Category Archives: Newsroom
I can only hope that this changed some votes in the right direction.
An expert assessing the importance of Donald Trump’s short fingers.
This map of age differences at marriage looks mostly as one might expect, but it’s less of a thing than I would have guessed in China. Gannon, I’m sure, would be disappointed in Argentina being dark blue.
Whites gain more from the social safety net than blacks, proportional to poverty numbers.
Greg Branch writes of Flint, and how it all unfolded.
A teenager in Germany who sparked outrage by claiming to have been raped by a refugee admits to making it up. There’s a definite left-on-left angle with that one…
Marcus Winters reports that charter schools are better at retaining hard-to-educate students, suggesting that maybe the notion that they’re tossing out the low-achievers may have less merit than some suppose?
Roosh, the ally of A Well Known Sex Blogger, has been getting a lot of attention lately.
Housing in New Jersey is expansive. A lot of communities are seeking to keep it that way. Relatedly, and even less surprisingly, resident participation in city planning has some pretty ill-effects.
Carbon dioxide emissions may be making forests more resilient!
Dylan Matthews reports that giving poor people money is good for the recipients and maybe not so good for those around them, but it’s unclear. Relative wealth and relative income are tricky.
Residents of Boulder have found a new, inventive argument to oppose more housing: Pet density.
Walmart coming to a town can be a glorious event. When it leaves, though, it hurts.
Turns out, it’s a bad idea to hire toxic people.
How North Dakota became an epicenter for drone development. Setting aside my usual giddiness with the exploitation of non-coastal human resources and development, the great expanse really is good for this sort of thing.
So… Rubio had a pretty bad night. Not much point in denying that. Some have been arguing that this is the first time Rubio’s been a big target, but that really isn’t true. From a comment I left the other day:
I’m not sure it won’t. That was a huge thing early on, but has become less so with time because he has been getting a lot of negative attention. R2R carpetbombed the Iowa airwaves, and elsewhere. Cruz has been taking shots and really ramped it up over the past week. Trump has taken shots. Kasich’s people took a shot. Talk radio has taken shots. His views on immigration came up in the most unflattering way possible in the last debate, and was brought up in previous debates (in one of which he was Target #1), and he’s still standing.
So while I’m not-at-all sure it won’t happen, there is quite a bit of reason to believe that the obvious liabilities have already played out. There may be some as-yet unfound non-obvious liabilities, but that’s an unknown unknown at this point.
Photo by DonkeyHotey 
The only upshots for Rubio are fortuitous timing (in a way) and a potential to demonstrate solid support if it exists. In the former case, the Superbowl is today and a lot of the focus will be there today and tomorrow and the election is Tuesday. Also, because it was on a Saturday Night, SNL didn’t get a crack at him. In the latter case, if he comes out of New Hampshire looking unfazed by this, then that will be more to his benefit than if the disaster had not occurred. It would indicate that his support has some depth, and that he can weather mistakes.
I don’t believe the upshots will outweigh the bad. I’m looking beyond the primary here and to the general election. We’ve had a vague sense of what his weaknesses as a candidate are, but this crystalized the image. A lot of critics are going with Rubio-as-a-robot, which I actually think is wrong. Rubio comes across as warm in a way that HRC and Mitt don’t, especially. But it does point to a concern I had earlier but that he alleviated in earlier performances: That he’s an empty suit. A Ken Doll. A wind-up doll of sorts. This solidifies those concerns and if this is indicative of where he will be in November, that’s not good for the GOP. If Hillary Clinton ever finds her groove, Rubio will go down in the same way that Thomas Dewey did: As the candidate dismissed as the groom on a wedding cake.
So, without further ado, going into New Hampshire, here is how the race looks for each of the candidates:
Marco Rubio
1st Place: He’s the nominee.
2nd Place: His odds improve considerably if he has some separation here (as looked more likely before the debate than after). Especially if Cruz is #3. If he’s a weak #3, the road gets narrower with more potential for a fourth candidate making things more difficult for him. The key is separation, by either five or more points or Cruz standing in between him and Jeb/Kasich/Christie.
3rd Place: If behind Cruz, he needs a good debate performance ahead of South Carolina but can rebound. If behind Kasich, Christie, or especially Jeb, his odds decrease considerably.
