Category: Rants

As a humble educator (at least in the material sense, for those of you who have concluded that I'm cocky as all hell) there are many things I can't afford. I am not in poverty, of course, but I consider my lifestyle to be modest. A twelve year old car, a rental ranch in the undergraduate part of town, and so on.

I bring this up only to point out that I can't afford things like luxury cars, expensive vacations overseas, designer clothes, yadda yadda yadda.

And I point that out only to poke tons of holes in my logic. You see, I totally could afford a BMW or a month in a Tuscan villa if I was willing to make a ton of sacrifices. I could sell every single object of value that I own and, combined with my retirement savings, blow the proceeds on an epic vacation. I could move into a punk house and share the rent with 25 other people, redirecting what I currently pay in rent toward monthly BMW payments. Or I could do as many people do and borrow money to pay for these splurges. So the statement "I can't afford ____" is very rarely accurate. It would not be a good idea for me to do any of the things I suggested here. It's clearly not impossible, however.

To use somewhat less ridiculous examples, everything I afford represents a choice. I like to collect commemorative coins. They are not useful, but I choose to buy them on occasion. Each one represents something else I chose to forgo. It wouldn't be accurate for me to say "I can't afford $300 shoes!" In reality, I chose to spend the money on something else because I am lucky enough to have some disposable income each month.

OK. The boring part is over. Here's the point.

The Republican primaries – as well as the 2010 elections – have been lousy with declarative statements about what the United States cannot afford. To hear the candidates tell it, there is a laundry list of unaffordable items. Some are currently in the budget and some are merely proposals. The bottom line is clear, though: we just can't afford _____. Health care reform. Social Security. Medicare. Public education. Stimulus spending. Physical infrastructure. Public employees. The space program. Environmentally friendly technologies. These and more are just too expensive.

That disingenuous rhetoric pours from Romney, Gingrich, Santorum (increasingly), and every dour-faced old Senator who shoves his mug into a news camera. Of all the "lies" we talk about in the context of politics and especially in campaigns, this is the biggest and most pervasive. We can afford whatever we want. We sent a bunch of goddamn rockets to the moon just to give the Soviet Union a big middle finger. We spend literal trillions on our defense establishment.

We subsidize all kinds of favored industries at the expense of others. And the household/personal budget is a poor analogy here, as the government has tools at its disposal that radically alter the equation. It can raise taxes. It can print more money (see: World War II). It can reallocate what it currently spends. It can sell assets (like gold reserves). It can borrow.

I'm not arguing that any of those are or are not wise. That depends on context and one's risk tolerance. Printing money, for example, is probably not a good way to address the problem. The point is that we could afford any of the things we are told we cannot afford. We simply choose not to. Candidates who say "America cannot afford…

" mean "This is not on my list of priorities.

" The history of this country, particularly throughout the Depression and Second World War, have proven that we can "afford" essentially anything we want. The question is, are we willing to make the necessary sacrifices? For the military and for corporate largesse, yes. The opportunity costs of those priorities are immense. For anything else, therefore, the answer is no. We say we can't afford them because that sounds prettier than the truth, which is that they simply aren't important to us.

So, Rush Limbaugh. By this point you know what he said, so I'm not going to recount it here.

Here is the laundry list if you're curious, uninformed, or a glutton for punishment. Let's momentarily ignore the fact that Limbaugh is a sad, sad excuse for a human being who has to keep ratcheting up the shock factor to get attention because he's not relevant anymore, and therefore we're playing into his hands by talking about him. Let's also ignore the fact that I'm pretty goddamn sure he doesn't understand how birth control pills work, as he apparently believes that one can have "so much sex, she’s going broke buying contraceptives and wants us to buy them." This strongly implies that he thinks that birth control pills are taken each time a woman has sex. I think he's got them confused with his limp dick pills. But we digress.

After his half-assed non-apology, forthcoming only under the direct threat of having his radio show advertisers abandon him, the conservative media have gone into overdrive trying to turn this story to their advantage. This has taken the tried-and-true "But nobody complains when libruls do it!" format for the most part. As usual, this has involved collecting cherry picked quotes, misquotes, and totally irrelevant statements and presenting them as evidence that "the liberals" are every bit the misogynist pigs that Rush Limbaugh is.

