Month: October 2010

Will Wilkinson thinks that Obama's cowardice on DADT and marijuana can be explained by the generation gap:

Defending status-quo policy on gays in the military or the drug war is bound to alienate many of Mr Obama's most enthusiastic young supporters. But younger voters are a fickle lot in any case. Their turnout in 2008 was an anomaly. It would be imprudent for Mr Obama and the Democrats to count on an equal showing this fall or in 2012. In contrast, you can be sure the always-reliable 65 and older crowd will show up in droves. The stances that would help Mr Obama consolidate support among especially young or especially liberal voters also risk scaring off older voters and capricious independents, and it's clear which tack the White House is taking. Either way, he may be in trouble. 

Over the weekend, Robert Gibbs discussed DADT on Meet The Press:

“[W]e have a process in place right now to work with the Pentagon for an orderly and disciplined transition from the law that we have now to an era that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ doesn’t exist. And I will say this . . . ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will end under this president.” 

Jason Mazzone exposes the hollow core of this position:

The problem with the Administration’s position is that it is based on a false notion that a judicial remedy is inconsistent with orderly change.

Courts have broad discretion when they craft remedies to cure constitutional violations. And when remedying a constitutional violation requires overhauling the organization or longstanding practices of a government entity, courts always aim for an orderly transition if possible. There are many examples. Most obviously, segregated schools were not desegregated overnight but pursuant to a multi-step process overseen by the courts over an extended period of time.

If the Administration’s concern is with an orderly transition, it should have given Judge Phillips a proposal to end enforcement of DADT on a schedule and in a manner that would minimize disruptions.

Michael McDonald digs into the early voting numbers. Seth Masket has questions:

The growth in early voting is really an interesting and under-developed area for campaign scholars.  Researchers have noted, for example, that when someone of the president's stature comes to down for a rally, it can give him or some other candidate a short-term boost in the polls.  That boost will soon disappear, so it doesn't matter too much.  But if the visit gets thousands of people to walk over to an early polling station and vote, it can matter quite a bit.

Despite television portrayals to the contrary, Americans today have weaker ties to extended groups of friends than did prior generations, Neal Gabler observes:

…we miss the friendships we no longer have, and we know that Facebook or e-mails cannot possibly compensate for the loss. So we sit in front of our television sets and enjoy the dream of friendship instead: a dream where we need never be alone, where there are a group of people who would do anything for us, and where everyone seems to understand us to our very core, just like Jerry and George, Chandler and Joey, Carrie and her girls, or the members of the McKinley High glee club. It is a powerful dream, and it is one that may now be the primary pleasure of television.

In real life, one can’t fit more than a friend or two into the average twentysomething’s New York City apartment.

Today 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.

–Z.P.

 

George Packer reflects on the continuing foreclosure crisis:

I just finished reading a powerful new book called “Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession,” by Paul Reyes, a writer in Tampa who spent the past couple of years helping his father with his “trash-out” business—clearing out what former owners left behind in houses claimed by the banks: the letters and photos, books and posters, carpets and fridges and fleas. Reyes, treasuring what the owners themselves didn’t bother to keep, calls this “a guilt-ridden literary forensics.” (For the visual analogues, see this essay by Reyes on the Times Web site, and the new school of photojournalism it describes.)

He has a weakness for the intimate details that people in haste and trouble left behind, combined with an insider’s ability to find ongoing life in landscapes that more casual visitors would regard as undifferentiated decay. It’s a bleak book, with an accumulation of unpleasant physical detail and a strain of comedy and affection—Down and Out in Tampa and Lehigh Acres. There’s also a moving subplot of dislocation and downward mobility in the author’s own family. Everything feels transient, dreamy, and thinly rooted in the sandy soil, amid the palmettos and shotgun shacks, with hard times bearing down like a tropical hurricane.

(Image: painting by Amy Casey. Artist's website here.)

Chait, along with several other pundits, thought that this very funny ad was legit. And it takes a very canny soul to pwn Chait. He updates:

Other versions of the same ad are "paid for by the friends of people against the kicking in the face of children" and "by concerned pediatric orthodontists." 

Larison defends vote-by-mail:

I just moved back to Illinois, but I did not find the time in the last month and a half to register here before the deadline. Once again, I applied for an absentee ballot in New Mexico, where I am registered. Were absentee voting rules more restrictive, or were absentee voting not permitted, I probably would not be able to vote in this year’s election. Given the laughable choices available, that wouldn’t be so terrible as far as I’m concerned, but that isn’t the point. Absentee voting is essential to making it much easier for people to move around the country without being cut off from the electoral process, and it is also very important for enfranchising students in their home states. I suppose students can and do register wherever they happen to be, but that isn’t something that they should have to do, and fortunately they don’t. 

An iPhone, an HD camera and a balloon … brings back amazing footage (yes, when it came back to earth, they found it by GPS):

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Hat tip: NYMag.

Tom Ricks is unsurprised by the news:

 More evidence, I would say, that the surge worked tactically (that is, improved security and so enabled Uncle Sam to edge toward the exits) but failed strategically (that is, didn't lead to a breakthrough in Iraqi politics). I think the big question is how far the Sunni Awakening reversal will go. Is this the beginning of the next phase of the war? I dunno. And how much will U.S. troops be involved? Again, an open question. I am hearing through the grapevine that things are getting friskier. 

Yglesias echoes:

We were able to stitch together some kind of peace and quiet that’s allowing the United States military to withdraw while holding its head high and claiming victory, which is fine as far as it goes. Still, there’s no genius “counterinsurgency” method here ready to be successfully deployed around the world.

The cult of Petraeus must be resisted. He is a gifted commander and took advantage shrewdly of several factors in Iraq to enable us to save face and get out as far as possible. But the surge was designed to create the peace for a national reconciliation and non-sectarian government. It failed. You just cannot change history or culture that quickly – or erase the memories of the carnage.