By Patrick Appel
Public support for gays serving openly in the military is now overwhelming:
Seventy-five percent of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said homosexuals who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents alike now believe it is acceptable for gays to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces.
(hat tip: Timothy Kincaid)
By Patrick Appel
Juan Cole on Bush accepting a time-something:
Bush has agreed in all but name with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on a timetable for US troop withdrawal from that country. As usual Bush’s staff made up an implausible euphemism for the timetable, calling it a "time horizon" for "aspirational goals?" Language like that is a sure sign that Bush is too embarrassed to call it like it is.
By Patrick Appel
Matt Pressman tries to figure out why people love to hate the NYT. Amid the bashing is Slate press critic Jack Shafer’s semi-defense of the newspaper:
“What newspaper do they think does a better job? If you go to the library and start cranking through the microfilm of 30-year-old New York Timeses, I think you’ll quickly realize that it’s a more lively, more intelligent newspaper than it was 30 years ago. And it wasn’t a bad paper then. Does the paper aggravate, does it contradict itself? Yeah, but it’s a huge, huge monster. It’s on practically every continent every day, and our expectations of The New York Times are huge, as they should be.”
By Patrick Appel
The Atlantic‘s once yearly news-stand only fiction issue is out. If, like me, you find digital short stories wanting, you can pick up a dead-tree version on the magazine stand. Aryn Kyle’s story, Nine, is a standout piece as is Ann Patchett’s essay on book tours. A snippet from Patchett:
I can never get very far from the niggling belief that something about book tour is inherently wrongheaded, that the basic premise of authors selling their books is a flawed one. Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician (though I am not, in fact, afraid of public speaking, and I’m good at it). We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. Reading, no matter what book clubs tell us, is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
By Patrick Appel
Some early reaction to Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s withdrawal plan. Yglesias:
Maliki here — and for the past couple of weeks more broadly — is addressing himself to the most fundamental "facts on the ground" in Iraq of all, the gross unpopularity of the American military presence. Under those circumstances, only real desperation (such as the terrible situation prevailing in 2006) makes it make sense for Maliki to uncritically endorse an open-ended presence.
To really understand the importance of Maliki’s , comments you need to consider their opposite. Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, "at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves." It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about "Obama’s Iraq Problem." Obama would probably lose the race.
You’ll recall that just a couple of weeks ago Maliki’s call for a withdrawal timetable was dismissed by the White House as a "transcription error."
By Patrick Appel
"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
By Patrick Appel
Matt wants to get rid of the electoral college. Hendrik Hertzberg has similar wishes:
…once Americans have experienced the advantages of one or two national popular elections—dramatically higher turnout, campaigns waged on national issues, political energy in every corner of the country, candidates turning up in more than a dozen or so states, every vote counting equally, and no more red state/blue state blather (to say nothing of no more losers stumbling into the White House)—the new arrangement will quickly be formalized in the Constitution itself.
By Patrick Appel
Elizabeth Kolbert gives a brief history of the American lawn:
What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them. In the meantime, the familiar image of Dad cutting the grass and then, beer in hand, sitting back to admire his work, is, in many communities, a fiction: increasingly, lawn care has become another one of those jobs, like cooking dinner or playing with the kids, that’s outsourced to someone else.
(Image by Flikr user great sea.)
By Patrick Appel
While Andrew is away, I’ll be checking his e-mail account and posting reader dissents, responses, and window views as per usual. As Politics Of Scrabble remarked this week, blogs act as a "portal to the vast fields of information out there to be harvested" working as "second-by-second synthesizing plants and clearing houses" for news and opinion. We’ll do our best to keep the blog chugging along. Don’t hesitate to e-mail.
The Dish 
