Kate Taylor looks at what women think about male politicians behaving badly.
Are women actually outraged about the Weiner and Spitzer candidacies? In interviews, some New York women said they would not consider voting for the men because of their conduct, but others said they were more concerned about the men’s politics than their behavior.
Polling data thus far suggests that there may be a gender gap in perception of the two men, at least among Democrats. A Wall Street Journal/NBC New York/Marist poll released June 26 found that, among registered Democrats, 62 percent of men had a favorable opinion of Mr. Weiner, compared with 45 percent of women. And last week, another poll found that slightly more men (49 percent) than women (43 percent) viewed Mr. Spitzer favorably.
But political analysts say New York this year will provide an unusual test of how women feel about misbehaving male politicians, because there are other alternatives who are equally liberal, if not more so, on social issues. Women are expected to make up a significant majority of the Democratic primary electorate — close to 60 percent — and their choices will shape the outcome.
How about we poll about the behavior of male politicians that's even more objectionable. Say those that are attacking civil rights, the right to privacy, and the ability of women to make their way in the workplace? I know that's not as fun as talking about penis pics, but...
Come on inside, let's see what else is up on the editorial pages.
Ross Douthat on the Republican slough of despond surrounding immigration, which is totally the Democrat's fault.
...as the Democrats have come to march in lock step on the issue —dropping the old union-populist skepticism of low-wage immigration in favor of liberal cosmopolitanism and Hispanic interest-group pandering — many of the country’s varying, conflicting opinions have ended up crowded inside the Republican Party’s tent.
So there are Republicans who would happily vote for the Senate bill as is, no questions asked, and Republicans who might never vote for a bill that contains the words “comprehensive” and “reform,” let alone “immigration.”
See, Democrats have become all close-minded in favor of being open-minded, which has forced Republicans to display diversity in their fight against... diversity. Douthat then explains the clever solution that Republicans have: creating a permanent underclass with fewer rights and no prospect of ever becoming a full citizen.
...the House would find a way to go along with a version of amnesty that either didn’t include the promise of citizenship or made the path so long and arduous that few immigrants would take it.
Just think of it as the Republican Dream Act — cheap labor, no rights.
Clifton Leaf covers an idea that may deflate most of the headlines around medical breakthroughs that you've heard since... forever.
... even after some 400 completed clinical trials in various cancers, it’s not clear why Avastin works (or doesn’t work) in any single patient. “Despite looking at hundreds of potential predictive biomarkers, we do not currently have a way to predict who is most likely to respond to Avastin and who is not,” says a spokesperson for Genentech, a division of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, which makes the drug.
That we could be this uncertain about any medicine with $6 billion in annual global sales — and after 16 years of human trials involving tens of thousands of patients — is remarkable in itself. And yet this is the norm, not the exception. We are just as confused about a host of other long-tested therapies: neuroprotective drugs for stroke, erythropoiesis-stimulating agents for anemia, the antiviral drug Tamiflu — and, as recent headlines have shown, rosiglitazone (Avandia) for diabetes, a controversy that has now embroiled a related class of molecules. Which brings us to perhaps a more fundamental question, one that few people really want to ask: do clinical trials even work? Or are the diseases of individuals so particular that testing experimental medicines in broad groups is doomed to create more frustration than knowledge?
Having been through a family health crisis (ongoing) where studies, drugs, and statistics have been advanced with the regularity of machine gun fire, Leaf's presentation is both frightening... and all too fitting with the confusing swamp of options and outcomes we've been living with.
David Leonhardt revisits the abortion debate to look at why there still is an abortion debate.
It's no secret that the Republican Party differs with public opinion on some of the day’s biggest issues. Be it on gun control, immigration, same-sex marriage or high-end taxes, the party has advocated a position at odds with the beliefs of most Americans, polls show. This disconnect has helped Democrats win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.
The recent acrimony in the Texas Legislature, with Republicans pushing a restrictive abortion bill, seems to provide a new example. It has allowed Democrats to cast Republicans, once again, as out of the mainstream.
Yet abortion is not quite like those other issues.
On abortion rights, both parties have a claim on public opinion. Maybe more to the point, both can make a strong case that the other party has an extreme view. Abortion is the relatively rare issue in which the cliché is true: public opinion does actually rest about midway between the parties’ platforms.
I've maintained for years that people would very soon look back on the question of gay rights with the same "of course, how could people have ever thought otherwise" attitudes that most now hold about issues of race and gender. But in 2020, there will still be an abortion debate. And in 2050. Sorry.
The New York Times looks at executive pay vs. executive value.
