Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 218

Moderate In The Extreme

Ezra wants us to stop referring to “moderate” voters, whom he calls a statistical mistake:

What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they’re left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they’re labeled as moderate.

But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream.

“A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British,” says Broockman. “A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process. You’ll often see really draconian measures towards gays and lesbians get 16 to 20 percent support. These people look like moderates but they’re actually quite extreme.”

The result is that voters who hold gentle opinions that are all on the left or the right end up looking a lot more extreme than voters who hold intense opinions that fall all over the political spectrum. … “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want,” Broockman says. “Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want — that’s what we tend to call moderate — versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want.”

Losing Our Taste For Cupcakes?

Roberto A. Ferdman is unsurprised that cupcake company Crumbs is closing up shop:

Cupcakes are a fad, not a food staple. The cupcake bubble, after all, was exactly that: a bubble. And bubbles—even cupcake bubbles (paywall)—burst. The market called this one back in 2011.

Bill Saporito has seen this all before:

Crumbs joins the long list of once hot food franchises that couldn’t resist the smell of growth and ultimately had difficulty managing it: David’s Cookies, Krispy Kreme, Einstein Bagels, World Coffee, just to name a few. They can survive, but generally after massive restructuring. Crumbs ran out of time and money. The pattern is similar: a good product or idea becomes increasingly popular, and investors get moon-eyed about the prospects. At the same time, other operators and investors will swear to you that there’s plenty of room for more than one brand—or that if there isn’t much room, their concept is superior.

Daniel Gross predicted this years ago:

Trends often inspire counter-trends. And the latest hot trend in dessert has proven to be something of a backlash to cupcakes. The cupcake bubble has been replaced, as I documented last year, by a fro-yo bubble. Tart instead of sweet, light instead of heavy, low-cal instead of fattening, fro-yo is in many ways the ying to the cupcake’s yang.

But John Aziz believes there “was never a cupcake bubble”:

[C]upcake sales have declined a little — falling 6 percent in 2012, flat in 2013, and falling 1 percent so far this year, according to NPD — but that is nothing like a bursting bubble. That’s a gentle, gradual decline that’s reflective of consumer tastes that have gradually changed, a marketplace that has become crowded, and snacks like the cronut and wonut that have begun to eclipse the cupcake. … Companies like Crumbs who botch their expansion plans, leaving themselves stuck with high levels of debt, tend to fail in whatever industry they are in. That’s not a bubble bursting — that’s business.

Jessica Grose finds all the cupcake hated a “little sexist”:

What’s going on seems to be about more than just the confection, which, like any other, some people enjoy eating and others do not. My theory: It’s about a dismissal and dislike of a certain kind of woman. (Hooooooold on, hear me out.) The kind of woman who watches Sex and the City (an important driver of the cupcake trend) and takes the bus tour to Magnolia Bakery. The kind of woman who gets excited about J. Crew catalogs and Instagrams her “glittery cupcake nail art.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams defends the humble cupcake:

Crumbs didn’t fail because people have stopped loving cupcakes. Put out a tray of cupcakes – Hostess, homemade, you name it – at a partytoday and see how long it lasts. Crumbs failed because the novelty has worn off — and because the product itself simply couldn’t sustain consumer loyalty after it had. But as long as there are mouths, people are going to love cupcakes. It’s cake you can carry around; figure it out. Victory will always belong to cake, even when all that’s left of Crumbs is, well, you know.

David Sax is of the same mind:

After nearly two decades as the reigning dessert trend in America, and increasingly the world, the cupcake will not go away. It will be there at birthdays, graduations and office parties. It will still elicit palpitations of excitement on sight, even from those who cursed its constant attention, because fundamentally the cupcake’s enduring strength is its very essence: a cake you can hold in your hand and eat without a fork. A cake you can eat in the car. America’s perfect cake.

Why So Upset About Contraceptives?

Noah Rothman advises Republicans against going to war with birth control. Dan Savage ponders the right’s motivations:

[W]hy are conservatives fighting so hard to make contraception harder for women to obtain? Because they don’t think people—young people, poor people, unmarried people, gay people—should be able to enjoy “consequence-free sex.” Because it’s sex that they hate—it’s sex for pleasure that they hate—and they hate that kind of sex more than they hate abortion, teen moms, and welfare spending combined. Knowing that some people are having sex for pleasure without having their futures disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy or having their health compromised by a sexually transmitted infection or having to run a traumatizing gauntlet of shrieking “sidewalk counselors” to get to an abortion clinic keeps them up at night.

