Here, there and everywhere

Or, you know, not really.

Commenting on new abortion restrictions in Arizona and Illinois, Feministing’s Jos makes a really important point about access to abortion and the (I’ve used this word a lot today) efficacy of reproductive rights:

The bottom line is that legal abortion is useless if it is inaccessible. The new laws in Arizona and the return of parental consent in Illinois are part of a larger attempt by abortion opponents to make abortions harder and harder to come by until the procedure is completely out of reach for everyone. Policy that limits access most directly impacts those who are already the most vulnerable. The more laws like these are enacted, the larger that group becomes. Roe v. Wade is simply not enough – safe and legal abortion needs to be a real option for all women regardless of age, class, race, geography, or any other mitigating factors.

Missing in the mainstream debate over abortion access is a conversation about actual physical availability of safe* abortions.  In their National Report Card on Women’s Health, the National Women’s Law Center notes that 86 percent of U.S counties – or 34 percent of women – lack access to a safe abortion provider.  And the picture is even bleaker in rural communities, where 97 percent of rural counties lack access to a safe abortion provider.  Even in states where there is an abortion clinic, there is no guarantee that the women in the state have access; many women aren’t in the financial position to take a day long trip to an abortion clinic.  For at least a plurality of women in the United States, the legal right to a safe abortion is, in practice, a complete fiction.  Ideally, you’d have to at least acknowledge this fact to gain “access” to the mainstream debate over abortion.  As it stands however, you can patently ignore this (critical) fact, make the absurd claim that abortion laws are still too permissive, and get away with a nice perch at the New York Times.  It’s completely rational, except when it’s not.

There’ll be no limit, to the things that you can gain in positivity, balance it with negativity

Eric (at the always excellent Pulpit Bulls) makes a smart point about the utility of responding to negative campaigning:

I’d like to take this in a different direction and use the above spot to note that advertisements rebutting your opponents’ smears is incredibly underused. That’s not to say it’s always smart — in many cases you don’t want to highlight and repeat a smear against your candidate, especially considering how many casual commercial viewers would presumably just catch the smear and ignore the surrounding content. This is a concept that television writer Alex Epstein recently explored on his screenwriting blog, by suggesting that people don’t remember “not” very well. Epstein suggests that when people hear Barack Obama is not a Muslim or Richard Nixon is not a crook, they deduce it to Obama is a Muslim and Richard Nixon is a crook.

The empirical data on the efficacy of negative campaigning is really interesting.  On one hand, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that negative campaigning – and smears in particular – are very memorable.  In their meta-analysis of 111 studies containing 294 pertinent findings, political scientists Richard Lau, Lee Sigelman and Ivy Brown Rovner concluded that, true to what you would expect, negative campaigning is indeed a fantastic way of making your opponent look bad.  But, as they note, that is an extremely short-sighted view of campaigning.  After all, the broader goal of a campaign isn’t to tar your opponent as a “draft dodger” or a “flip flopper,” it’s to win.  And as they repeatedly stress, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that negative political campaigns “work in shifting votes towards those who wage them.”  In fact, contra the conventional wisdom, negative campaigning is no more effective than positive campaigning, even though negative campaigns are far more memorable and more likely “to generate somewhat greater campaign-relevant knowledge.”

If this has any political relevance, its exactly what Eric proscribes later in his post, namely, that it is often in the best interest of the candidate to explicitly push back against negative campaign messages.  What’s more, there are plenty of real-life examples of this approach working: in the Old Dominion, a commitment to positive campaigning and an explicit push back against negative campaigning helped Tim Kaine win the governorship in 2005, and played a decisive part in Tom Perriello’s upset win against Virgil Goode last year in the 5th district congressional election.  On a separate note, I am a little curious as to why campaigns continue to go negative.  This analysis was published two years ago, and it only reaffirms the results of a similar analysis performed nearly a decade earlier.  In other words, we’ve known about the limited efficacy of negative political campaigns for awhile now.  So, what’s the deal?

links for 2009-07-15

• Matthew Yglesias » The Joys of Employer-Based Health Insurance
• Jail Break – Mark A. R. Kleiman
• Holt: Secret CIA Program Was ‘Serious’ | The Washington Independent

We Just Weren’t Made for These Times

If you’re looking for two great posts to read this afternoon, you should head over to the Brass Tack’s place for her great post critiquing The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolhert’s review of recent obesity-related books, and then jump over to Grand Mute’s (woefully under-updated) place for his take on the Brass Tack’s critique.  I don’t have much to add to the discussion, but I did want to highlight and comment on Grand Mute’s observation that obesity is a cultural problem as much as it is a nutrition one:

