Getting to know… Sen. Lugar
Why Getting Lyrics Wrong Matters
Paul Devlin continues his quest to correct the record of bad transcriptions in the new Anthology of Rap. Devlin spoke with Adam Mansbach, a member of the anthology's advisory board who was disappointed with the collection:
[T]his is a book that seeks to establish the relevance and artistry of hip-hop lyricism, and instead it's made many of the world's best MCs look downright incoherent by misrepresenting their words.
When Ice Cube says "your plan against the ghetto backfired," and it gets turned into "you're playing against the ghetto black fly," more has happened than just a simple error in transcription; you've made an important song perplexing and impenetrable—while staking a claim, backed by institutional power and market presence, that your version is canonical.
Over at The Nervous Breakdown, Art Edwards admits his own history of misheard lyrics and debates whether he likes his own versions better.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
After Getting Amazon To Boot Wikileaks, Lieberman Eyes Other Firms (VIDEO)
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, yesterday succeeded in getting Amazon.com to boot Wikileaks off its servers.
Now, Lieberman says he’s widening his scope.
“We’ve gotta put pressure on any companies — like Amazon, [which] just cut Wikileaks off from its servers to distribute — there’s a company now in Sweden, I think it’s called Bahnhof, which is providing that kind of access to the Internet to Wikileaks,” he said on MSNBC this afternoon. “We’ve got to stop them from doing that.”
As TPM reported yesterday, Lieberman’s committee staff called Amazon and asked, “Are there plans to take the site down?”
Amazon responded by removing the site, telling the committee it violated unspecified terms of use.
TPM yesterday asked a committee spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, whether Lieberman was planning to reach out to other companies.
“The committee is not reaching out to other companies,” she said. “Senator Lieberman hopes that the Amazon case will send the message to other companies that might host Wikileaks that it would be irresponsible to host the site.”
Phillips said that hasn’t changed, and that Lieberman has no specific plans as of now to speak with other companies, including the Swedish firm Bahnhof AB where Wikileaks is now reportedly residing.
But his pressure on Amazon is already having a wider effect. The New York Times reported this afternoon that a Seattle-based company called Tableau had deleted charts and graphs uploaded by Wikileaks.
Tableau explains on its web site:
Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.
The company also said Wikileaks violated the site’s terms of use by uploading content it doesn’t have the rights to.
Watch the video of Lieberman on MSNBC:
Tax deal getting close, Democrats worried Obama may cave
Washington (CNN) – Multiple congressional Democratic sources tell CNN that a compromise to extend all Bush-era tax cuts temporarily is getting close, and that there is increasing concern among Democratic lawmakers that the White House will not fight hard enough to get Democratic priorities in return.
“The goose is cooked,” said one senior Democratic source, “the question is what the larger deal is going to look like.”
Many Democrats are unhappy at the prospect of giving up on their goal of permanently extending tax cuts only for those making $ 250,000 and less. Sources in both parties say a deal in the works would extend all expiring Bush era tax cuts for all income levels for two or three years.
In exchange, Democrats are hoping to squeeze out of Republicans a wish list of concessions. Democratic sources say that list generally includes: A lengthy extension of unemployment benefits, without having to find offsets to pay for them; extending college tuition tax credits set to expire at the end of the year; extending the so-called “make work pay” tax credits also expiring December 31st; and the HIRE act, tax credits for businesses that hire unemployed workers.
Democratic sources, all of whom declined to talk on the record about private deliberations, say there is widespread Democratic concern that the White House will not push hard enough on those issues and, in the words of a senior Democratic source, “cave on our priorities.”
“This is the first fight of 2012,” said the Democratic source, who said many Democrats worry the White House will set an early tone it’s willing to give in too much to Republicans.
Another Democratic source said Democrats are simply facing reality.
“No one wants to leave here without extending the tax cuts, the question is what are we getting in return for doing that. I don’t know how much of an appetite there is for a long and drawn out fight. The calendar is not our friend,” said this Democratic source.
Although the START arms control treaty is not officially part of any discussions, a Democratic source also says they are hoping an agreement on taxes will get a “wink, wink, nod, nod,” from Republican Senator Jon Kyl, Arizona, on moving forward with treaty ratification.
In addition to substantive issues Kyl has with the treaty, he has been demanding ample time for debate.
Interestingly, so far these detailed discussions do not appear to have taken place in the formal bipartisan tax cut negotiations set up by President Obama and congressional leaders, according to sources familiar with the talks.
