The Daily Parker

NBC News has hired the 32-year-old Clinton as a feature reporter. Naturally, given her parents, there is some controversy:

Upon her arrival [at 30 Rockefeller Center], Chelsea was given a welcome bag, filled with NBC swag, 30 Rockers tell me. NBC’s David Gregory responded by jokingly asking: “Where’s my welcome bag?”

Gregory’s joke hints at the unprecedented level of special treatment Chelsea receives: she didn’t do live shots on her Rock Center debut; she gets chauffeured everywhere in a town car while others her age strap hang with the suckers in Gotham’s sewers; she has her own personal spokesperson; and she has her own chief-of-staff, Bari Lurie. (Lurie is to Chelsea what Huma Abedin is to Hillary: a fiercely loyal female aide and confidante, who logged over 7,000 miles with her during the 2008 campaign.) Other top talent at the network noticed that luxury: Lester Holt, Hoda Kotb, Natalie Morales, and Savannah Guthrie all share a single assistant. (An NBC spokesperson says, however, that Chelsea pays for her own chief of staff.)

“Everyone needs to get a grip,” says [a] high level [NBC] executive. “She’s hardworking, she’s taking it very seriously. She really wants to genuinely do these Making a Difference pieces. She knows she’s a lightening rod. When people write nasty things, she takes the lumps.” After all the bad press during the roll out, there were fears Chelsea was going to pack it in. Instead, she decided to tough it out. “I respect that,” says the NBC insider. Clinton’s personal spokesperson, Matt McKenna, had strong words for her detractors: "When Chelsea's critics are ready to step forward and use their names, she'll be more than happy to answer them. In the meantime, she's enjoying working for NBC and NBC is glad she's a part of their team."

So how did she do in her first segment? Take a look:

I've seen a lot of TV, both amateur and professional. This is average professional work. It's a good package, maybe not that exciting, but one that tells a harmlessly good-feeling story.

Of course Clinton won't have the same treatment at NBC as other kids her age; she's already a public figure, with a view of history that even the top Medill grads probably won't have had. Of course this will cause resentment. I hope Clinton handles it with the same grace she's already handled the derision and ridicule people have heaped on her since she turned 13. The only question that matters in the present situation is: does this hire make sense for NBC? I think we'll see pretty soon.

I'm reading Chris Mooney's latest, The Republican Brain, which attempts to explain the differences between conservatives and liberals based on their psychological makeups. For instance, conservatism correlates negatively with openness but positively with conscientiousness. He also talks about episetemic closure, which psychology predicts (and we can observe) is far more likely on the right than on the left.

I plowed half-way through the book yesterday, and I expect to finish it on the plane Wednesday. As Jon Stewart would say, buy it, read it, it's on shelves now.

Transport analyst and writer Tom Vanderbilt has a four-part series in Slate about the crisis in American walking:

The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. ... Why do we walk so comparatively little? The first answer is one that applies virtually everywhere in the modern world: As with many forms of physical activity, walking has been engineered out of existence. With an eye toward the proverbial grandfather who regales us with tales of walking five miles to school in the snow, this makes instinctive sense. But how do we know how much people used to walk? There were no 18th-century pedometer studies.

[S]ince our uncommon commitment to the car is at least in part to blame for the new American inability to put one foot in front of the other, the transportation engineering profession’s historical disdain for the pedestrian is all that much more pernicious. In modern traffic engineering the word has become institutionalized, by engineers who shorten pedestrian to the somehow even more condescending “peds”; who for years have peppered their literature with phrases like “pedestrian impedance” (meaning people getting in the way of vehicle flow).

As Vanderbilt says, traffic engineers and our obsession with the car have driven most of the problems. Even though engineer Charles Mahron and people like him crusade against the worst urban designs (see, e.g., Brainerd, Minn.), I don't think anything will change without a disruptive and permanent external shift. I don't really want $10 gas, but wow would that focus people's attention on driving.

Krugman explains:

Mr. Christie’s big move — the one that will define his record — was his unilateral decision back in 2010 to cancel work that was already under way on a new rail tunnel linking New Jersey with New York. At the time, Mr. Christie claimed that he was just being fiscally responsible, while critics said that he had canceled the project just so he could raid it for funds.

Now the independent Government Accountability Office has weighed in with a report on the controversy, and it confirms everything the critics were saying.

The governor asserted that the projected costs were rising sharply; the report tells us that this simply wasn’t true. The governor claimed that New Jersey was being asked to pay for 70 percent of a project that would shower benefits on residents of New York; in fact, the bulk of the financing would have come either from the federal government or from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which collects revenue from residents of both states.

But while it’s important to document Mr. Christie’s mendacity, it’s even more important to understand the utter folly of his decision. The new report drives home just how necessary, and very much overdue, the tunnel project was and is. Demand for public transit is rising across America, reflecting both population growth and shifting preferences in an era of high gas prices. Yet New Jersey is linked to New York by just two single-track tunnels built a century ago — tunnels that run at 100 percent of capacity during peak hours.

Someday—maybe five years from now, maybe ten—the Port Authority will have to resume the tunnel project. And then, it will be much more expensive, and much more dire.

Will people remember why?

