The Explainer on disorderly conduct, etc.

Yesterday's beer summit came and went, with no surprises (unless you count the vice president's participation, NA beer in hand, as a surprise).

The only reason I'm posting about it again is to highlight this Slate piece from last week. I've always been uneasy about any incident hinging on a disorderly conduct charge--aka POPO--but I'm hardly an expert in either police work or any kind of law. A lawyer friend alerted me to this piece, which makes it pretty clear: there was absolutely not legitimate reason to arrest Dr. Gates.

Lies, damn lies, and obvious mistakes major newspapers don't bother to correct

It's become a pretty common thing for conservatives to get simple facts wrong--a very different thing from presenting different opinions, or even highlighting DIFFERENT facts--related to health care and health care reform. Jonathan Chait rounds up a few examples here, attributing the problem to conservatives' general lack of interest in health care policy.

Here's what I'd call the most egregious example: Martin Feldstein's op-ed in Tuesday's Post, in which he states the following:

Obama has said that he would favor a British-style "single payer" system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried but that he recognizes that such a shift would be too disruptive to the health-care industry.

Notably, the WSJ article to which Feldstein links gets the facts (again, not opinions or spin) right:

A single-payer system would eliminate private insurance companies and put a Medicare-like system into place where the government pays all health-care bills with tax dollars.

Perhaps it's an honest mistake. But if Feldstein doesn't know the difference between socialized health care and socialized health insurance--between the UK and Canada--then why is he writing an op-ed on the subject for the Washington Post? And, his intentions aside, will we see a correction from the Post? I won't hold my breath.

In other health-care-reform news, yesterday the president presented eight essential features of reform. It's a good list.

Three bottles of much-scrutinized beer

Tom Philpott offers a self-consciously inconsequential critique of this afternoon's just-three-guys-talking-it-out-over-a-beer event at the executive picnic table: while Dr. Gates is drinking a marginally respectable Red Stripe, why are James Crowley (I still can't believe that's his name!) and the president drinking, respectably, fake Belgian beer made by an American swill monolith and formerly American swill now owned by a Belgian monolith?

Elsewhere, a couple of Christian temperance folks have an equally inconsequential but evidently entirely UN-self-conscious suggestion: drink lemonade instead! Leave aside the question of whether drinking corn syrup and flavoring--I'm assuming they have in mind regular-guy, I-swear-I'm-not-an-arugula-eating-elitist lemonade, as with the beer choices--is a net improvement on drinking 12 ounces of something that's 5 percent alcohol. Here's the real question--can anyone read this quote, from Rocky Twyman:

Studies show that alcoholism leads our previous youth to use harder drugs like cocaine that is responsible for vicious youth crimes, especially in inner-city America that gave Obama large electoral margins.

and deduce that our country's great moral failing is not a power and principality of racism that poisons (often well-intentioned) people's actions but instead...drinking?

U.S. fruit growers learn from an Iranian scientist

I love fresh fruit. I know, so do you, but understand: I geek out over fresh fruit. I've been lusting after a $75, heavy-duty cherry pitter, which would immensely speed up one of my favorite summertime hobbies, second only to complaining about the heat: pitting a huge amount of cherries in front of a baseball game (helps to be a fan of such a slow-moving sport), after which either Nadia or I makes something tasty out of the ones I don't accidentally eat. We're getting married in January, so it'd be pretty intuitive to wait and register for the thing. But I'm itching to buy it now. (I'm also getting frighteningly fast at pitting cherries the old-fashioned way: inside my mouth. I've half-filled a small bowl with pits while writing this post...but it's kind of gross to make a cobbler that way.)

Anyway: are you interested in reading about an Iranian pomologist who has done a lot to help growers in the Pacific Northwest learn how they can diversify the varieties they grow? Of course you are! As a guy who loves apples but hates Red Delicious apples, I found this article totally fascinating. Not interested? What if I told you that you likely would never have encountered a Fuji apple in the States were it not for this guy's work? Pretty cool.

Disqualified for belief alone

This is pretty crappy: a pediatrician in the U.K. was removed from an adoption panel based on her opposition to adoptions by same-sex couples.

As far as I can tell from this story in the Daily Mail, she wasn't covertly sabotaging individual adoptions or strategically hiding her opinions on the subject, which she attributes to her Christian faith. Instead, she was up front about her beliefs and asked to be allowed to recuse herself from cases with same-sex couples.

Isn't this pretty much exactly what she should have done in this situation? What more could she reasonably have been expected to do--change her beliefs? Winkingly say she had done so?

The fight over whether or not we have common ground

The Ryan-DeLauro abortion reduction bill was introduced in the House today. The bill is being pushed hard by White House Priest Corps members Joel Hunter and Jim Wallis, among others, and it looks likely that the administration will support the bill's approach, despite objections related to contraception and sex education.

Tony Perkins is less than impressed. Kristin Williams takes the attacks on point by point.

