John Jeremiah Sullivan remembers uncovering two young Axl Rose mugshots, and why he prefers the one that GQ didn't end up running:
It’s the shots of him at eighteen that move me, though. He isn’t pretty yet, he hasn’t begun to think of himself as a rock star. He’s a boy-man, with a trace of fear in his pugnacious stare. I can’t remember what he’d done, that time. Stolen another kid’s bike, I think. Or destroyed another kid’s bike. When I first saw his hair, I understood something Dana had told me hours before, at a bar: that when they were children, Axl was Raggedy Ann in the Christmas parade. Looking longer, a person could understand something else, too, about the Midwestern darkness in his voice.
Today on the Dish, Andrew wouldn't back down on the Juan Williams case, with more reaction here, here, here, here, here, and dissents (and Andrew's rebuttals) here. Obama told America It Gets Better. Samual shared the brutal story of his ex-gay therapy, and HRC stooped to a new marketing low. On Prop 19, John Gravois unearthed the juicy story on the Napa valley of marijuana, Al Giordano thought Prop 19 could usher in legalizations across the country, a new ad upended the arguments about underage access to it, and we kept a close tally on the polls.
In international news, the Wikileaks doc dump promised some grim reading, America's one real exceptionalism may endanger it the most, dogs remained man's best bomb detector, and we tallied the human toll in Iraq. Max Boot mourned Britain's spending cuts, Larison laughed, and Yglesias didn't think they stood a chance in the U.S.
Video surfaced of Miller's press intimidation, and blogazines continued to fascinate bloggers. Fallows found the best ad of the election cycle, Anita Hill told the truth, and Hertzberg took a Dish reader to task. Peggy Noonan lambasted DC Republicans, but Andrew didn't have much hope for the Tea Party either. Andrew egged on Reihan about inefficiencies in government, San Francisco revolted against public pensions, and Republicans sicked their dogs on Mitch Daniels for thinking about taxes.
Thursday on the Dish, Andrew sized up Britain's budget cuts and replied to Rick's response on inequality and the dying middle class. British defense cuts could precede our own, and even McCain's former policy advisor applauded them. Al-Sadr switched up the chess game in Iraq.
Scott Morgan laid the smackdown on the LA Times, Reason interviewed Prop 19's supporters and opponents, drug busts don't affect prices, and the polls tightened. Yglesias urged the scandalous to stick around, Greenwald gutted the defense of Miller's "bodyguards," and we hailed Tyler Cowen as an economist. The DADT ruling was stayed, and Ben Adler annihilated Obama's argument that only Congress can allow gays to serve.
TNC weighed the benefit of fighting when young, with the bad of fighting as an adult. Kinsley summoned the best defense of buck-raking there is, the Dish became a "mixed regime," and this quote made William F. Buckley roll in his grave. Megan learned no one owns a city, and police officers chilled out because of surveillance. FOTD here, headline for the day here, Nick Carr bait here, quote for the day here, VFYW here, MHB here, map of the day here, and skinny CPAP views here.
By Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images.
Wednesday on the Dish, Dan Choi re-enlisted. Andrew pushed back against Walter Russel Mead and Goldblog on Israel, and on Ross for lowering his expectations on the GOP establishment and the Tea Party. Farhad Manjoo tracked the blogazine's rise while we lived it, and this reader tried to balance the right and the left. Frum preached compromise and Andrew urged conservatives to be realistic (when imagining a world where McCain had won). Andrew picked apart Obama's stealth tax policy, and we hoped it wasn't true about his visit to India.
France and Britain joined forces to blow Bagehot's mind while saving money on defense, and we rounded up opinions on what the UK's defense cuts meant for the U.S. Scott Horton reported on Obama's secret prison in Afghanistan, albinos were still in trouble in Tanzania, and aid money engendered the need for more aid money.