One Democratic source close to the talks called it a “side show,” while others said that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, and other leaders have been talking directly to each other, and to the White House.
Getting off the AIDS bandwagon
(Scott)
Science reporter Michael Fumento is a paragon of political incorrectness. This year he blew the whistle on the absolution of Koua Fong Lee by the Minnesota legal system. The Minnesota media usually perk up at the slightest national attention to any local story. The Lee case is a huge local story. For some reason, however, Fumento’s critique of the Minnesota authorities in the Lee case has yet to penetrate the local media.
Fumento more notably provided a sane counterpoint to the AIDS hysteria of the 1980′s. Starting in 1987 Fumento deconstructed The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS peddled with great effectiveness by Dr. Everett Koop from his lofty perch as the Surgeon General of the United States. I think it was Fumento who pointed out at the time that heterosexual men were more likely to die of breast cancer than of AIDS.
This week Fumento returns on the occasion of World AIDS day to point out the gross disparity in research funding between AIDS and other leading causes of death in the United States. In his awkwardly titled Forbes column Fumento asks “On World AIDS day, let’s remember the true forgotten victims.”
Fumento points out that HIV/AIDS accounts for just 1 out of 146 U.S. deaths, yet will receive over $ 3 billion in federal research funding in 2011:
* HIV/AIDS gets about $ 200,000 per patient death in the NIH research budget, according to calculations from the FAIR Foundation (Fair Allocations in Research). We spend 21 times more per AIDS death than cancer death. Pancreatic cancer will strike about 43,000 Americans this year and is essentially a quick death sentence. It gets 1% of the funding per death as AIDS.
* Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.
* The disparity is all the worse when trends are considered. While AIDS cases and deaths remain level, those of Parkinson’s inexorably climb while Alzheimer’s fly off the chart.
Several lessons can be drawn here. One that Fumento draws is this: “[D]isinformation can cause indefinite devastation. Nobody knows how many people have already died because disproportionate AIDS spending has robbed other diseases of badly-needed funds, much less those who will in decades to come.”
Bondy: Yogi might say it’s getting late early for Jeter – New York Daily News
 Kansas City Star |
Bondy: Yogi might say it's getting late early for Jeter
New York Daily News Yankee legend Yogi Berra (below) recalls how management wouldn't budge even when negotiating with franchise players. Derek Jeter can attest those tactics continue today. Has your opinion of Derek Jeter changed as he negotiates a new deal with the … Hank is confident Jeter will return to Yankees Jeter Resumes Talks With Yanks Source: New York Yankees have meeting with Derek Jeter's agent |
Kids at Harvard Are Getting Stupider
photo credit: lisso
At least, that’s what I’m assuming, if this headline at The Hill is any indication:
112th Congress should pass legislation to encourage civic-minded youth
Got that, everyone? According to Scoop/Seminar (a media nonprofit) founder and Harvard undergrad Alexander Heffner, it’s now up to Congress to nanny us all into being better citizens. Jesus Quincy Adams.
Heffner’s case?
Unemployment among 18-24 year olds is roughly 25 percent, despite a recent increase in job growth.
Well, Alex, as I noted once before, minimum wage reforms ushered in by the Democratic Party have forced millions of young people out of otherwise gainful employment, the only type of which many of them are eligible.
And then there’s this:
Moreover, this year’s graduating class is lagging behind even farther, with greater debt and less ability to pay it off. In the last four years, student debt has soared about 25 percent. In sum: students are defaulting at a peak-high of 7.2 percent, and their earning-to-debt ratio, in many cases, will preclude them from borrowing funds.
Do you think the soaring debt phenomenon might have anything to do with the Democratic Party leading people to believe that a college education is a right, even when not everyone is qualified to go to college? Social science research abounds on the causes/correlative variables to student loan defaults-unemployment (see above) is one of the highest correlative factors, and leaving school without a degree (especially if you drop or flunk out because you’re not smart enough to be there in the first place) is another highly correlated factor.
Young Alexander would also have us all weeping for the children of privilege bused to the nation’s most elite institutions of higher learning:
Locked into – more or less – constant economic hardship, prospective high school graduates and undergraduates believe, in order to avoid the recession roadblock, they must pursue a job in the finance sector. The closer they are to money, capital, or savings, the likelier they will survive in the long haul.
I see it first-hand here in Cambridge, where this is the prevailing wisdom….
Oh, really? So you mean it isn’t the fact that the people you see first-hand there in Cambridge are at Harvard and are piped straight into Wall Street gigs that makes them seek out financial sector jobs? Excuse me while I wipe away my tears of laughter.