Kirsten Powers has put together one such list, one that has achieved fairly wide circulation on the internets. One thing caught my eye:

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a "bimbo alert." He called Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut.

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" (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a "bimbo" for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Thus Powers starts off with a fair point. Whether it's Ed Schultz, Rush Limbaugh, or Walter Cronkite, media commentators can certainly do better than calling women bimbos and sluts. Shame on Ed Schultz. And as much as it pains me to say it, Powers is correct in pointing out that there was little to no outrage surrounding Schultz's comments (although he was suspended by MSNBC). While we could argue qualitative points about whether Schultz's comments are as "bad" as Limbaugh's, the point holds. This could have turned into a good column for Powers.

Then she remembered her agenda, and things went downhill in a hurry.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a "mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.

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" He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find "somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."

OK. That stuff really isn't misogynist. It's mean. It might be over the line of good taste in Cupp's case. It might just be unnecessary and irrelevant with the Prejean story. It might be juvenile to make cracks about Malkin's (ghastly) appearance rather than focusing on her (idiotic) ideas. But I think you would be hard pressed to label those comments misogynist, either in a vacuum or compared to Limbaugh's recent rants.

Left-wing darling Matt Taibbi wrote on his blog in 2009, "When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth." In a Rolling Stone article about Secretary of State Clinton, he referred to her "flabby arms.

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" When feminist writer Erica Jong criticized him for it, he responded by referring to Jong as an "800-year old sex novelist."

Hmm. I guess the balls-in-mouth thing is borderline at best, but the other two comments are about age and appearance. And the number of instances in which Taibbi has mocked the appearance of male political figures is longer than the phone book. So perhaps a better criticism would be his shallowness. Those quotes make pretty meager evidence for woman-hating.

Then things go completely off the rails.

In Taibbi’s profile of Congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann he labeled her "batshit crazy.

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" (Oh, those "crazy" women with their hormones and all.)

Wow. OK. That's really reaching. Like, that's possibly the lamest effort to paint someone as a misogynist that I've ever seen. It's akin to calling Al Sharpton an asshole and then scare-quoting "asshole" as evidence that you hate black people.

Chris Matthews’s sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide. Over the years he has referred to the former first lady, senator and presidential candidate and current secretary of state as a "she-devil," "Nurse Ratched," and "Madame Defarge." Matthews has also called Clinton "witchy," "anti-male," and "uppity" and once claimed she won her Senate seat only because her "husband messed around."

This is weak sauce for so many reasons. First, do you really want to play the "Let's look at what pundits have called Hillary Clinton over the years" game, Kirsten? Second, I agree with the general consensus that Chris Matthews is a condescending, chauvinist asshead who would have fit right in with the media of the 1950s. This laundry list of words uttered about Clinton, however, hardly provide much evidence of that. I mean, calling someone "Madame Defarge" is hardly the sort of thing that would get the interest groups in a tizzy, even if Glenn Beck said it. Then she really stretches things:

Matthews has wondered aloud whether Sarah Palin is even "capable of thinking" and has called Bachmann a "balloon head" and said she was "lucky we still don’t have literacy tests out there."

Once again, those quotes have absolutely nothing to do with the main argument in this column.

The author then devotes a paragraph to Bill Maher quotes. We are all inescapably aware of the fact that Bill Maher is a jagoff.

He's a paranoid, attention starved conspiracy theorist who thinks Jenny McCarthy is an authority on vaccination. After trying to suggest that Bill Maher is really important and well respected among liberals, she notes:

Maher has called Palin a "dumb twat" and dropped the C-word in describing the former Alaska governor. He called Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann "boobs" and "two bimbos." He said of the former vice-presidential candidate, "She is not a mean girl. She is a crazy girl with mean ideas." He recently made a joke about Rick Santorum’s wife using a vibrator.

Again, anyone who thinks it's appropriate to call women twats, bimbos, and cunts in any setting is an asshole. Point taken. The rest, once again, is irrelevant. He called Sarah Palin mean? Heavens!

So basically the take home points here are: A) Ed Schultz called someone a slut and a bimbo, for which he was rightfully suspended, and B) Bill Maher uses words like cunt and bimbo to describe female political figures. Everything else here, including the implication that Maher is held in great esteem on the left, is tangential at best and irrelevant at worst. She could have focused on Schultz and Maher, recounting in detail how various feminist figures and blogs failed to make the same stink that they have made over Limbaugh. That would have been a point earned and taken.

