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Yglesias

New Haven Is Poor, New Haven County Is Rich

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 25, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Joseph Delaney thinks that playing host to a prestigious university is no ticket to prosperity:

Mark has been discussing Edward Glaeser and his comments on how universities can create urban prosperity. Now, I am a big fan of universities and think that they serve an important role in global economic development. However, I am dubious that they make any particular community prosperous. Consider New Haven, CT — the home of Yale University (recently ranked the #11 university in the world).

According to wikipedia, the poverty rate in New Haven is 24%, which compares unfavorably with the rest of the United States where it is 14%. The poverty rate in New Haven, despite the presence of Yale, is nearly twice that of the United States as a whole.

I think this is the wrong level of analysis. The city of New Haven is a very small entity. New Haven county in which it’s located has a median household income of over $68,000 a year. It’s much richer than the American average. And Connecticut is one of the richest states in the union. Most American cities don’t really work as economic units. Lots of people who work at Yale, or in downtown New Haven, or who generally benefit from Yale-related prosperity don’t live within the municipal boundaries of New Haven.

Politics

Pawlenty: U.S. Should Not Be Governed By Religious Law — Unless It’s Christianity

By Igor Volsky on Mar 25, 2011 at 3:44 pm

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) is now disputing Adam Serwer’s suggestion that the presidential explorer may have a “Sharia law problem” with his conservative Republican base because he attempted to increase minority home ownership in Minnesota, including a program that would have made it easier for Muslims to purchase homes. As Serwer’s piece explains, “many Muslims hold that the paying or charging of interest is prohibited, which makes it difficult to purchase a home in the United States.” Banks have begun offering “Sharia compliant” products “which structure the payments in a sort of house-buying layaway plan” and in 2004 — with Pawlenty’s urging to increase minority home ownership — the Minnesota Housing Financing Agency “decided to partner with a local group, the African Development Center, in ‘developing culturally sensitive products,’ that would allow Muslims to enter the market.”

But as Ben Smith reports, Pawlenty is now denying he ever approved the partnership and says he dissolved the program as soon as he heard about it:

“This program was independently set up by the Minnesota state housing agency and did not make any mention Sharia Law on its face, but was later described as accommodating it,” the spokesman, Alex Conant, said. “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut it down. Fortunately, only about three people actually used the program before it was terminated at the Governor’s direction.”

Pawlenty’s objection: “The United States should be governed by the U.S. Constitution, not religious laws,” Conant said.

But that’s not what Pawlenty tells Christian audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he’s been using his personal faith (he is an Evangelical Christian) to build support for a presidential bid. In fact, during an interview with Christianity Today in late January, Pawlenty argued that elected officials should apply their faith to government:

I started with the perspective of someone who says that faith is separate from public law and public service; it really isn’t. We have, as a country, a founding perspective that we’re founded under God; our founding documents reference and acknowledge God, and acknowledge that our rights and privileges come from our Creator. [...]

I remind people that our country is founded under God, and the founders thought that was an important perspective.

During a recent address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, Pawlenty proclaimed, “The Constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith.” He added, “we need to be a coutnry that turns toward God, not a country that turns away from God.”

Alyssa

Chasm City Book Club Part II: Race to the Future

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 25, 2011 at 3:33 pm

Spoilers through chapter sixteen of Chasm City appear below the jump, but as usual, please don’t spoil beyond that. The first installment of the book club appears here. Let’s go through chapter 26 for next week.


Noir’s an interesting genre, with its basis in the assumption that the main characters are denying emotions that the readers are quicker to realize they have than the characters are to acknowledge that they’re experiencing them. Successful noir may take a complicated path to that acknowledgement, and it may be momentary, but that wellspring absolutely has to be there for the story to work.

I think much of the trouble I’m having with Chasm City comes from the fact that I can’t find the wellspring here. Our nun, Amelia, doesn’t want much more than to be left alone. Tanner wants revenge for the death of a woman who is a sort of depressingly passive and semi-incompetent version of a manic pixie dream girl. The person he’s trying to kill obviously experiences profound emotions of revenge, but we don’t even have a glimpse of him yet. And there’s not a lot about this society that feels terrifically compelling. As Tanner says at one point:

We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. Teh only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nanotech-inspired gadetry. No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.