Make sure to read the whole thing-especially the part at the end where the young hack throws in a random jab at Citizens United v. FEC.
Oh, and Alex: You should take advantage of your time at Harvard and expand your horizons with some courses from Jeffrey Miron.
Cross-post from The Dangerous Servant
Kids at Harvard Are Getting Stupider
photo credit: lisso
At least, that’s what I’m assuming, if this headline at The Hill is any indication:
112th Congress should pass legislation to encourage civic-minded youth
Got that, everyone? According to Scoop/Seminar (a media nonprofit) founder and Harvard undergrad Alexander Heffner, it’s now up to Congress to nanny us all into being better citizens. Jesus Quincy Adams.
Heffner’s case?
Unemployment among 18-24 year olds is roughly 25 percent, despite a recent increase in job growth.
Well, Alex, as I noted once before, minimum wage reforms ushered in by the Democratic Party have forced millions of young people out of otherwise gainful employment, the only type of which many of them are eligible.
And then there’s this:
Moreover, this year’s graduating class is lagging behind even farther, with greater debt and less ability to pay it off. In the last four years, student debt has soared about 25 percent. In sum: students are defaulting at a peak-high of 7.2 percent, and their earning-to-debt ratio, in many cases, will preclude them from borrowing funds.
Do you think the soaring debt phenomenon might have anything to do with the Democratic Party leading people to believe that a college education is a right, even when not everyone is qualified to go to college? Social science research abounds on the causes/correlative variables to student loan defaults-unemployment (see above) is one of the highest correlative factors, and leaving school without a degree (especially if you drop or flunk out because you’re not smart enough to be there in the first place) is another highly correlated factor.
Young Alexander would also have us all weeping for the children of privilege bused to the nation’s most elite institutions of higher learning:
Locked into – more or less – constant economic hardship, prospective high school graduates and undergraduates believe, in order to avoid the recession roadblock, they must pursue a job in the finance sector. The closer they are to money, capital, or savings, the likelier they will survive in the long haul.
I see it first-hand here in Cambridge, where this is the prevailing wisdom….
Oh, really? So you mean it isn’t the fact that the people you see first-hand there in Cambridge are at Harvard and are piped straight into Wall Street gigs that makes them seek out financial sector jobs? Excuse me while I wipe away my tears of laughter.
Make sure to read the whole thing-especially the part at the end where the young hack throws in a random jab at Citizens United v. FEC.
Oh, and Alex: You should take advantage of your time at Harvard and expand your horizons with some courses from Jeffrey Miron.
Cross-post from The Dangerous Servant
Kids at Harvard Are Getting Stupider
photo credit: lisso
At least, that’s what I’m assuming, if this headline at The Hill is any indication:
112th Congress should pass legislation to encourage civic-minded youth
Got that, everyone? According to Scoop/Seminar (a media nonprofit) founder and Harvard undergrad Alexander Heffner, it’s now up to Congress to nanny us all into being better citizens. Jesus Quincy Adams.
Heffner’s case?
Unemployment among 18-24 year olds is roughly 25 percent, despite a recent increase in job growth.
Well, Alex, as I noted once before, minimum wage reforms ushered in by the Democratic Party have forced millions of young people out of otherwise gainful employment, the only type of which many of them are eligible.
And then there’s this:
Moreover, this year’s graduating class is lagging behind even farther, with greater debt and less ability to pay it off. In the last four years, student debt has soared about 25 percent. In sum: students are defaulting at a peak-high of 7.2 percent, and their earning-to-debt ratio, in many cases, will preclude them from borrowing funds.
Do you think the soaring debt phenomenon might have anything to do with the Democratic Party leading people to believe that a college education is a right, even when not everyone is qualified to go to college? Social science research abounds on the causes/correlative variables to student loan defaults-unemployment (see above) is one of the highest correlative factors, and leaving school without a degree (especially if you drop or flunk out because you’re not smart enough to be there in the first place) is another highly correlated factor.
Young Alexander would also have us all weeping for the children of privilege bused to the nation’s most elite institutions of higher learning:
Locked into – more or less – constant economic hardship, prospective high school graduates and undergraduates believe, in order to avoid the recession roadblock, they must pursue a job in the finance sector. The closer they are to money, capital, or savings, the likelier they will survive in the long haul.
I see it first-hand here in Cambridge, where this is the prevailing wisdom….
Oh, really? So you mean it isn’t the fact that the people you see first-hand there in Cambridge are at Harvard and are piped straight into Wall Street gigs that makes them seek out financial sector jobs? Excuse me while I wipe away my tears of laughter.