Instead she got greedy, presumably because she didn't think two examples would be enough. She needed a parade of misogynist comments to give this argument gravitas.

The finished product is so full of red herrings and flat-out lousy reasoning that the valid points she could have made end up lost among the nonsense.

I have a friend in a terrible situation at the moment, one that I've watched several friends and acquaintances go through over the past few years. Her company has stopped paying all of its employees.

They were unable to meet the Feb. 1 or Feb. 15 payroll and, despite many promises and runarounds, there were no paychecks forthcoming on March 1 either. Being a practical person, I have advised her in the strongest possible terms to stop doing any work until paychecks are forthcoming.
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Yet she and the rest of the employees are still working. They're being threatened by their landlords and they don't have any groceries, but they're still working. Whenever I have a friend in this situation I am struck by the absurdity of the dilemma. How sad it is to realize that the American workforce is whipped enough to keep working even when it isn't getting paid.

We have some misguided sense of obligation to our employers no matter how many times they reiterate how little obligation they feel toward us.

The contract between employee and employer, formal or otherwise, is simple: they pay us and we work. If we don't work they certainly aren't going to pay us. The inverse of that statement does not always hold, however. When one works for a smaller company, I understand that there is a stronger sense of, "Well if we all make a sacrifice now we can right the ship and then payroll will be back to normal. If we all quit, the company will definitely go under." That makes some sense. Up to a point. Inevitably, however, the reality of having bills to pay can no longer be ignored.
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I would certainly like to think that I'm rational enough to refuse to work if I'm not being paid, but I've never been in a similar situation so I can't say with certainty how I'd react. If my friends are any indication I'd be showing up to work anyway, paycheck or no paycheck. How did we get like this? I mean, despite some aspects of this reaction being understandable, from a distance this looks like pure insanity. Battered Worker Syndrome at its finest. If our ancestors were brought here in a time machine and we tried to explain that sometimes Americans work without getting paid – either "off the clock" overtime or work in the complete absence of paychecks – they would return to their time convinced that people in the future are all insane.

Actually, not all of our ancestors. If we explained this to people from the late 19th/early 20th Centuries they could no doubt relate to it. This is precisely the kind of Gilded Era labor-capital relationship they would recognize. Thankfully that was followed by the Progressive Era and the growing recognition that, you know, human life and labor had some basic dignity worth recognizing and protecting. It took a long time, though, for that to sink it. It has taken almost as long – we're 31 years past the inauguration of St. Ronald – to beat that dignity back out of the workforce.

If your employer stops paying you, show up to work anyway. Because your job is the most important thing in your life, and people who don't want to work (paycheck be damned!) are the lowest form of life. Leeches. Welfare queens. Bums. Criminals. The efforts at shaming the lazy, ungrateful American worker have succeeded so well that people are afraid to stop working even when their landlords are threatening eviction. The labor-management power imbalance is so severe that we don't even seem capable of standing up to our employers to say, "Uh, I'm not coming in tomorrow if I don't get paid."

That sounds like an eminently reasonable request, and in a reasonable world any employer would understand that the employees are not going to work (or be expected to work) without compensation. Here in the land of the unreasonable, we get pep talks about pitching in to help out The Team and guilt about failing to work regardless of the circumstances.

I don't know. I took a Friedmanesque approach here, basing this on anecdotal evidence from people I know. Maybe my friends are atypical and weird. I have the sneaking feeling, however, that this sort of "take one for the team" attitude (and expectation) is common given the general reverence with which The Bosses are treated in our society. That said, feel free to restore my faith in humanity by telling me I'm crazy and this doesn't really happen. Reassure me that American labor has enough backbone and common sense to stop working when the paychecks stop coming.

Whenever gas prices spike (for reasons having more to do with speculation than "supply and demand", as we are so often and so condescendingly told) it is only a matter of time until someone points out that we shouldn't complain because gas is far more expensive in Europe. CNN helpfully offers an editorial entitled "America, quit whining about gas" to encourage you to be stoic about the impending $4.50/gal summer. The author points out that Norwegians currently pay a staggering .
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54/gal for petrol/gas. Wow! That sure is expensive.