But Douthat wants to reframe the debate as “less about whether sex should be consequence-free and more about whether, on a societal level, it really can be”:

[T]his argument would not demand that pre-pill consequences be re-attached to sex, to better return women to drudgery and childbearing. Rather, it would make the point that notwithstanding social liberalism’s many victories those consequences haven’t exactly gone away; it would question whether more and cheaper contraception suffices to address some of the social problems associated with sexual permissiveness; and it would raise the possibility that a broader reconsideration of current norms and policies might offer more to American women in the long run than strangling the last craft-store patriarch with the entrails of the last reactionary nun.

Marcotte, on the other hand, looks at how opposition to contraception correlates with the belief that women should be financially dependent on men:

By claiming women are getting something for “free,” conservatives are reinforcing this myth that women can’t actually be independent—they either need to rely on the government or a husband. That’s what Jesse Watters was getting at on Fox News, talking about single female voters who want the contraceptive benefit, who he called “Beyoncé voters”: “They depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands,” he argued, ignoring that women are actually demanding the right to the health care they are paying for.

Rush Limbaugh sounded a similar note this week, denouncing men who support the contraceptive benefit by saying they are “Pajama Boy types having sex, sex, sex,” and that “Today’s young men are totally supportive of somebody else buying women their birth control pills. Make sure the women are taking them, ’cause sex is what it’s all about.” Yes, men support women’s reproductive rights only so they can have lots of sex while foisting the responsibility of providing for women onto the government, which Limbaugh falsely claims is providing the contraceptive coverage.

Mental Health Break

Aha!

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Alice Robb delves into the linguistics of emoticons and emojis:

At the forefront of the research into emoji use today is Stanford-trained linguist Tyler Schnoebelen. By analyzing emoticon use on Twitter, Schnoebelen has found that use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class—just like dialects or regional accents. Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. “You start using new emoticons, just like you start using different words, when you move outside your usual social circles,” said Schnoebelen. He discovered a divide, for instance, between people who include a hyphen to represent a nose in smiley faces— :-) — and people who use the shorter version without the hyphen. “The nose is associated with conventionality,” said Schnoebelen. People using a nose also tend to “spell words out completely. They use fewer abbreviations.” Twitter notoriously obscures demographic data, but according to Schnoebelen, “People who use no noses tend to be tweeting more about Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber. They have younger interests, younger concerns, whether or not they’re younger.”

The gender divide in emoticon use is another topic of debate. “Based on the ideology that women are more emotional, the normal claim is that women use more emoticons,” said Schnoebelen. He’s quick to point out that analyzing emoticon use—or any linguistic pattern—along a gender binary is simplistic, but studies suggest that women account for a disproportionate amount of emoticon use.

In a primer on how to use emoticons more intelligently, Roni Jacobson also stresses the gender stereotypes involved in smileys and frownies:

Multiple studies over the past 15 years have shown that women use emoticons more than men. Women also smile more in real life, perhaps because they are expected to be the more expressive gender, says Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University who studies online communication. In a 2009 analysis of messages featured on a texting-based Italian dating show, she and her colleagues argued that men and women used their texts to project different identities. The women who sent in their messages seemed to be “performing a kind of socially desirable femininity” characterized by “playfulness” and “fun,” while the men acted more serious.

“There’s this new norm that women are expected to show more happiness and excitement than men do,” said Herring. “If you’re a woman, you may have to realize that if you don’t use a smiley face sometimes, you may be misinterpreted as being in a bad mood or unhappy with the person you’re talking to. I don’t think that’s true for men.”

Ahmad Chalabi? Really?

I'm putting the odds of an Ahmed Chalabi @WSJ op-ed sometime this week at 50/50.—
Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) July 05, 2014

Chulov and Ackerman report on the suddenly bright political prospects of the erstwhile Bush administration darling. His name has even been tossed in the hat as a potential successor to embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:

“In all of Iraq, nobody knows how to punch above their weight or play the convoluted game of Iraqi politics better than Ahmad Chalabi,” said Ramzy Mardini, a Jordan-based political analyst for thinktank The Atlantic Council. “His enduring survival is beyond our comprehension. Unlike Ayad Allawi [another former exile], Ahmad Chalabi is close to Iran. This is the key relationship that makes Chalabi’s candidacy something of a realistic prospect should Maliki be ousted. If Iran has a redline against a candidate, [he doesn't] have a shot in making it in the end.