Make sure to read the whole thing-especially the part at the end where the young hack throws in a random jab at Citizens United v. FEC.
Oh, and Alex: You should take advantage of your time at Harvard and expand your horizons with some courses from Jeffrey Miron.
Cross-post from The Dangerous Servant
The Ulsterman Report: Is President Obama Getting Punked by the Russians?
It is interesting to note that while it is the TSA body scan/search controversy that now rages in America, President Obama appears primarily focused on obtaining Senate approval for an updated START treaty – an ongoing agreement between the United States and Russia to further reduce their respective nuclear arsenals in the coming years. Such reductions are widely supported by various European nations, and according to a recent CNN poll, the vast majority of Americans. President Obama originally signed the treaty agreement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev several months ago, with little mention or sense of urgency by the Obama White House for final Congressional approval since that time – until now. Inside the Beltway prognosticators are not so quietly indicating that, following the “shellacking” Democrats and by default, the Obama White House, took in the November midterm elections, President Obama is now desperate to, in any way possible, appear “presidential”. What better than to repeatedly invoke the name of great Cold War warrior Ronald Reagan, as Obama did just last week in his weekly address, while signing off on a new nuclear asenal agreement with the Russians?
To date, the American media has done little to report on the issue more than to state the delay of the START’s ultimate approval has been due to delays by Republicans. This is not entirely accurate. As the treaty worked its way through the Congressional review process, more than 30 amendments, many sponsored by Democrats, were added to the original version signed by President Obama and Russian President Medvedev. Perhaps most notable among these amendments was the attempted exclusion of the new START treaty from impacting America’s future missile defense system. That’s right – President Obama had willingly signed off on an agreement that would have significantly reduced further development of a comprehensive missile defense system. The very thing that had caused President Reagan over 20 years ago to rise from the negotiations table, look then Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the eyes and declare “Nyet!”, was the very thing current President Barack Obama so willingly gave up – America’s right to have and share with its allies, a comprehensive missile defense program. In essence, Obama gave up this nation’s right to more effectuvely defend itself from the very missiles he wishes to see reduced. It is the kind of myopic, weak, and preening statesmanship that greatly increases international threats to America and its allies.
Another delay to the START treaty passage was the Russian Parliament’s recent revoking of the treaty themselves when an amendment to remove the missile defense system from the agreement was made by Republicans in Congress. Just as they had done so in the era of Reagan, the Russians are now demanding the United States stop further enhanced development of its own missile defense system. The Obama White House has said very little regarding this – instead only now offering up the oft-repeated implorations from the President to “pass this treaty now.”
What appears most clear is that it is Russia now openly and aggressively demanding the United States concede to its demands, and enjoying an American president seemingly willing to accomplish just that. At a time when President Obama is attempting to portray a figure of international strength, he once again is confirming the reality of his seemingly never ending penchant for weakness.
____
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The Washington Post On Getting ‘Pushed Around’
While I share the frustration of the Washington Post’s editors at Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s rejection of President Obama’s call for international observers for Egypt’s imminent elections, I really had to marvel at the claim that “Mr. Mubarak’s rude dismissal of what have been gentle U.S. calls for change is making the Obama administration look weak in a region that can be quick to act on such perceptions“:
Mr. Obama should make it clear that he will not be dismissed or pushed around by Arab strongmen. If Mr. Mubarak gets away with it, others will be quick to follow his example.
Leaving aside the lazy Orientalism on display here (is there some other region of the world where leaders are rewarded for looking weak?), if Mubarak does imagine that the Obama administration can be “pushed around,” it’s obviously not difficult to imagine where he got the idea, given that Obama has spent the last eighteen months being stiff-armed by a different Middle Eastern leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, as he has tried to hold Israel to its obligations to halt settlements.
The Post’s editors have, of course, taken a decidedly different view in that dispute. Rather than recognize the administration’s position on settlements for what it is — a long-overdue corrective to years of U.S. indulgence of Israel’s entirely illegal and hugely provocative settlement enterprise — the editors warned from the outset that “President Obama’s battle against Jewish settlements could prove self-defeating.”
During the dust-up resulting from the settlement announcement during Vice President Biden’s March 2010 visit to Israel, the Post’s editors interpreted the Obama administration’s “determin[ation] to prove that they will not be pushed around by Israel” as “quickness to bludgeon the Israeli government.”