As cynical as it is, it’s not actually cynical enough. It’s not time or resources that’s stunted this society—it’s will and priorities. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care about about these brutish people. I’d like to spend more time with the Ultras, but that’s not what I’m getting.

Much of the rest of the society we’re spending time with feels similarly tired. The mist-jumpers take horrendous risks because they’re bored. The other residents of the Canopy hunt people from the Mulch in increasingly complicated games, but they seem sort of lackidasical about it. There’s nothing exceptional noble about the folks we encounter down in the Mulch: the kid who drives the rickshaw is reasonably nice, but there’s nothing so compelling about that society that it feels worth defending against the depradations of the Canopy.

I think part of the problem with the shallowness of these depictions is that the alternate narrative we’re getting suggests something enormously momentous. Sky Haussmann’s supposed to be some sort of villain, but at this point, he’s the only person who’s connected to higher-level emotions and events. If there’s going to be a spectacular downfall, there has to be some sense of spectacular promise, right? But I don’t understand what’s so fraught about this mission that the saboteur would be planted in the ship, and from what we see of the world that Haussmann’s mission gave us, it’s hard to retain any sense of hope that their mission was ever worth it.

Justice

Pawlenty: U.S. Should Not Be Governed By Religious Law — Unless It’s Christianity

By Igor Volsky on Mar 25, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) is now disputing Adam Serwer’s suggestion that the presidential explorer may have a “Sharia law problem” with his conservative Republican base because he attempted to increase minority home ownership in Minnesota, including a program that would have made it easier for Muslims to purchase homes. As Serwer’s piece explains, “many Muslims hold that the paying or charging of interest is prohibited, which makes it difficult to purchase a home in the United States.” Banks have begun offering “Sharia compliant” products “which structure the payments in a sort of house-buying layaway plan” and in 2004 — with Pawlenty’s urging to increase minority home ownership — the Minnesota Housing Financing Agency “decided to partner with a local group, the African Development Center, in ‘developing culturally sensitive products,’ that would allow Muslims to enter the market.”

But as Ben Smith reports, Pawlenty is now denying he ever approved the partnership and says he dissolved the program as soon as he heard about it:

“This program was independently set up by the Minnesota state housing agency and did not make any mention Sharia Law on its face, but was later described as accommodating it,” the spokesman, Alex Conant, said. “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut it down. Fortunately, only about three people actually used the program before it was terminated at the Governor’s direction.”

Pawlenty’s objection: “The United States should be governed by the U.S. Constitution, not religious laws,” Conant said.

But that’s not what Pawlenty tells Christian audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he’s been using his personal faith (he is an Evangelical Christian) to build support for a presidential bid. In fact, during an interview with Christianity Today in late January, Pawlenty argued that elected officials should apply their faith to government:

I started with the perspective of someone who says that faith is separate from public law and public service; it really isn’t. We have, as a country, a founding perspective that we’re founded under God; our founding documents reference and acknowledge God, and acknowledge that our rights and privileges come from our Creator. [...]

I remind people that our country is founded under God, and the founders thought that was an important perspective.

During a recent address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, Pawlenty proclaimed, “The Constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith.” He added, “we need to be a coutnry that turns toward God, not a country that turns away from God.”

Yglesias

Regime Change Fever Reaches Canada

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 25, 2011 at 3:14 pm

The three opposition parties that together have a majority in Canada’s parliament have finally teamed up to topple Stephen Harper’s conservative minority government. Harper’s always been in a precarious position because all three of the opposition parties are generally to the left of Harper’s Conservatives. In other words, the median MP has usually been a Liberal even though the Conservatives had the largest delegation. All that said, the early polling looks favorable for Harper:

But Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff should pause before celebrating. Most polls continue to show the Conservatives well ahead of the Liberals. An Ipsos-Reid poll released on Thursday has the Conservatives at 43-per-cent support, in majority-government territory, with the Liberals far behind at 24 per cent. The NDP enjoyed 16 per cent support, while the Bloc Québécois has 41 per cent of the vote in Quebec.