Right?

Well, maybe. Indulge me in some napkin math. For the sake of argument, let's briefly overlook the fact that European cities actually have functional public transit systems (compared to, say, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix…) so driving is not quite as integral to daily life. And bear in mind that European gas is so much more expensive because it is taxed to hell and back.
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I drive an elderly Nissan Sentra that gets approximately 30 mpg. I fill its 12-gallon tank twice monthly. Let's round up from the current prices and say gas is $4/gal, as it will be soon. It costs me (12 gal x $4 x 2 fill-ups) $96 per month to fuel my car.

Assume Sven drives the same car and fills up with the same frequency.
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He's paying (12 gal x $11.50 x 2 fill-ups) $276 per month. Jeez. If we had Norway Prices in the USA, I'd be out an additional $180 per month. Gas in Europe sure is expensive!

Except it isn't. With Norway's high tax burden comes a 36 hour work week (with a mandatory month of paid vacation), free health care, and a public pension system that is likely to actually exist when Sven gets older. Time for more math. According to my pay stub, I pay $140/month to Social Security and $200/month to a state-run pension system. Then I pay $130/month (single) for lousy HMO health insurance, $49/month for Medicare, and another $50 to a Health Savings Account that I use every month for prescription co-pays. That adds up to $569 every month to provide myself with health insurance and retirement benefits that Norwegians don't have to buy. I'm not so sure that Sven is jealous of the $180/month I save thanks to low American gas prices.

Yes, this comparison is off-the-cuff and imperfect. Sven's income taxes are also higher than mine, but the point is that the American system does a good job of creating the illusion of cheap commodities. We point and laugh at Europeans' large tax burden because it makes us feel better. However, when we consider the cost we pay out-of-pocket for things most Europeans have provided for them by their Oppressive Socialist governments, the question of who's getting the better deal becomes more complicated to answer.
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During my weekly trivia game with my co-workers on Sunday, a question prompted me to re-read a very compelling narrative of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. As usual I ended up more convinced than ever that understanding the Vietnam War is absolutely crucial to understanding the neoconservative foreign policy, the post-Cold War era, and the political mindset of Baby Boomers who were young during the war and now hold positions of great influence in the political, military, and business worlds. It is unfortunate that so few people who were not alive during Vietnam really understand what happened – since schools teach history chronologically, the spring term inevitably ends before getting through much of the 20th Century – beyond a vague sense that it wasn't good. We lost.

I'm convinced that Vietnam has cast a very long shadow over the American psyche since 1975. The past 30+ years of politics, particularly in foreign policy, has been largely an effort to erase the humiliation and feelings of inferiority that the withdrawal/defeat/whatever left on a generation whose parents has World War II as a cultural touchstone. Dad and Uncle Joe had D-Day and Iwo Jima; the young people of the 1970s had Khe Sahn, the My Lai Massacre, and Americans scrambling onto helicopters to flee Southeast Asia with their heads hanging. "Peace with Honor" was a feeble effort to dress up a defeat as something noble, but there's no getting around the fact that there was very little reason to be proud of the outcome (not to mention the simultaneous disaster in Cambodia).

Liberals took away the lesson that getting involved in unwinnable wars – ones that consist of bombing the living shit out of a country and then wondering why its people do not embrace America – in faraway countries is a bad idea. Conservatives took away the lesson that we lost because liberal pussies (like Nixon, Kissinger, Ford, and Westmoreland) gave up. But those are merely two different paths away from the same point: we lost, it sucked, and it ended in embarrassment. That must have been very hard to process for people raised on stories about the Battle of the Bulge and V-E Day celebrations. The ingredients for a perfect crisis of masculinity all converged in 1975.

