Semi-Open Thread: Obama’s Tax Plan

With midterms and whatnot, I can’t work myself up to writing a real post, but if I could, I’d write about Obama’s new tax proposal. So consider this a semi-open thread–what are your thoughts on it?

Have Conservatives Found Their Anti-Mitt?

The 2012 Republican presidential nomination process has been a bizarre process of the party’s faithful fighting against their establishment; an on-going effort to find a successful counter-claimant to the nominee-apparent. And one-by-one all these Quixotic quitters have been felled by the wind from their own mouths. Now comes the latest, and perhaps last, hope of the anti-establishment conservatives, Rick Santorum, who now polls above Romney both nationally and in Romney’s own home state of Michigan.

Frankly, I never imagined that Santorum could become a serious challenger. He lacks any noticeable charisma, it seems to me, he lost his 2006 bid for a third Senate term by 18 points (big losers in state politics don’t normally become national winners), and he’s far too openly religio-moralistic in his politics for most people–even most conservatives–to feel really comfortable with him. So…why Santorum now?

Baby’s Got Blue Eyes

While taking care of some administrative details, I stumbled across a student’s senior research project from a couple of years ago that I thought was pretty fascinating. The student was an African-American female, who had brown eyes but often wore blue contact lenses. She worked as a waitress at a local restaurant, and decided to do a field experiment to test how people responded to her eye color(s). To avoid a wholly subjective evaluation she decided to focus on tip percentages, comparing nights she went natural vs. nights she wore her contacts. The results were intriguing–when displaying her natural brown eye color, her tip rate averaged less than 15%, while when she had blue eyes it averaged over 17%, and only night did it fall below 15%.

She also recorded comments that she received. Keep in mind her clientele was predominantly white, but it’s not as if black folks are at all unusual in our town (only about 4.5% of the population is black, but it’s a small town so it’s not like they’re cloistered far away from the eyes of us white folks). The two comments that caught me as just being crass, while attempting to be complimentary, were:

• “You are the prettiest black girl I have ever seen.”
• “You have pretty eyes girl, all the black guys must want you.”

And she noted,

When told that the blue eyes were contacts approximately one half of all guests seemed disappointed while the other half were careful to mention, “You’re still beautiful regardless”.

The student took this well, commenting that she understood they were trying to be complimentary, but noted that she felt, “an underlying sense of dissatisfaction, with hidden language suggesting that I did not quite measure up.” Of course that’s not very objective data about what the customers were thinking, but it’s pretty objective data about this particular African-American female’s subjective response.

Some racism is subtler than other racism, and some is wholly unintended and unconscious. Keep that in mind next time you tip your waitress.

What’s My Job

Via my wife.

It’s not too far-fetched to think my job is some combination of these. And after more than a decade in this business, you’d think my wife would actually know that I’m not always at the beach (this is Michigan, and we teach in winter, dear). All that’s missing is what my administration thinks I do, but that’s probably NSFW.

Same Sex Marriage in Washington

Washington governor Chris Gregoire has signed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Washington. Hooray–the SSM juggernaut rolls on.

When Gregoire signed Washington’s “everything but marriage” domestic partnerships bill into law in 2009, I predicted it was the prelude to full-blown same-sex marriage in the state because it authorized all the legal rights of marriage in domestic partnerships, withholding only the name. It was a camel’s nose under the tent kind of ploy, and I said at the time it would allow Washingtonians to get accustomed to the idea, and eventually realize that there wasn’t any gain in withholding the word. (Although on the potential significance of the word itself, see Burt Likko’s comment on the 9th Circuit’s Prop 8 decision.)

Of course local bigots are planning to put a repealing initiative on the ballot. Hellfire and damnation, why can’t they just leave people alone?

Once upon a time opponents of SSM used to (correctly) claim that SSM had never been enacted democratically. Nowadays they’ve had to drop that argument, because Washington follows New Hampshire, D.C., New York, Vermont, and Maine (although Maine’s law was repealed by a vote of the public–on the other hand, the public’s likely to vote on it again this year, and if the new initiative passes, it will be the first time SSM has passed through citizen initiative).

Even conservatives at this point recognize that same-sex marriage is here to stay. All they can hope for now is a semi-successful rear-guard action to keep it from spreading to every state. I’m reminded of the British toast from the Napoleonic wars, “Confusion to our enemies!”

New San Francisco Bay Bridge

For the engineering-minded reader, here is an interesting article on the new San Francisco Bay Bridge that is being built (a new Eastern portion that is, between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland).

You may remember that the last one had a section of the upper deck collapse in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. This one is designed to withstand the greatest lateral displacement expected from a quake in the next 1500 years. And what fascinates me is one of the key features, “sacrificial sections of weaker steel” that will absorb the energy, sparing the rest of the structure. These are 60 foot long sliding steel tubes at the joints, and hinge plates that connect the four shafts that make up the single tower of the suspension bridge portion. I immediately thought of how Indy cars are designed to shed pieces in an accident, to bleed off the energy–this seems to be the same principle. Unlike an Indy Car, though, if the hinge plates are deformed in an earthquake, the bridge will still be operational–they’ll still be strong enough to hold the sections of the tower together, and can be replaced at greater convenience, without shutting down the bridge.

That is so cool.

Santorum Wins–What Does It Mean?

Rick Santorum swept the primaries in Minnesota and Missouri and the Colorado caucus yesterday. So what does it mean? The big news, I suppose, is that Romnney didn’t win Colorado, despite getting 60% of the vote there in 2008.

Note that the Missouri primary doesn’t give Santorum any delegates, because the state GOP is holding a caucus on March 17. That’s because the state legislature moved the primary date ahead of what the national GOP allows, so in order to avoid losing half it’s delegates, the state party is choosing its actual delegates through at a “legal” date.

Note also that Gingrich missed the filing deadline in Missouri, so he didn’t appear on the ballot. Is this yet another sign of the disorganized state of his campaign, or does it only signal that he didn’t worry about a primary that wouldn’t produce any delegates?

With 1144 delegates needed to secure the party’s nomination, the current delegate count, according to the BBC article linked to above, is

• Romney: 101
• Gingrich: 32
• Santorum: 17
• Paul: 9

Thoughts?