Because, for all the economic and technological factors that have gone into fueling the obesity epidemic, these factors have only been the “how.” The “why” of obesity stems from culture, and specifically the culture of food: what is food, when and how and with whom it should be eaten, and so forth. Basically, if people didn’t recognize fast-food french fries as food, it wouldn’t matter how cheap McDonald’s could sell french fries for, because the demand would just not be there. On a broader scale, people eat as they do because of a mix of old customs, new marketing, and timeless peer pressure – and, yes, because technological and economic developments have enabled them to eat so.

So what’s the point of this – if you will – sociological take on obesity? Even if we remove the enabling factors – cheap corn, “supersize” portions, urban “food deserts”, total ignorance of nutrition – we will still be left with the root cause of obesity: the desire for a certain (and incidentally unhealthy) diet. And that means, so long as a caloric surplus is available, people will continue to get fat(ter).

I go a little further, and say that the “why” of obesity stems from the (in this case) pernicious confluence of culture and biology.  As Ezra Klein notes in his most recent food column at the Washington Post, the vast majority of humanity’s 200,000 year history has been marked by an all-consuming struggle for calories.  Scarcity defined our existence, from our social relations to – as Greg Clark explains in A Farewell to Alms – the economic advancement of our civilizations.  Or put another way, human beings are built for scarcity and hardwired to grasp for the most calorie dense foods available.  As I’m sure you can imagine (indeed, as I’m sure you can see) this simply doesn’t work work in a world where historically scarce calories – meat, sugar and animal fat – are extraordinarily cheap.

Of course, the advantage of being human is that we’re not slaves to our biology, and it’s possible to at least mitigate now-harmful biological impulses – this is where culture comes in.  And Americans, unfortunately, have the misfortune of living in a country with an utterly dysfunctional food culture.  Like Grand Mute explains, the depressing lesson of the obesity crisis isn’t only that our institutions aren’t up to the task of education and reform, but that our culture and our biology have put us in a bind which might actually be impossible to loosen.

U.S relaxes asylum rules for women fleeing domestic violence

This isn’t as relaxed as I would prefer, but nonetheless, it is a good first start towards a more fair and more just system of asylum:

The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance on an issue at the center of a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

In addition to meeting the existing strict conditions for being granted asylum, abused women need to show a judge that women are viewed as subordinate by their abuser, according to a court filing by the administration, and must also show that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country.

Honesty is the best policy

You know, I respect those conservatives folks, like the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Szasz, who are honest and straightforward about their hatred for the poor and disadvantaged:

The idea that every life is infinitely precious and therefore everyone deserves the same kind of optimal medical care is a fine religious sentiment and moral ideal. As political and economic policy, it is vainglorious delusion. Rich and educated people not only receive better goods and services in all areas of life than do poor and uneducated people, they also tend to take better care of themselves and their possessions, which in turn leads to better health. The first requirement for better health care for all is not equal health care for everyone but educational and economic advancement for everyone.

Or, in other words, it’s not that we shouldn’t provide health care for every American so much as it is that some Americans are too stupid and lazy for adequate health care, and as such, deserve to die.

Update: And this is what I get for being mostly uncharitable towards people who write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page – I completely misread what they wrote.  As it turns out, Szasz doesn’t want poor people to die, though it sort of sounds like it at first glance.  My apologies.

links for 2009-07-14

• "We Bring Fear" | Mother Jones

Conservatives and Consumption

thebrasstack (A Friend of the Blog who still doesn’t have her place on the blog roll. I apologize, I’m lazy.) offers her thoughts on Sarah Palin’s ridiculous Washington Post op-ed:

In fact, Palin makes no mention of climate change in the whole editorial. It’s as though she were railing against tax dollars going to the NIH with no mention that, you know, the idea is to pay for medical research that cures diseases. She isn’t making an argument that climate change is too expensive to address, or that its effects will be mild. She’s completely ignoring the issue. Cap and trade will make us use less! Isn’t that bad? [Emphasis mine]

This actually reminds me of something I’ve wanted to discuss for awhile now: when Sarah Palin gave her (not-really-that-memorable) debut speech at the Republican National Convention last year, I remember hearing conservatives describe her as the true heir to Ronald Reagan (as they are wont to do when it comes to a particular kind of socially conservative Republican politician).  Of course, as we found out shortly after her debut, Palin is almost nothing like Reagan; she doesn’t have the rhetorical deftness or even the personal charm of Ronald Reagan.