The median compensation of chief executives at 200 of the nation’s biggest public companies came in at $15.1 million last year, a 16 percent jump from 2011, according to Equilar, the executive compensation analysis firm. The pay packages — including salary, bonus, benefits, stock and option grants — ranged from $96.2 million at Oracle to $11.1 million at General Motors.
Is that excessive? One way to answer that question would be to look at the pay gap, the ratio of the pay of the chief executive to that of the company’s employees. But nobody really knows what the gaps are. Three years after passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law requiring companies to disclose the gaps, the Securities and Exchange Commission has not even proposed rules to put the provision into effect. Nor has Congress or the administration pressed the agency to get on with the job.
...
But corporations don’t want any of that. To hear them tell it, computing the pay gap is too hard. Nonsense. The real obstacle is that many chief executives do not want to have to defend what are sure to be some indefensibly large gaps.
By too hard, they mean "too embarrassing." But seeing that we've watched these bozos take the world to the brink then turned around and given them a raise for it, companies are probably just worrying too much. They should print the CEO's salary along with the letters F.U. on every employee's paycheck, just for reference. It wouldn't make any difference.
Kathleen Parker on the "principled martyrs" in the GOP House.
At this stage in the second term of the president they couldn’t defeat, Republicans seem more like stubborn children refusing to come out of their rooms for supper, even though the alternative is going to bed hungry.
This simile is unavoidable in light of the House’s passage of a farm bill without any provision for food stamps — the first in 40 years. The move prompted fantastic outrage from Democrats, notably Rep. Corrine Brown (Fla.), who shrieked: “Mitt Romney was right: You all do not care about the 47 percent. Shame on you!” ...
Was this really the right fight at the right time?
The wrong time would be in the midst of the politically life-altering debate on immigration reform. Again, congressional Republicans want to parse reform in pieces, excluding the 11 million or so immigrants here illegally, instead of dealing with reform comprehensively, as the Senate has done — and as most Americans think necessary.
Don't worry, Kathleen. Once the GOP creates the permanent non-citizen laborer class, they can let the 47% starve.
Dana Milbank has another look at the GOP's hatred for feeding American children.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), a committee chairman and the man who led House Republicans to their majority in 2010, was explaining why he and his colleagues decided to drop the food stamp program from the farm bill.
“What we have carefully done is exclude some extraneous pieces,” he said.
Extraneous? For almost 50 years, food stamps have been part of the annual farm bill, and the $80 billion spent on the program keeps tens of millions of Americans, about half of them children, from going hungry.
...as a political matter, the food stamp folly shows just what a difficult situation Republican leaders find themselves in. For the second time in two days, they had been forced to placate conservatives in their own ranks by taking a position that alienates crucial segments of the electorate.
Yes, being stuck between selfish old bastards on one hand and insanely selfish old bastards on the other hand is tough. I suppose the GOP could do something radical like stop trying to appeal to the worst in human nature, but then it wouldn't be the GOP.
Carl Hiaasen waves to poor Marco Rubio
As the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform sink, so goes his hopes of establishing himself as the solid Republican front-runner in the 2016 campaign for the White House.
Meanwhile, the junior Florida senator is under siege from the bug-eyed right wing of his own party. Glenn Beck called him a “piece of garbage” and even the tea party has turned on him. It’s gotten so bad that GOP action groups are putting out commercials saying nice things about Rubio, just to preserve his shot at the presidency.
Unfortunately, immigration reform is the only serious issue on which Rubio has presumed to lead. Otherwise, his time in Washington has been quiet and forgettable.
During the big post-Newtown debate on expanding background checks of firearms buyers, Rubio revealed himself as just another gutless sniveler controlled by the NRA. In the budget battle he offered not a single new idea, only boilerplate attacks on President Obama over the federal deficit (which is now, to the chagrin of Republican presidential hopefuls, shrinking).
...
Rubio’s problem is that he isn’t in the mainstream, and he doesn’t have the conviction to get there. He won’t stand up to Beck just like he wouldn’t stand up to the NRA.
Hey, Glen Beck hates him. Maybe he's not all bad. On the other hand...
John Timmer on the cost of burning coal in China.
Coal is the least efficient of the fossil fuels in terms of the amount of energy gained vs. CO2 released. Burning it also releases numerous toxic chemicals and particulates, which can exact a cost on a country's population in terms of reduced life expectancy and increased health costs. Figuring out the exact cost of coal use, however, is challenging because of a combination of different pollution controls and the mobility of the population.
Thanks to an unusual combination of policies (some completely unrelated to pollution), China has accidentally provided the opportunity to put an exact number on the human cost of coal use. And that number turns out to be staggering: 5.5 years of reduced life expectancy that, when spread over the half-billion people of northern China, means a loss of 2.5 billion life-years.
Two and a half
billion years of human life, literally up in smoke.