Month: May 2011

Today on the Dish, Andrew condemned the torture and murder of a child in Syria, and the entire population united against a regime which refuses to progress.

Andrew frisked Palin's rogue bus tour, Beinart called her campaign now or never, and the press scrambled to cover the paparazzi candidate. Palin, however, rose to the occassion by calling Obama un-American, loved the smell of emissions while greenhouse gases reached an all-time high, and kept using her children as props. Readers egged Andrew on, using Carla Bruni's "hidden" baby bump as an example, and the GOP commissioned polls to reinforce their views. Roger Ailes churned out the anti-Obama memes, and we explored the edge Obama still has over others, especially among Republicans and the elderly.

The Ryan plan split the GOP over healthcare, and Andrew reminded everyone how much more expensive private healthcare is than a public version. Conor Friedersdorf criticized the flipside of the terrorism threat, Tyler Cowen searched for the driverless car lobby, and medical marijuana hit a million patients. Readers recalculated the real cost of a bike rider's commute, we celebrated high-risk takers and looked down on low-risk takers, and Angry Birds taps into our primal urges. Sharing is caring (with coworkers), the post office approached collapse, and we grilled headphone users on what song they're listening to. McArdle begged parents to vaccinate their kids, Kelly Hodgkins trained us in mental push-ups,

Correction of the day here, quotes for the day here, here, and here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and contest winner #52 here.

–Z.P.

Fareed Zakaria is glum:

We think of Egypt as having gone through a regime change. But it really didn't go through a regime change. Egypt has been run since 1952 by a military dictatorship. It is still run by a military dictatorship.

Issandr El Amrani counters:

Fareed Zakariya … writes that Egypt is still run by a military dictatorship — well, yes, but it's a dictatorship that has been repeatedly pushed into giving concessions and has a fairly weak sense of authority for the moment.

Robert Worth is on the same page:

In the first days after Mubarak fell, many Egyptians feared that the Supreme Council would enshrine itself as a permanent ruling junta. Instead, the generals seem anxious to please the crowd, fearful, perhaps, that they may become the next target. Egypt’s real rulers, in a sense, are the youth of Tahrir Square, whose periodic protests have continued to push the council toward greater concessions. Even the interim prime minister, Essam Sharaf, seems captive to them. After the council appointed him in March, he went straight to Tahrir Square, where crowds carried him on their shoulders as he declared, “I am here to draw my legitimacy from you.”

(Photo: A woman watches from her balcony as demonstrators gather in Tahrir Square on May 27, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said that there would be no use of violence against protests dubbed 'the Second Revolution of Anger' taking place in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Peter Bach and Robert Kocher want to address it by making medical school free. Suzy Khimm isn't sold:

[E]ven if the entire cost of medical school were removed from the equation, the cloudy future for both Medicaid and Medicare might remain another huge disincentive for entering primary care, which lies at the foundation of both entitlements. Teaching hospitals and those that serve low-income, elderly and other vulnerable populations are particularly at risk of these provider cuts, so altruistically minded doctors willing to accept lower pay might be still dissuaded from pursuing this path given the sheer uncertainty ahead.

Don Taylor agrees that free medical school isn't a good solution.

I may be hallucinating:

The Donald and The Wasillan are meeting at Trump Tower! They will have dinner! Shushannah is on the scene. In-depth analysis here.

Yes, this is getting completely ridiculous – until a Palin-Trump ticket emerges, and we all take a Xanax and watch a Real Housewives marathon, while obsessively playing Angry Birds just to keep reality at bay (hey, it works for me). Meanwhile, buried in the blogosphere, the House has just voted 387 – 19 not to raise the debt ceiling. Yes, it was a symbolic vote. But the danger is real:

“The people who are more politically savvy realize this may not be the normal brinkmanship,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Nor, he added, is this standoff like the fight a few months ago over the current year’s spending, which ended with a late-night deal shortly before the government would have shut down.

“The thing that people are missing is that in shutting down the government you can go to the 11th-and-a-half hour, and the consequences of not doing it, while significant, are not economy-threatening,” Mr. Warner said. “You can’t go to the 11th-and-a-half hour on the debt limit. You don’t know what’s going to spook the bond markets.”

An Iranian reader writes:

The attached pic is from this weekend. Nasrin Sotoudeh, perhaps the most famed female political prisoner in Iran today, was brought to court from jail after almost a year of being kept in a cell in Evin Prison. She was thrown into jail because she was one of the few lawyers left who bravely risked her freedom to defend political prisoners. (President Obama mentioned her in his Persian New Year msg in March as an example of the regime's oppressive nature, and she just won the Freedom award of US PEN.)

She has resisted torture, gone on hunger strikes time after time, and even refused to appeal her insane 11 years jail sentence to showcase the injustice in Iran. Her husband, Reza Khandan, was in the court while she was ushered in and this pic of her with handcuffs hugging him has already turned into a symbol of resistance by the Green movement and Iranian women. She is a true hero.

Chait announces, with some glee, that Republican leaders have fully "convinced themselves of their own pseudo-polls" on the Ryan budget:

Advocacy groups for every cause under the sun like to commission polls that show that the public agrees with them, and it can almost always be done if the wording is just right. If that somehow fails, the pollster-for-hire can present the respondents with arguments that are designed to push them toward the desired result.

This trick can gin up the appearance of public support. But it’s not an actual tool for measuring public opinion, because in real life political debates, you can’t control the arguments your opponent decides to make. New York Times blogger Nate Silver recently joked, “Our plan to cut deficit by selling nukes to Afghan warlords will be VERY popular once voters get to hear both sides of the argument.” And, of course, if you worded it just right – Would you approve of a plan to simultaneously reduce the deficit and arm anti-communist freedom fighters who have strong religious values? – you could probably get a result like that.

A vandalised statue of former President Hosni Mubarak stands next to the main road to Cairo on May 29, 2011 in 6th October City, Egypt. 6th October City was established in 1979 and whose name commemorates Egypt's military operations in the 1973 6th of October War against Israel. Protests in January and February brought an end to 30 years of autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak, who will now face trial. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Fadwa al-Hatem shrugs at the latest dog-and-pony show from Assad – a new bill promising fair elections:

What astonishes me most about the situation in the country is the two-faced attitude that the regime is displaying. On the one hand it wishes to be applauded for its "bold" reforms and initiatives, while at the same time its feared security apparatus continues killing, arresting and torturing countless Syrian citizens.

Two forms of carrot are constantly dangled tantalisingly in front of the population: those of "reform" and "resistance" (ie against Israel). Both are vacuous but were thought capable of keeping the regime in power indefinitely. For anybody who follows such announcements regularly, the official and unofficial government media are always peppered with words such as "civilised", "progressive" and "development" – terms for something that is supposedly in a constant state of progress, or transition. This is what we find today in Assad's Syria, with political reform always something that is to be studied and applied moderately, but never actually implemented. Reform is the promised land that nobody will ever reach.

Chart from Calculated Risk:

In real terms, all appreciation in the last decade is gone.  Real prices are still too high, but they are much closer to the eventual bottom than the top in 2005. This isn't like in 2005 when prices were way out of the normal range. In many areas – with an increasing population and land constraints – there is an upward slope to real prices

Felix Salmon wonders why the stock market has vastly out-performed housing.