Throughout the 1980s we engaged in a number of pitiful attempts to boost national morale with new, more successful "wars". However, the idea of trying to turn these ephemeral sideshows – like a U.S. invasion of a soccer field-sized island in the Caribbean called Grenada – into a great national Victory reeks of desperation and merely underscores the depth of the scars left behind by Vietnam. Gulf War I was supposed to be the Real War that a new generation could call its own, but it's hard to get too excited when the other side isn't really fighting back. Then there was the debacle in Somalia – another defeat. Then some confusing mess that no one understood in Bosnia. And then a ten-year quagmire with no objectives and no definable victory in Iraq. Golly, they sure did try to have a successful war to hang their hats on, but war without diplomacy is essentially just a fireworks show from a political perspective. Having failed to grasp what made World War II significant or why we could not win Vietnam, our national response has been to create a foreign policy and military apparatus that isn't good at much of anything except being expensive and reducing countries to rubble with absolutely overwhelming air power and technological superiority.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that the brunt of the suffering on account of the Vietnam war was borne by, you know, the Vietnamese. But I find the lasting impact on our political leaders from that generation fascinating. One of the trademarks of Vietnam was the unshakeable belief that American military might and technology simply could not lose to a sandal-wearing, poorly trained, half starving army equipped with hand-me-down Chinese knockoffs of Soviet equipment. And so the frustration grows each time we go off to fight another conflict and end up shocked and amazed that despite all of our space age hardware we cannot produce the desired outcome. I have a feeling that I'm in for a lot of "I'm a Boomer and this doesn't describe me at all" comments, but that misses the point. American foreign policy as engineered and executed by our elected officials and military establishment since Vietnam have clearly shown the psychological burden of being the generation that lost what was supposed to be its great war. To this day our leaders and a substantial portion of the electorate are still trying in vain to prove that we're big boys and we can do it, yet every second-rate conflict we get involved in now feels hollow. Too bad we still place such a huge cultural emphasis on raising people – especially boys – on a steady diet of WWII porn; without that we might actually produce a generation that could define its success in terms other than bloodshed and American hegemony.

Last week I had some fun with the now infamous Virginia bill that would have required women seeking abortions to be, for lack of a subtler term, vaginally probed. Virginia Democrats won a rare victory by getting that provision withdrawn from the bill, with an assist from the massive amount of publicity given the issue by pro choice groups.

Wait, I don't think "victory" is the word I'm looking for here. From the Washington Post story on Gov. Bob McConnell's change of heart on vaginal ultrasound:

Virginia officials backed off last week from requiring vaginal ultrasounds before abortions, but state legislators are still expected to pass a bill that mandates abdominal ultrasounds and adds other significant requirements for women seeking abortions.

This is yet another example of a technique that the modern GOP uses with great success: a kind of legislative Red Herring wherein they add something blatantly ridiculous to a bill and then "compromise" by agreeing to remove it. And then they pass the bill they wanted all along. The Democrats are forever playing defense, then celebrating their big win when they manage to get the Trojan Horse provisions removed. Good job, guys. Too bad the rest of the bill sucks too. They make themselves relevant by occasionally limiting the worst excesses of Republican insanity. It's inspiring.

This trick is probably as old as humanity, dating back to the first time one caveman tried to buy something from another.

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Start by demanding the moon and then "compromise" by accepting a little less than that. Psychologists have labeled this the "Door in the face" technique. Of course this only works on the uninformed, the inexperienced, and the gullible. So yeah, it pretty much works all the time in American politics.
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Some legislature debates a bill consisting of tax cuts for the wealthy and a swift punch to the balls for the working class. After much emotional debate and fierce Democratic opposition, the Republicans grudgingly agree to drop the ball punch.

And this would be hilarious if it didn't work all the time.

Don't ask me how – the less said about my methods and sources the better – but I have managed to get ahold of secret internal documents from House Republican caucus detailing the majority's legislative strategy for 2012. Yesterday I wrote about the return of Culture War-type issues due to the recent positive trend in key economic indicators shifting the GOP narrative. That they would attempt to turn the election into a referendum on hot button social issues is unsurprising, but a small, skeptical part of me wonders if a few of these bills they intend to introduce go too far. The tentative name for this set of proposals is "Contract with America Contract USA #1".

1. The Protecting Women's Rights Act, which bans all forms of contraception and replaces it with a four volume set of the collected works of Cotton and Increase Mather (also available as an audiobook).

2. The Reproductive Health Enhancement Act, which would require women to consent to having an Evangelical minister insert his hand into the vagina (up to the wrist, but no further) before receiving an ultrasound or other prenatal screening. This proposal has already been test-marketed in Virginia with much success.

