Month: May 2010

Iain Dale attacks it. As does Iain Martin:

[A]n enthusiastic supporter of the government had the best argument. The idea, he says, is that it diminishes the PM’s power to call a snap election, giving the Lib Dems a lock on such a decision because he would need their votes to get to 55% of the House. This, he says, is an erosion of executive power and A Good Thing. However, he claims (or presumes, because ministers have yet to decide or make it clear) that there seems to be nothing to stop the Lib Dems breaking the coalition at some point, and joining Labour and the other parties to vote down the Tories on an old-fashioned 50%-plus-one no-confidence vote. Not sure that’s the case, as combined the other parties seem to have about 53% of votes in the Commons.

Or is it being suggested that there will now be two types of no-confidence motion? One requiring 50% plus one if it’s the PM’s opponents are putting it down and another different kind requiring 55% if it’s the PM trying for a dissolution?

The beauty of the existing convention of 50% plus one in all eventualities is that it is simple, easily understood and was, until the coalition document, accepted by all sides.

A ComRes poll:

On whether the coalition is good or bad for Britain:

* 44% say good, 21% say bad and 28% say will make no difference

* Again it is last week's Labour voters who are the most negative – 45% of them say it'll be bad, 24% good compared to 65% of Tory voters and 58% of Lib Dems who say good and only 11% and 17% respectively who say bad.

I second every single point in David Brooks' column today. There is an alchemy in this moment that is more than the sum of its parts.

Marriage licenses are way up since marriage equality passed:

Based on the early numbers, the District is on target to issue four times as many marriage licenses this year as they did in 2009.

Oy, the awful impact of rising marriage rates in an urban center. What a dreadful influence on the urban poor. Adam Serwer highlights the obvious conservative contradiction. If this is "insidious and dangerous" as the Pope now insists (but obviously not as insidious and dangerous as employing and protecting child-rapists), I'm a heterosexual.

Spurred by Dish readers, Graeme shares his interactions with veiled women throughout the Middle East:

[E]very wearer of burqa and niqab I have asked has viewed the garment as a blessing: a liberation not so much from the stares of men as from the stares of anyone at all. It freed them from caring about their appearance. They didn't have to do their hair. (Of course, since fashion abhors a vacuum, and when women's clothes are made forcibly subdued, they find ways to mark style by decorating the fringes of their abayas, say, or by paying heavy attention to eye make-up.) They could count money in public. They didn't get covered with filth, as I did, standing around waiting for the bus, and they could check me out and stare at me without risking the awkwardness of my staring back. No doubt there are women whose burqas are compulsory, but I have not met them.

The whole post is worth a look.

A meditation on the blue-bells of the English woodlands, copses and valleys where I was lucky enough to grow up:

But there is another quality that makes the bluebell magical: it is in a hurry. The flowers have to beat the closing over of the tree canopy and their rush to become themselves is what makes them taut and glossy, with so much damp in them that you can't rub one bluebell leaf past another. The mineral green leaves cling to each other, like wet flesh to wet flesh. It doesn't last. As soon as they are perfect, they are over. Within a couple of weeks, the entire population will be drowned as if a flood has run through the wood. Now is the moment: it's when spring turns into summer.

(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty.)

"Nobody is winning," – Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan.

Kinsley confronts the movement:

Some people think that what unites the Tea Party Patriots is simple racism. I doubt that. But the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

Brooks' take on Kagan in a nutshell:

My own view of Kagan is that she’ll probably be a very good justice, and is almost certainly the sort of open-minded pragmatist I would like to see on the court. What’s sad is that she has to repress the normal expression of opinion, which is the God-given right of every New Yorker, in order to get the job.

A 76-year-old woman is hospitalized with a heart attack after cops and the DEA swarm the wrong house with guns drawn. Money quote:

"She was traumatized. Even the doctor said this is what happens when something traumatic happens. He said it's usually like a death in the family or something like that just absolutely scares them half to death, and that is what has happened," said [daughter Machelle] Holl.