Month: May 2010

Silver digs up some past data. About what you'd expect.

"I have never watched an episode of American Idol" – Ramesh Ponnuru. Just kidding.

William Galston highlights a revealing study:

[S]ometimes it takes a new angle of vision to make you see just how difficult things are. My “aha” moment came over the weekend, when I read a recent survey that tracked the fate of a large sample of individuals who were unemployed as of last August. Here a summary:

Of the 908-person sample, 67 percent remained unemployed but were still looking for work, and an additional 12 percent had given up and dropped out of the labor force. Only 21 percent had found jobs (only 13 percent full-time) and were currently employed. A stunning 28 percent of the newly reemployed had been looking for work for more than one year, and 6 percent for more than two years. Fifty-five percent accepted a pay cut in their new jobs; 13 percent took a cut larger than one-third of their previous salary.

My "aha" moment on this came from reading Don Peck.

Let the kids decide:

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming

Douthat pistol whips the paleocons:

From Ron and Rand Paul down to the contributors at LewRockwell.com, most of the intellectual bad habits that paleocons criticize in their foes are commonplace inside the “paleo” tent. There’s the extreme rhetoric, the enemies’ lists, the obsession with past defeats, the conspiratorial theories of how and why the cause of true conservatism has been betrayed. (Paleoconservatives tend to talk about neoconservatives exactly the way that Sarah Palin talks about liberal elites.) There’s the no-enemies-to-the-right instinct that tolerates race-baiters and “moderate” white nationalists, among other unfortunate characters — and at the same time there’s the tendency toward factionalism and purity tests (it sometimes feels like there are more “paleo” publications and webzines than there are paleocons) that resembles the old intra-socialist battles of the early 20th century. And finally, there’s the impulse to take an admirable principle — whether it’s Rand Paul’s staunch federalism or Pat Buchanan’s non-interventionism — and push it so far that people begin to doubt your intellectual judgment and your moral soundness alike.

Larison asks Ross to open his eyes.

Weigel is none too pleased by Palin’s attack on McGinniss:

Politicians don’t have veto power over who gets to write about them, or how they research their stories, as long as they’re within the bounds of the law. It’s incredibly irresponsible for them to sic their fans on journalists they don’t like. And that’s what Palin is doing here — she has already inspired Glenn Beck to accuse McGinniss of “stalking” Palin and issuing a threat to boycott his publisher.

This is really the ultimate example of the way Palin manipulates the press and inverts the relationship between reporters and politicians, turning the former into “stalkers,” and the latter — as long as they’re Republicans or members of her family — into saints whom no one can criticize. No one in the media should reward Palin for this irresponsible and pathetic bullying.

He follows up by defending himself against the ALL CAPS e-mails of Palin loyalists:

I have trouble, generally, understanding the status Palin has for her fans. Maybe I don’t want to understand it. Many of the people who wrote me pine for the death of the media, and they do so because they are angry that a politician they like is covered critically. I would encourage them to think harder about this impulse.

Video above from a third Weigel post.

Suderman makes a point of information on this encouraging report. And a good one.

Beinart and I quoted Leon Wieseltier's criticism of Israeli extremism. After prematurely hanging up his spurs, Chait complains:

Yes, Leon has written movingly against Israeli ultra-nationalism in 1994 and 2002. And many other times before and since. He did it a couple months ago. This idea that he has somehow stopped doing so is an ideologically-charged game of internet telephone. No, he hasn't accepted Peter's sudden belief that all supporters of Israel must focus obsessively on the evils of the Israeli right, at the expense of all other evils. But that's another argument altogether.

But when you read the Diarist cited, you find a somewhat more nuanced view. In so far as it is comprehensible, it is a response to appallingly revanchist behavior by far right settlers, but supports their goal:

The lunatic Jews who insist that a Jew must live anywhere a Jew ever lived do not see that they, too, are re-opening 1948 and the legitimacy of what it established. Why does the Israeli government allow the argument for a unified Jerusalem to be mistaken for the heartless revanchism of these settlers?

So Wieseltier's attack on the far right is that they are weakening the case for Israel's permanent control of all of Jerusalem, and re-opening the entire question of the legitimacy of Israel to boot. TNR's liberal Zionists manage to maintain an admirable distance from the farthest Israeli right, while never supporting anything that might actually prevent them from driving Israel into the ground. Has TNR backed Obama over Netanyahu on the settlements question – about as basic a question if we are ever to get a two-state solution? You need to ask? Matt Zeitlin sees the debate as the tyranny of small differences:

I think there’s a lot of talking past each other from the Chait/Wieseltier/Goldberg wing and the Yglesias/Beinart/Ackerman/Klein

wing of the American Jewish punditocracy.

Best I can tell, on matters of actual policy, they mostly agree with each other and stand opposed to the Israeli and American right on the issue. Much of the apparent disagreement seems to stem from different ways of viewing and describing the conflict (the threat from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas; the legitimacy of Goldstone; varying accounts of moral goodness; how much we should “focus obsessively on the evils of the Israeli right” and so on). There’s also a perception among some people further to the left on matters related to Israel that the TNR/Goldberg are just Commentary style hawks on Israel, which isn’t true and I think Wieseltier’s pieces, especially the 2002 one, show that very well.

The question is whether those pieces are, in fact, outweighed by the larger task of defending anything the Israeli government does at any given moment, and smearing anyone who dare criticize it.

Or a painting by Michael Sowa if one's tastes differ. But it's a striking resemblance to nipply old Ralphie, no?

BP is providing live underwater footage. Jim Tankersley explains the maneuver.