Month: May 2010

Packer warns:

Less than a few decades ago, Republican voters would never have defied their most powerful politician—in this case, Mitch McConnell—and nominated a party outsider like Rand Paul. It’s almost certain that Paul will win in November, and when he gets to Washington he’ll make Jim Bunning seem like a dull, go-along-to-get-along insider. The prototype for Republican senators these days is no longer McConnell, and it certainly isn’t an aging centrist like Richard Lugar. It’s Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who holds office not to legislate but to blow things up, who doesn’t need to make party elders happy because he can create his own base of support by making himself irresistible to cable news. Rand Paul will up DeMint’s ante, and “the world’s greatest deliberative body” will continue its descent into mass-media hell.

Pensioners exercise in London's first purpose built 'Senior Playground' in Hyde Park on May 19, 2010 in London, England. The playground, which cost 50,000 GBP, features six machines: a cross-trainer, sit-up bench, body-flexer, free runner, flex wheel and an exercise bike. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

Larison hammers away at the national GOP:

The national Republican leadership and quite a few conservative pundits and bloggers have convinced themselves that excessive spending and government expansion were the things that drove the public away from the GOP, and this is not at all true. Nonetheless, when a primary candidate appeared who made an argument for strong fiscal conservatism and opposition to bailouts, much of the party establishment worked to try to defeat him. If the spending argument were correct, Paul would be an ideal candidate for the fall and the party leadership ought to have rallied around him. In refusing to do so and in actively working to defeat Paul, Grayson’s backers have made clear that they don’t actually put much stock in their own anti-spending rhetoric, and they have reminded everyone that their aggressive, ruinous views on national security take precedence over everything else.

Suzanne Smalley recalls the media's failure during the Chandra Levy case. You will recall that much of the MSM and key parts of the blogosphere, like Mickey Kaus, assumed Condit's guilt. There was much much less fuss about accusing a public figure of murder than in describing a public person as a lesbian. But the blogosphere also maintained some skepticism – the Dish primarily among them:

The summer of Chandra Levy seems like yesterday, though almost a decade has passed. I'd like to think I'm a better reporter now, less likely to follow the pack. More important, the media landscape has changed. Blogs barely existed in 2001. Now, when I cover any high-profile crime, I make sure to check out Web Sleuths, an Internet forum for armchair detectives who analyze cases and post court filings. … Bloggers are unrestrained by the orthodoxies of the professional reporter. They don't need to follow the conventions of the 800-word newspaper story and can instead toss out an idea in two sentences that will nonetheless spur national discussion. They can ask questions without necessarily supplying an answer. Critically, bloggers also do not typically rely on official sources for information. Reporters and their anonymous sources both benefit from the relationship. Reporters get exclusive information, which earns them promotions; sources weave narratives that serve their interests. This corrupting symbiosis makes the reporter all too quick to take an official's word at face value.

In the Levy case, this dynamic was clearly at work. At routine press conferences, all that reporters wanted to hear about was [Congressman Gary] Condit.

But some of us stayed fair. And were eventually proven right.

A Spanish mathematician crunches the numbers on successful relationships:

The results of the mathematical analysis showed when both members of union are similar emotionally they have an “optimal effort policy,” which results in a happy, long-lasting relationship. The policy can break down if there is a tendency to reduce the effort because maintaining it causes discomfort, or because a lower degree of effort results in instability. Paradoxically, according to the second law model, a union everyone hopes will last forever is likely break up, a feature Rey calls the “failure paradox”.

According to the model, successful long-term relationships are those with the most tolerable gap between the amount of effort that would be regarded by the couple as optimal and the effort actually required to keep the relationship happy. The mathematical model also implies that when no effort is put in the relationship can easily deteriorate.

