The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Rep. John Boehner is so opposed to this fictitious “government takeover” of health insurance.

I wonder why.

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Let’s have fun with this. I’ll write down my thoughts about the State of the Union as it happens, but I don’t really see the value in literally live-blogging this sort of thing. Anyway:

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While the Boston Globe dropped the ball with its coverage of the education bill passing through the state House of Representatives, The Somerville Journal picked it up and ran with it. I’m not asking for anything impossible, here, if a local newspaper can pull off what a big, lumbering dinosaur like the Globe apparently finds difficult.

I noticed an article in the Boston Globe, a copy of which was lying in a common area at work, about an education bill that had just passed through the Massachusetts House of Representatives. So I read the whole thing, which was a lot of quotes of people saying that they liked charter schools and descriptions of the marathon length of the midnight session and whatnot.

And then I realised that, having read the article, not once did it mention the number or even title of the bill, nor did it describe in concrete terms what the effects are. The bill apparently increases the number of charter schools the state will permit to exist, but doesn’t specify how many charter schools will be permitted if the bill passes the State Senate. It also “aims to overhaul the state’s worst schools”, but doesn’t say how.

Granted, the article does mention that “members plowed through about 150 amendments to the bill”, which is an interesting piece of information, and maybe does excuse a somewhat sketchily-detailed article. However, that doesn’t excuse the lack of any detail whatsoever. This follow-up, which appears to be a web-only article, and therefore one which won’t get as many views, reveals that the so-called “overhaul” of failing schools is actually just a conversion of those schools into charter schools. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it strikes me as something that’s pretty important when it comes to informing the public’s view of a bill’s effects.

Maybe this is just an indictment of one of the limitations of print journalism. With the pressure on to file a report on a big, breaking story like this in time for the presses to churn out enough copies for the morning edition, details necessarily fall through the cracks. And that’s ignoring situations like the infamous Dewey Defeats Truman headline, where the pressure to make it to press led to the printing of a blatantly counterfactual article before all the details came in.

The increasing prominence of blogging is a double-edged sword in these cases. You don’t face deadline pressure, but then you also have a sense of immediacy that leads to kicking out first impressions that end up becoming a final draft. Tesla knows I’ve fallen prey to that trap, but at least I’m just a lonely little fourth stringer who nobody looks to for advice. I’d be interested to know how many people read blogs via RSS versus going directly to webpages. Either way, though, it seems to me that the “time shift” effect encourages getting the story right over getting the story first, since you can’t count on your audience reading your post before someone else’s, even if you post first.

Mike the Mad Biologist reminded me of something that struck me during my recent trip to Washington, DC. My trip being, as it was, Fallout-themed, I of course had to visit the Jefferson Memorial, and the memorial made quite an impression on me, both for the rather imposing statue of Jefferson at its center and for the quotations that adorned its walls. Mike’s post, of course, primarily reminded me of this one, from a letter addressed to James Madison:

Almighty God hath created the mind free…All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens…are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion…No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.

Obviously, that passage serves as a rather appropriate retort to any of this “America is a Christian nation! Freedom of religion, not freedom from religion!” bullshit, but, more circumspectly, I mainly just wish that more people had the sense to recognise that attempting to use the power of government force people to believe as they do isn’t in their own best interest. Political power changes hands quite frequently, and the shoe can wind up on the other foot at any time. It’s far better to pursue and promote universal principles of freedom both of and from any particular creed, because the power to compel can easily be turned against its first wielder.

One of the shitty things about living in funky urban neighbourhoods is that you have to deal with assholes who come into said urban neighbourhoods because they hear people talking about how great they are, then are shocked, shocked at all of the horrible moral deparvity going on around them. My god, people are drinking the demon rum! They’re having parties! They must be stopped.

This kind of bullshit shut down one of my favourite bars, Cambridge’s B-Side Lounge, and apparently there’s a stuck-up prick trying to bring the same teetotaling assholery to Davis Square. I don’t know much about Ward 6′s current alderwoman, Rebekah Gewirtz, but she’s gotta be better than this Campano joker:

“I don’t like the way the square is going. Whenever you have that many liquor licenses, drugs and violence follow,” said Campano. “I would like to see mercantile and retail — a nice mix.”

Maybe he hasn’t noticed, but that’s what’s already there. But I guess we don’t have a fucking Wal-Mart, so we’re not “mercantile and retail” enough.

