Month: July 2010

CSIS looks at the Arab-Israeli military balance:

As the report shows, Israel has … benefited from continuing US aid and arms transfers – benefits that are substantially greater than the dollar figures show because Israel is able to draw on the most advanced US military technology, often on preferential terms, and integrate into its own advanced military industrial base. Israeli political claims that the Obama Administration has somehow distanced itself from a concern with Israel’s security have not been reflected in arms transfers and security cooperation.

Dan Zak fears young gays are forgetting their forebears:

For a demographic that was once so twined with mortality, the gays have gotten good (or have they always been good?) at focusing on the now, the young, the ephemeral. Today’s gays — the gays of my generation, the millennials, the 20-somethings — are post-gay, or New Gay, loosed from the closet, free of the diving bell of AIDS-as-executioner, left to skirmish over (or ignore) petty legislative battles on a state-by-state or school-by-school basis. The “end of gay culture” has been journaled for nearly a generation now. What about gay history? Is that ending too? From Sappho to Prop 8, and then what? Now what? Yearly parades celebrating outrageousness, tempered by the tired yammerings of marriage defenders?

Will gay history end when Storme DeLarverie and her peers are dead? Or when a gay man or woman is elected president of the United States?

Douthat passes judgement:

[Conservative] rethinking needs to circle back to the realities of contemporary politics, and the challenges of actual-existing policy issues, rather than indulging in manichaean fantasies about a final battle between virtuous liberty-lovers and wicked statists.What’s more, [Continetti is] right to suggest that certain ways of rethinking American politics are simply toxic and self-discrediting and ought to be labeled as such, no matter how many copies of “The Road to Serfdom” they inspire people to buy.

Indeed, to the extent that Jonah Goldberg is heavily invested in many of the ideas that Beck is popularizing, then it’s his obligation to draw a clear distinction between those arguments and the noxious, John Bircher paranoia that Beck often swaddles them in.

Exum tends "to believe the actions of local actors are more significant than those of U.S. policymakers":

In general, we Americans — especially some of our friends on the American Right — tend to overestimate the importance of what we do in comparison to what local actors do. (Iraq and Afghanistan, seriously, should have taught us better.) That doesn't mean we fold up our tents and head home: we just have to be realistic about what we can hope to achieve through the application of U.S. power, military force especially.

Sharron Angle finally granted a 30-minute interview to the Nevada media. Here's a bit on the separation of church and state:

Pareene parses her answer:

As for the context, she actually got it mostly right:

"Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up to protect the church from being taken over by a state religion, and that's what they meant. They didn't think they couldn't bring their values to the political forum, and it didn't mean that people with religious beliefs shouldn't have that freedom."

Right. No state religion. This is what we liberals try to explain, all the time: that the separation of church and state protects churches. So, thanks for getting on board, Sharron! But I'm still not sure how she squares that answer with a repeated insistence that "the tenet of the separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine," since she seems to be explaining one of the stated reasons for the establishment clause.

Tyler Cowen warns that "the Haitian social fabric is fraying":

Most people are ignoring the Haitian situation, as they have mistakenly concluded it has stabilized.  It has not.  You still have a million and a half people, in a basically untenable situation, more or less homeless, with the heart of the country destroyed and not much ongoing reconstruction or reform.

A new Tumblr that narrates scenes found in high-end home catalogs:

Elaine was not amused by Gary’s passive-aggressive response to her request to “garnish the cocktails.”

Drum's counterpoint:

Contra Megan's headline ("No Easy Way To Fix Social Security"), Social Security is a pretty easy problem to address, and the reason it's easy is that you don't have to limit yourself to a single big solution. In fact, Social Security reform practically cries out for a basket of small, almost imperceptible changes. You could, for example, partially uncap the payroll tax or change the tax rate slightly (or a combination of the two); gradually increase the retirement age to 68; and adjust the inflation calculation for annual benefits slightly. This would fix Social Security's problems entirely and would be barely noticeable for most people.

Rob Tisinai vents:

There are plenty of reasons to ban adult/child marriage, reasons that have nothing to do with same-sex marriage, reasons that have nothing to do with tradition. I imagine our opponents would agree with those reasons.  But they conveniently forget them when they claim that altering a tradition means anything goes.  And I have to wonder — again — if the case against marriage equality is so strong, why must they resort to arguments that collapse into repellent chaos with a moment’s examination?

Of course, that’s a question that answers itself.