Month: December 2010

So Is She Gay?
It is not illegitimate to ask of Kagan.

The Morality Of Oil
Is there no point at which we can say: this is enough?

The Price Of Winning
This election is as phony as it is exciting.

In Defense Of Rand Paul (Kinda)
Was the CRA in many respects an infringement of freedom? Of course it was.

They Still Don't Get It
To remain closeted requires a massive use of deception.

What Do Atheists Think Of Death?
To philosophize is to learn how to die.

"No Place In This Process"
Why is sexual orientation off the list when gender is on?

The Borking Of Kagan
This question is now closed on this blog.

Jesus And Christ
This intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith.

Noonan Unhinged
Her criticism of Obama is unrelated to the reality.

Why The Closet Must End In Public Life
Sexual orientation is a fact about people.

The Best Analysis Yet
I build on Noah Millman's take on the Israel dilemma.

Firing Gays Should Not Be Illegal
So says Benedict's church.

Israel Derangement Syndrome
Our conversation needs to be more open and honest.

Was Israel A Mistake?
Perhaps, but it should not be abandoned now.

Getting Shit Done
Obama's competence and long-term direction is showing.

Obama: Hostage To Petraeus
This war is a huge and metastasizing mistake.

McChrystal – And The Press's Failure
The Obama operation is at war with itself.

Why Does Trig Matter?
Because Palin has insisted that he matters.

Click the following links to vote for the 2010 Malkin Award, Moore Award, Yglesias Award, Hewitt Award, Von Hoffmann Award, Mental Health Break Of The Year, and Face Of The Year. Also – for the first time -  Chart Of The Year and Hathos Alert are on the ballot. The Shut Up And Sing finalists have likewise been announced; it's now up to you to pick the worst pop song designed to reflect a profound moral conscience. I.e. the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history.

Among the various contenders for the prizes, a roster of the big names in political and cultural discourse: Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Kos, Justin Bieber, Bill Donohue, Jim Manzi, Glenn Reynolds, Sean Penn, Bryan Fischer, Keith Olbermann, Bristol Palin And The Situation, Larry Kudlow and … Andrew Sullivan.

We're giving readers a week to pick the winners for these prestigious prizes. The polls will close on the first of the year. You picked many of the entries; we just marshalled the very best/worst for your selection.

Vote early. Vote often.

The Daily Dish Awards Glossary

Click here to vote for the 2010 Malkin Award!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Yglesias Award!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Moore Award!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Chart Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Hewitt Award!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Face Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Von Hoffmann Award!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Hathos Alert!

Click here to vote for the Pretentious Pop Song In History!

Click here to vote for the 2010 Mental Health Break Of The Year!

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at Ricochet, capable editor Diane Ellis writes about Gallup's list of the most admired men in America, which includes a lot of political figures:

The cynic’s interpretation:  A list including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter as the most admired men is evidence that Americans are imbeciles who are prone to the servile temptation, admire ruthless power wielders, and rejoice in the expansion of government.

The idealist’s interpretation: A list including George W. Bush, Nelson Mandela, Pope Benedict XVI, Rev. Billy Graham, and the Dalai Lama testifies to the value that Americans place on the qualities of humility, religiosity, and perseverance in the face of adversity.

My guess is that polls like this are all about name recognition (it hardly makes sense to answer "my grandfather" when Gallup calls on the phone), though I'd never cite a living politician if asked who I admired most. There is a worship of people who hold power that runs through most humans. In modern times, it hasn't served us particularly well, and it is particularly contrary to America's civic religion. That said, I don't think Jimmy Carter was a ruthless power wielder, nor do I think humility is a quality that any of the men mentioned possess (the Dalai Lama possibly excepted – I don't know enough about him to judge one way or the other).

It's particularly surprising to me that George W. Bush has successfully passed himself off as a humble guy. Former alcoholics with powerful fathers and a decidedly mixed record in business don't tend to run for the governorship of their state if they're humble. Hubristic foreign wars that almost fail due to insufficient planning and lack of troops aren't launched by humble men. "The Decider" is not a humble nickname to give oneself, and the humble men I've met would never mock suboordinates by giving them frathouse nicknames. Does a humble president jump into a flight suit and land on an aircraft carrier for the cameras? And the last thing a humble man would do is follow his failed presidency by writing a book that purports to teach others the art of successful decision-making. (In fairness, it is quite possible that George W. Bush has fooled himself into thinking that he is humble.)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Interesting Rush Limbaugh monologue here:

I love mother-in-law bashing. It's a stereotypical form of humor that I have always enjoyed.  I find as I grow older that fewer and fewer people like stereotypical humor.  It offends them.  They don't really like it.  But I do.  I just (laughing) In the stereotypes of relationships, stereotypes of in-laws, stereotypes of kids, stereotypes of whatever, I love the jokes.  Because there's always a grain of truth in it.  Always a grain of truth. (interruption) Now, my in-laws are cool, I have to tell you…  If I told a joke or made a funny comment, stereotypical comment about my in-laws, it would be a joke, not because they're really that way. 

…I'll give you an example.  I mean, just off the top of my head.  I can't remember how this joke actually goes. Mixed emotions: You see your brand-new Mercedes driving off the side of the cliff; your mother-in-law is driving.  Okay?  Mixed emotions.  Now, I would never want to see my mother-in-law drive off a cliff in any car, hers or mine, but it's a funny joke.  But I don't tell it because it relates to me personally. I just think it's funny, and I am not gonna back down from my sense of humor. I'm not gonna make people make me back down from my sense of humor.  Too many people are forced to back down from who they are.  I mean, the inner Limbaugh is on display here each and every day.  Those people who think that I'm hiding something? Ha!  You don't know the half of it. 