These prudish fucks need to just move out to the exurbs where they don’t have to endure the horror of horrors that I like to call “having shit to do after 6 pm”.

So, earlier today I Twittered™ about Glenn Beck’s ridiculous frog video, which got linked on Skepchick. I was working under the assumption that he actually killed a frog on TV, which seems crazy: but, hey, it’s Glenn Beck. Anyway, various people have pointed out that he appears to grab a rubber frog and that you can’t actually see anything go into the pot of boiling water, two things that I missed from the low quality YouTube version.

Since I have to leave for karaoke with Rebecca Watson in a few minutes, I’ll just ask a question instead of writing up my full thoughts on the matter: does pretending to boil a fake frog on TV rather than actually boiling a live frog on TV make Glenn Beck any less crazy?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

I didn’t create this “Questions” post category to not use it. Anyway, today’s question comes from Matt Lauer:

Is it worse if some of this opposition to President Obama is fueled by outright racism, or is it worse if some liberals, in an attempt to defend President Obama and his plans, invoke the charge of racism to discredit the critics?

The former, Matt. Being racist is worse than pointing out when other people are acting like racists. (Incidentally, this is exactly what his guest says.)

Thanks for playing, folks! See you next time, when the question will be, “Is it worse if Hitler exterminates a shitload of Jews, or is it worse if some guy calls Godwin’s Law in an argument?”

So, apparently, an abortion clinic run by Women’s Health Services is moving into an empty building in Brookline, which used to house a Hollywood Video. Some asshats brought up a lawsuit to prevent them from doing so. What may surprise you is the justification:

“If you ever have observed protesters at an abortion clinic, they carry signs, which are alarming in their graphic detail of aborted fetuses. They have life-sized statues of the Virgin Mary, and they usually have somebody dressed as the grim reaper,” said May. “I don’t know how the town could have overlooked the emotional harm that could come to children by allowing the clinic to operate at that location.”

Yes, that’s right. Women’s Health Services can’t put their clinic there because ZOMG ABORTION PROTESTERS ARE SCARY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! As amusing as it might be to hear people call out abortion protesters for the violent, insane motherfuckers they are, this just plain pisses me off. Why are we punishing Women’s Health Services for the actions of a bunch of looney idiots with more hate and free time than good sense? If the protesters are such a goddamned dangerous nuisance, maybe we should, I dunno, do something about them. Like maybe arrest them for vandalism when they break windows or disturbing the peace when they disrupt city council meetings:

The lawsuit notes that protesters have already picketed community meetings held to discuss the clinic’s plans, while vandals smashed several windows at the property shortly after it was announced that it was the possible site of a clinic offering abortions.

It’s tempting to cite free speech and then run screaming from this issue to avoid attracting the attention of the buzzing, angry hornets, but this goes well beyond the protections of the First Amendment. Violence and threats are not free speech, they’re terrorism. There’s no other way to explain it. The anti-abortion nutjobs are using intimidation tactics and vandalism and inciting fear in order to obtain their desired political goal. That’s the textbook definition of terrorism, right there, and it’s about fucking time that we started treating these people like the terrorists they are.

Correction: I originally cited “Planned Parenthood” as the owner of the proposed clinic. This was incorrect. The clinic would actually be run by Women’s Health Services, a local health provider.

From Amanda Marcotte‘s Twitter feed, this:

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.

Ok, yes. So the obvious mistake is that, well… MEDICARE AND MEDICAID ARE ALREADY RUN BY THE GOVERNMENT. But if you’re anybody other than Arthur Laffer — yes, the economic genius whose greatest accomplishment is a curvy line on a chart that he pulled out of his ass one day — you knew that already.

“But wait,” the ghost of Billy Mays’ beard says, “there’s more!”

The DMV, maligned as it is, is run by the state governments. You can’t just blithely generalise a state-run office to a federal project like the health care public option. After all, the federal government has established some efficient, well-run, and beneficial agencies in its time. Like, you know, the United States Postal Service. When was the last time you lost any mail sent by USPS? Can you even remember? Sure, the price of stamps keeps going up, but so does the price of everything else. The biggest problem with the USPS is that they continue to deliver unsolicited bulk mail, but anti-regulation asshats like Laffer would consider that capitalism at work.

So, yeah, if Obama’s health care works as well as the USPS, I say bring it the fuck on.