Hillary Clinton believed It Gets Better, to the consternation of some in the gay community, while Adam Serwer wondered if DADT was going to be Obama's Prop 8. Daniel Larison made the constitutional argument for church and state that O'Donnell was incapable of making, and 9/11 terrorists never attacked Texas. Rand Paul slipped down on Rasmussen, and Charlie Cook predicted a counterwave to this election's wave. DePaul University curbed their students' cannabis policy group, and the drugs and states rights battle escalated in California.
Bristol Palin danced in a gorilla suit, painters lied about how pretty Venice is, and the Rent Is Too Damn High went the way of the meme. DVR killed the political ad, supply killed the demand for prostitutes, and lots of people drop their cameras. Malkin award here, Yglesias awards here and here, view from your CPAP here, more BLT community names here, VFYW here, more on the "successful" here, email of the day here, dissents of the day here, MHB here, and FOTD here.
Tuesday on the Dish, Andrew commended Dafna Linzer's reporting on the blurred lines between classification and deception, and juxtaposed Rick Hertzberg's left with his right. Andrew called the Tea Party on their executive power hypocrisy, and a reader felt jettisoned by them in general. Andrew weighed in on Rand Paul's "anti-Christian" satirical brotherhood, O'Donnell didn't know her First Amendment, and the internet (and reader) moshpits went at it over Andrew's definition of "successful."
Will Wilkinson thought Obama might be sacrificing young voters on DADT and the drug war, but Scott Morgan disagreed. Chris Good inquired about commercial cannabis sales, California's major newspapers wimped out over Prop 19, and we looked at 46 tons of burning bud. Justin Logan challenged the Defending Defense people to a debate, early voting was under-developed, and Bush II wasn't ambitious enough. Carly Fiorina had a magical budget plan, we learned journalists can smear some groups and barely apologize, and Palin may have already peaked.
Most of Americans' friends existed on television, and Adam Ozimek foresaw a future of computers connected to our brains. Homer and Bart were officially Catholics, and Limbaugh was officially a parody of himself. The Rent Is Too Damn High Party would let you marry a shoe, and The Social Network nailed every t-shirt Zuckerberg ever owned. Belgrade had a curious cure for homosexuality, and readers updated GLBT to the new and yummier sounding BLT. The jart touched many lives, humans played with bikes, the media made miners better men, and we compensated teachers in a crazy way. Pirates were winning, police didn't always appreciate whistleblowers, Sarah Palin hates puppies, and C-SPAN had a lovers' spat.
Quotes for the day here, here, and here. Yglesias award here, more responses to your CPAPs here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest #20 winner here.
Krakow, Poland
Monday on the Dish, Andrew related to The Social Network (minus the coke orgies, that is), and revered authority only in the search for truth. Andrew butted heads with Serwer over what to call illegal immigrants and gays, and mostly rejected the rose-tinted worldview of the Tea Party. We considered the geography and the ideology of a two state solution, and heard a Palestinian's personal account of the revolution. The Iraq surge fail lived up to Andrew's predictions, and Goldblog nailed the difference between Islam and political Islamism.
Chris Wallace held Carly Fiorina's feet to the fire, Andrew Ferguson did brutal justice to D'Souza, and Andrew put Tunku Varadarajan in his place. HRC consistently held up their double standard, and the Palin model assisted in the arrest of an Alaskan blogger. Democrat Jack Conway ran the ugliest Christianist ad of the season, fundamentalism threatened liberal society as evidenced by Damon Linker, and this British TV critic came clean. Mazzone dug into Gibbs on DADT, Mike Barthel didn't think It Gets Better for humanity as a whole, and Senator Michael Bennet played the gay issue in his favor. Kleiman and Yglesias unpacked Prop 19's impact on federal drug laws, and you can hear Dr. Donald Abrams on cannabis as medicine here. Jim Manzi fisked the NYT on economics, Larison went to bat for absentee ballots, and Ross pep-talked Obama staffers.
