Once a trend like that becomes established, it's hard to stop. Put yourself in the position of a bored browser in front of a supermarket wire-rack, contemplating novels by two authors you've never read. They both cost the same, and you have enough pocket money to buy one. The year is 1980…How do you make your mind up? Well, you remember what you've heard about the authors, and you look at the cover painting, and you read the back flap blurb. Assuming all of these are equal … you probably buy on weight, because you subconsciously anticipate a longer reading experience and, all things considered, good experiences that last longer are better than short ones. Remember that the actual cost of the paper and ink is only a small component of the retail price of a book — around 10-15%. Increasing a book block's size from 150 pages to 180 pages is cheap. And so, from the 1960s to the 1990s, publishers unconsciously trained readers to expect longer novels.
The Times of London has some useful perspective. Here's the timing, so use Occam's Razor. David writes his "Waterloo" post on Sunday afternoon at 4.59 pm. On Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal publishes an editorial lacerating Frum:
Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role.
Mid-morning, Frum gets a summons to lunch at AEI, where one way he "makes his living" is removed. This could all be a total coincidence. But the right's fatal miscalculation on healthcare – and their clear defeat last weekend – must surely have led to some gnashing of teeth and fury.
The tea-partiers yell and shoot and throw bricks; the neoconservatives just take one of their own dissidents out and metaphorically shoot him.
The assumption is that conservative intelligentsia acts often as a kind of group-think Politburo in Washington, an elaborate and bizarre conspiracy theory until you realize it's completely true. They loathe liberals; but they hate intellectually honest conservatives more.
Especially when those intellectually honest conservatives are proven right.
Gillespie is wrong — legalization of weed generally leads to higher prices, not lower (have you *seen* the prices in Amsterdam?). Of course the sin taxes are a factor, but it also shouldn't have been hard for a free market fetishist like Gillespie to see the other reasons.
Once it moves off the black market people have a lot more choices of product and aren't limited to whatever their connection has this week, and so many start choosing quality product over the only stuff that's available, which provides upward price pressure. You also open up the market to consumers who often feel there's too much risk vs. reward in participating in the black market, which also drives up prices as demand increases and a more affluent clientele enters the market (many of us with straight, non-pro-athlete, non-writer jobs can't afford to have a pot bust on our record…).
A reader sends in this translation of Newt Gingrich's latest blather:
"I think the Democratic leadership has to take some moral responsibility for having behaved with such arroganceskill, in such a hostilesuccessful way, that the around 22% of the American people are deeply upset. So let’s be honest with this. This is a game that they’re playing, and they’ve just won an inning. People should not engage in personal threats. I’m happy to condemn any effort to engage in personal threats. Don’t let my righteously indignant call to anger, you know, anger you. I think the Democratic leadership has to take some real responsibility for having run a machine that used well-worn Congressional tacticsto win corrupt tactics, that bought votes, that bullied people, and as a result has enraged about a fifthmuch of the American people. And I think it’d be nice for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to take some responsibility for keeping their campaign promises to the equally “American” remainder of the people of the people of over what their actions have done to this country,"
Philip Klein posted this video Thursday of Petraeus talking about the Israel (the audio quality isn’t great):
Klein provides links:
If you aren’t familiar with the story, here’s the post on Foreign Policy’s website that started the controversy, which Petraeus told me was wrong in all the key respects. And here’s the Max Boot post from Commentary that Petraeus told me accurately reflects his position.
From the linked Max Boot article:
General Petraeus obviously doesn’t see the Israeli-Arab “peace process” as a top issue for his command, because he didn’t even raise it in his opening statement. When he was pressed on it, he made a fairly anodyne statement about the need to encourage negotiations to help moderate Arab regimes. That’s it. He didn’t say that all settlements had to be stopped or that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. And he definitely didn’t say that the administration should engineer a crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations in order to end the construction of new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem. In fact, his view, as I mentioned in my earlier post, is that settlements are only “one of many issues, among which also is the unwillingness to recognize Israel and the unwillingness to confront the extremists who threaten Israelis.”
[T]here really does seem to be not very much to the story about Petraeus. In his Senate testimony, he said that what happens in Israel and the Palestinian territories has an “impact” and said yesterday that there is a “spillover effect.” As Walt notes, this is “mild, unsurprising stuff.” Petraeus now insists that he never said the more provocative things attributed to him in the original report on the briefing, and he also claims that he never requested that the occupied territories be placed in Centcom’s area. So, like anyone not blinded by ideology, Petraeus acknowledges that Israeli policy has an effect on the entire region, but he has not made the more specific and provocative claims that have been attributed to him. It’s true that some have read too much into the reports about Petraeus, not least Abe Foxman, who overreacted more than anyone. I’m sure Klein will move swiftly to attack Foxman’s distortions and absurd accusations any minute now.
I take Larison’s point. Nonetheless, the paper Petraeus presented made a clear distinction between American interests and Israeli interests in the wider war on Jihadist terrorism. Until recently, Washington polite opinion could not publicly concede that. Now it’s taken for granted.
In an age of mass tourism (and YouTube), the travel writer’s job has changed. It is not enough anymore simply to describe a landscape; we must root out its meanings. Jonathan Raban, playing the immigrant in “Hunting Mister Heartbreak,” goes shopping in 1980s Manhattan and is struck by the tone of bombastic abundance. “Macy’s was scared stiff of our boredom,” he writes, nailing the frenetic nature of not only an American department store but American capitalism.
Writers such as Raban, Colin Thubron, Jan Morris and Pico Iyer each possess, in addition to the requisite eye for detail, an agile and well-stocked mind for synthesis, and their findings are riveting (and often surprising) even to people intimately familiar with their subjects. The physical hardships these writers endure in the course of their journeys often pale in comparison to those of their predecessors—though Thubron continues to travel rough—but the scaled-down suffering is offset by the greater creative challenge.
Jennifer Bleyer mocks young people using food stamps to purchase foodie products. Elizabeth Nolan Brown shrugs:
People are always railing, of course, about how people on food stamps don’t buy enough healthy food. But heaven forbid the food they buy is too healthy, or healthy and also outside the mainstream. It’s absurd. Fresh produce is a luxury? Soy protein (which costs about the same as meat) the height of libertine-ism? Not to mention that things such as Chinese gourd and coconut milk are the very kind of corner-store staples in ethnic neighborhoods that often sell these sorts of foods cheaper than mainstream varieties…
I confess I did flinch at the idea of these people spending their taxpayer-provided food dollars at Whole Paycheck. And that made me realize that I have this unrecognized prejudice that the poor — meaning those who qualify for food stamps — must be condemned to eat cheap, bad food as the price of receiving state charity. That's not right, is it? I mean, why wouldn't I care if Joe Bob bought a box of Velveeta with his food stamps, but spending that money on a wedge of triple creme Brie rankles?
The Dish 