Connecticut's house has voted to repeal the death penalty, which will make the state the 17th to abolish it:

Senate Bill 280 cleared the House 86-62, a vote that broke largely along party lines. The bill now goes to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who has pledged to sign it, ending a form of punishment in the state that dates back to Colonial times when those convicted of being witches were sent to the gallows.

[S]upporters of the repeal effort say the state's death penalty is irrevocably broken — just one man, serial killer Michael Ross, has been executed in the past 50 years, and that was after he waived his appeals. Rep. T.R. Rowe, a Republican from Trumbull who supported the repeal bill, called the current death penalty "a paper tiger."

Others pointed out that government is not infallible, and the chance, however slight, of an innocent person being executed is too grave a risk when the punishment is death.

And just a quick reminder, here are the jurisdictions that still have capital punishment: Belarus, China (PRC), Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), Tonga, United States, Vietnam. We executed 46 people in 2010, putting us ahead of everyone in the world except China (over 4,000), Iran (252), North Korea (60), and Yemen (53). Great company to be in.

Oh, and thanks to a couple southern states, we're the only democracy that executes children.

Connecticut is making the right move. I hope the rest of the country follows suit.

Theories also have predictive value; that is, in order for a hypothesis to graduate to theorydom, it has to fit all the available facts and predict future events. You know, like anthropogenic climate change, which gets closer to being a true theory every day. For example, via Fallows, a paper written in 1981 seems to have predicted it pretty well:

Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the everyday pressures of research (falling ill helps). It was in this way we stumbled across Hansen et al (1981) (pdf). In 1981 the first author of this post was in his first year at university and the other just entered the KNMI after finishing his masters. Global warming was not yet an issue at the KNMI where the focus was much more on climate variability, which explains why the article of Hansen et al. was unnoticed at that time by the second author. It turns out to be a very interesting read.

[T]hey attribute global mean temperature trend 1880-1980 to CO₂, volcanic and solar forcing. Most interestingly, Fig.6 (below) gives a projection for the global mean temperature up to 2100. At a time when the northern hemisphere was cooling and the global mean temperature still below the values of the early 1940s, they confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions. They assume that no action will be taken before the global warming signal will be significant in the late 1990s, so the different energy-use scenarios only start diverging after that.

And the band played on...

The FBI has put together a committee of university presidents to root out foreign spies who have infiltrated American colleges:

While overshadowed by espionage against corporations, efforts by foreign countries to penetrate universities have increased in the past five years, [Frank] Figliuzzi, [Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence] said. The FBI and academia, which have often been at loggerheads, are working together to combat the threat, he said.

Attempts by countries in East Asia, including China, to obtain classified or proprietary information by “academic solicitation,” such as requests to review academic papers or study with professors, jumped eightfold in 2010 from a year earlier, according to a 2011 U.S. Defense Department report. Such approaches from the Middle East doubled, it said.

The problem with this, as a number of people pointed out in the article, is that academics share information freely. That's their freaking job. And the U.S. has hundreds of thousands of foreign students—76,000 from China alone—because, for now anyway, we have the best schools in the world.

Of course the FBI should go after real spies, and discovering former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Tretyakov probably prevented Russia from stealing information that would have helped them catch up to where we'd gotten ten years earlier.

The university presidents on the FBI's committee need to remember their first duty. I hope some of them will remind the FBI that suspecting lots of foreigners of trying to spy on us will cost more than it will save.

This is a very old conversation. There are always people who see enemies everywhere. Sometimes they're right; but we need to make sure that when they're wrong, they don't cause more damage than they're trying to prevent.

I like being busy, but it does take time away from lower-priority pursuits like blogging. If I had more time, I'd pontificate on the following:

• Paul Krugman wonders why Paul Ryan is taken seriously, as do I;
• Chris Mooney and Kevin Drum wonder what about the Republican brain makes them so opposed to facts;
• The Atlantic Cities has a fun gallery of world subway platforms; and
• The Times examines the ridiculousness of taking laptops out at airport checkpoints.

For now, though, it's back to the mines.

Some items that have gotten my attention:

• Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court's divisions, and how they may throw the health-care law into chaos
• Laura Miller on Game of Thrones' real-life inspirations and Charli Carpenter writing in Foreign Affairs on Game of Thrones as Realpolitik
• The Daily with more about craft brewing's increasing market share
• On Friday, schlock artist Thomas Kinkade died, joining a pantheon of artists we wish the world would forget but probably won't, a group that includes Johannes Pachelbel, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Le Corbusier.

More, I'm sure, later.

...by finally stating the obvious:

[Y]ou would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics, after the results were made painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory might show some humility, might moderate their views a bit. You'd think they’d say, you know what, maybe some rules and regulations are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or credit card companies or mortgage lenders. Maybe, just maybe, at a time of growing debt and widening inequality, we should hold off on giving the wealthiest Americans another round of big tax cuts. Maybe when we know that most of today’s middle-class jobs require more than a high school degree, we shouldn’t gut education, or lay off thousands of teachers, or raise interest rates on college loans, or take away people’s financial aid.

But that’s exactly the opposite of what they’ve done. Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal. (Laughter.) In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget "radical" and said it would contribute to "right-wing social engineering." This is coming from Newt Gingrich.

And yet, this isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party. This is now the party’s governing platform.

If you didn't hear the speech, it's worth reading.

Republicans, naturally, bleated like sheep but largely confirmed the President's main points. Oh, what a fun election this will be.