For a lefty, Robert Scheer is upbeat:

Rand Paul is bad on a lot of social issues I care about, and no, I don’t embrace his faith in the social compassion of unfettered free markets. But the alternative we have experienced is not one of a progressive government properly restraining free-market greed but rather, as was amply demonstrated in the pretend regulation of the oil industry, of government as a partner in corporate crime. It is the power of the corporate lobbyists that is at issue, and it is refreshing that candidate Paul has labeled Washington lobbyists a “distinctly criminal class” and favors a ban on lobbying and campaign contributions by those who hold more than a million dollars in federal contracts.

(Hat tip: Welch)

A reader writes:

Fine to toss the lion's share of blame for "Going Rogue" at the feet of Jonathan Burnham and Roger Ailes, both of whom have clear-cut mercenary reasons to publish what Claire Berlinski, reviewing the book for "The American Review," calls "a series of bromides, one after the other."

But please save a morsel or two of blame for Adam Bellow, the book's editor and the Anakin Skywalker of conservative publishing.  I worked with him years ago at The Free Press, a right-of-center imprint (then owned by Macmillan) that had a reputation for putting out brainy, wonky books by the likes of George Will, Charles Murray and Francis Fukuyama. Adam was not only the son of an American literary titan and Nobel laureate, but, in his own right, a thoughtful, self-effacing intellectual who longed for a smarter, saner conservatism that could challenge the ideological excesses of the resurgent left, newly emboldened by the election of Bill Clinton.

I'm not sure when or where — or why — Adam went off the rails.

Of Sarah Palin's book, Ms. Berlinski writes that "no one involved in creating this memoir felt it necessary to make her words memorable. Nor did they make her sound wise, self-aware, thoughtful, adult, educated, or even plausible as a fictional character." Without mentioning Bellow by name, she points out that her editor either didn't notice, or didn't care, that an exchange between Todd and Sarah misquotes what is arguably the most famous passage in the English language. (Todd refers to "darts and arrows" when he almost certainly means to invoke "slings and arrows.") Adam Bellow could have fixed this in two seconds with his red pencil, saving his author from herself — and I'm fairly certain that his author wouldn't have bristled. (She probably wouldn't even have noticed.) The Adam Bellow of the early 1990s would have done so without hesitation; he would have been horrified, in fact, to let a mistake like this go to print. But the current Adam Bellow was either too lazy, or too preoccupied with other matters, to remember his primary duty as an editor.

Kinsley pokes fun:

Now that the sex lives of Supreme Court justices have become grist for commentators, we are finally free to discuss a question formerly only whispered about in the shadows: Why does Justice Antonin Scalia, by common consent the leading intellectual force on the Court, have nine children? Is this normal? Or should I say "normal," as some people choose to define it? Can he represent the views of ordinary Americans when he practices such a minority lifestyle? After all, having nine children is far more unusual in this country than, say, being a lesbian.

Let me be clear: the issue is not the fact that Scalia has chosen to have nine children. That is his personal business. The question is whether he is an extremist advocate of the so-called "Nine Children Agenda."

Goldblog interviews Peter Beinart in two parts (one, two). Peter:

I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become–and I'm quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here–an "apartheid state."

And foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state is exactly what the current Israeli coalition wants to do.

You ask what has changed. First, year after year of settlement growth at triple the rate of the Israeli population (including this year, since in practice, Netanyahu's "partial freeze" has led to no slowdown of building, and in any case he has said it will not be renewed after September). The more the settlements expand, the more settlers–including fanatical settlers–take over parts of the Israeli bureaucracy and become integral to the Israeli army and rabbinate, all of which makes the prospect of removing them without outright civil war more remote. These people have already murdered an Israeli Prime Minister, and they routinely use violence against Israeli troops and Israeli leftists, not to mention Palestinians. Their young "hilltop youth" are so extreme that they actually scare the settler old guard. "When will the state of Israel wake up and realize that it is facing a real threat from an enemy within," those words are not from a dove, they are Ben Dror Yemeni, the hawkish editor of Maariv last year. And it's not just the growth and increased radicalization of the settlers, it's the emergence of a political coalition determined to protect them and make a Palestinian state impossible.