It is a gorgeous Saturday and I hope that all of you are spending quality time out in this sunshine. In this thread, we don’t care who you had breakfast with.
Adam Gopnik writes a Must Read article on the endless deflections of the people who refuse to consider any form of gun safety laws. This is in response to the breathless dismissal of a recent Journal of the American Medical Association paper demonstrating a pretty clear state by state correlation between strong gun laws and less gun violence and the latest news about the arsenal found in Adam Lanza’s home. There’s alot here, but this:
Finding a correlation, eliminating a correlation, proposing a correlation—these are not inconclusive fitful stabs at truth: they are meaningful acts. And when you put them together with many other similar, even stronger correlations, a cause stares you in the face and asks you to sit down and take it seriously. To believe that gun laws don’t work, you have to believe that each of the many studies showing that gun laws limit gun violence—all of them, every single one, from Canada to Australia and back home—are not just flawed at the margins or somewhat inconclusive but that they are fundamentally, entirely, completely, round-the-block wrong. And that isn’t a plausible claim.
In their endless quest to make sure that Americans are fully employed, Rep. Steve King and Senator Inhofe have introduced a bill in Congress to outlaw the use of any language but English on Federal government paperwork:
One major impact King’s bill could have is to stop the decades-long practice of printing non-English ballots in areas where there’s a significant non-English language group. Indeed, Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 currently requires local jurisdictions with a substantial number of non-English speakers to allow them to vote in other languages.
Sheesh. Two Democrats are also sponsoring this mess. But still, I have to say that the GOP effort to reach out to other minorities is going swimmingly.
Ryan Lizza was in Philly for a writer’s seminar where he was interviewed by Dick Polman from Newsworks. Lizza notes that it is increasingly difficult to do long-form journalism in a world where the short form stuff gets all of the attention:
“The price (politicians) pay now for a ‘gaffe’ is so high – the way Twitter and cable jump on stray comments – it’s just insane. So the campaigns are closed off in ways that weren’t even true in 2008….It’s really hard to cover campaigns now – especially with a magazine like The New Yorker, which wants depth, in-depth interviews….You can go to a politician and say, ‘I’ll give you lots of time, 10 (magazine) pages about your whole life, long quotes – but sometimes it doesn’t matter, because (after publication) a quote can get cherry-picked and spun out on Twitter. It happens all the time. It’s happened to me.”
Polman goes on to discuss how an quote from a Lizza article “leading from behind” became a conservative critique only because they took that bit out of context. Which just demonstrates to me what is missing from so-called objective journalism — context and fact-checking. Politicians and pundits can say the President is leading from behind ONLY because they face journalists who won’t hold them accountable for misuse of the phrase.
So what interests you today?