Month: July 2010

This could weaken them. Doug Mataconis analyzes:

If the Republican primaries in states like California, Florida, and Texas are required to award delegates proportionally, it would throw a curve ball into the nominating process that would have interesting, and unforeseeable, consequences. At the very least, these new rules would seem to favor candidates who have national, rather than merely regional, appeal within the GOP and would also be advantageous for those candidates able to convince voters that they have a chance of winning in November, rather than candidates who appeal to some hard-line ideology.

Dan Savage joins the debate over Sex At Dawn:

I'm not saying that everyone everywhere has to be non-monogamous; the authors of Sex At Dawn don't make that argument either. (Lots of monogamists, however, run around insisting that everyone everywhere should be monogamous—and the monogamists get a pass because, hey, they mean so well and wouldn't it be nice if everyone were?)

The point is that people—particularly those who value monogamy—need to understand why being monogamous is so much harder than they've been lead to believe it will be. In some cases this understanding may help people find the courage to seek out non-monogamous relationships and/or arrangements and/or allowances that make them—gasp!—happier and make their relationships more stable, not less, as a routine infidelity won't doom their marriage/domesticpartnership/commitment/slavecontract/whatever. But understanding that monogamy is a struggle for most people, and being able to be honest with our partners about it, may actually help some people remain monogamous.

This Terry Savage column is one for the record books. Kos calls it the "most assholish opinion column of all time." I can think of competitors myself.

Steinglass makes a shrewd point:

However limiting and intellectually repressive parenthood may be in America, it's much more restrictive for mothers in traditionalist gender-segregated societies like Japan, Italy and Greece. That comes out in childbirth statistics: women in Japan, Italy and Greece have simply stopped having children. In other societies with gender-segregated traditional family roles, like Vietnam, higher birthrates result from intense Confucian pro-natalist social pressures that leave women extremely unhappy, and birthrates there are likely to drop rapidly as women achieve greater social independence. American women, meanwhile, are still choosing to have kids, and that's partly because they can continue to have careers, and their male partners share at least some of the child-rearing duties.

And this is a success for Western feminism, right? It's good for kids to have non-miserable mothers.

Kevin Sullivan thinks Max Fisher's take on Iran's new hairstyle rules is misleading. This is correct:

I don't know that this idea – that Iran is a Pyongyang-style police state – meshes with the accounts of most respected Iran scholars or analysts who have spent significant amounts of time in the country. Private life is an incredibly precious thing there, something even this dreadful regime must handle (and regulate) with care. There's a sort of unspoken agreement that the regime can put the public face of its choosing up for window dressing, but an Iranian's home is his or her own, more or less. Of course people are monitored and bugged, but I don't know that Fisher can verify just how pervasive that activity really is beyond anecdotal accounts.

And Levi had to lose his, of course. The first of many surrenders …

The New York Times is, for some reason, unafraid to use the word "torture" to describe the acts committed by Chicago cop, Jon Burge. I guess Dick Cheney didn't call. But the eventual conviction of this criminal gives some small shred of hope that justice might eventually be done in the cases of Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo et al. There was no public outcry – as so often, the public is only too happy to pull a Noonan when screams in cells can be kept off our radar screens. The press did this, notably John Conroy of the Chicago Reader, a true journalistic hero in this corrupted age. Now that Burge has been convicted, Conroy offered this statement:

"I think Burge is a guy who was failed by his supervisors. I think that if the first time Burge as a detective pulled somebody in and roughed him up in some way, if his lieutenant said to him, 'Burge, you do that one more time and I'll have you guarding the parking lot at 11th and State,' I don't think it would've happened again. He was a good enough cop without it. He could've gone just as far without the torture. It just required some supervision, somebody to say, 'We don't do that here,' and there's no Jon Burge—Jon Burge is not notorious, he's a well-regarded cop and serves his career and retires to Florida and all's well with the world.

I think everybody wants Burge to be a monster, and he's not. He's a creature of our own devising, in a way. He's a product of the Chicago police system at the time—and now, too—which does its best to protect errant cops unless they're caught red-handed."

But what happens when your commander-in-chief doesn't just turn a blind eye to torture, but endorses it? Well, we know all too well.

Lee's Summit, Missouri, 8.30 pm

The paper does do so, as long as it is not committed by white men with enormous power:

"My children are not animals," she said, meaning Javon and his two older brothers, both also behind bars. One is awaiting sentencing for armed carjacking; the other, a trial in a torture-kidnapping case.

"The police is always trying to pin stuff on my kids that they didn't do," she said.

Torture is what street criminals do; it is not, by definition, what Charles Krauthammer's friends authorize. It's really quite simple when you keep those rules in mind and never ask any questions.

Philip Rucker takes the temperature of Republican strategists:

[They] are already praising the video. For a political figure used to an off-the-cuff style, Palin's video has a professional and polished feel that could strengthen and broaden her emotional appeal among female voters. One prominent GOP media consultant described the video as "brilliant," adding: "I wish I'd done it."

Glynnis MacNicol further analyzes the ad:

Truth be told it almost manages to make Palin look presidential, or at least a serious candidate.

It plays to Palin’s strengths without being overly kitschy (apparently pink elephants are the new pitbulls wearing lipstick) and as Mika Brzezinski noted this morning there’s not even a hint of Palin portraying herself as a victim of the media. So perhaps she’s figured out that that’s always a losing card.

Equally interesting is the fact this video makes no mention of any of the women Palin initially dubbed the ‘mama grizzlies.’ This video is all about Palin. The closest it comes to acknowledging another candidate is at the very end when she notes “there’s a WHOLE stampede of pink elephants crossin’ the line and the ETA — stampeding through — is November 2nd, 2010.”

Mike Allen notes: “The emphasis on women could help expand Palin’s appeal toward the center, helping the Republican Party with its demographic peril.” And it certainly seems as though Palin has decided marshaling the power of those 18 million cracks is her best bet. If there was any doubt that Palin wants to be a player in 2012 (and I’ve certainly had plenty) this video pretty much clears it up.