4th Place: He can win, but the path is very narrow. Who got third? That’s the question.
5th Place: He’s done.
Ted Cruz
1st Place: He’s going to be very difficult to beat.
2nd Place: Unless behind Rubio, he’s in very good shape. Possibly to being a 50/50 proposition.
3rd Place: He’s still in good shape. My odds for him go up.
4th Place: He’s still in the race, but needs to rebound in South Carolina.
5th Place: he’s still in the race, but must do well in South Carolina.
Donald Trump
1st Place: This is expected. His odds improve, but not greatly. It’s South Carolina where he is going to need to prove himself.
2nd Place: He’s not done, but his path becomes narrower.
3rd Place: He’s done.
4th Place: He’s done.
5th Place: He’s done.
Jeb Bush
1st Place: I don’t even know.
2nd Place: Unless Rubio is close behind, he’s probably slayed Rubio and become the third viable candidate.
3rd Place: He’s hurt Rubio a great deal and we’re probably looking at a four-man race with good implications for Cruz (and Trump), or a three-man race with Rubio dead.
4th Place: Not enough, but he’ll probably fight on. Especially if he beats Rubio.
5th Place: He will be under some very intense pressure to drop out.
John Kasich
1st Place: I don’t even know.
2nd Place: He will probably be a factor in the race in the short-term, but it’s unclear he has long-term potential. Once NH is exposed as the one-off it probably he, he’s likely to become an afterthought before Super Tuesday.
3rd Place: If he’s ahead of Rubio, probably a short-term factor. If behind, probably not.
4th Place: He’s done.
5th Place: He’s done.
Chris Christie
1st Place: I don’t even know.
2nd Place: Probably a factor in the short-term, slightly more long-term factor potential than Kasich.
3rd Place: If he’s ahead of Rubio, probably a short-term factor. If behind, probably not.
4th Place: He’s done.
5th Place: He’s done.
Note: I am a bit down on Christie this cycle. But I think more than anyone else, he has set himself up to potentially be a viable candidate in 2020.
Related to recent conversations around here, some union leaders are worried about Trump’s appeal to their rank-and-file.
Apparently, the four militia members in Oregon are interested in standing down – and Ammon Bundy wants them to but Cliven doesn’t – but don’t want to go to jail. That’s something they should have thought about before, I think.
I love this Ted Cruz snub video so much.
Oh my god there is a giant gas cloud that’s going to consume us all! Alternately, why we have about 30,000,000 years go get off this rock (and out of this galaxy).
I understand the point that Sumner is trying to make here, and I think that class bias is a part of it, but the other part of it is that college offers an easier mechanism for intervention. The mechanisms he refers to for the others are… more intrusive.
NPR lists out six alternatives to our current primary system. It’s no good having Iowa and New Hampshire hard-coded in, but I’ll take just about anything over a National Primary (or, really, any system that places undue importance on a handful of large states that might as well be their own countries). I favor the Ohio Plan (with some tinkering).
OPEC may have started a price war, but rich investors are going to make winning it hard.
Wendell Cox looks at the most and least housing-affordable cities in the world. USA! USA! USA! (Excluding California.)
Los Angeles City Council is combatting the dangers of second hand snuff. (Well, technically, I think this calls under the category of fourth-hand, the dangers of seeing people use tobacco products.)
Peter Suderman argues that Hollywood is stuck in expanded universes. I think such things have been a great advance, a form of continuation without the repetition of sequels.
A theater in Idaho is in hot water for serving alcohol at a Fifty Shades of Gray showing and may lose its liquor license. Eugene Volohk believes there’s a First Amendment case.
Teens aren’t so sure that there’s anything wrong with porn, but come down hard of failing to recycle.
The friendship between a goat and a tiger that warmed our hearts has come to a tragic end. Not that tragic! The goat is fine! The tiger just got tired of being bossed around is all.
The Dixie Chicks are finally on tour in the US again. The question being… is their divorce from country music final?
Stanford has a new pilot program to blend computer science and the humanities. Relatedly, a recent meta-analysis reveals the obvious, that college majors and personalities tend to be related.