Privacy died in 1888, fewer babies might mean more carbon, and America bailed out GM for one venti latte per person. Daniel Kaplan questioned internet privacy, Lawrence Lessig loved the remix, and apparently we all love chicken dishes. Yglesias award here, VFYW here, shell art here, more views from your CPAP here, MHB here, FOTD here, and fake political ad of the day here.
Wow, so many responses, some filled with relief, some filled with despair, some filled with legit medical advice from professionals, but most of all, you got responses from people who are alive and well. Survivors, you could honestly say, in multiple ways. Untreated sleep apnea has caused many fatalities, strokes, and other critical issues related to a lack of adequate oxygen to the brain. Snoring, fatigue, and needing 10 hours of sleep every night just to function the next day are all serious issues that require serious measures.
My long story short, I had been dumped by girlfriends, had friends yell me awake in my tent on camping trips, and even had a neighbor mention my snoring.
I started out with Breathe Right strips and nose sprays, which helped a bit, but it wasn't until I was engaged that my fiancee said she could no longer live with it. Not many things are as embarrassing or as harmful to a relationship than to wake up in the middle of the night and find your significant other trying to sleep on the living room couch because they couldn't sleep, and I wouldn't wake up.
At this point, I finally sought medical attention and got a sleep study, with predictable results. Every time I snored, my "Pulse Ox," as they call it, dropped to dangerous levels without my conscious knowledge. Options were discussed. I first went with surgery – fixed a deviated septum, widened the nasal passages, and had a laser taken to my uvula and soft pallete tissue, all in one step. Fortunately, recovery was mostly pain free and within a few weeks, my snoring was gone. Yay!
But then it slowly returned over 6 months. My nasal passages re-constricted themselves and the surgeon said he was unable to do anything about it. He sent me to be fitted with a mouthpiece that literally dislocates my jaw and thrusts it forward. Not very comfortable, but effective enough according to another sleep study, and not being kicked out of bed in the middle of the night anymore. I also combine this with nightly doses of 12-hour Afrin, to which I'm literally addicted to now.
All was well and good until it wasn't. I would either wake up short of breath in the morning, feeling like I never slept at all, or be jolted awake by a panic attack and gasping for air. If you're lucky, your unconscious brain can tell your adrenal glands to work overtime to get you awake so you don't, like die or in your sleep. The snoring had only returned to a dull roar that my now-wife can endure by wearing ear plugs, and the jolting awake thing is quite rare, but clearly something is wrong. And thanks to being dumped by my health insurance company after the treatments, I don't have the financial ability to seek further treatment – aka, a CPAP machine.
Unable to get health insurance at any cost because of this pre-existing condition, my only hope is "Obamacare," when the non-denial clause kicks in. I'm sure it will be very expensive though, which is also a problem because of the view of my recession. Wish me luck.
When did Americans, and in particular Republicans, become such wimps? When I fly, I have to go through scanners and my luggage is scanned and/or searched before it gets on the plane. There is also good chance there will be an air marshall on the plane. When I fly, I am more worried about the pilot being drunk than some Muslim trying to crash the plane. Republicans are also terrified of a cultural center in New York and many believe that Sharia law is just around the corner.
All of this scares them and requires that they blather on constantly about how "dangerous" the Islam faith has become. Yet, they are also the party of "bring em on"; of exercising their Second Amendment rights to "fix" the current administration; and they are excited about the prospect of bombing Iran.
Another writes:
In spite of our military waging trillion dollar wars on terror to kill them over there instead of here, and in spite of Homeland Security running the most invasive search protocol ever used en mass on civilians, Juan Williams says he's nervous. Does he have any faith at all in the efforts of those he claims to support?
Yglesias doesn't think the sort of spending reforms Britain is undertaking are possible in America:
[T]he system they have in the UK where you can simply sweep opposition objections aside is actually the right way to do bipartisanship. Call it bipartisanship by alternation. When Labour wins the election, Labour has the chance to implement a bold agenda creating and expanding programs in a way that they think will make Britain a better place to live. Then when the Tories come in, they’re able to be brutal in their efforts to pare back or eliminate things that they think aren’t working. Over the long term, you get a trajectory where programs survive if and only if they’re so widely regarded as successful that no mainstream party would dare abolish them.
