Month: July 2010

Chait watches their grip slip:

In the past, the Republican Party has always managed to hold in check the tactical radicalism of its base. It's starting to run wild. In past elections, I would have totally discounted the possibility that the party might nominate a figure like Sarah Palin, because the party establishment has always been strong enough to push aside candidates who were not strong electoral vehicles for conservatism. I'm no longer sure they have that power anymore.

Good to have your eyes open, Jon. Now start looking at what's going on in Israel.

Noah Millman shares why he changed his mind (at least twice) on marriage equality. It strikes me as a model of bloggy discourse: allowing oneself to change one's mind in public and change it back if necessary, and using the process to understand yourself and the world a little better.

Read the whole intellectually honest thing.

Melody Dye passes along some research suggesting that our slow cognitive development is key to our intelligence as a species:

In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. Indeed, the trio makes clear that our early vulnerability is an evolutionary “engineering trade-off,” much like the human larynx—which, while it facilitates the intricate productions of human speech, is actually quite a precarious adaptation for anyone trying to swallow safely. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity.

Jonah Lehrer adds his two cents.

Joel Wing covers the political stalemate:

As always, Maliki is the main barrier to forming a new government. He insists that he return as prime minister, which is opposed by almost all the other parties. The negotiations with the Iraqi National Alliance and the Iraqi National Movement have gone nowhere because of him, while the Kurds are largely staying on the sidelines willing to support any coalition that emerges that will agree to their demands. Maliki has the luxury of being able to drag out the process because he still holds onto his office. That means four months after Iraq’s election, the country’s politicians are still no closer to forming a government. 

When a politician refuses to acquiesce to the demands of all the other parties and remains the national leader four months after an election, with no resolution in sight, have we really constructed a workable non-sectarian polity? Or did Petraeus successfully p.r. his way toward a face-saver?

Chris Good profiles the first casualty of the NAACP resolution:

[Mark] Williams has lent controversy to the Tea Party movement for some time now, and it's not all that hard to find Tea Party organizers who will tell you that he is a racist and a bigot and that he's giving the movement a bad name. In fact, he's already on his way out as chairman, or so he told me: the controversy, the schedule, and his own pursuits have let him to set the wheels in motion for him to step aside from his "chairman" role (which entails speaking on stage as an emcee, some light consulting, and media appearances) into that of a lesser consultant or affiliate.

Williams is a talk radio host (though not on the air at present) based in Sacramento, and he has said many controversial things since and before the Tea Party movement began. I profiled his fraught relationship with the movement, and Tea Party Express's sudden ascent, earlier this year; see that story if you want to know some of the history.

TNC lauds the civil rights group and laughs Williams off the stage.

Mark Kleiman thinks not:

The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis….The non-medical cannabis industry that would be allowed if Proposition 19 passed would quickly fuel a national illicit market….As a result, pot dealers nationwide — and from Canada, for that matter — would flock to California to stock up. There's no way on earth the federal government is going to tolerate that. Instead, we'd see massive federal busts of California growers and retail dealers, no matter how legal their activity was under state law.

Kleiman still plans to vote for the proposition as a protest against current drug laws. Drum is more optimistic:

There's really no telling what the feds will do until someone forces the issue. So why not force it? At the very least it has a chance to move the public opinion needle a bit. Besides, I think it would be entertaining to watch the tea partiers twist in the wind trying to figure out which is more important: (a) making sure the hippies don't get their dope or (b) fighting the jackbooted tyranny of federal officers interfering with the sovereign Tenth Amendment right of states to police their own borders. Or something.

Weigel argued last week, given the current dynamics in the media, Palin doesn't need to compete on a policy level.  Andrew Sprung differs:

Weigel's post is titled, "But does she really need to learn anything?" The answer is yes. Palin faces the Herculean task of wiping out the impression of feckless ditziness that Tina Fey helped burn into tens of millions of American minds. Maybe she'll do it.  It would not entirely surprise me if someone of her transcendent narcissism and ambition did achieve enough policy fluency to compete in 2012. She was effective in the Alaskan gubernatorial debates in 2006.  But she cannot get away forever with clueless stares and helpless repetition of the question when interviewed even by friendly hosts on matters of national policy. Weigel underestimates the rigor remaining in the American Presidential selection process.

Bernstein goes in another direction.

Auden put it best:

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.