“If Iraqi politics were Game of Thrones, Chalabi would play Lord Baelish, a consummate puppet master behind the scenes, constantly plotting his path to power. For him, chaos isn’t a pit, but a ladder and Chalabi knows the ways and means of exploiting a crisis to suit his interests and elevation in Iraq’s political circles. He apparently has good relations with everyone, except Maliki.” The next month will determine how willing Chalabi’s patrons are to throw in their lot with him. Maliki, apparently emboldened after a private talk with the office of Iraq Shia Islam’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said on Friday that he was not going anywhere. Some of those touting Chalabi as leader are now saying he would be a better fit for finance minister.

A palpably amazed Adam Taylor spotlights how the neocons are reprising their old roles as Chalabi cheerleaders:

This week the National Journal’s Clara Ritger spoke to Richard Perle, the famously neoconservative adviser to Bush at the time of the Iraq war. Asked about who should next lead Iraq, Perle said 69-year-old Ahmed Chalabi was best suited for the job. “I think he’s got the best chance,” Perle said. “It would be foolish if we expressed a preference for somebody less competent, which we’ve done before.” …

So, Perle is championing a man who provided false information that led to a war now widely viewed as disastrous, is accused of stealing millions of dollars and is widely thought to have helped spy on the United States for Iran. And Perle isn’t alone. Paul Wolfowitz, another leading neoconservative who was key to Bush’s foreign policy, also has come out to say that for all his flaws, Chalabi is a viable candidate. “The man is a survivor,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “That’s impressive. I think he wants to succeed in what he does, he’s smart; maybe he’ll figure out a way to do it.”

Does Contraceptive Coverage Pay For Itself?

Austin Frakt considers the question from the insurer’s perspective:

In part because it is so cost-effective, most people are willing to pay for contraception with their own money, if they can afford to. (Many Medicaid-eligible individuals perhaps cannot, but most employed people probably can.) Insurers benefit from this, because every pregnancy avoided is one less they have to pay for. Therefore, when employer-sponsored insurers pick up the tab for contraception, not very many more pregnancies are avoided — most people were already using and paying for contraception.

According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, though the proportion of Americans with no cost-sharing for contraceptives rose in 2013 to 50 percent from 20 percent, prescriptions written for contraceptive medications increased only 4.6 percent.

But when they begin to fully cover contraception, insurers take on its full cost, “crowding out” the willingness of individuals’ to self-insure for it. Therefore, the government’s accommodation of religious organizations’ objections to covering contraception (obliging insurance companies to pick up the cost of the coverage, with no offsetting premiums or cost-sharing from either employees or employers) may impose a cost on insurers, even though contraception is cost-effective for society as a whole.

Daniel Liebman’s two cents:

There is strong evidence that public contraceptive funding for underserved populations is cost-saving, and there is a chance that the cost-neutrality observed following the [Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB)] and Hawaii mandates will materialize for other insurers as well. There are undeniable economic benefits of contraception for society as a whole, as well as a multitude of social benefits that could fill many posts of their own. Focusing specifically on the economics of insurance, however, the literature on the subject is sparse. All told, we currently have little evidence to indicate the time frame needed for private insurers to realize cost offsets or savings, if there are indeed any to be had.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The former half-term governor has now declared herself in favor of impeachment of the president, and called on all good Republicans to do the same. Drudge, the original impeacher, went into full metal jacket mode – and an instant poll of his readers (close to 170,000 of them at time of posting) backed impeachment by 72 to 15 percent.

You can try and figure out the logic but this is the most coherent of the passages in her declaration of war:

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt; many cities are on the verge of insolvency; our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers? His friendly wealthy bipartisan elite, who want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best “border security” money can buy in their own exclusive communities, do not care that Obama tapped us out.

Look: don’t ask me. Nothing she says has ever made much sense to me.