There is, however, one way in which she is very much a reflection of the Gipper, and that’s in her complete and total disregard for limits.  Andrew Bacevich, in his most recent book The Limits of Power, argues (correctly, I think) that Ronald Reagan represents not only a repudiation of Carter’s politics, but also of Carter’s appreciation for the limits of America’s power.  Where Carter asked us to conserve, Reagan asked us to consume.  And where Carter spoke of a “crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will,” Reagan proclaimed that it is “morning in America.”  Rhetorically at least, Reagan set America on the path towards unending conspicuous consumption, of which we are now seeing the results.

Moreover, this ethos of consumption seeped into the conservative movement, and eventually, came to define it.  You can find examples of it everywhere: it was at the forefront of the Republican program of the past eight years, and it informs Republican attacks on climate legislation.  Hell, it was the main theme of President Bush’s post-9/11 message, when he urged Americans to shop (which, economics aside, was not what the country was looking for).  I think it’s fair to say that for an impressive swath of the mainstream Right, the mere notion of sacrifice is wildly irresponsible, if not outright treasonous.  Sarah Palin’s editorial then, isn’t really anything special; if anything, it’s depressingly typical of the conservative movement.

How important is racial diversity?

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s joint, guest-blogger Conor Clarke asks why we should “treat racial diversity as more important than other forms of diversity at a place like the Supreme Court?”  His argument for why we shouldn’t actually makes a lot of sense: it makes sense to argue for affirmative action as a means to remedy certain historic disadvantages, but the picture becomes a little uneven when you’re pushing for affirmative action – and especially race-based affirmative action – as a means to increase diversity within a particular institution/industry.  As Conor asks:

Why do we think racial diversity — as opposed to diversity of opinion, religion, sex, sexuality, age, language or class — is uniquely disposed to make an institution more effective?

My only answer to this is that given the unique role race has played in the country’s history, and given the tremendous differences in upbringing, life experiences and outcomes that are associated with race, it makes the most sense to focus on race as the chief means of diversifying an institution.  By focusing on race, your chances of adding a significantly different perspective are a little higher than would be the case if you were focusing on another characteristic, again, given the country’s history.

Now, that said, I’m not sure if I’m convinced by that answer.  If you’re thinking in terms of what would make an institution more effective, it’s not necessarily the case that racial diversity fits the bill.  Indeed, if anything, it’s gender, class and educational diversity that is far more relevant to broadening perspectives and avoiding organizational pitfalls like groupthink.  After all, its easy to imagine a racially diverse institution which, nonetheless, is fairly homogeneous in terms of education, religion and economic background (the Obama administration, for instance).  And I would be the first to argue that that kind of homogeneity is not a good thing, especially for an institution like the Supreme Court, whose pronouncements have incredible influence over a significant amount of time.

So, the short of it is that while racial diversity in an institution like the Court is certainly a good thing, I’m not so sure that it is more – or even as – important as other kinds of diversity.

For shame, Washington Post

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the Washington Post has decided to take the initiative in sullying its already questionable reputation by publishing an op-ed by noted climate scholar failed vice presidential candidate and one-term governor Sarah Palin:

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America’s unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won’t bring jobs. Our nation’s debt is unsustainable, and the federal government’s reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage. [Emphasis mine]

I bolded these sentences for two hilarious – but very different – reasons.  The first sentence is simply unbelievable; I’m genuinely shocked that Palin could write that without the slightest hint of irony.  After all, her entire career was built on exactly what she criticizes – the “personality-driven political gossip” of the nation’s chattering classes.  As Dahlia Lithwick astutely noted a few days ago, Sarah Palin the national figure wouldn’t exist absent the media’s enthusiasm for her.

The second sentence, however, is just another reminder that Sarah Palin is – even at her most coherent – a complete policy lightweight.  In an editorial opposing cap and trade, Palin completely failed to mention global warming, emissions, pollution or carbon.  Indeed, reading the editorial, you get the sense that she doesn’t quite understand the costs of inaction, or what exactly is at stake: namely, global disaster on a catastrophic scale (the dead rising from the earth, cats and dogs living together, etc.).  But that doesn’t surprise me; what surprises me is that the Washington Post thought this was a good idea and not something which makes a (further) mockery out of their once respectable editorial page.