Leonard Pitts on Caitlyn Jenner.
I am not normal.
This, I learned from a news story 35 years ago. The details have faded with the passage of time, but the gist of it remains clear. Some expert had crunched a bunch of numbers in search of the “average” human being, the planetary norm, and found that she was an 8-year-old Japanese girl, living in Tokyo. I don’t fit that profile; I’m willing to bet you don’t, either. So as a matter of statistical fact, I’m not “normal” and neither are you.
I’ve always found that story a useful corrective whenever I am tempted to declaim too haughtily on what is or isn’t normal. I offer it now to Rush Limbaugh in the vain hope it will help him rethink his assault last week on the woman who used to be Bruce Jenner. Granted, the story was about planetary norms and Limbaugh was ranting about American social norms, but the principle still applies.
What Limbaugh fears isn't Caitlyn Jenner, it's acceptance of Caitlyn Jenner. Not because it represents some fall in morality, but because it robs him and other pundits of a talking point.
I don't usually posts letters to the editor, but I couldn't resist this brief note in the Miami Herald.
Joanna Lee Frank.
How amazing. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is going to tell the world what everyone already knows. On June 15, he’ll formally announce he's running for president. Surprise! My concern, is how to contain my excitement. I plan to announce my reaction on June 16. I'll need about 24-hours to sort out my thoughts. Meanwhile, the suspense is building.
Don't let the sarcasm hit you on your way in. But come in....
Ross Douthat offers his services as a consultant for any Democrat hoping to run against Hillary.
A little while ago, the plan for a not-Hillary candidate looked obvious: While Clinton played it safe and hugged the political center, her challenger would run hard to her left, channel the energy of the party’s grass-roots activists, campaign against the front-runner’s establishment instincts and her husband’s triangulating past. ...
Since her official entrance into the race, however, Hillary has moved aggressively to shrink the space for that kind of battle. Her big policy statements – on criminal justice reform, immigration, and now universal voter registration – have all aligned her explicitly with the party’s activists, and to an extent many them did not expect.
Actually, I don't doubt that Douthat (yup, did that on purpose) is sincere in his advice.
Every Republican, pundit or otherwise, would be happy to help some other Democratic candidate slow the Clinton train.
So all that really remains for her would-be challengers is to attack her ethics. There, at last, the anti-Hillary argument becomes an easy one: From the Nixonian style of her State Department operation to the way her family fattened itself on global tribute during her recent public service, her rivals can point to sins and misdemeanors that would have already disqualified a lesser candidate.
There you go, Democratic candidates. The best advice for running against Hillary? Pretend you're Fox News.
The New York Times on a big change in the discussion about climate change.
In a welcome development, businesses are asking world leaders to do more to address climate change. This week, the top executives of six large European oil and gas companies called for a tax on carbon emissions.
These companies — the BG Group, BP, Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and Total — are not taking a bold environmental stand. They are being pragmatic. They want an efficient and predictable policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions because they realize something must be done. Numerous scientists, economists, environmentalists and political leaders have previously proposed similar ideas.
A carbon tax would raise the price of fossil fuels, with more taxes collected on fuels that generate more emissions, like coal. This tax would reduce demand for high-carbon emission fuels and increase demand for lower-emisson fuels like natural gas. Renewable sources like solar, wind, nuclear and hydroelectric would face lower taxes or no taxes. To be effective, the tax should also be applied to imported goods from countries that do not assess a similar levy on the use of fossil fuels.
It may seem easy to dismiss the importance of this announcement because these are European firms. But it's big. Fossil fuel companies have cooperated together for decades to both pump up public doubt over climate change and help stop any environmental regulations. This schism among companies, and between oil and coal, represents a crumbling of an old, old pact.
Dana Milbank checks out how it's going for those already using Douthat's "just keep shouting scandal" advice.
Rep. Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican who was a reality TV star before entering politics, is unlikely to be listed in any Smartest Member of Congress rankings. Yet even he finds it easy to uncover scandal at the Clinton Foundation.
At a House hearing this week, Duffy was in high dudgeon, discussing ties between Hillary Clinton and Boeing. “In ’09, Secretary Clinton . . . makes a shameless pitch in Russia that a Russian airline should buy Boeing airplanes,” he said. “I would like all airlines to buy our great American jets, but she’s making a pitch as the secretary of state! And then, um, in 2010, a short while later, actually Boeing gets the contract for $3.7 billion. And after that, it’s amazing: Boeing makes a $900 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation!” ...
Million, thousand — whatever. It’s hard to know what’s more clownish: Duffy’s belief that the secretary of state shouldn’t tout U.S. goods abroad, or that a $900,000 charitable contribution from Boeing (one of about 150,000 donors contributing about $2 billion to the foundation) amounts to scandal.
To this point, Milbank is absolutely sensible. Unfortunately, he has a rule that he can only go about 1/3 of a column before Clinton derangement sets in. So he spends the rest of the article complaining that the Clintons shouldn't have done so much in their jobs and raised so much money for charity, because it lets idiots complain! Like Milbank.
Tim Padgett on the foreign policy of Marco Rubio.
I’m waiting any moment now for Marco Rubio to demand that President Obama recall our ambassador to China and shut down our embassy there.
That’s because the junior senator from Florida — and now Republican presidential candidate — has decided to get tough on China.
In an article posted last week on the National Review, Rubio declared that the communist regime in Beijing “has gotten a free pass” for far too long and that it’s got to start answering for its often brutal human-rights abuses. ...
He’s decided to confront China the way he and the rest of the Cuban-American congressional caucus insist we stand up to communist Cuba. And I’m assuming that means: No more diplomatic relations with China.
Right, senator?
This question will not be asked at the first Republican debate. To be fair, the first Republican debate probably won't get past "what's your name?"
Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser explain why finding the Higg's Boson was in some ways a tragedy.
Predicted about 50 years ago, the Higgs particle is the linchpin of what physicists call the “standard model” of particle physics, a powerful mathematical theory that accounts for all the fundamental entities in the quantum world (quarks and leptons) and all the known forces acting between them (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).
But the standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end. It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building blocks with the other great edifice of 20th-century physics: Einstein’s cosmic-scale description of gravity. Without a unification of these two theories — a so-called theory of quantum gravity — we have no idea why our universe is made up of just these particles, forces and properties. (We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time.)
Even worse for many, the Standard Model is just... untidy. It leaves us with a ugly zoo of particles that often don't follow neat patterns and arrangements. Much of the appeal of string theory lies in its underlying simplicity. And yes, I know how strange it is to call anything so mind-boggling as a theory that turns everything into little singing loops of space time "simple." But the
result of string theory is a world composed of bits that are much more satisfying to organize.
...the favored theory for the next step beyond the standard model is called supersymmetry.... Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a “partner” particle for every particle that we currently know. It doubles the number of elementary particles of matter in nature. The theory is elegant mathematically, and the particles whose existence it predicts might also explain the universe’s unaccounted-for “dark matter.”
Only predictions made by supersymmetry, and by string, stubbornly refuse to show up in experiments. Possibly the worst thing about the current situation? It leaves us with a lot of things that are difficult to explain out there on the largest and smallest of scales, but it also leaves us sadly lacking in the kind of "huh, that's an odd result" experimental data that can be tugged to unravel existing theory. The Standard Model is messy, unsatisfying, and fails to provide all the answers. However, it may also be right.