Felix Salmon makes a list of reasons to bailout GM, while Henry Blodget still wants bankruptcy:
We stress that, in recommending the bankruptcy option, we are not suggesting that the government abandon GM’s workers: We’d rather the government spend billions on retraining and job placement than on propping up perpetually weak companies that can’t fix themselves.
I’m with Blodget.
That "whack-job" quote and the "diva" comment about Palin: Salter once came close to calling Arianna Huffington exactly those things.
The Senate begins its work.
It’s been a while since I gave my stump speech on marriage equality. In the 1990s, I must have given it hundreds of times. It was a much lonelier struggle back then, which is why it is so moving to see how this profound cause has now burgeoned into a mass movement worthy of it. At one moment, in one speech, I tried to explain to a frustrated audience member why the institution of marriage matters to us gay people, and why nothing else will ever do. It came out something like this: Growing up gay in a largely straight world, and being told that you can have your legal contracts for your relationship if you’re lucky, or live with domestic partnerships if you’re really lucky, is a bit like growing up in a big, old house. You’re allowed to live there – in fact, you were born there and grew up there – but certain rooms are off-limits. "You can’t go in there," the adults say, as soon as you learn to walk. "Or there," they remind you as you get older. And you wonder why. But you’re a good kid and don’t want to make a ruckus, and it’s your home too and your family, and they seem very insistent. After a while, they allow you to go up to the second floor and even third floor. There are rules there: don’t touch that vase, don’t put your feet on that couch, don’t spill anything on that rug. But you can still hang out there if you really want to. But there’s one room at the very top of the house that has always been forbidden, and the more lee-way you are given elsewhere, the more stringently that rule is enforced. In the end, they say, "You can go anywhere and do anything – apart from that room." And you accept this, because they seem so intent on it. And you love them. But you keep wondering: why that room? What is up there? What am I not allowed to experience or to see?
And one day, you get up your courage and you wait till the adults are out and you gingerly make your way to that room you have never been in before.
And you go in, and look around, with some awe and burning curiosity. And you look in the cupboards and the drawers and under the chairs, and finally you find, in one dusty old desk, what they never wanted you to find.
You find the legal papers, the deed, that proves that they own the house. And you don’t. However long you live, whatever you do, however you conduct yourself, this house will never be yours. You can live in it – with their permission, and under their authority. It is your home, because where else were you born and where else would you live – but only to rent, never to own. It is your family, but you are always kept one critical step away from being fully part of it. There is one fine line you will never be allowed to cross.
It is your country, but you are never fully a citizen. You can live here, but you can’t vote. Your parents can die here, but you will never inherit this house.
We want to be citizens.
We want to be a full and equal part of our own homes and our own families and our own lives.
And some of us, having been in that room for a short while, know what it feels like.
And we will never, ever let it go.
When applying for jobs in the Obama administration:
Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.
Try somewhere else, Ackerman.
Marc Lynch studies Al-Qaeda’s relationship to technology:
…one of the biggest problems for a virtual network like AQ today is that it needs to build connections between its members while protecting itself from its enemies. That’s a filtering problem: how do you get your people in, and keep intelligence agents out?
An AQMonster.com database would be easy pickings – an online list of all the ‘explosives experts’ would be a gift to intelligence, no? An AQFacebook or AQSpace might create an identifiable universe of jihadist sympathizers, but again would probably help intelligence agencies as much as AQ. Perhaps an AQLinkedIn model, where members need to be recommended by a current member would reproduce the low-tech approach of allowing in trusted members and keeping out unknown quantities. This could potentially strengthen the ‘organization’ part… but at the expense of a greater distance from the pool of potential recruits who would not be sufficiently trusted to join. Overall it’s hard to see how AQ could adapt social networking without creating such vulnerabilities. Its rivals, on the other hand, have no such problems – Muslim Brotherhood youth are all over Facebook.
(Hat tip: Noah Shachtman)
Ross counters Austin Bramwell:
The rationale for the movement and its institutions is to advance right-wing ideas, not to preserve them. And while it’s true that many individual ideas identified with modern conservatism are held and defended by non-conservative thinkers, it’s awfully hard to argue that, say, Nat Hentoff has done more for the pro-life cause than the National Right to Life Committee. If you want your ideas translated into actual policy, a few sympathetic columnists won’t do the job: You need think tanks and activist groups and lobbyists. You need, in other words, a movement.
I suppose congressmen and congresswomen and Senators are no longer enough. And ideas don’t matter. And yes, Nat Hentoff has done more.
Newnham-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, England, 4 pm.
Freddie tackles Stephen Fry for advocating the misuse of words:
Words have value in their ability to distinguish and to discriminate. And they are only ever damaged in one direction: they become more abstracted, more broad, less specific, less forceful, less memorable, less powerful, more middling, less individual. When people misuse "anticipate" to the point where it is identical to "expect," there’s nothing to cheer for anyone. Why? Because where we once had two words for two concepts, we now have two words for the same concept– and no word that means "anticipate". You and I are rapidly losing that wonderful word. In it’s place is a vague shell. Irony is a fantastic concept, wonderfully precise. The word "ironic," at this point, is close to having no individual meaning whatsoever. When "ironic" can mean any kind of sort of strange, sort of funny happenstance, we no longer use that word to access a specific and incisive idea.
Orwell was right. There are some core underpinnings for Anglo-American democracy. One of them is the constant struggle to use plain English directly. As a language, its breadth and concreteness are its strengths. And yet we speak increasingly like Germans. ‘Enhanced interrogation techniques" my ass. It really did sound better in the original German. In English, we say torture. Like Englishmen.
Manzi, as so often, cuts to the chase:
A bailout of GM would be a pure exercise of political power to deliver taxpayer funds to one organized group of citizens at the expense of the country as a whole. It should be avoided.
Rewarding failure is the central characteristic of the Bush administration. Obama pledged to be the un-Bush. Don’t do it!
The Dish 