In case you’d ever believed that a positive correlation existed between civilian gun ownership rates and the preservation of democracy, I had a chance to explain in The Atlantic why the necessary data doesn’t quite back you up:
In this week’s edition of the Press, we examined the potential pitfalls and ramifications of gambling expansion in Texas, the largest state without any wholesale gaming on its grounds. For some, gambling will be the panacea they’ve long sought: The Alabama-Coushatta, broken by Jack Abramoff, will finally return to solvency, and Texas’s horse industry will manage to stave off its path oblivion. For others, though, gaming legalization will only bring wrack and ruin: to the poor, to the weak, to the heathens in all of us.
Puerto Rico’s historic vote last fall seemed to set it on a path, for the first time in a century, toward statehood. However, its recent legacy as a drug- and gang-related conduit has resulted in a murder rate traditionally seen only in post-colonial power struggles. As Hector Pesquera, the island’s police superintendent, said, “This is the United States of America, whether people like it or not. We are the country’s third border. If we don’t protect it, you guys are fucked.”
Now, continental US cities — New York, Orlando, Houston — have started to feel the blowback. Few voters seem to notice. Few politicians seem to care. But, as noted in this week’s edition of the Houston Press, that won’t stop the cocaine and the corruption from barreling forward, and won’t help keep these American citizens from the most widespread violence any US land knows:
Every day after baseball practice, my Dad picked me up. Still clad in my dirt-stained pants, still too young to have a full appreciation for deodorant, I would toss my bookbags and gear in the back of our Volvo and jump in the front seat with him. He’d ask how practice was, and I’d tell him about the double play Alex and I turned, about the two singles I hit in the scrimmage. It was fun, I’d say. He’d nod, and he’d drive, and as we’d round the final sublets before swinging onto the freeway, I’d turn to him and ask if today was the day the US had found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
It was 2003. I was a freshman in high school. This was our routine, my father and I. I’d drop sweat across the infield, bunch my baseball socks into the lowest and smelliest confines of my bag, and, early in the ride back, ask my father if we’d yet discovered Iraq’s stores of anthrax and smallpox and ricin. I would ask my dad, days upon weeks upon an eventual season, whether or not the hunt was over. Whether we’d found the reason we were there.
“Anything today?”
“Nope.”
There wasn’t anything excitable in my voice; I wasn’t looking for anything sensational, for anything approaching bloodlust. I could care less about the shock of awe. I was just looking for a fact. A single reality. A fact that predicated an invasion, 10 years ago today, that produced the viscera of war that Afghanistan hadn’t yet seen, and that brought new vocabulary — Fallujah; IEDs; Mission Accomplished — to a generation whose childhood had been nothing but permanent play.
For all of its horror, Vietnam wasn’t founded on a lie. Nor WWII. Nor, even, the Spanish-American War — though don’t tell any of those who still remember the Maine. Those wars, mismanaged though they may have been, were at least founded upon some basic principle, on some humanistic, American belief. They may have turned hollow and reprehensible, but their initial shot — that first border crossed — came with some better thing pushing it.
Iraq didn’t. The Iraq War forced an entire generation of adolescent Americans to throw their throats behind their leaders, and to find an early and repeated sense of a distinctly lingering pain: of the feeling of being lied to. For almost every American under the age of 28, their earliest geopolitical interaction was based on a farce. It was founded on arrogance, and condescension, and, eventually, torture. What should have continued growing as the most patriotic generation since those under Pearl Harbor — and, trust me, you’ve no idea how much I listened to Toby Keith’s “Angry American” as an early teen — saw everything it had pushed for collapse upon itself. This lie made a generation sick of entanglement, and cynical toward an entire party. This lie corrupted our faith in what America ever stood for.
But that would come later — after the hundreds of thousands — the hundreds of thousands — left dead as a result of America’s invasion. That would come when the lie eventually settled. This time a decade ago, though, I was walking across a patch of outfield, a low western moon hanging over my high school’s pines. I knew the invasion had begun — I knew, unlike anything we’d truly seen in Afghanistan, that my nation was at war. That we were destroying Iraq for one reason.
I hopped in the front seat, and my dad began the drive home.
“Have they found the WMDs yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
Not yet.
No.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Happy_AnniversaryShut up, all of you. Go away. You are complicit in one way or another in a giant crime containing many great crimes. Atone in secret. Wash the blood off your hands in private. Because there were people who got it right. Anthony Zinni. Eric Shiseki. Hans Blix. Mohamed ElBaradei. The McClatchy Washington bureau guys. Dozens of liberal academics who got called fifth-columnists and worse. Professional military men whose careers suffered as a result. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the world. The governments of Canada and France. Those people, I will listen to this week. Go to hell, the rest of you, and go there in silence and in shame.
