Nate Silver applies Occam's razor to the Senate:
The reason that Democrats are likely to hold the Senate but not the House — the necessary and sufficient reason — is because only one-third of the Senate is up for re-election every year. If the whole Senate were up for re-election, Democrats would lose it and lose it badly.
A reader writes:
I love Japanese advertising and agree that the Kikkoman ad is mesmerizing. In case you don't know already, shoyu is the Japanese word for soy sauce. Crosslingual puns are the best.
Alas, the ad isn't real:
This animation flash has no relationship with the soysauce manufacturer Kikkoman. This is not for product promotion use, and we refuse any question in this regard. The soysauce warrior, Kikkoman, and other characters… are made by many users of the biggest posting site in Japan called 2-Channel.
Another reader adds:
I think the cat committing suicide by hanging itself should have tipped you off.
Another rubs it in:
Hey, have you heard about Chocolate Rain? Or Sneezing Panda? KikkoMan has been around since the '90s, dude. We passed it around in college. Here is the English subtitled version.
"I still say that adding mayonnaise doesn't turn chicken shit into chicken salad. Here's my test: Tell me one thing we didn't know last week that we know now about the Iraq war," – Tom Ricks on Wikileaks's latest document-dump.
Well, I guess we did know that the Bush administration kept lying through its teeth to us before Wikileaks' latest revelation; but it's sobering, and surely, important to have documented proof.
Michael Tomasky argues for a boycott:
[I]f you’re any kind of liberal at all, even in the softest and most non-political possible sense, [going on Fox is] basically an indefensible thing to do. Fox News wants liberalism to perish from the face of the earth. Going on their air on a regular basis and lending your name and reputation to their ideological razzle-dazzle is like agreeing to be the regular kulak guest columnist at Pravda in 1929. For “balance.”
Ross disagrees:
Yes, there are shows where the host or the format makes it fruitless to express a dissenting view, and there are pundits who end up playing the Washington Generals to their ideological opponents’ Harlem Globetrotters. But trying to avoid being Alan Colmes isn’t the same as writing off Fox News’ audience entirely, and giving up any attempt at communicating with them directly, because the network as a whole is too congenial to conservatives. And again, to what end? Is liberalism any better off now that Juan Williams “got what was coming to him” for going on Fox in the first place? Aren’t Fox News’s millions of viewers considerably less likely to have their assumptions challenged now that one of the network’s more liberal commentators has a highly personal reason to drift rightward, or at least hold a grudge against the left? Indeed, doesn’t this imbroglio just guarantee that both NPR listeners and Fox News watchers will find themselves wound a little tighter in their respective ideological cocoons?
I agree with Tomasky. The point is surely that the only "liberals" allowed on Fox News are the ones designed to buttress the "conservative" worldview. Until that changes, why bother? When Fox has any program hosted by a former or potential Democratic presidential nominee, or a leading actual smart lefty, liberals can end their boycott. Several GOP politicians – from Huckabee to Palin to Kasich – have had their own shows. How can you even begin to claim to be "fair and balanced" when that imbalance is so pronounced?
Just as important, it seems to me is if Fox could give, say, Ron Paul his own show, and actually allow an internal conservative debate about issues, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or foreign policy, or the social issues, such as abortion, or even have a supporter of gay equality who isn't an easily dismissed leftist stereotype on prime time – like a Jon Rauch or a Ted Olson? Why not give Frum a show to counter the party line with smart conservative policy proposals and discussions? What's needed on Fox – and what you'll never see – is solid conservative attacks on and critiques of other conservatives, on matters of principle or policy. That's the difference between an opinion channel and a propaganda channel.
They are a propaganda channel. Until they change, I see no reason any liberal should appear on them. And the first test of when they change from spewing partisan propaganda will be if they even allow conservative debate of any genuine kind.
A reader writes:
Your reader's suggestion that President Obama pardon Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld has a certain appeal, but it is flawed. In Burdick v. United States, the Supreme Court held that (1) a pardon carries an "imputation of guilt", and (2) a pardon cannot be forced upon a person and can be rejected by such person. I can't see Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld ever accepting explicitly or implicitly such an imputation of guilt. And so it is very likely that they would reject a presidential pardon unless accompanied by a real threat of US prosecution for war crimes. Because President Obama clearly has decided against such a prosecution, the likely result from an attempted pardon would be to hand the war criminals a public relations victory.
Another writes:
Even if I agreed that Bush could and should be pardoned, there is a major reason why he can't be: "war crimes" isn't limited to domestic prosecution.
This is especially the case considering that some of the crimes took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, Italy, Germany, various places in Eastern Europe, etc. While multiple attorneys and lawyers have recommended that Bush staffers never leave US soil, that won't stall prosecution in abstentia for war crimes. And a presidential pardon would signal to the rest of the world, including places with less-than-savory dictators, that the ruler of a nation is above the law if he wants to be. The reaction from Europe and many other democracies, which hold that no one is above the law, would all but be forced to prosecute for war crimes.
