Today, like most days, was full of action in the news – from the political to the nonsensical – how’d you like the Afternoon Reading edition? Would it be more helpful to you in an email format, and have me return to writing? Use the comments section to let me know what you think!
WAIT, WHO’S THROWING THE TANTRUM HERE? – Seems like Joe Scarborough acted like the professional here and walked away from Kos before things got too heated…and now here’s Moulitsas, on the wrong side of the fence, bitching about Scarborough…still:
Look, it’s been good for Daily Kos to have me on, but it’s not my favorite medium, I’m often uncomfortable, and part of me would be grateful if I never had to do a TV spot again. I did as much MSNBC as I did because I like and respect Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz. If they decided they didn’t want me on anymore, I’d be perfectly okay with that. However, I do think it’s noteworthy when I’ve been booted from the network because of a Scarborough temper tantrum.
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LEADERSHIP FROM THE WISDOM HOLE – Yesterday, it was my girlfriend Emily who nailed my funny bone when I needed it…today, it’s web cartoonist Scott Meyer:
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JOHN NASH, EAT YOUR HEART OUT…AND TAKE YOUR MEDS BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THIS – The newly-created U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), one of the unified combatant commands under the Joint Chiefs, designed to wage war on the Internet has a secret code embedded into its logo/crest…and Wired will give you a t-shirt if you can crack it:
The newly formed U.S. Cyber Command is supposed to centralize and focus the military’s ability to wage war over the internet, but so far it’s basically famous for brain-teasers. The command’s fancy logo contains a super-secret code in its inner gold ring: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a. Though some people noticed the code late last month, Wired’s Threat Level blog picked it up this morning and announced a contest, with a free t-shirt going to the first reader to crack the code open.
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FROM THE BUMP TO THE BUN – Washington DC sports fans now have someone other than Alexander Ovechkin to cheer – rookie phenom and Washington Nationals starting pitcher Stephen Strasburg, who boasted 14 K’s in his major league debut. Stras-mania has driven the creation of “Strasburgers” at many eateries in town, and Washingtonian Magazine has their mitts on who’s a straight fastball, and who’s a slider:
Just like everyone else with any business sense in Washington, restaurants are jumping on the Stephen Strasburg craze. But as Strasburgers flood the market, how can foodies tell the aces from the minor-leaguers? We visited three area restaurants to rate their burgers for taste, presentation, and creativity—also known as “Strasburgness.” In each category, we ranked them from 1 (bottom) to 14 (tops) in honor of the phenom’s debut game with 14 strikeouts.
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CELL PHONES GET CREEPIER EVERY DAY – If you thought geolocation data was a threat to privacy, read about this little phone that literally tracks your movement:
Engineers at Japan’s KDDI phone corporation have announced a new kind of mobile technology that tracks “even the tiniest movement” of users, according to the BBC. Strapped to your wrist, it would log every tiny detail of your arm’s movement and beam it back to a centralized command center. And we both know how your arm was moving around 11 p.m. when “Co-Ed Confidental” came on Cinemax.
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FILE UNDER “THINGS I WASN’T REALLY WONDERING ABOUT TODAY” – Scientific American pours praise on poop processing:
The point isn’t so much that what happens to our sewage reaches into every crevice of our culture. The point is that once you’re managing it instead of wishing it away, sewage turns out to be a pretty good thing.
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FAIR AND OPEN HYPOCRISY – Blogger, wonk, and Republican operative Michael Turk catches Free Press in some net neutrality astroturfing…I mean, did someone really say this would be a good strategy?
According to an article in The Daily Caller today, groups that Free Press listed as signatories to its pro-net neutrality agenda not only didn’t sign it, but had no recollection of ever being asked.
People working with groups like the Dr. Pepper Museum and Operation Catnip were asked why they support net neutrality. They could offer no explanation as to how their names, and those of their organizations came to be on the letter. This article comes on the heels of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation making a specific request to be removed from the letter after it found itself as an unwitting signatory.
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WELL, THIS ISN’T GOING TO WIN ME ANY FRIENDS – Yesterday I cited a Pew Research Center study on how the recession has impacted Americans. It found:
While nearly all Americans have been hurt in one way or another, some groups have suffered more than others. Blacks and Hispanics have borne a disproportionate share of both the job losses and the housing foreclosures.
Today, I find the New York Times reporting on another Pew Research Center study on mobile web use:
The image of the affluent and white cellphone owner as the prototypical mobile Web user seems to be a mistaken one, according to a report published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Center.
The study found that African-Americans and Hispanics continue to be more likely to own cellphones than whites and more likely to use their phones for a greater range of activities.
…
Younger people and people living in households making less than $30,000 a year are increasing their mobile Web use at particularly fast rates, he said, and the African-American and Hispanic populations are younger and poorer relative to the white population.
Here’s the nasty part: liberals are often champions of poor minorities in the wealth disparity fight, and conservatives tend to tout personal responsibility as virtue, and favor equal opportunities to succeed over equal results of varying degrees of effort. So if Blacks and Hispanics have been most impacted by job losses (which nobody can really control), and housing foreclosures (the result of mortgage default, which Democrats blamed in 2008 and 2009 SOLELY on predatory lending, which exists), but they are also using web-capable phones, which indubitably include smart phones with expensive data plans and paid applications…whose fault is the wealth disparity?