Ted Cruz got a little bit of bad publicity for some campaign mail he sent out:
As Iowans prepare to head to the caucuses on Monday for the nation’s first votes in the presidential primaries, the campaigns are pulling out all the stops. The mailer sent out by one Republican campaign, however, might end up backfiring.
Tom Hinkeldey, a resident of Alta, Iowa, tweeted a photo (which was later deleted because it included his personal address) on Friday evening of a mailer Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign sent addressed to his wife, Steffany. The mailer was a large card printed to look like a manila envelope on one side and was labeled in all capital letters, “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.”
This rubbed some people the wrong way. Not the least of which was Hinkeldey, who claims to have been motivated by this to go out and vote for Rubio.
This sort of nudging and neighbor-shaming isn’t new. Kolohe reports that he’s gotten it from Democrats, though with a more encouraging tone. D Hawkins reports that MoveOn did it in 2012, and some have claimed that Obama himself did it.
Fans of Cruz cried foul and some theories were bandied about that it was a photoshopping job or a false flag attempt. I almost believed it, but in an indifferent sort of way. Basically, if it was a false flag then it was wrong (and illegal), but Cruz chose to be the kind of person that you look at this and think, “Yeah, that seems like something he would do.”
Stages:
1. Denial
2. Photoshop
3. Blame rival campaign
4. Oh hey, great mailer! Just a gentle reminder of American Constitutional duty!
— D. Hawkins (@HawkinsUSA) January 30, 2016
As it happens, the Cruz campaign not only admitted doing it, but in typical Cruz fashion the candidate loudly refused to apologize for his love of democracy and voting. Rubio didn’t come out and condemn the mailers, but he said he was puzzled by the intent and the tone. His focus on those things may be significant, because, shortly thereafter, what might have been a point of differentiation between Cruz’s rough manner and Rubio’s more conciliatory manner collapsed with the revelation that the Rubio campaign appears to have sent out a very similar document. Similar, but not the same. The part that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up with Cruz was that it named names with an implicit threat of your name being before them. That’s more than what MoveOn did, which was encourage. It’s more than what Rubio did, by tut-tutting a bit. While I’m not entirely comfortable with the Rubio tack, the tone is rather different. It doesn’t come across as officially as Cruz’s does, and perhaps most importantly it doesn’t name those names.
Erica Grieder, who seems to tentatively support Cruz, came to the defense of the mailers (including the naming of names):
1) They both seem weird and obnoxious to me. However, I have no frame of reference for what campaigns do in states with real elections.
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
2) I am aware that similarly weird-and-obnoxious tactics have proven effective in a variety of contexts.
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
3) For example, utilities have shamed customers over their power usage (including relative to their neighbors): https://t.co/5Vt8auaByq
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
4) Assigning Florida schools an A-F rating, ironically (I think), was one of Jeb Bush’s signature, tho shamey, reforms as Florida governor
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
5) All of this is consistent with Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism”, which I think is gross but many of you support
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
6) I’m also reluctant to make assumptions about how Iowans see these mailers. They seem to have differential norms about voting.
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) January 31, 2016
In any event, the Cruz mailer has been condemned by the Secretary of State for looking like an official document. Perhaps more damning, though, it looks like they may have just made the numbers up.
Photo by DonkeyHotey
“What I’m thinking is this. When I’m president, we’re not just going to build a wall, but also a moat. Imagine Border Patrol sitting atop the wall, looking over the moat, armed with POISON DART GUNS! They won’t even have to use them because none of the Mexicans would dare approach the wall, because the moat will have alligators and the Border Patrol officers will be wearing PIRATE HATS! The pirate hats will have the scary skull and crossbones and the crocodiles will be HUNGRY! No one would dare go up to my moat. It’ll be great. The greatest moat setup the world has ever seen!” -Donald Trump
“Donald Trump announced today bold new plan today to build a moat staffed with alligators, and to staff his border wall with border patrol officers wearing pirate hats and armed with blow darts. We will discuss the merits of his bold new proposal today…” -some Fox News show
“Anyone who looks at my record will see that I have always supported a moat with alligators, or ‘gators’ as we like to call them in Texas. And there is really nothing on his agenda that I can say that I oppose from the moat to the blow darts. It’s a terrific idea from start to finish.” -Ted Cruz
“Rafael Cruz says he’s in favor of ‘cocodrilos’ along the border wall, but betrays us on the pirate hats. Just another RINO, or as they would say in Rafael’s native language ‘rinoceronte.’ I don’t speak Spanish, though, because I am an American, but Rafael Cruz probably does because he isn’t. Remember.” -Ann Coulter
“Are we really going to do this pirate thing? Okay, then, while I understand some of the apprehension surrounding immigration, we need to approach this serio… I’m sorry. Really? We’re really going to talk about pirates?” -Carly Fiorina (more…)
Malcolm Harris writes of the dark history of liberal reform.