Since Canada has first past the post voting, the geographical distribution of support winds up mattering a great deal.

Politics

The Vermont House Passes Bill Calling For A Single Payer Health Care System In The State

By Zaid Jilani on Mar 25, 2011 at 2:49 pm

As we previously reported, the Vermont legislature, led by Gov. Peter Shumlin (D), has been considering a proposal to establish some sort of single payer health care system, where a single public insurer provides health insurance to all state residents, similar to the Medicare system for American seniors.

Last night, the Vermont House of Representatives debated and approved by a 92-49 a bill that would create a single payer system in the state. Shumlin praised the move as making Vermont the first state where “health care will be a right and not a privilege“:

After hours of debate, the Vermont House of Representatives approved a bill that would create a single-payer health care system in Vermont. It passed 92-49. In a meeting right after the vote, the house speaker, the governor and others who worked on the bill called it a historic moment for Vermont.

“Become the first state in the country to make the first substantive step to deliver a health care system where health care will be a right and not a privilege,” said Gov. Peter Shumlin.

The “bill outlines a four-year timeline leading to establishment of the statewide, publicly funded system. It begins by setting up the Green Mountain Care Board on July 1 with a budget of $1.2 million to begin planning the new system. It then creates a health insurance marketplace — or ‘exchange,’ of the sort required by last year’s federal health care legislation. And it then calls for converting the exchange to the Green Mountain Care system.”

Now that it has passed the House of Representatives, it will move on to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. A bigger hurdle Vermont faces is obtaining a waiver from the federal health care reform act and finding a way around federal ERISA laws — which “pre-empt states from enacting legislation if it is ‘related to’ employee benefit plans –that insurers could use to sue the state. The health reform law currently offers a waiver to states who meet certain standards by 2017; Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) has introduced an amendment that would move the waiver date up to 2014 — an idea that President Obama has endorsed.

This week, 200 doctors from 39 states including the District of Columbia signed an open letter saying they would seriously consider moving to the state to practice medicine if it enacted a single payer system. “The idea of having one set of rules, one form for billing, and knowing that all patients are covered – that would be wonderful,” said Scott Graham, a Kentucky family physician who signed the letter.

Yglesias

The Emerging Conservative Coalition in Egypt

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 25, 2011 at 2:29 pm

Michael Slackman reports on the shifting political sands in Egypt:

In post-revolutionary Egypt, where hope and confusion collide in the daily struggle to build a new nation, religion has emerged as a powerful political force, following an uprising that was based on secular ideals. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group once banned by the state, is at the forefront, transformed into a tacit partner with the military government that many fear will thwart fundamental changes. It is also clear that the young, educated secular activists who initially propelled the nonideological revolution are no longer the driving political force — at least not at the moment. As the best organized and most extensive opposition movement in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to have an edge in the contest for influence. But what surprises many is its link to a military that vilified it.

What’s interesting about this, on some level, is how banal it is. A political coalition between religious conservatives, the military, and economic elites is the bedrock of center-right politics in most democracies. And, again, in most democracies the main conservative party usually wins the elections. There’s a powerful logic to this sort of alliance, so while its emergence in Egypt is surprising there’s also something non-surprising about it.

Health

The Vermont House Passes Bill Calling For A Single Payer Health Care System In The State

By Zaid Jilani on Mar 25, 2011 at 2:29 pm

As we previously reported, the Vermont legislature, led by Gov. Peter Shumlin (D), has been considering a proposal to establish some sort of single payer health care system, where a single public insurer provides health insurance to all state residents, similar to the Medicare system for American seniors.

