Month: January 2009

Could it also mean the demise of the GOP? Publius reacts to the notion that Republicans need to twitter more to attract the next generation:

I think the GOP’s youth problem is actually a non-white problem. Obama won generally among 18-29 year old voters by 66-32. However, he won white 18-29ers by a more modest +11 margin. Thus, the larger youth gap comes from the fact that McCain (considered a more moderate GOPer) got absolutely shellacked among young non-white voters. Embracing social networking sites isn’t going to help much with that particular problem.

And the country ain’t gettin’ any whiter.

If you haven’t check out the Atlantic cover-story on this very theme, here it is.

Reihan considers a two state solution:

I really wish that something like John Bolton’s fanciful scenario could work, i.e., hand over an impoverished Gaza with its poisonous political culture to an Egypt that has more than enough on its plate, and hand some slice of the West Bank to a Jordanian state that warily eyes its restive Palestinian majority, all while Israel’s increasingly radicalized Arab minority (many of them self-identified “Israeli Palestinians”) look on. But it clearly won’t.

The effort to unmake the Palestinian national movement — to turn the Palestinian Question into a discrete series of more manageable regional questions — seems to have failed. Maybe Israel will keep trying until it works, or until Palestinian partners emerge who can make it work. I don’t know. All I know is that the two-state scenarios that I hear about most strike me as equally implausible. The Palestinian national movement thinks in terms of historical Palestine, which suggests that even the Palestinian state envisioned by the Arab Peace Initiative would be seen as woefully inadequate, not to mention unviable, by most Palestinians. One can see why it would appeal to at least some of the Arab states, of course. Would it win over Palestinian public opinion? The small upside in a two-state solution for the security picture is that inter-state aggression is assigned a different kind of weight. Israel might actually find it easier to defend itself against attacks emanating from a Palestinian state than from the ambiguous entities that exist now. Of course, I’m not even sure about that. After all, the occupation of Gaza had drawn to a close.

Oh, Blimey, look at the mattress:

Noah Millman’s thoughts on the Gaza end-game are well worth your time:

That’s what the war is about, strategically: providing Israel’s government with domestic and international cover for the next phase of unilateral retreat from its post-1967 positions to more defensible ones.

Not terribly inspiring, nor terribly complicated, is it?

Allahpundit isn’t too impressed by his fellow atheists’ ad campaign:

The good news: They exceeded their fundraising target by 2,700 percent. The bad news: They totally wussed out by tossing “probably” in the slogan. The worst news: They couldn’t think of anything better to do with £135,000 than buy dopey ads on the side of a bus.

Seriously? Taxpayers for Common Sense fisks Martin Feldstein:

In a Wall Street Journal editorial published on Christmas Eve, Feldstein argues that plowing an extra $30 billion into DOD would produce 300,000 jobs. With all due respect to Dr. Feldstein, his reasons do not reflect the well-documented realities of the Pentagon budget.

Feldstein recommends a “short-term surge” of at least $30 billion per year in 2009 and 2010, followed by a sharp dropoff. About $20 billion would go to procurement and research and $10 billion to operations, presumably to support the thousands of troops he also wants to add. But everyone knows money at the Pentagon moves more like molasses than a surging river. Severe increases in the cost and schedule of major weapons systems has been amply documented by DOD itself. Embedding expensive weapons in the DOD budget by overestimaing budgets and lowballing costs and production schedules has resulted in less military for more money, a problem detailed in the new Center for Defense Information book America’s Defense Meltdown. And more troops means billions of dollars in support costs for decades to come.

(Hat tip: Ken Silverstein)

Freddie locks horns with Helen:

…many people see marriage, as Helen does, as bound up in child-rearing and traditional gender norms. The problem is that many people, straight or gay, don’t particularly give a shit about child-rearing or traditional gender norms, thanks, and will be subverting them anyway. The difference is that the straight couple gets to subvert them from inside marriage and the gay couple doesn’t. This is yet another example of a situation where cultural conservatives are trying to use form and rules to fight a battle that was won in psychology and culture long ago.

Respect for traditional gender roles and traditional notions of marriage can’t be enforced; you can calcify the institution and draw the boundaries so that you’re excluding gay people who might undermine them, but the straights inside are doing a very fine job of undermining all on their own. Conservatives love to say that government can’t do everything, and they’re right. One of the things government can’t do is force people to respect norms and codes that they don’t want to.

Look, I’m on record as being a passionate defender of both marriage and romantic love. I wish more people would live out the philosophical tenets implied in their marriage oaths. But those things can’t be enforced, and never could be, not by law, morality or religion. Only the individual respect for fidelity and individual love for one’s partner can create the kinds of attitudes I want people to show towards their marriages, and I find respect for fidelity and love for one’s partner to be attributes shared by both some straight and some gay people.

We’re a Netflix-and-beagles marriage so it occasionally behooves me to point out those few occasions when contemporary movie comedy rises above the usual Sandler dreck. I don’t know why the critics were luke-warm toward Burn After Reading. Dish readers will love it. But, seriously, I don’t know why my stoner readers did not let me know about Pineapple Express before now. Jesus, guys, seriously.

There are very few movies that I have laughed almost continuously through to the point of incapacity. The first Austen Powers, Team America, Borat, Harold and Kumar II, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and now Pineapple Express. Plus: Seth Rogen and James Franco are my finalists for Sexiest Man Alive. Never hurts in a movie, does it? Rent it. It’s gnar-gnar.

Larison joins the debate. A tart point:

I think that the purpose of the standards set forth in just war theory is to make it as difficult as possible to meet them, because war, while sometimes necessary, is a great evil. It should not be easy to go to war even in self-defense, much less should it be easy to escalate or start wars. For the loophole crowd, the reason for invoking just war theory seems to be mainly to gain the political benefits of being able to claim to being on the right side, and preferably without having to meet most of the obligations that just war theory requires (or to lower the standards for meeting those obligations such that virtually every operation will meet them no matter what happens).

There is something striking about how rigorously theocons apply Vatican teaching to questions of private individuals’ sexual and emotional relationships and how loosely they apply it when it comes to tempering right-wing governments from embracing torture, economic inequality, the death penalty and pre-emptive war.