Sanity Returns: We Hope

The headline oversells the actual quote from Secretary Napolitano, but it looks like we may see an end to removing your shoes at the metal detector at some forseeable point in the future.

Why Huntsman? (And Why Lieberman, Etc)

Steve Benen wonders why Jon Huntsman gets so much media attention despite being at about 1% in a GOP primary. The reason that jumps out at me is that major media outlets tend to take great interest in people who loudly criticize their own parties from the center.

I see the reasons for doing this as arising from the old business justification for being in the center. People on the left may prefer left-wing media outlets to centrist outlets, but they're still an audience for the major centrist ones. Something like that is true on the right, even if it might not be as strong nowadays, since they have a dedicated cable news channel to serve all their needs. Go far enough to one side or the other, though, and the other side will just stop watching you. And of course, people in the middle will go first to the media outlets in the middle. So if your business model is one where you want to compete for as big an audience as possible, you need to be in the middle.

This gives the media two reasons for paying disproportionate attention to Huntsman and people like him. First, he fits the ideology that their business model suggests they adopt -- one that's in the middle. Second, his ability to attract interest from viewers from all parts of the political spectrum far outstrips his poll numbers. I don't find Newt Gingrich particularly interesting, and I wouldn't find Rick Perry especially interesting if he weren't leading the polls, but I found Huntsman's belief in science refreshing enough to be worth a blog post. (As Jamelle points out, Huntsman is not a moderate on other stuff and thinks, for example, that we should repeal health care reform.) So if I actually watched TV news rather than just reading text all the time, I'd be more of a potential Huntsman viewer than a Gingrich viewer.

Tomorrow's Pre-Compromise Today

HuffPo has some AFL-CIO saber rattling trying to get the Administration to back off the idea of taking the Georgia Works program national. Georgia Works, a program that began during the recession and backed by the state's Republican Governor and Democratic Labor Commissioner, tries to set up unemployment benefit recipients with on-the-job training for up to 8 weeks of their benefit period. This is "win-win" insofar as it gives someone who is unemployed a bit of training/experience, and gives firms a free 8-week trial period for new employees.

The Georgia Works program may be a fine idea. It may be a total waste of time. But either way, it's yet another sort of thing that the White House should be offering to Republicans during the course of negotiations, not basing as the national model. The first revision of the Obama Jobs Plan isn't going to attract any Republican votes under any circumstances. So why include any ideas that are attractive to Republicans at all? Why not let them come up with a list of things they dislike, and propose Georgia Works as a compromise? Clearly the strategy of pre-emptive compromise hasn't worked so far, why does the White House think it's going to work this time?

Shrimp On A Treadmill

When I hear people ridiculing some scientific study like the one where the scientists put shrimp on a treadmill to see how fast they run, I usually expect that the scientists are investigating something genuinely useful and the critics are misrepresenting what is going on. The point of the shrimp on a treadmill study was to figure out how changes in water quality affect the health of shrimp, which is the kind of thing you'd want to know about if shrimp were an economically important species in your country, as they are in ours.

My confidence that scientists are doing worthwhile things far exceeds my confidence that Republicans are representing scientific research accurately.

A Breath of Fresh Air

I can't comment on the T-Mobile/AT&T saga, but elsewhere, the concept of actually enforcing antitrust law is a refreshing change from the Bush years.