Ilan Goldenberg gives Iraq the 538 treatment:
As opposed to 2005 when there Sunnis largely boycotted, there seems to be broad excitement and participation across the spectrum. It remains to be seen whether the elections will be perceived as fair and whether they’ll be able to integrate some of the marginalized groups, particularly the Sunnis. But the level of political activity and engagement is a good thing.
Felix Salmon wonders what would happen if Google ran aground:
Google is too big to fail. If Google went down tomorrow, the loss of $100 billion in stock-market value would only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total economic loss associated with such an event. Between AdSense and AdWords, Gmail and Blogger, Google Docs and Google News, the company has built itself into an indispensable counterparty which would take many years and hundreds of billions of dollars to replace.
Watching jet-paint dry:
A photographic moment in Boston.
Brad DeLong puts this economic crisis into perspective. Why is a lower standard of living unimaginable for us for a while? Why is it essential that income keeps rising? Why can’t we do more with less?
…everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time. There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.[…]
Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family’s annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith’s Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.
Books are not an exceptional category.
This is why our problem is not just economic; it’s spiritual. We have mistaken consuming for living.
Yes, the snuggie:
A fascinating little glimpse into Liz Cheney’s view of the executive in her Colorado College senior thesis:
"To assert that the Constitution is a shield of protection ‘for all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances,’ " she writes, "is to deny the nation the right of self-preservation. There have been and will be times in the experience of the country when constitutional provisions will of necessity be suspended to guarantee the survival of our democracy." The Supreme Court was wrong in declaring [Lincoln’s] actions illegal in Ex Parte Merryman because his power "was actually an assertion of the power of the people." How he divined that will of the people, Cheney does not explain.
So, according to the Cheneys, the president has the inherent right to declare war and conduct it entirely as he sees fit; the war may include within its remit the entire territory of the U.S. and everyone within it, citizen and non-citizen alike; all such persons are subject to the president’s extra-legal control, backed by military force and indefinite imprisonment without charges. Torture is the icing on this cake – the way in which dictators have always created the evidence they then use to justify their dictatorial power. It is a perfect loop – with only a four-year election getting in the way. But that’s Rove’s job: to create such a climate of fear and internal division that majorities clamor for a permanent protector.
This is what we were just delivered from: far more frightening than any economic depression.
Some papers are comparing the Republican’s stand against the stimulus to their stand against Bill Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction bill. The Democrats were subsequently slaughtered in the 1994 midterms. Weigel says nah:
The Clinton budget raised taxes; the Obama stimulus doesn’t. I think this is the most important distinction. The Clinton budget reconciliation increased income taxes, raised the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, and raised the gas tax by 4.3 cents per gallon. Basically, every American paid more taxes after the budget was passed. The Obama stimulus package doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes. It includes $275 billion of tax cuts. Are they poorly designed? Arguably. But they’re tax cuts! I literally cannot remember a time when the entire Republican conference in either house voted against tax cuts.
But they’re Democratic tax cuts.
A reader writes:
You wrote:
"I do not experience being Catholic as a choice any more than I experience being gay as a choice."
But as you must know, these are completely different things. It is one thing to have one’s thoughts influenced or shaped by the tradition one was brought up in; I would think no one could avoid that. But affirming the truth of a particular faith is always a choice, and you always have the power and right to affirm the faith you were brought up in, or another, or none. I cannot understand any reason for pretending that one has no choice in the matter — and to me it is pretending, and morally unserious, and in fact, dangerous.
Simone Weil wrote that Jesus wants us to prefer the truth to him, because before being himself, he is the truth. When we think we see a contradiction between the truth and Jesus, we have misunderstood one or the other, and should sort it out: Weil said that when we think we see Jesus standing apart from the truth, we must turn aside from Jesus, and toward the truth; but when we do so, we do not take more than a step toward the truth without falling forward into his arms, realizing that he was standing at the truth all along, and where we thought he had been standing apart from the truth was an illusion or a mistake.
Weil’s view is my own. What I meant by the lack of choice is that there have been moments in my life when I have indeed sensed the loss of faith or its slackening or, at one moment, its inversion. But even in its inversion – fifteen interminable minutes when I didn’t wonder if God existed, but if God really was evil – the despair was lifted by a force greater than my own.
What has kept me believing is not, as I have experienced it, a conscious act of will. It is more an acceptance of God’s grace. My experience of Jesus will not let go of me, however much I would like to let go of it. This element of faith – its involuntary pull as well as its voluntary push – is how I have found it.
One can only describe here and say: this is what human life is like.
I mean no more than that, but the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.
Nancy Pelosi is handing out a trillion dollars’ worth of STD-ridden condoms to illegal immigrants for gay sex while the earth enters a new ice age. Did I miss anything?
The Dish 