Month: July 2010

E.D. Kain contests this Malkin Award:

If you believe in your heart of hearts that an unborn child is nevertheless a child – a living, growing, human being – and yet the law of the land dictates that said living, growing human being is not in possession of even the most basic right – the right to life – then how different is this from slavery?

Copyranter scratches his head over "the Kurt Cobain dwarf doppelgänger":

The point, I guess, of this unfortunately humorous ad for a New Zealand domestic violence support organization is that, when you've been abused by an angry man-monster, you see angry man-monster faces everywhere. Sorry, but smiles should never be the result of viewing an ad for such a serious subject.

Former NYT food critic Frank Bruni indulges in thoughtless eating:

Too often, those of us who swim deeply in the food culture of the moment give the impression that every dining choice made is a deeply considered one, that life is a series of carefully researched, freighted judgment calls about the content, and destination, of every single meal. But is life really lived that way? Can it ever be? Do any of us really have the time or energy (or budget) for that?

I know I don't. And as often as not, when I wrap up a day on the road around 9:00 p.m., I'm tired enough or eager enough for a solitary moment or interested enough in NOT thinking so hard about eating and food that I just get room service, or plop myself on a bar stool at a restaurant that I select spur-of-the-moment, or do something along those lines. I make a deliberate decision NOT to deliberate too much.

A reader writes:

Your reader writes:

I’ve been smashed in the face to the point of having my front teeth chipped.  Along with that kind of trauma comes cut and severely swollen lips, gum damage, and the inability to smile like she is in the photo

A blow directly to the mouth that breaks teeth is indeed likely to significantly injure the lips.  However, that is certainly not the only type of blow that may result in chipped or broken teeth.  A blow to the lower jaw, for instance, may cause the lower and upper teeth to hit each other with enough force to chip several teeth, while leaving the lips completely uninjured. I’m not a dentist, but I am an emergency physician, and I have seen a lot of patients come to the ER because of a broken tooth.  Sometimes they have lip or gum damage, and sometimes they don’t.

Another reader:

That reader really has gone out on a limb.  In my youth, I chipped my four front teeth after having drunk too much (I fell and apparently had my mouth open when I hit the ground causing my four top teeth to take the entire impact).  I had no lacerations on my face or any other injuries except my bruised ego.  I got up, dusted myself off and continued my evening.  Of course the next day, I was cussing myself out, especially after getting the bill from my dentist.  Note, I do not have buck teeth nor an overly sized mouth.  It was just one of those freak accidents that happen all too often when inebriated.

A final reader:

I think that it is outrageous for someone to assert those pictures are fake. If you look at the picture, you can see her swollen lip. If there was broken skin, it could have been on the inside of the mouth, she could have cleaned it up a bit, she could have taken the pictures several hours after the injury. The benefit of the doubt obviously has to go with Oksana, and given the incredibly nasty phone calls, those recordings reveal exactly the kind of abuse and invective that a domestic abuser would use. It’s not a far reach to think he’d slug a woman.

Jonathan Rauch tracks the Republican-leaning Independents, who are currently tilting to the GOP – but also demanding much more ideological purity:

In a span of only two years, independents went from leaning solidly Democratic on most issues to being scattered toward the middle and often leaning Republican. That was a significant rightward swerve.

But not on all issues … What appears to be happening is that debranded Republicans are more economically than socially conservative. True, many of them may be both, but the issues that motivate them are primarily economic. Their flight from the Republican Party is pulling the average ideology of independents in a libertarian direction, a trend amplified by a milder tendency of non-leaning independents to move in the same direction.

That's great for 2010. But for the long run, it means that the GOP becomes more marinated in the right, while the Dems retain a pretty broad coalition: 

If the GOP take an election victory this fall as evidence that bashing Muslims, illegal immigrants and declaring Obama a socialist while offering no actual specific spending cuts, they could alienate the middle some more. And if Obama, as I expect, pivots to debt reduction through his debt commission next year, fiscal conservatives, disgusted with the GOP and the Dems, could move back to the man they backed in 2008.

Austin Bramwell puts this more succinctly:

As a demographic matter, Republican constituencies are shrinking while Democratic constituencies are growing. At the same time, the Republican constituency is becoming increasingly conservative.

I see no Republican leaders prepared to walk slowly back to the center yet. Why would that change if they win in November? Advantage: Obama.

Pareene rounds up clips from Huckabee's first week as a network TV talk show host:

Because Mike Huckabee could very well be a GOP nominee for president (if Mitt Romney fails to properly restart after an operating system upgrade, or something), it is worthwhile to take a look at how he is building his name recognition, and making himself acceptable to Regular Daytime TV-Watching Americans.

Bernstein applauds Friedersdorf:

People like to believe that agency matters — that is, they constantly underemphasize structural factors such as the effect of the economy on elections or the difficulty in winning Congressional votes beyond a party's strength in Congress.  When one's side doesn't win, it's easy to believe that either they didn't really want to win, or in the sports cliche, they didn't want to win badly enough.  Yelling and screaming is a good way to avoid that particular accusation, even though rationally there's really no case that extreme demonstrations of emotion are likely to be helpful. 

Here's the magazine's defense of the picture. And here's an excerpt from Aryn Baker's cover story on the woman depicted (it appears that the full story isn't online). Allahpundit:

The image is as stark an argument as you’re likely to see for continuing the war, which is why lefties naturally have been all day. Some offer legit complaints — instead of putting a mutilated girl on the cover to make the case for staying put, why not put a dead soldier on there to make the case for pulling out? — and some not so legit, like the idea that because this happened last year when U.S. troops were already in the field, it portends nothing about what’ll happen on a wider scale when we leave.

He adds:

Most of the bloggy links that I’ve seen today have gone to the piece at Time defending the decision to publish the photo, not the actual cover story about the catastrophic social backsliding to come once Islamist fanatics regain power (not to mention the inevitable retrenchment of Al Qaeda). Maybe a little too heavy on the distracting shock factor here?

Well, that's bound to happen when you don't put the full cover story online. But the cover image is a great visual for making the moral case for staying – something those of us who want to scale down the war effort must confront. Yglesias, alas, claims that "actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims":

It’s certainly true as Time’s emotionally manipulative new cover image indicates that the Taliban are terrible for women and that the more of Afghanistan they rule the worse things will be for women. That said, it’s extremely disingenuous to act as if continued American military engagement in Afghanistan is the key to preventing further cases of girls like Aisha from being maimed for violations of retrograde notions of gender norms.

We were not responsible for these evils when they were perpetrated for years before 9/11. And we are not responsible now. After ten years, I'd say the American soldier's burden in trying to alleviate the awful consequences of Jihadist rule is completed.

Ackerman flags a new Pew study (pdf) on Pakistan. A surprise:

"Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes.” Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley. But it’s not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they’re a bad or “very bad” thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people.