anyone and in fact most places with weak central government are not real nice, I am thinking Haiti, Somalia and Sudan. But magicaly good things are supposed to happen if we just lower taxes and end regulation, hasn’t happened yet and no matter how hard we wish for good things it wont happen in the future either.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 8:27 AM UTC

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April 1st, 2010

Equality of the sexes

Probably not in a good way, but this certainly is interesting.

According to Dr David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, women are having more affairs than ever – recent studies say the figure is around 20 per cent for men and a bit over 15 per cent for women – but they behave very differently from men when they cheat.
‘The biggest difference is that women are much better at keeping their affairs secret,’ he says. ‘If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.’

Cheating is something a lot of people do and maybe as a society we need to chillout about it.

Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:02 PM UTC

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