Can a smartphone bill really have that much of an impact on a budgeted mortgage payment? It’s no secret that I have an HTC Incredible – I got it free with a New-Every-Two upgrade (that means I took the personal responsibility to suffer the BlackBerry Curve for two years so I wouldn’t have to pay for my next phone), but I pay about $140 per month – and I don’t use any paid applications. Really quick math says that a $150,000 home, which seems about right – correct me if you disagree – with a 30-year mortgage at 3% fixed (I know that’s very low and fixed mortgages aren’t a predatory practice) has somewhere around $500 per month payments…my phone bill would be a third of that. Someone earning $30,000 a year is taking home, at best, about $2,000 per month. My phone bill is almost a tenth of that.
I don’t know what the smart thing to say here is, so I’ll quit with the analogy. Like I said, that will probably be as unsettling for some to read as it was for me to write. I’m not making any causal arguments, but it’s something to think about.
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A LITTLE MORE CRISPY AND BUBBA, PLEASE – My Nashville Predators renew an agreement with FOX Sports Tennessee for another 4 years of coverage. Dirk Hoag at On The Forecheck raises an important point:
The big thing to keep an eye on this fall is to what extent HD broadcasts increase. The overall commitment to increase the number of games covered overall (from 55 last year, and 30 of those were HD) is excellent, however. Slowly but surely, we’re inching closer to 100% HD coverage of the Preds!
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O, COME ALL YE TEA-FUL – Conservative activism resource group FreedomWorks has announced a major blogger conference this coming September, which spans three days leading up to the Second Annual 9-12 Rally (the first was the brain child of FOX News host Glenn Beck):
FreedomWorks has worked hard to be a resource for activists, and we’re now trying to extend a hand to bloggers. There will be no registration fee this year, and it is open to all bloggers (and those who facilitate them). Feel free to pass along to blogger friends!
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WE’RE NOT REALLY LOOKING FOR A POLITICAL HOME; WE JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE – All the same, the folks at Reason Magazine are hosting a debate on where libertarians “fit,” a debate that will no doubt showcase the oratory prowesses of the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey, National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, and FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe…RSVP is required, so if you’re a libertarian or conservative (or just plain interested) inside the Beltway, make sure to register:
What: A “Where Do Libertarians Belong?” debate between Cato Institute Vice President Brink Lindsey, National Review Editor-at-Large and American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Jonah Goldberg, and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe.
When: Monday, July 12, 6.30-8:30 pm
Where: Reason’s DC HQ, 1747 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC 20009. (Two blocks north of Dupont Circle; take Red Line Metro to Dupont Circle North exit.)
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HARVARD vs. PRINCETON…YOU DECIDE – Harvard economist Greg Mankiw (a former advisor in the Dubya White House) gets his wonk on and takes Princeton economist Paul Krugman (a New York Times columnist and frequent contributor on Real Time with Bill Maher) to task for calling stimulus opponents “logically incoherent”:
A coherent objection to this line of argument might be the following: If the government borrowed the money to spend, it would need to eventually pay the money back. That means higher future taxes, on top of the future tax increases that President Obama already will need to impose to finance his spending plans. Higher future taxes reduce demand today for at least a couple reasons. First, there are Ricardian effects to the extent that consumers take future taxes into account when calculating their permanent income. Second, those future taxes are not likely to be lump-sum but will be distortionary; it is plausible that at least some of those future tax distortions may adversely affect the incentive to invest today.
That is, businesses may be reluctant to invest in an economy that they expect to be distorted by historically unprecedented levels of taxation in the future. The more the government borrows, the higher taxes will need to go, the more distorted the future economy will be, and the less attractive is investment today.
I am pretty sure Paul would not find this line of argument persuasive. As far as I can tell from reading his commentary over the years, he does not believe that the distortionary effects of taxes are particularly large and so they do not figure much into his policy analysis. But many other economists (and I suspect many stimulus-skeptics like the tea-partiers) believe that taxes have significant incentive effects and can prevent the economy from reaching its full potential. Their argument seems logically coherent, even if it relies on a different set of parameter values for the relevant elasticities than Paul believes to be true.
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IF I WAS EYEBALLS-DEEP IN COLOMBIAN PRIMO, I’D PROBABLY BE WEARING A DONKEY SUIT TOO – A Flickr gem from the US State Department:
Their caption: "Actors from the Andrés Carne de Res restaurant join the celebrations at the U.S. Independence Day “State Fair” Community Event at the U.S. Embassy Bogotá in Colombia, on July 2, 2010."
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COULD IT BE BECAUSE THEY SUCK EQUALLY? – Obama’s approval rating has tanked, but Democrats and Republicans are in a dead heat on the 2010 Generic Congressional Ballot:
The latest results are based on Gallup Daily tracking for the week ending July 4, with no interviewing on the Independence Day holiday. Gallup historical trends suggest that a slight Republican lead on the generic ballot among registered voters — or even a statistical tie — would translate into sizable Republican seat gains in Congress on Election Day, given their typical advantage in voter turnout.
Overall enthusiasm for voting in the 2010 midterm elections held steady in the latest weekly average, with 30% of registered voters saying they are very enthusiastic, although this is down from the higher enthusiasm levels of late March and April. Republicans continue to hold a significant edge on this potentially important indicator of voter turnout rates. The current 13 percentage-point GOP enthusiasm lead is similar to the average 17-point lead the party has held since March.
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That’s all for tonight, folks – keep the feedback coming!