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion folks have a much larger piece of legislation in their sights as well: health care reform.

And here's an interesting, less beltway-focused take on common ground between pro- and anti-abortion rights people.

OMG I luv א!!!

This is pretty cool: the Codex Sinaiticus is online. Good writeup by Paul Vallely.

Bishop Wright on what the Bible actually has to say about women's leadership

Via Allan R. Bevere: N.T. Wright, nobody's liberal, makes the biblical case for women's ordination:

Sen. Sanders: Anyone want to get rid of the VA? I didn't think so.

I enjoyed this bit from Bernie Sanders. Complete w/ a nonsensical interjection from Sen. McCain....

Compared to what?

The congressional Republicans would like you to know just how complicated our health care system will be under the Democrats' proposed reforms. Yes, they've tried this trick before, but they're generally right: it'll be complicated.

But--like their claims that health care post-reform will cost a lot of money, that some of that money will go to bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats will make decisions about allowing and preventing care--the Republicans tend to skip the part about how whatever bad thing they're describing IS ALREADY TRUE UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM. That's a fairly significant thing to leave out. (Someone should point it out to them; I'm sure it was an honest mistake they made! All those times, over and over again.)

Anyway, TNR has a good corrective: a chart showing how convoluted health care is right now. Oh nos! We can't give this up for something COMPLICATED!

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait details how the Republicans aren't really acting like Republicans on health care--they're being awfully spendy. What they're acting like is health insurance lobbyists--e.g., by opposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid payments. WTF? Here's Chait:

Conservatives certainly have understandable ideological reasons to oppose the Obama health care reform as a whole. It's the particulars of their opposition that arouse curiosity. The right has presented its opposition to health care reform as principled disagreement with "big government." But opposing "big government" can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.

It's not that every conservative apparatchik is walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash and a conspiratorial grin. Intellectual corruption doesn't work that way. The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right. Health care is an issue where precious few conservatives have paid any attention to the details of policy. And the industry is a natural ally of the conservative goal of preventing single-payer health care. So the industry has managed to define its self-interest as the conservative position on health care.

And Jonathan Cohn reminds us to stop comparing our health care future to Canada and England, neither of which represents a model that's remotely on the table here, and to look instead at France and the Netherlands--countries whose citizens have no interest in trading places with us when it comes to health care.

Salmon vs. DeLong on stimulus

Felix Salmon: The economy's still bad. This means we spent too much on the stimulus bill, and any more will be useless.

Brad DeLong: That's "like sticking your toe into the ocean and pointing out that your hair is still dry."

That we may be several

The Episcopal bishops have voted to affirm gay and lesbian ordination. Now the resolution returns to the House of Delegates.

Anglicans in the Wilderness declares a "golden opportunity to pray online for The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion," adding the following:

For the sake of preserving an atmosphere of peace, when you come to pray we hope your prayers posted online will not presume or ask for any particular outcome at General Convention, nor preach on any hot-button issue.

Okay, fair enough. But then there's this from their Twitter feed, complete with a link to a not-exactly-neutral writeup:

Thank you Lord for the clarity of TEC's D025. Help us now to choose. Help us to decide rightly. http://bit.ly/kPYXi

Thank God for the clarity of confirming that TEC is apostate and deserves to be cut loose? That's a rather suspicious-sounding prayer. If your wish is to stay in communion with a TEC that doesn't ordain gays and lesbians, wouldn't the appropriate prayer be one of lament that the bishops decided this way, or petition that the House of Delegates will somehow decide the other way, rather than gratitude for CLARITY? If your goal is for the apostate liberals to be even more so and thus further marginalized, fine, but don't call that praying for the church.

Elsewhere, Mark Silk: "Give the Duncanites a couple of decades, and they'll be fighting over the ordination of gays and lesbians to.

"Cruising down Wilson / All up in my Prius"

Northern Virginia's Arlington County is an interesting specimen of urban-village planning, with walkable business districts and high-rise residential buildings built around subway stops. By no means a worst-case scenario when it comes to suburban living.

Still, this video (via FPR) about Arlington's yuppy-and-chain-store landscape is pretty funny:

Yet another reason not to shop at Trader Joe's

They're the 17th best Chicago-area grocery chain on sustainable seafood issues.

Safeway/Dominick's is fifth.

James Stambaugh's "Christianity must..." list

I don't think I'll ever agree 100 percent with someone else's list of what Christians need to believe / do / say / focus on / whatever. But James Stambaugh's 10 Things Christianity Must Do gets closer than most.

I'm not quite as absolutist as he is about either #3 or #8 on his list. But I think I'm pretty much with him on the rest of it. Take a look--good stuff.

Rick Warren among the Muslims

The latest episode in Rick Warren's ongoing effort to roughly alternate when he's pissing off liberals vs. his own base: he's speaking at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention this weekend. On Our Nation's Birthday, no less!

Good for him.