But the obviously potent issue she is referring to is illegal immigration, the issue that took down Eric Cantor, and the issue that truly riles up the Fox Nation. And here’s the critical part with respect to the November elections:

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

And so a gauntlet has been laid. A vote for the Republicans this November is a vote for the impeachment of Obama. Any Republican Senate candidate who does not back impeachment will now face growing Tea Party backlash. And every single Senator will now be asked if they support impeachment or not. That seems to me the import of Palin’s endorsement of the most radical action that can be taken against a sitting president. The November elections have just become a vote on the question of impeachment.

Are the Republicans aware of the implications of this? There are plenty of voters who might have voted Republican this fall who will hesitate if they think it means subjecting the country to the kind of spectacle we saw the last time a Democrat dared to win a second term in office. There are many African-American voters who might have sat out this election – but now will see the president beset by the same forces that tried to take down Bill Clinton and may well show up in force. There are, for that matter, many women voters who, before Hobby Lobby, might have felt apathetic this fall and may not now. What I’m suggesting is that, not for the first time, the Republican party’s most treacherous opponent … is the Republican party. And McCain’s Frankenstein leads the way!

Today, we took note of a new study of the power of psilocybin; and the role that plankton could play in reducing atmospheric carbon. I mulled over the promise and pitfalls of “reform conservatism” as well as the “revenge doctrine’ of the state of Israel. Plus: Big Pharma takes on marijuana; and the conversion of a small but growing minority of evangelicals to marriage equality.

The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “The Challenge of Reform Conservatism.”

If you haven’t yet, but have been meaning to, please take a moment to subscribe. Without you, we have no way to keep this show on the road.

And see you in the morning.

(Photo of the former half-term governor and failed vice-presidential candidate from Runner’s World.)

Looking Back At The Great War, Ctd

John Cooper and Michael Kazin have been debating the wisdom of America entering WWI. In the latest round of argument, Kazin imagines what Germany winning might have meant:

Cooper is certainly correct about Woodrow Wilson’s motives for entering World War I. He did wager that the blood of American soldiers could make a “new world order” more likely. But if a triumphant Germany—no sure thing, even if the U.S. had stayed neutral—had been a pillar of that order, what’s the worst that would have happened? At least, it would have meant that Adolf Hitler would be remembered, if at all, as the recipient of two Iron Crosses who still failed to make it past the rank of lance corporal. It also might have given Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) – the largest in the world and one committed to democratic rule and cultural tolerance – an influential role in combatting attempts to suppress national minorities and reining in the militarist state.

But John Cooper insists that a German victory would have been disastrous:

Defeat in 1918 unquestionably poisoned the politics of the Weimar Republic, and I agree with Kazin that without it Hitler would probably never have risen from obscurity. But would either Germany or other nations have been immune to the viruses of fascism and racialist nationalism? Being on the winning side did not immunize Italy and Japan against those infections. One likely result of a German victory might have been the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but before we relish that possibility think about what a chilling effect that would have had on later anti-colonial movements. Or consider how in later decades Gandhi might have fared in a German-dominated India or Mandela in a German-reinforced Boer South Africa.

(Video: Hitch recites Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem Dulce et Decorum est.)

Who Profits From Prohibition?

Lee Fang contends that big pharma (and painkiller interests) are bankrolling anti-marijuana campaigns:

People in the United States, a country in which painkillers are routinely overprescribed, now consume more than 84 percent of the entire worldwide supply of oxycodone and almost 100 percent of hydrocodone opioids. In Kentucky, to take just one example, about one in fourteen people is misusing prescription painkillers, and nearly 1,000 Kentucky residents are dying every year.

So it’s more than a little odd that [the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA)] and the other groups leading the fight against relaxing marijuana laws, including the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids (formerly the Partnership for a Drug-Free America), derive a significant portion of their budget from opioid manufacturers and other pharmaceutical companies. According to critics, this funding has shaped the organization’s policy goals: CADCA takes a softer approach toward prescription-drug abuse, limiting its advocacy to a call for more educational programs, and has failed to join the efforts to change prescription guidelines in order to curb abuse. In contrast, CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids have adopted a hard-line approach to marijuana, opposing even limited legalization and supporting increased police powers.

Jon Walker adds:

After reading this article it is worth drawing attention to the interesting correlation between medical marijuana states and prescriptions for opioid pain relievers. On average opioid prescription rates are noticeably lower in states that have medical marijuana laws. Of course correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. That said, it is also worth noting for-profit companies rarely give significant sums of money to politically active groups purely out of the goodness of their hearts.