Meet Freddie, the cow that escaped the slaughterhouse and found a home.
Warm winter weather is bad for squirrel waistlines.
I wish this piece on the awesomeness of consumer choice had chosen something other than blue nail polish as an example.
The Guardian looks at the question… what the heck happened to Sarah Palin? My stock answer is always the same: The right wanted an icon, the left wanted a villain, and she wanted to be a star.
Jonathan Freedland is concerned that we are laughing at Trump and Palin when we should be worried about how they have tapped into middle class rage.
Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson does not seem optimistic about 2020. This phase of politics where everyone decides that voters can’t be flipped is going to end in tears. For some, anyway.
How FDR and a data whiz from Michigan gave birth to modern polling.
Have we exported spree shootings to Canada?
According to a new study, liberals are more dogmatic than conservatives.
The Bernie Sanders campaign picked an odd fight with Wikipedia over use of its campaign logos, though apparently backed down.
Cheap oil usually does wonders for the economy, but not this time.
Drive safely on Estonia’s icy roads: Make sure to stay over 25mph and don’t wear your seatbelt.
Bruce Springsteen does Take It Easy. I admit that I am a sucker for tribute covers of the newly departed. Somewhat relatedly, Michael Reilly writes about how the Internet has changed the way we deal with death.
Michael Hiltzik writes of the long con of the NFL, and how San Francisco paid a high price for cooperation.
Here’s a cool time lapse video of the snow in Central Park.
How Norway turned on immigration.
Laura Jean Schneider argues that the federal grazing system doesn’t support good land managements.
I’ve long known, or at least suspected, the the right’s fixation on terminology and defining conservatism would haunt it. I didn’t think the one to discover this fault would be, of all people, Donald Trump.
Relatedly, David Frum’s piece on conservative identity and conservative ideology is worth reading.
AT&T is moving further away from using operators. I didn’t know they even still had them.
The Canadian Senate is so weird.
Obama had some tough-ish words for HBCUs, and they didn’t go unnoticed. HBCUs have many of the same struggles as community colleges and even for-profits, though often get a lot more sympathy than the latter from some, and a lot less from others.
Autocomplete makes for a pretty killer online dating profile.
Did the wind industry rig the noise rules on wind turbines?
How Joel Dreyer went from a respected psychiatrist to a major drug dealer.
While height works more or less the way you might expect, obese men and women have more sexual partners than their normal-weight counterparts.
Maybe it’s not a name your considering for your kid, but a brand!
Opposites don’t attract. I like how the article confirms what I’ve previously said about women insisting on a greater degree of similarity than men.
A biotech firm seeks to flood the Chinese market with 3D-printed rhinocerus horns to undercut the poaching trade.
A glance at the twelce categories of email in the inbox of Melissa Click, she of “I need some muscle over here!” fame.
I wonder what, if anything, has changed from this 2002 article on ticket pricing.
Eric Bolling apparently believes that Sesame Street is all about left-wing communism.
Well, the plaintiffs didn’t get much of anything, but at least the lawyers got paid handsomely.
I am fascinated by the prospect of a Dirk Gently TV series, though bummed if it takes place in the USA.
Nautilus looks at the mathematics and psychology of the lottery, and Chidike Okeem argues that anti-lottery zealotry is errant, hubristic, and puritan.
Andrew Stiles is not very impressed with political dating apps. I… can’t work up too much outrage. If it’s a dealbreaker and/or something important to you, go for it. Compatible value systems are important, and if politics is a part of that value system… well, a dealbreaker in a spouse isn’t the same thing as a dealbreaker for friendship. Also, things that make me glad I’m not young and single.
The University of Idaho remains on an island in FBS football with little opportunity to find its way into a regionally appropriate football conference. As such, they run the risk of being the first football program to drop to FCS. New Mexico State may not be far behind.