- Charles P. Pierce
Once upon a time, the Bradley Effect ransacked races involving both racial and social components. Now, however, it appears that such a statistical phenomenon has finally faded out in at least one nominal contest: gay marriage. While the results are only recent — all evidence comes from the 2012 elections — the statistics seem to conclude that the Bradley Effect in same-sex marriage is, at long last, dead:
Marriage equality advocates in each state provided their own tactics and targeted demographics, but each could point to lessons from other states’ previous failures. Minnesota reached out to its significant religious populations. Maryland targeted its minority, namely African-American, communities. Washington and Maine, with liberal-leaning majorities already, cited interpersonal relationships as reason enough for the passage of marriage equality. All four states found traction, and as the election approached, all four pointed to polls remaining steadily in their favor. And then the final numbers came through, and they realized that the numbers—for the first time in the history of gay marriage polling—had stayed true.
“If we had seen [pre-election] numbers varying wildly, I think we would have been lot more worried,” Levin said. “The big thing to figure out now is if Bradley Effect is dead. Old markers showed that you needed a 55 percent margin before the election in order to win—if that isn’t true anymore, what is the new normal?”
Zack Kopplin has seen what creationist legislation has wrought in Louisiana. He’s seen the students — public school students, educated on the public dollar — receiving religion as fact, all under the guise of “academic freedom.” His state has sparked something in him, in this 19-year-old. And even though he’s a sophomore at Rice University, he’s doing more to slow the national rise of creationist “education” than anyone his age or otherwise. He’s the new face of the anti-creationist contingent in the country, and he’s trying to make sure his new home doesn’t become like his old:
But the public has taken notice. Between award ceremonies at the Playboy Mansionand national interviews — all while dodging derogatory postings from the head of Kentucky’s Creation Museum — Kopplin has fast become the face of the anti-creationist movement.
“It’s hard to be very optimistic…but when I look for reasons to be optimistic, it’s people like Zack,” says Dr. Neal Lane, the former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and now a fellow with Rice University’s Baker Institute. “These people who believe in a young earth…they don’t see inconsistencies with their belief. And they’re really in the way of democracy.”
As Andrew Sullivan said, know hope.
In my first appearance on RealClearPolitics, courtesy of the Houston Press, I attempted to parallel Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s recent showmanship with Sen. Joe McCarthy’s public farce. And just as McCarthy faced his own public reprisal, so, too, has Cruz:
Cruz, suffice it to say, had never seen such public rebuke. Nor, it seems, had any sitting senator since McCarthy. And since Cruz’s line of coarse and unprecedented questioning had already drawn parallels with McCarthy over the past week, it was only right that the historic parallel played out.
Nelson’s public rebuke may not have the lasting effect of Welch’s lines on decency, but both the speech — and the successful passage of Hagel’s nomination — should silence Cruz’s search for the nation’s hidden Islamists.
For what it’s worth, I’d never been labeled a ‘racist’ prior to this post. Glad to get that out of the way.
(Before I even approach the jump, this infographic is just phenomenal. Go there. Be there.)
So, it would seem Kazakhstan has come around to finally trying to up Russia’s rent on Baikunor, the only manned space-launch facility remaining. If this seems something strange, remember: Central Asian satellites have shown, time and again, independent lurches in regards to deals struck immediately following the USSR’s fall. (Peruse Tajikistan’s military bases, or Turkmenistan’s pipeline growth.) To wit:
We’ll let The Economist run this one:
One thing that immediately stands out is how few metropolitan areas have surpassed their pre-recession peaks. New Orleans makes the top ten list, and it basically has the same number of people working now as in 2007. Looking at all metropolitan areas (and not just large ones) only about one in four have regained or surpassed their previous peak.
The second thing that stands out is Texas. The focus on just the very top of the league table for large metro areas actually understates the performance of the Lone Star State. Looking at all metropolitan areas, 8 of the top 20 and 17 of the top 50 metros, in terms of percentage employment growth, are in Texas. California represents the flip side of the coin. Three of the bottom ten metro areas are in California. And the Los Angeles metropolitan area is the single worst performer in absolute terms; employment there is 366,000 jobs short of the December 2007 level. But: California is catching up. In the year to October, the state of California added more jobs than any other state, including 20,000 more than Texas. Los Angeles added just under 80,000; good news, but there is a ways to go to claw back all of the lost ground.
Linda Hirshman runs through the legislative and historical parallels between the gender, racial, and sexual orientation movements, as well as the now-forgotten slip-ups the former pair experienced on their way to Brown and Roe. There’s no telling whether or not the gay movement has tipped its hand too early, but:
It seems there are five reasons why Chinese manufacturing, seemingly hollowed by the hour, has come to its current, unpropitious state:
Courtesy of Matt Lawyue, my ego has been sufficiently buoyed by a feature-length piece in GQ detailing the route Portland took to becoming a culinary destination. Not that I’d ever take advantage of it — a Stanich burger with a grease overspill is all I and my arteries will need — but it’s good to know options are still out there:
I told her that when I lived in Montana I had gone down in a nuclear missile silo buried in the prairie near an air force base, and an officer there had described how the missiles were aimed at missile silos in southern Russia. That evening Katya mentioned this to her father …. He told her to tell me that the missiles on his base in Kazakhstan had been aimed at the missiles in Montana.Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia
