J. Scott Carpenter says it is "going to need help from the international community – and a lot of it":
If Tunisia doesn't succeed, no other country in the region can. Tunisia's 10 million inhabitants do not suffer the ethnic and sectarian divisions that bedevil many of their neighbors. Tunisians are well educated and largely middle class — 80 percent own their own homes. Nearly all Tunisians practice the same form of moderate Islam. The populace looks to Europe for its economic and political inspiration. The cry Tunisians made famous around the world during their revolution, "Dégage!" (Get out!), is tellingly in French, not Arabic.
Julianne Hing collects evidence that programs specifically tailored to minority college students can greatly boost their dismal graduation rates. TNC cheers:
Julianne Hing marshals some evidence to show that black male graduation gap is not an intractable fact of American existence. I'm a fan of these sorts of posts, not because they bring a dose of positivity, but because they bring a dose of realism. When faced with what appears to be a problem impervious to wonkery, it's very tempting to succumb to the creeping sense that there are no answers.
Last weekend, Kay Hymowitz complained that "most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance." Sounds pretty good to me, but, for some reason, Matt Yglesias feels defensive:
Since I’m still in my twenties for a few more months, I thought I’d actually look up the median age at first marriage for American males. The most recent year the data is reported for is 2007, when it was 27.7 which is indeed a few years older than it was “not so long ago” in 1960 when it was 22.8 years. But in 1920, it was 24.6 years. In 1890, it was 26.1, presumably because everyone was too busy watching Judd Apatow movies. Or maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.
I was hoping to see something about the Irish general election today on the Dish. It's not anywhere near the significance of Libya and the Arab world uprisings, nor as relevant to an American readership as Wisconsin and other states' attacks on unions. But it's important to us, significant to Europe, and one of the most successful political parties in the Western World is likely to be dumped on its arse. If nothing else, it's worth a mental health break.
PS: A suggestion for an alternative mental health break that is NSFW: Check out the Rubberbandits music video "I Wanna Fight Your Father". Limerick lads with their own style of, um, limerick. We might be having a tough time at the moment, but we haven't lost our creativity or sense of humour.
This post from yesterday, on the test scores of states without collective bargining, was misleading. Politifact corrects the record:
A review using current data finds that Wisconsin does perform better on test scores than the non-union states, but not as dramatically as suggested in the Facebook post. And there is at best limited evidence that unionization played a causal role in shaping differences in test scores.
In 2009, Virginia ranked in the middle of states on the ACT and SAT, and in 2010, it actually outranked Wisconsin on the ACT (12th vs. 17th in "average composite score"). The reason it doesn’t rank higher on the SAT is because so many of its students take the test – including marginal students who wouldn’t even take them in another state. (Wisconsin boasts a higher average SAT score than Virginia partly because only "four percent" of Wisconsin students took the SAT, compared to "67 percent" in Virginia. Virginia’s lower average SAT score is a function of a larger pool, not dumb students or bad schools, as PolitiFact pointed out in debunking the false claim that Virginia ranks 44th .)
No, I do not think Stoll has a point at all. Common Cause is a federally-registered 501c3 nonprofit organization. If they go outside their mission, they can lose that status. They also MUST openly and publicly list all donors and sources of income. They must also openly and publicly list all expenses for every single dollar. Their 990 (income tax forms) are available on the Internet for anyone who is interested. This is not true of a private individual at all.
Another writes:
Here is the mission statement for Common Cause:
Common Cause is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the core values of American democracy, reinventing an open, honest and accountable government that serves the public interest, and empowering ordinary people to make their voices heard in the political process.
Mssrs Koch, on the other hand, advocate in the shadows for their own extremely narrow, private interests. So how can you agree there is a moral equivalency between a cooperative group funded by rich donors that promotes transparency and good government, and two multibillionaire brothers who work behind the scenes to manipulate the body public to their own advantage?
Another:
While George Soros has been reputed to have given as much as $2 million to Common Cause, they have a $10 million budget mostly from dues and subscriptions. And in any case, Common Cause isn't Soros's outfit; they were independent first. And back to the main point of all this, Common Causes' causes don't enrich Soros' businesses.
Perhaps Obama's DOMA move is an attempt to drive a wedge between the Cultural-Right, which favors anything that bans or delegitimizes same-sex marriage, and the Federalist-Right, which could see Section 3 as denying state sovereignty. Section 2 says, in essence, no one can tell states to recognize SSM if they don't want to. Section 3 says, for you liberal states that do want to, the Federal Government won't recognize your decision. Section 2 is federalist; Section 3 is anti-federalist.
While Hirschman suggests that the trap Obama has set is for congressional Republicans, it seems perhaps even savvier than this. Namely, he may be taking aim at the potential GOP presidential field.
He has just introduced DOMA as a concrete issue that the Republican primary must take up. With the threat of its repeal more imminent than ever, Obama may be calculating that it will be a live issue for Republicans in their debates. This means that any otherwise reasonable looking Republican, and one with more of an emphasis on fiscal conservatism instead of social, must come out swinging for the crazies. This, in turn, may make it harder for them in a general, when they have to appeal to independents and young adults.