What’s the opposite of an uplifting sports story? This is the opposite of that.
If you need an elderly woman for a photo op and don’t have one, it’s a bad idea to dress a man for the part, it turns out.
Jacob Heilbrunn argues that Germany was right to allow republication of Mein Kampf.
Camestros Felapton explains that no, the Nazis were not leftists.
City Journal has an interesting look at how Christchurch (NZ) rebuilt itself after an earthquake.
Why the trip to seems to take longer than the trip back from.
Thought we may have the ability, in the future we may not need to remember so many complicated passwords. I still can’t get over that a college football message board requires more complicated passwords than does my bank.
Scott Alexander’s two pieces on Guns and States are long (as is Alexander’s thing), but interesting.
We need to bring the word “Gutmensch” into the US vocabulary. It’ll look great sitting right next to “shadenfreude.”
After having thought about it considerably, I still have to disagree with Tyler Cowen pretty strongly: Doctors are not auto mechanics.
In simulations, at least, concealed carriers are actually pretty effective in conflict.
Good news! USC is no longer requiring students to disclose their sexual history.
Norway is trying to teach its migrants about how to treat women.
Huh. Maybe we do need a border wall with Canada after all.
Support from an unexpected source: Campbell’s comes out in favor of mandatory GMO label.
The VA supervisors who oversaw the catastophe on 2014 are back on the job.
Kevin Drum asks if society owes his mother reparations for raising him. Well, that’s not quite what it’s about, which is the politics of means-testing.
Michael Brendan Dougherty says that immigration is disrupting the nation state as the financial and psychological costs of emigration fall.
Yeah, if they’re good enough to fight for our country, they should get to stay. That shouldn’t be in debate.
Has the Episcopal Church been suspended from the Anglican Communion over its views on gay marriage?
According to Harvard Business Review, diversity policies don’t seem to make workplaces fairer, but they make white men feel threatened. So I guess it depends on what the aims are?
According to Anna Maria Barry, MSG was taken down by flawed science and xenophobia.
As we all know from TV, when we think of spousal abuse it’s important to know it’s the couples we least expect.
A new study on vouchers in Louisiana show negative outcomes for those that win the lottery compared to those that lose the lottery. Louisiana is an interesting case partly because their public system is largely charter-based. But it’s definitely something for proponents to look at.
Cobb has some interesting thoughts on Star Wars.
The mystery of the disappearing bookseller in Hong Kong. {More}
A woman’s rape claim was undermined by her Fitbit.
Before it became the site of the current standoff, residents Malheur County, Oregon, expressed a desire to become a part of Idaho. If my dream of splitting Idaho ever came true, I’d be dipping into Oregon to constitute the state of South Idaho (name possibly TBD). No plans to include Jefferson, however.
The two sides of devout Mormonism. I didn’t know that the Bundys were Mormon during the flap in Nevada, but as soon as I found out that they had a son named Ammon, things kind of fell into place.
A somewhat sympathetic take on one of the angry ranchers complaints by, of all outlets, Grist. I am sympathetic to the ranchers in this regard, but in the personal sense and not the shared-outrage sense. But even if I don’t quite by it, it was a noble effort by Grist.
Robert VerBruggen is questioning his prior support for drug decriminalization. He touches on why I take a cautious view (except for pot), but the lack of reform in our War on Drugs has me almost has me saying “Screw it.”
Well this just sounds like a delightful situation.
As bad as things are for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, at least their premier MP isn’t having to deny charges that he is plotting to kill the party leader.
This is clever enough, I guess, though they don’t get the Trumpku right. It’s supposed to be: Statement. Statement. Exclamation!
The seventh row of the Periodic Table is now complete with the addition of four new elements. Will a heavy metal element could be named after Motorhead’s Lemmy.
Huh. It seems to me that Jia Tolentino of Jezebel is less than impressed with your resolve not to read books by white men. Seriously, she makes a good point that energy is better spent actually promoting alternatives rather than expressing what you will and will not read.
There are a lot of disturbing things happening in Poland, but Pawel Swidlicki argues that the EU needs to forego intervention.
Peru is pretty pissed at Greenpeace for a stunt on some ancient landmarks.