It might interest the talk radio host to know that it isn't stereotypical humor per se that offends his critics, so much as the fact that the particular stereotypes he invokes are used for the sake of provocation as much as humor, and so frequently offered at the expense of liberals, blacks and women that he isn't able to claim that saving grace of comedians: being known as an equal opportunity offender. Perhaps he could bolster his reputation by doing a monologue about the grains of truth in negative stereotypes about white people, Christians, men, Republicans, Southerners, talk radio hosts, and conservatives.

I wonder if his audience would appreciate his sense of humor as keenly were it directed at those targets. Or if maybe there's something more than a desire for jocular observations keeping them tuned into the show.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Washington Examiner updates us on the subject:

An illegal immigrant injured while working can receive workers' compensation, the District's highest court has ruled.

Palemon Gonzales was working at a D.C. bar as a busboy on June 30, 2005, when a customer threw a bottle that hit Gonzales in the right eye, blinding him. Gonzales, an illegal immigrant, had to have his dislocated lens reattached through surgery, and he wasn't able to return to work — at a different bar — until Jan. 25, 2006. By then, Gonzales was already in the process of trying to collect workers' compensation benefits. Asylum Company, which owned the bar where Gonzales was injured, fought the claim, in part, on the grounds that it contends an illegal immigrant can't receive workers' compensation.

Critics of illegal immigration are upset:

Now we can add workers’ compensation to the growing list of incentives for foreign nationals to come here illegally, along with free medical treatment, free public education for their children and in-state college tuition in many states.

That's a flawed way of assessing this situation. If illegal immigrants didn't have to be compensated when injured on the job, employers would have a bigger incentive to hire them. Whereas rules that extend to illegal immigrants the same rights as documented workers make them marginally more expensive and less likely to be hired.

You'd think, listening to some critics of illegal immigration, that undocumented workers have things better than American citizens. What these people don't realize is that if a law were passed mandating that illegal immigrants be paid a minimum wage of $25 an hour with gold plated health care benefits, and it was strictly enforced, far fewer undocumented workers would be employed in the United States.

by Patrick Appel

Jonathan Bernstein asks:

[D]id the shift from the ban to DADT help the fight to achieve the original goal of ending the ban?  Putting aside the issue of implementation (for which I don't think those affected can forgive Bill Clinton, unless I have the facts of the situation wrong), and assuming that the votes just weren't there in 1993 for Clinton to win on the issue, was accepting DADT better than just continuing the status quo?  I think there's a case to be made, but I'm really not sure…I can see a case that it made no difference, or a case that it was worse than nothing.  Anyone have an argument one way or another?

St. Gallen, Switzerland, 10.29 am

by Conor Friedersdorf

She makes it at National Review Online:

In their 75 hours a week of pop entertainment, I want young men and women to hear songs about, say, a girl who knows she doesn’t have to settle, or how they can have more than they’ve seen modeled around them in their own lives, or how they can be made of the strong stuff of true commitment and love.

Okay, I'll give it a go.

– A song about a girl who knows she doesn't have to settle.

– A song about how young people can have more than they've seen modeled around them.

– A song about young people being made of the strong stuff of true commitment and love.

by Conor Friedersdorf

One of my favorite people to read is George Packer, and he doesn't disappoint in a blog post about the snow storm:

Twenty inches of snow isn’t a 7.5 earthquake or Category 4 hurricane. Unless it’s life-threatening, an emergency rarely lifts human beings above themselves. A snowstorm like this is bad enough to make people parochial and aggrieved, but not disastrous enough to make them generous and heroic. The stories of people trapped on subway trains all night, of hundreds of 911 calls going unanswered for hours, remained abstract, because we were in no actual danger. And so, instead, it seemed as if our block was being singled out for idiocy and neglect.

The scene on the street brought my neighbors and me into a fraternity of usefulness and scorn: we locals did one another little favors—here’s some salt, thanks for shoveling my walk—and remarked on the folly of outsiders insisting on driving a car through such snow. The circle of inclusion was now the neighborhood—more narrowly, the block—but this bond wasn’t strong enough to prompt one of us to put an orange cone of warning at the bottom of the street, let alone to organize all of us into teams that could shovel out the whole block. Urban solidarity had a limit, and some quaint notion of deserving city services kept us waiting passively on the silent street for the plow that, by midday Tuesday, still hadn’t shown up.

The whole thing is worth reading – and reminds me that I sure would enjoy an occasional Talk of the Town from his pen.

by Patrick Appel

PPP's new poll isn't a surprise, but the size of the anti-Palin population is somewhat jarring:

[A] majority of voters in every single state we have polled so far on the 2012 race has an unfavorable opinion of [Palin]. And her average favorability in the Bush/Obama states of Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia that are most likely essential to Republican chances of retaking the White House is 36/56. Democrats can only hope…

I'd prefer a Romney presidency to a Palin nomination. If you think the GOP is bad now, imagine the party remade in Palin's image. Even if she lost – which would be likely – the populist forces unleashed by her running would be beyond toxic. And, sadly, elections are decided on fundamentals more than candidates. If the economy tanks again, she'd have a shot at the White House. Were she president, congressional gridlock might prevent her from doing anything too drastic domestically, but as commander of the armed forces she'd have the power to provoke war with Iran or North Korea or whomever.

I understand why certain Democrats thirst for Palin's nomination. Palin's unfavorables, what might be called her reverse-coattails, could move several down-ticket races into the Democrats' column. But any Republican presidential candidate will have a chance of winning, however slim. She's much too dangerous to chance it.