Last night, the Vermont House of Representatives debated and approved by a 92-49 a bill that would create a single payer system in the state. Shumlin praised the move as making Vermont the first state where “health care will be a right and not a privilege“:

After hours of debate, the Vermont House of Representatives approved a bill that would create a single-payer health care system in Vermont. It passed 92-49. In a meeting right after the vote, the house speaker, the governor and others who worked on the bill called it a historic moment for Vermont.

“Become the first state in the country to make the first substantive step to deliver a health care system where health care will be a right and not a privilege,” said Gov. Peter Shumlin.

The “bill outlines a four-year timeline leading to establishment of the statewide, publicly funded system. It begins by setting up the Green Mountain Care Board on July 1 with a budget of $1.2 million to begin planning the new system. It then creates a health insurance marketplace — or ‘exchange,’ of the sort required by last year’s federal health care legislation. And it then calls for converting the exchange to the Green Mountain Care system.”

Now that it has passed the House of Representatives, it will move on to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. A bigger hurdle Vermont faces is obtaining a waiver from the federal health care reform act and finding a way around federal ERISA laws — which “pre-empt states from enacting legislation if it is ‘related to’ employee benefit plans — that insurers could use to sue the state. The health reform law currently offers a waiver to states who meet certain standards by 2017; Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) has introduced an amendment that would move the waiver date up to 2014 — an idea that President Obama has endorsed.

This week, 200 doctors from 39 states including the District of Columbia signed an open letter saying they would seriously consider moving to the state to practice medicine if it enacted a single payer system. “The idea of having one set of rules, one form for billing, and knowing that all patients are covered – that would be wonderful,” said Scott Graham, a Kentucky family physician who signed the letter.

Security

Newt’s Not Alone: Four Republican Lawmakers Have Shifted On Libya

By Travis Waldron on Mar 25, 2011 at 1:45 pm

As ThinkProgress reported Wednesday, former Speaker of the House and current presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has had a hard time defining his position on American intervention in Libya. While Gingrich may be the most high-profile flip-flopper, he’s certainly not the only one to have changed his position. In fact, ABC News reports that multiple Republican members of Congress have conveniently shifted their positions on Libya to keep themselves on the opposite side of the issue from President Obama.

In a Feb. 26 press release, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) called for a no-fly zone, saying:

“[S]tronger penalties must be imposed in order to hold the regime accountable for its heinous crimes, and to prevent further violence against the Libyan people. … Additional U.S. and international measures should include the establishment and enforcement of a no-fly zone.”

Ros-Lehtinen, however, expressed new-found reservations in a March 26 release, saying she is “concerned” about the enforcement of the no-fly zone.

Similarly, on March 9, House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon (R-CA) criticized President Obama for not taking action, saying, “He’s doing a great job of doing nothing on Libya.” But eleven days later, after Obama announced the intervention, McKeon held a different position:

I am concerned that the use of military force in the absence of clear political objectives for our country risks entrenching the United States in a humanitarian mission whose scope and duration are not known at this point and cannot be controlled by us.

And then there is Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s panel on the Middle East. McCaul announced Thursday that the administration had missed its window of opportunity for a successful intervention. “We had an opportunity ten days ago,” McCaul said. “We failed in that.”

However, just six days before deciding Obama was 10 days too late, McCaul supported the administration’s decision to use military force.

“Gadhafi’s heinous crimes against his own people warrant prompt action in order to mitigate the loss of life, to allow for uninterrupted flow of humanitarian aid and to ensure a more peaceful resolution of conflict between the Libyan government and its citizens.”

Not to be outdone, Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI), who sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for intervention in a Feb. 22 press release:

“The United States Must Support These Brave Men and Women Who are Seeking to Throw Off the Shackles of Tyranny in Libya.” “The unrest in Libya is another sign that our nation must take action to protect our vital national interests and support the efforts of those who are seeking freedom across the globe,” she said then.

And yet, after Obama took action, Miller accused him of doing so without “clearly stating to the American people the compelling national interest” of intervening.

Last night, Gingrich hinted that his apparent flip-flops were actually just individual responses to positions taken by Obama. Apparently, these four lawmakers were reading from the same playbook. No matter the decision Obama makes, they’ll be there to oppose it.

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