DL Open Thread: Sunday, April 17, 2022

Happy Whatever-It-Is-You’re Celebrating-Or-Not-Celebrating-Day!

Child Poverty Is Back:

All of this was data from just a couple of months. The real power of money like this comes over time. A different paper, also out of Columbia, looked at a range of studies on the benefits of cash payments to families with young children. Here’s the takeaway: A $3,000-a-year child benefit would pay for itself 10 times over. These payments come back in higher long-term earnings, higher educational attainment, higher birth weights, lower neonatal mortality, better adult physical health and better adult mental health. They lead to less crime and higher tax revenues and longer life expectancy.

“It worked,” Bennet said. “And that makes it all the more confounding that we find ourselves in the position we’re in.”

Here’s the position we’re in: That expansion? It’s gone. The American Rescue Plan provided the extra money for a year. The theory was that the policy would be popular and Congress wouldn’t permit it to expire. But the theory was wrong, at least so far. The Biden administration added an extension in Build Back Better, but that bill died, and there’s no immediate hope of revival. Once again, we are accepting our prepandemic levels of child poverty as a permanent feature of our democracy.

And so the Biden administration’s single biggest policy success has turned, for now, into a signal political failure. What went wrong, and how can it be salvaged or at least not repeated? I’ve been asking that question of politicians, strategists, scholars and activists, and a few theories dominate.

Main takeaway:  Democrats sucked at policy development, policy messaging, and understanding their own damn policies.

Tucker Carlson Narcs Himself Out: “Female Orgasm Is The Original Fake News”.    I think the guy has some issues. BTW, he and Kid Rock are into, wait for it, testicle tanning.  Satire is dead. Or, perhaps not:

Can Biden Simply Announce His Lame-Duck Status Now?  He had a nice three month run or so.  Now? Cluelessness personified.  Not that all the alternatives are all that great.  Bonus points if you can spot the likely Third Way standard-bearer.

Who Is ‘Co-Conspirator-1’?  This story has flown under the radar. It shouldn’t:

Through these operations aimed at influencing the course of international affairs, the defendants worked to weaken U.S. partnerships with European allies, undermine Western sanctions and promote Russia’s illicit actions designed to destroy the sovereignty of Ukraine. The defendants schemed to affect U.S. policy towards Russia through staged events, paid propaganda and the recruitment of at least one American citizen (CC-1) to do their bidding in an unofficial capacity and without notice to the Attorney General, as required by law. In pursuit of these goals, the defendants sought to co-opt U.S. and European politicians and to influence public opinion in their favor, using American and European citizens as their proxies to validate them, bring them access to power, evade sanctions and obscure their true objective to advance Russia’s foreign policy.

Manafort? Devin Nunes?  That Rohrabacher guy?  Looks like we’re gonna find out.

Florida Goes After Math.  In the aftermath of losing all status as a credible state:

When vetting math books for K–12 classes, the state education commissioner rejected 41 percent of submissions because of “references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the state announced yesterday in a press release titled, “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.”

The press release does not provide any examples of the offending material, but it does say that 54 of 132 submitted textbooks were rejected, including 71 percent of materials proposed for grades K–5. The materials did not comply with the state’s educational standards, which apparently emphasize real-world context for math problems and discourage “unsolicited strategies” such as “culturally responsive teaching.”

Man, that insidious critical race theory is everywhere.

RIP: Art Rupe.  If you don’t have the Specialty Records boxed-set in your collection, you’re really missing out.  Little Richard, early Sam Cooke, some of the best jump-blues around, oddities that still hold up today, Lloyd Price, Percy Mayfield.  Perhaps my fave overlooked duo was Don & Dewey–pretty sure the Righteous Brothers covered almost all their songs when they were featured on Shindig.  Los Lobos covered this one at their recent Gild Hall show:

You say you wanna hear one more?  Justine, you just won’t treat me right!:

What do you want to talk about?