The problem is that you can also get overkill – like the over-reach of the 1945 government, which eventually required the radicalism of the Thatcher years to return Britain to balance. But in times of fiscal crisis, Britain's elected five-year dictatorship can do what is necessary and clearly face accountability. America's system, in contrast, can lead to paralysis if partisanship and polarization are as grotesque as they now are.
But it is also true that polarization in Britain is much less right now than in America. Remember this is not just a Tory budget. It's a Tory-Liberal budget. It would be the equivalent of Reagan and Bush II winning enough Democrats for their tax cuts; or Obama winning enough Republicans for his modest stimulus. Which, of course, reveals the difference. Obama got zero GOP votes for a stimulus a third of which was tax cuts in the worst downtrun since the 1930s. The current GOP is far more rigidly ideological and economically irresponsible than any other governing party in the West right now.
An Afghan girl, from Kapisa province, stands outside a tent in a camp on the east of Kabul, Afghanistan on October 21, 2010. People from the restive Kapisa province have fled to the camp in part because they are frigthened of the Taliban fighers in the area. By Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.
Max Boot complains that "The Strategic Defense and Security Review released this week by Prime Minister David Cameron is bad news for anyone who believes that a strong Britain is a vital bulwark of liberty." Larison can only laugh:
Aside from more sharp pangs of nostalgia for the Empire that they must be causing him, the real problem Boot has with Britain’s military spending cuts is that it will make it much harder for Britain to participate in and lend political legitimacy to the next unnecessary war that Boot and other hawks are interested in starting. This is what Boot euphemistically calls “the burden of defending what used to be called the Free World,” which has nothing to do with defending the “Free World” and everything to do with projecting power to various corners of the globe for mostly dubious or bad reasons.
The NYT's account of systemic use of torture largely by Shiites on Sunnis, revealed in the Wikileaks doc-dump, is here. It's horrifying – along the lines of Abu Ghraib and Bagram, but also, in many cases, even worse and cruder. It occurred during US occupation of the country; although most of the torture was perpetrated by Iraqi security forces, and although on occasion American forces prevented torture, some occurred under American control, and there was inevitable enmeshment as they fought alongside:
The documents show that Americans did sometimes use the threat of abuse by Iraqi authorities to get information out of prisoners. One report said an American threatened to send a detainee to the notorious Wolf Brigade, a particularly violent Iraqi police unit, if he did not supply information.
Some of the worst examples of Iraqi abuse came later in the war. In August 2009, an Iraqi police commando unit reported that a detainee committed suicide in its custody, but an autopsy conducted in the presence of an American “found bruises and burns on the detainee’s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck.” The report stated that the police “have reportedly begun an investigation.”
Then in December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied.
The forces that conducted these horrific acts are the forces we are handing the country over to. History will harshly judge this war, and those of us who supported it, its long-term strategic effect, and so forth. In particular, it appears, that one of the main actors was Iran, and Iran has emerged as the core winner. But the hell unleashed by the incompetent occupation led to over 100,000 often gruesome civilian deaths in what was a nation-wide bloodbath of almost frenzied proportions.
I think it can be said, now more forcefully than ever, that whatever moral legitimacy this war once had is now gone forever.
It was worse than a mistake. It was, in many ways, a crime.
[I]t's clear that the favorable electoral environment has attracted a strong group of Republican candidates. Despite the influence of the Tea Party movement, the GOP actually has more House candidates who have previously held elected office running for open seats than the Democrats do…
If this is surprising, a lot of that has to do with 1) a weird occasional media focus on noncompetitive races and 2) the ability of some smart politicians to brand themselves as "Tea Party" candidates.
The Dish 