3. The American Science Education Modernization Act, which will enhance American pupils' competitiveness in high tech fields by requiring schools to base science education on the Four Humours. The bill sets a benchmark of matching or exceeding Japanese, Chinese, and Western European test scores in science by 2018.

4. The Strengthening the Separation of Church and State Act, which establishes Protestantism as the official state religion and replaces the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses with that "Footprints in the Sand" poem.

5. The Victims' Rights Act, which shifts the burden of proof from the state to the victim in cases of rape and child abuse.

6. The American Diplomacy Initiative Act, which places on the roof of every U.S. embassy an enormous set of speakers to play Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" on a loop and a 200-foot bronze statue of a hand with the middle finger extended.

7. The Healthy Bodies, Healthy Democracy Act, which bans the Communist plot known as water fluoridation and replaces the USDA food pyramid with an image of a 10-gallon steel bucket full of bacon, KFC Double Downs, and rich sausage gravy.

8. The Equal Rights for All Americans Act, which replaces civil unions for same-sex couples with indefinite internment in an open prison camp in the Sonoran desert.

9. The Biotechnology Advancement Act, which replaces stem cell research with fervent prayer and a national network of hallways in which Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients can "walk it off" rather than being a bunch of pussies waiting for the doctor to kiss their boo-boos.

10. The Rebuilding America's Public Schools Act, which replaces funding for education with vouchers (for free pizza at participating Godfather's Pizza locations) and eliminates teachers in favor of marketing videos from prominent PR firms and their largest clients.

It's an ambitious agenda, I'll give Speaker Boehner that much. Can they pass all of this in an election year? More importantly, will they succeed in making this election about issues such as homosexual desert prison camps and state-mandated fisting? The smart money says Yes.

Polling has gotten much more accurate in recent years, as the field that used to be an art is now a well understood science. By that I mean that we now have a good understanding of response effects, framing, and how to avoid poorly worded or leading questions. I'm hardly an authority on the subject, but I know enough to be staggered by just how terrible some survey questions from major polling outfits can be. This is compounded by the frustration of watching the media present endless public opinion data without the slightest understanding of what the numbers mean or how the questions can influence the results.

Consider the following question from a Feb. 10-13 CNN/Opinion Research poll (n=1,026 adults nationwide ± 3, 228 Catholics ± 6.5)

As you may know, the Obama administration has announced a new policy concerning health insurance plans provided by employers, including religious organizations, and how they handle birth control and contraceptive services for women. Based on what you have read or heard, do you approve or disapprove of this policy?

Compare this to two other pieces of information from the same poll. First, 81% of all respondents and 77% (!!!) of the Catholics disagree with the statement, "Using artificial means of birth control is wrong." Furthermore, 88% (!!!!!!) of Catholics chose the latter option when asked, "Do you think Catholics should always obey official Church teachings on such moral issues as birth control and abortion, or do you think it is possible for Catholics to make up their own minds on these issues?" In light of this widespread support for contraceptive use, the results from the first question – 44% approve, 50% disapprove – appear way too low. It creates the impression that the White House's new policy is quite unpopular.

Compare this to two similar questions from other polls.

CBS/NYT (Feb. 8-13, 2012. N=1,197 adults nationwide. ± 3) asked, "Do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients?" A substantial majority indicated support (66% support, 26% oppose). Fox News/Anderson-Shaw (Feb. 6-9, 2012. N=1,110 RV nationwide. ± 3) asked, "The new Obama health care law requires that employer health plans provide birth control coverage as part of preventive services for women. Overall, do you approve or disapprove of requiring employer health plans to cover birth control for women?

" They found 61% approval (80% of Democrats, and even 39% of Republicans).

So why did the CNN poll find so little support? Compare the Fox, CBS/NYT, and CNN questions. The other two questions explain what the new policy is, whereas the CNN question simply asks respondents for an opinion on "a new plan" "concerning health insurance" and "how they handle birth control." It does not describe the new policy except to say that it exists and has something to do with contraceptives.

Americans know almost no policy specifics, so asking for an opinion "based on what you have heard" makes no sense. Most respondents will simply offer a response based on whatever information they can glean from the question…in this case, that is likely to be CNN's description of the "Obama administration" policy. In essence, most respondents will read that question simply as, "What do you think about Barack Obama?

