The New York Time's lead paragraph in its contraceptive coverage features a dastardly sentence structure:The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have rejected a compromise on birth control coverage that President Obama offered on Friday and said they would continue to fight the president’s plan to find a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions.
Did you spot it? I read the paragraph without any hesitation as "Bishops... said they would continue to fight the president's plan[. The President's plan finds a way] for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions..."
An alternate reading is that they will "continue to fight the president's plan [in the hopes of creating an alternative plan wich would create] "a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions."
Later down in the article, there appears to be more support for the latter reading. I'm breaking off the Bishop's logic, because it deserves some analysis in the context of the overall healthcare debate. See you on that post in a couple minutes.
The New York Times has recommitted itself to providing the context for the debt-ceiling crisis with a helpful infographic and article. How did the deficit get so big?With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here — from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.
It's a factual statement. It's been repeated ad nauseum. It has no effect on the American right's philosophic depedence on cutting unrelated government priorities.
The New York Times has an article out on "Bath Salts" the grey-market desigern drug stimulant that has been banned by 38 states.Bath salts contain manmade chemicals like mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV, also known as substituted cathinones. Both drugs are related to khat, an organic stimulant found in Arab and East African countries that is illegal in the United States.
They are similar to so-called synthetic marijuana, which has also caused a surge in medical emergencies and been banned in a number of states. In March, the Drug Enforcement Administration used emergency powers to temporarily ban five chemicals used in synthetic marijuana, which is sold in the same types of shops as bath salts.
Now to my knowledge, MDPV has nothing to do chemically, behaviorally, or pharmacologically with synthetic cannabinoids that were banned by the DEA. So how are they similar? they're synthetic psychoactives and have an inflated market share becuase their traditional behavioral analogues are criminalized.
Full disclosure: I designed and conducted experimental animal research with a synthetic cannabinoid WIN-55215,2 on its effects on memory.
David Brooks has a really tough task ahead of him. His career depends on cheerleading for conservatives in 2012 to an audience who understands the poverty of their arguments. If you're going to get voters who can add excited about the Republican party, you've got to make the situation look bleak enough to distract voters from the actual plans, personalities, and platform of the Republican party.
Brooks prefaces his pundiry for the remainder of the 2012 election cyle with an simple declaration of his theme. Here is the template that David Brooks will be reusing ad nauseum:I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.
Of course, any policy wonk (or man-on-the-street with a calculator) would say that Ryan's Folly and the Pawlenty Tax-a-palooza are probably too imaginative with their accounting, this will certainly be Brooks' theme. I'd like to call attention to the art of decline mongering, however. What tells Brooks that the situation is bleak as can be?
Semi-weekly New York Times links:
Links to front-page New York Times articles to get you around the paywall.
- The deepening of the Egyptian Revolution seems more focused on ensuring real personnel change than any ideological or theological agenda, answering Islamaphobes everywhere.
- Meanwhile, airstrikes in Libya kill 5. No word yet on when Islamaphobes will have to eat their hat on preventing mass murder there.
- In La Cote D'Ivoire grim reality is setting in.
- The Portugal bailout is not without political cost.
- In the local carnivore movement, slaughterhouse capacity is proving the big bottleneck in getting beef to market. Thank me later for avoiding a "Where's the beef" pun.
- If your stated goal is to be the adult in the room, expect your political opponents to stick to 'No Deal' on matters of national importance.
- Speaking of which, a looming government shutdown would have serious consequences, including being more expensive than maintaining government operations. Even from a budget or 'cutting spending' standpoint, shutting down the government doesn't make any sense. Yet John Boehner is preparing a shutdown just to punish Planned Parenthood. Punishment, I suppose, for being a health resource for women.
- The race to the bottom for states attracting businesses is reaching new heights.
- Another look back at secessionism, of the oldentimes variety, not the Texas Governor style. It does seem like the GOP calls for secession have quieted down a bit recently, doesn't it?
- Getting on to the Republican substantive agenda, the House votes to prevent the EPA from protecting the environment against industrial emissions. Next week, they'll ask the Department of Justice to stop prosecuting criminals. Oh wait, they already did.
- Maybe feeding food crops into industrial energy processes isn't the best idea.
- Headline: Obama administration to tackle inequality in education. Meanwhile, Bloomberg's gambit of school reform has come crashing down in just 3 months. If Social Security is the third rail of American politics, inequality in education is the super high voltage long-distance power distribution grid cable.
- Why pay Congress? So we can have represntatives that don't have to be wealthy as a precondition for serving their constituents. I'm afraid to click the link to find out if Nicholas Kristof can come up with that answer after posing such a question.
- Japan is still not out of the seismic activity woods, registering a 7.4 magnitude aftershock friday morning (local time).
- Finally, Disney is planning to waste millions of dollars in China.
A fun adventure linking the NYTimes so you and yours can avoid the paywall. Enjoy!
The game from now on is to follow a link into the NYTimes website and grab as many links as possible without clicking on any content links yourself. Repost on your blog, and you give your readers unlimited access behind the NYTimes paywall.
The CIA is on the ground in Libya, repeating the tactics that brought a (relatively) swift rout against the Taliban in 2001, partnering with the Northern Alliance and directing American air strikes against government forces. The Libyan rebels, however, have much less combat experience than the Northern Alliance had, and it seems less likely that Qaddafhi's regime will be as comfortable melting away to form a long-running insurgency, settling for local protection rackets and drug money to finance personal fortunes. The oil wealth inherent in control of a united Libya is a much stronger reason to stay in power, and Qaddafhi's regime is more entrenched than the Taliban were in Afghanistan.
Government bailouts are paying off for the American taxpayer, bringing in additional revenue.
The New York Times is exploring a new business model for online traffic today. Canadian readers of NYTimes.com start facing a 'metering' scheme today which erects a pay wall after a user makes more than 20 page views in a month on the Times website. Links that lead to NYTimes content will not count towards the metered pageviews. American and global visitors will wait until the 28th of March before facing the same metered traffic and paywall scheme.
Clever devotees of the Times would do well to start linking to articles on the Times site and seeking out other bloggers who do the same to avoid the metering. One pageview to the NYtims front page would yield dozens of links to articles. A blogger can provide links to readers, in essence creating free portals to the Times website. Twitter, tumblr, and blogs will provide links to free articles, making it easier for friends and connected media to share the information that a person wants friends to see. A failure to provide links to friends freezes the connected people out from content for which they might have to pay $15-$35 per month.
Paul Krugman published a pithy blog post on the New York Times site looking at some of the Republicans' proposed cuts to public goods funding:WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899
Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million
Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million
These are deep cuts but not ones that will reduce the deficit. They cut effective programs to the bone without reducing overall government spending by an appreciable amount. Even worse, the money that one takes out of these programs will not be saved by the American taxpayer because the public will have to sink their own money into accommodating for the loss of the public good.
Explaining the value of these programs would be an excellent use of a NYTimes blog.
The New York Times runs this story on the similarity/difference matrix between Clinton and Obama administration responses to large midterm election losses. At the heart of it is the refusal to come to terms with the Reupblican strategy for the next two years.In applying the lessons, Mr. Obama might find areas for cooperation and conflict. The president and Congressional Republicans could find common ground on issues like education reform and alternative energy. They could clash on spending, environmental regulation and any attempt to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care program.
They could find common ground, but there's no reason to believe that they'll acknowledge good Democratic ideas any more in 2011 than they accepted repackaged Republican ideas like the individual mandate, this year's tax-cuts-for-small-business "small business bill."
Forecasting Republican obstructionism probably doesn't count as "News that's fit to print" either, but at least it's based in reality.