According to the Post, when Obama’s requests are rejected by Mubarak, Obama is in danger of looking weak in the face of Arab intransigence. When Obama’s requests are (repeatedly) rejected by Netanyahu, Obama has made a tactical error and must try to be nicer.
There are certainly criticisms to be made about the way the Obama team has gone about dealing with the settlements issue, but their function as a driver of Palestinian anger and suspicion and the danger they pose to a viable two-state solution aren’t in serious dispute. Likewise, the Mubarak government’s decades of repression of political opposition is a driver of extremism and undermines U.S. support for democracy elsewhere (we’ll leave aside for now how addressing that problem was made an order of magnitude more difficult by the Iraq war, for which the Post editors were, and remain, head cheerleaders).
Democracy promotion is an important element of U.S. foreign policy, and it’s troubling to see Obama rebuffed by Egypt like this. It’s also true that it sends a bad signal to other leaders. But let’s not pretend the problem began with Mubarak. As Seymour Reich, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, noted in a letter to the Post yesterday, Obama’s struggle with Netanyahu “reinforces the perception, especially in the Middle East, of a weakened United States.” I heard this same analysis from more than one Israeli official this past summer. But it’s apparently novel to the Washington Post’s editors.
Gaza rockets continue – with Gazans getting hurt
The latest bi-weekly GANSO report from Gaza, covering the period from October 31 to November 20, has some interesting statistics.
During that time period there were 36 mortars and 16 rockets that were intended to be shot to Israel. Of those 36 mortars, 5 of them fell short or exploded prematurely. Of the 16 rockets, 7 of them exploded before launch or landed in Gaza.
Those accidents resulted in the injury of 7 Gazans during those two weeks, and as far as I can tell, zero Israelis.
GANSO says that about 30% of rockets and mortars fired out of Gaza do not reach Israel. In this time period the percentage was 14% of the mortars and 44% of the rockets.
Gaza rockets continue – with Gazans getting hurt
The latest bi-weekly GANSO report from Gaza, covering the period from October 31 to November 20, has some interesting statistics.
During that time period there were 36 mortars and 16 rockets that were intended to be shot to Israel. Of those 36 mortars, 5 of them fell short or exploded prematurely. Of the 16 rockets, 7 of them exploded before launch or landed in Gaza.
Those accidents resulted in the injury of 7 Gazans during those two weeks, and as far as I can tell, zero Israelis.
GANSO says that about 30% of rockets and mortars fired out of Gaza do not reach Israel. In this time period the percentage was 14% of the mortars and 44% of the rockets.
Getting To START
In a sign of seriousness, the administration is now trying to get the pro-Israel lobby to campaign for passage. When all else fails …
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Got to admit it’s getting better
Peter Duffy has a convincing piece arguing that whatever Glenn Beck’s faults, he’s no Father Coughlin. But the point I’d make off of it is that for all the hand-wringing about today’s polarized age with its awful talk radio personalities and its eccentric political movements, things used to be much, much worse:
Coughlin was a giant in the history of radio, both the prototypical televangelist (he raked in the bucks) and the first political loudmouth with a mass following: He drew 40 million listeners in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon program, double the 20 million that Rush Limbaugh has claimed for his audience. But he didn’t just talk; he urged action — illegal and terrifying. By1938, increasingly unhinged and openly anti-Semitic, Coughlin was using his radio pulpit and his 200,000-circulation newspaper, Social Justice, to advocate for the creation of a violent hate group, the Christian Front. The group soon boasted members numbering in the thousands throughout the cities of Northeast. It has largely been forgotten that Coughlin’s “platoons,” as he called them, were responsible for a months-long campaign of low-level mayhem in New York City: They attacked Jews with fists and sometimes knives. They boycotted Jewish-owned businesses (guided by a “Christian index” of shopkeepers) and sometimes smashed their windows in the German fashion. This ugly episode culminated when 17 Coughlinites were arrested by the FBI in January 1940 and charged with planning acts of terrorism against Jewish individuals and institutions (and those deemed their allies).
Although he didn’t have a role in orchestrating the plan, Coughlin, after a brief hesitation, gave his full-throated support to the “Brooklyn Boys,” saying in a January 21,1940, broadcast that “I take my stand beside the Christian Fronters … [and] … reaffirm every word which I have said in advocating [the Front’s] formation.”
You still have crackpot theories about the Federal Reserve and unfortunate racial sentiments, of course. And it’s hard to say what sort of lunacy would emerge if we actually fell into a 1930s-style Great Depression. But for now, our disputes have mostly been confined to the realm of peaceful politics.