Yea or Nay?" Unsurprisingly, CNN gets a result (~45% support) that looks suspiciously similar to the President's current approval rating. Fox and CBS, on the other hand, show support that more closely reflects the general public attitude toward contraceptive use.

A lot of right wing blogs and pundits have seized upon those CNN numbers to imply a lack of public support for the new policies, but the results are based on a flawed question. Imagine if they asked "Do you support or oppose the way the Federal government taxes the sale of exotic pets?" Since almost no one will have the slightest idea how or to what extent the government taxes exotic pets, a meaningful answer to this question cannot be given.

Respondents will simply pick one of the recognizable parts of the question – Do I like taxes? Do I think it's a good idea for people to have exotic pets? – and respond based on their attitudes on that topic.

Either the folks at CNN and Opinion Research are wildly optimistic about the level of political knowledge and attentiveness to the news of the American public or they lack a basic understanding of how to ask a basic policy question. Regardless, these flawed results are now available to anyone who wishes to distort this issue or to suggest that the public does not widely support the use and availability of contraceptives.

Parents have tremendous leeway in determining how to raise their children. This prospect is terrifying to new parents, I imagine, because there is no manual on how to do it correctly and you only get one shot at it. There's no do-over if you happen to do a particularly poor job. Just therapy and lots of booze.

That's quite daunting. Even more daunting is that the child must end up being reasonably well adjusted to the society into which he or she will be thrown. So you have to account for everyone else's shitty parenting when doing your own. I've seen many staunchly anti-TV parents, for example, relax on that issue and let their kids watch a little once they realize that sending a kid to school at age five with no popular culture reference points is going to make it difficult to relate to the other children. Sure, you can raise your kid on ancient Navajo oral traditions and Rainer Werner Fassbinder films instead of Bob the Builder and Pixar if you want, but only if you're comfortable with raising a bizarre kid who's probably going to be mocked a lot. Ultimately it's your call.

At some point, though, parental choices cross a line between discretion and human experimentation. And these stories we see every few months now about parents deciding to raise "genderless" children amounts to exactly that. Nothing like a pair of knucklehead parents deciding to perform a psychological experiment – on their own child – that no IRB or human subjects committee would approve for all the tea in China. Perhaps this is an overly-academic view of the world, but if you're not legally or ethically allowed to do something to a child in a controlled research setting it probably doesn't belong in the Good Parenting Toolkit.

Look, everyone to the left of Pat Robertson recognizes that socializing children into "traditional" gender roles – toy guns for the boys, dolls for the girls – is stupid. What some people claim is the "natural" tendency for boys to be aggressive and girls to be Pink Princesses is actually a reflection of how good children are at identifying and meeting our expectations of how they will behave. I get it. It's not cool. It has the potential to be damaging to children.

What I fail to see is the logic – because there is none – in responding to that threat by performing an experiment wherein you intentionally deprive a child of something that is inevitably going to be a very basic, fundamental component of understanding and interacting with the rest of society.
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Would it not make more sense perhaps to wait until the child is old enough to actually understand such things and explain what's wrong with gender-based social roles? Or simply to tell little Billy that he should knock himself out playing with Barbies if he prefers?
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Nah. Let's just go ahead and raise a little genderless weirdo. He'll do really well when he starts school.

No one receives perfect parenting and to some extent we all walk through life dragging behind us the questionable decisions our parents made when raising us. I think parenting requires making peace with the fact that you're going to do some things that your child will grow up and resent. It happens. It's normal. You can't lose it over every choice you make, like "Oh god, what if he grows up and hates us and ends up doing drugs because we bought Jif instead of the natural peanut butter?" All that said, I fail to see the value in or benefits of going out of the way to try some weird, trendy theory on child rearing based on some aspect of society you dislike. Maybe I'm in the wrong here and these parents actually are visionaries. And maybe the results of this little experiment will prove to be instructive and useful – after all, it's a hypothesis for which there have been no previous tests. We can assume that parents would not consent to having their child injected with some totally untested AIDS vaccine with a shrug and "Well let's see what happens!
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", so why is this sort of psychological scheming considered an acceptable risk? I am not sure what goes through the head of someone who decides to turn their child into a data point with the distinct possibility that he or she will emerge completely maladjusted. To say that the risks outweigh the benefits is a substantial understatement.