Another:
The reader who suggests that Obama grant a blanket pardon to Bush, Cheney, and all others who ordered or enabled war crimes has taken entirely the wrong lesson from Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon.
First and foremost, Nixon never acknowledged any disgrace or admission of wrongdoing. His stated reason for resigning was to spare the country the trauma of a prolonged impeachment trial which he knew he would lose. He spent the rest of his life rehabilitating himself as a statesman, successfully building an image in Republican circles of a great man brought low by Democratic political tricks – not by his own evil.
Likewise, of all those who worked for Nixon, only John Dean openly admitted wrongdoing. The rest either denied their crimes or, like G. Gordon Liddy and later Dick Cheney, denied that they were crimes at all. There was no "full and potentially cathartic investigation" – indeed, the only reason we know as much about Watergate as we do know is that there were criminal trials for many principals both before and after Watergate.
Of course Ford's pardon of Nixon proved to be an enabler to these people in the future. By pardoning Nixon, Ford made the adage a practical truth: "when a president does it, it's not illegal." The pardon set a precedent – presidents, and ex-presidents, would be protected from prosecution for anything they did in office. Cheney and his ilk looked at the pardon and thought: We can get away with it. We can get away with ANYTHING.
(Photo: US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, US President George W. Bush and US Vice President Dick Cheney attend the Armed Forces Farewell Tribute to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon December 15, 2006 in Arlington, Virginia. Praise was heaped on the outgoing secretary by Bush and Cheney, and Rumsfeld used his farewell speech to call for an increase in military spending. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
Anne Applebaum's review of two new histories of WWII, whose insights sound eerily relevant to Al-Sadr's prominence today:
[W]e liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.
Kevin Williamson chides Prop 19 opponents:
Prop 19 would not change the prohibitions on driving while impaired. This is fear-mongering of the worst sort: "Oh, help! The stoned hippies are running over our children." California has real problems, and these busybodies are worried about, in their own words, passengers in cars who may be high. Not drivers — passengers. The only dangers presented by a stoned passenger are associated with an unscheduled stop at Jack in the Box.
It's the sort of argument employed when the facts don't justify your position.
Over the weekend Charles Murray went after elites. In response, Claire Berlinski created a "How Plebe are You?" quiz, David Frum rolled his eyes, and Will Wilkinson pointed to hard data:
Polls show that, in addition to being predominantly white and Republican, tea-partiers are wealthier and better-educated than the typical American. The proletariat they are not.
Andrew Gelman's terrific book "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State," documents the stark partisan division within the American upper class, which I think helps us understand what's really going on. Very roughly, churchgoing non-coastal rich people are Republicans, while the more secular coastal rich are Democrats. What we are now seeing is not a showdown between the vast non-ideological middle-class and some rising Acai-swilling, assortatively-mating bobo aristocracy, but a standoff between rival elites. The tea party is a movement of relatively well-to-do, relatively religious citizens aroused by the conservative identity politics of a handful of elite right-wing opinion-makers who seek to unseat their liberal counterparts.
It is a neat trick. Conservative elites pretend to be part of a marginalised cultural force while at the same time orchestrating an electoral bloodbath led by America's least marginalised people. The fact that this is working so tells us a lot about who the elites really are and where the power really lies.
What strikes me about so many intellectual conservative defenses of the current nihilist GOP is how tired they are. They are exactly the left-right, red-blue critiques of liberal elites made throughout the 1980s and 1990s, originating with Nixon. It is as if without this paradigm, they have nowhere else to go, and it sure beats actually formulating practical answers to the huge problems the country faces, at home and abroad.
Salon interviewed Simon LeVay, former neuroscientist and author of Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. The question I pose above is a dumb one for anyone with even a small grasp of evolution and genetics, but it's such a common one it's worth hearing LeVay's answer:
The usual idea is that a gene predisposing some individuals to homosexuality might promote the reproductive success of others, and the two effects might balance out. It might be that a gene predisposing a man to be gay might make a woman even more attracted to men than she otherwise would be, so that she would engage in more heterosexual sex and thus become pregnant more often. There are a couple of studies reporting that women who have gay male relatives (and who may therefore carry the same "gay gene") do indeed have more children than women without any gay male relatives. The answer will remain speculative, however, until the actual genes have been identified and their mode of action worked out.
There is also a socially evolutionary argument, that societies that had a few men uninterested in actually reproducing with women themselves might be advantageous. They might help advance a society's education, or become spiritual leaders, or be warriors unaffected by the need to take care of a household. One day, we'll get closer to the truth. It still amazes me that we are at such an early stage of figuring out this fascinating scientific question.
The Dish 