Another:
Reading Link’s post (and thinking back to Boehner’s comments about timing), I had an epiphany: what if the administration is abandoning DOMA, specifically Section 3, to allow court proceedings to get underway in advance of the impending implementation of DADT repeal? If Section 3 is standing when openly gay men and women can serve, would military spouses in same-sex marriage states be denied standing under DOMA? In the end Obama might be doing traditional marriage advocates a favor – nobody could stand for the monstrous injustice that might come from the first widowed spouse of an openly gay soldier.
7:30pm Tarik Yousef – Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington tells Al Jazeera following Gaddafi's 'surprise speech' speech at Green Square, thirty minutes earlier:
I am torn between seeing this as a legitimate speech in front of crowds willing to support him, but I'm also aware of the capability of Libyan propaganda machine, so I want to wait and see what the analysts make of it … That is not the average scene of what you'd expect from Green Square
A scattered sampling of the speech:
I am one with the people… life without green banners is useless… sing and revoice. … I am among the public. We will continue to fight. We will defeat them. We will die here on the soil of Libya. We will defeat the foreing threats as we defeated the Italians. This is the invincible force of youth. … We can defeat any aggression if necessary and arm the people…. You, the youth, be comfortable… dance, sing, stay up all night.
Meanwhile, in the streets of Tripoli (NSFW):
Mackey has compiled an impressive number of clips. He also relays this dramatic development:
While it is hard to distinguish between reports and rumors on the fighting around Libya's capital on Friday, Martin Chulov, a Guardian correspondent in Benghazi, wrote on Twitter that Mitiga air base in Tripoli "is confirmed to have fallen."
Most of Libya's delegation to the UN in New York had already abandoned the regime. The Libyan delegation to the Arab League in Cairo has renounced Gaddafi and condemned his attack on "unarmed citizens" (see 3.41pm). Libya's ambassadors to France and Unesco quit and condemned the violence. Prosecutor-general Abdul-Rahman al-Abbar became the latest senior official to resign and join the opposition.
10:06am France and Britain are to ask the UN for a Libyan arms embargo, financial sanctions and an indictment from the International Criminal Court against Libyan leaders for crimes against humanity, the Reuters news agency reports, citing an interview with French foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie on France Info radio.
10:12am Germany is preparing sanctions against Libyan leaders over the attacks on protesters, Guido Westerwelle, Germany's foreign minister, said on Friday ahead of a UN Security Council meeting.
10:14am Libyan state television reports Libyan families will receive 500 dinars (or about $400) each, while wages for some public workers could increase by 150pc.
11:00amSky News reports that the UK government allegedly paid Libyan officials to facilitate the evacuation of British citizens.
6:25pm Serbia denied media reports on Friday that its pilots or ground crews had been involved in Libyan air force bombing missions against protesters, adding that it was suspending all its arms exports to the country. The Serbian Defence Ministry were responding to reports in Arab and Maltese media that Serb mercenary pilots took part in bombing runs against protesters in the Libyancities of Tripoli and Benghazi.
Tim Lee makes his case against congestion pricing. He imagines standing in a busy grocery store and paying an "extra $6 for the express lane so I could skip the lines":
The grocery business is an intensely competitive one. If it were true that people could be won over to this kind of scheme once they had a chance to try it, you’d expect some entrepreneurial grocery store owner to give it a try. Yet I’ve lived in half a dozen different metropolitan areas and I’ve never seen a supermarket that utilized congestion pricing on its checkout lanes… customers would be suspicious that the supermarket was deliberately under-staffing the free lanes to gin up demand for the express ones. And this wouldn’t be a crazy suspicion! In the low-margin grocery business, it would be a pretty effective way for a manager to pump up his short-term profits, while the long-term harm to the store’s reputation would be hard for the corporate office to quantify.
He notes this is a case where "in the name of free markets, advocates of congestion tolling are advocating the use of a market mechanism that private firms in actual competitive markets rarely use." Avent counters.
Adam Kirsch reviewsWhat Is a Palestinian State Worth? by Sari Nusseibeh:
At the beginning of his book, he suggests that the Palestinians give up their demands for sovereignty and instead agree to become second-class Israeli citizens—that is, citizens without the right to vote or run for office. “Thus the state would be Jewish, but the country would be fully binational, all the Arabs within it having their well-being tended to and sustained. … In any case, such a scenario would provide [the Palestinians] with a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation.”
It seems to me that Nusseibeh, who was one of the earliest proponents of a two-state solution, is not seriously endorsing this idea. He is fully aware that it would not be feasible or desirable, from either side’s perspective. It is, rather, a thought-experiment, designed to challenge the assumptions of both Jews and Arabs. For the Palestinians, it is a challenge to “think deeply about what states are for”—that is, to examine whether they want the trappings of statehood or a better, more secure life. For Jews, it is a challenge to contemplate whether such a two-tiered system, with its echoes of South African apartheid, is consistent with Israel’s principles—and whether such a system might not already be in place in the Occupied Territories.
The Dish 