Nate Silver reads tea leaves:
[T]he Wisconsin dispute has motivated the Democratic base more so than [the Republican base]. That does not mean that the Republican base will not have other issues to motivate them in 2012 — they will almost certainly have plenty. But the likelihood of an “enthusiasm gap” of the sort that was present in 2010 has diminished.
A reader writes:
The Dish and NPR are my two main rivers of relevant and interesting news during the day. But while you are self-aware, with your own quirks and campaigns, NPR seems blissfully dumb about its image and how that plays around the country. That's what made me so pissed yesterday. NPR stumbled all over itself with this story, looked reactionary in its firing of its CEO, and hit sour note after sour note during the self-reporting on air.
If NPR can't manage their message, I'm afraid to say they deserve to get their funding cut.
I'm a progressive and a Christian who lives in a red state and loves NPR dearly. But when they say they aren't biased or elitest, I can't help but snicker. If they would just say, "Yes, our story selection is directed at mostly rich, mostly white, mostly liberals." OK, now we can all move on.
Another thing that struck me. As "Talk of the Nation" defended the network against being liberal elitism, they explained that Ron Schiller had been commuting to NPR headquarters on his own dime – from Aspen, where he lives with his domestic partner.
Sheesh.
A reader writes:
I am someone in an 11-year marriage that has been non-monogamous (though, unfortunately, not yet in the open about it) for about seven years. It's certainly not how I intended it to be. I had my fair share of short-term, recreational relationships prior to meeting my wife, and I reasoned that I had to give up my short-term term sexual behavior in order to have a successful, long-term marriage. What I hadn't counted on, however, was that the quality of my long-term sex life would take such a dramatic turn for the worse.
During our dating period, our sex life was exciting, though it was exclusively one-on-one and short on experimentation. Because we were a bit older, once we got married sex became almost exclusively for making babies, which we both wanted right away.
The first thing to go in my marriage was blow jobs. She didn't much like giving them in the first place and they pretty much disappeared after we got married. Our first child came after two years, at which time my wife's breasts became "food, not for sexual pleasure." Not only was I not allowed to fondle, kiss, or otherwise enjoy her beautiful breasts, I could barely comment on them anymore without a "tut tut" from my wife.
After our second child was born, however, things dramatically deteriorated. Sex became almost nonexistent; I think we had sex less than 10 times in that first year. By the time our younger child had reached the age of three, I'd already had sex with two different prostitutes while out of town on business and found another one locally. At home, sex was excruciatingly bland and too infrequent. The boundaries around what we could and could not do had grown so narrow that I was not enjoying it anymore.
On top of that, I'd been laid off, money was tight, and our younger child was showing serious signs of ADHD and was a complete handful. There was so much stress in our house that sex seemed completely out of the question.
And then, one night, my wife announced that she didn't care if she ever had sex again. Like a good husband, I didn't fly off the handle, but asked her what she'd like me to do with that information. After a brief discussion, SHE suggested I get a "girlfriend" for sex. But, like everything else sexual, there were some pretty ridiculous rules of engagement, and I wasn't in favor of her arrangement, so she withdrew her suggestion.
But, in secret, after I found a new job and had an income, I was able to hook up with several women before I found one with whom I'd had a relationship for nearly two years. I can get blow jobs, enjoy their breasts, and experiment in every way. I'm so happy to be able to do this, and I find that my extra-marital activity enhances the way I show up in my marriage. Chiefly, it's because I no longer have to resent the fact that my wife is just not that sexual. I didn't marry her because she was great in bed, but at the same time, I didn't expect to be in a virtually sexless marriage either. So, while it's OK for me if she wants these tight little boundaries around our sex life, I'm not going to live like that and be happy. So I get what I need elsewhere, and then go home happy, attentive, and loving.
A gay defense of his decision to represent DOMA's Section 3 in court. Money quote:
The constitutionality of Section 3 will now be both properly defended and properly challenged in the judicial branch, and it will be properly decided there. Boehner is right that the courts are the correct place for such a ruling, and I think we have a right to expect him to be consistent about that when the courts do make their final decision.
Greenwald criticizes my position on indefinite detention:
Here's Andrew Sullivan … suggesting that the only thing that ever bothered him about Guantanamo was the torture, not the fact that people were being indefinitely imprisoned without a shred of due process …
If you're someone who wants to claim to find torture repugnant: fine. But if you simultaneously justify the imprisonment of people based on evidence obtained by torture, then your protestations are meaningless. Wanting to use evidence obtained by torture is functionally incompatible with claims of finding torture morally unacceptable. After all, what's the point of barring the use of torture-obtained evidence in trials only to then imprison people anyway without trials based on that very evidence?
I did not say that torture was the only thing I found wrong about Gitmo, just the fundamental concern. And I was referring to prisoners captured but not tortured, and with no serious evidence against them, but who have been radicalized by Gitmo. I was referring to Jihadists the US manufactured. Maybe that should have been clearer. And all I was saying is that I understand the reluctance of the administration to release these men to, say, Yemen, even though I back the release of all who have no credible evidence against them. If Obama is using torture-procured evidence to keep these prisoners in jail, then that evidence is ipso facto incredible. But there are some, I fear, caught in the middle. I'm with Glenn on the need to try or release. I'm just aware how difficult that can be, if national security is put at risk.
Presidents live in a world bloggers do not. If a released Jihadist were to kill again, bloggers would not take the brunt of the responsibility. Obama would have to.
The latest end-of-gay-culture watch. NSFW but pretty funny as an attempt at a gay-off.
Bernstein notes what Frank Bailey calls Palin's translucent skin:
[Palin is wrong] about being unusually maligned. Barack Obama is regularly accused of hating the United States and deliberately trying to ruin it, among other things. Palin is accused of stupidity? No more than George W. Bush or Dan Quayle were. John McCain and John Kerry were both war heroes who were accused of cowardice or worse in battle. Bush was accused — only by a fringe, but still that's a lot of people, some of whom are treated as if they were respectable — of deliberately allowing the September 11 attacks, or worse. Bill Clinton was a murderer and a drug dealer. Al Gore was a liar. Ronald Reagan was a dunce and a warmonger. Hillary Clinton was…I don't even know how to get into it.
If you think of her as a reality show star, she'd be perfect for the Real Housewives series, where the most trivial of sleights become apocalyptic fights. If you think of her as Beauty Pageant queen, who saw her governorship as a "title", as she kept referring to it, then of course criticism stings. And the truth about anything is irrelevant. It's just one constant round of image-making.
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president of Iran and the country's most powerful moderate figure, is pushed off his perch. Money quote from FP:
"Rafsanjani was the last obstacle to consolidation of power of the hard-liners," says Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His removal is "the last nail in the coffin of reform in Iran."
Khalaji's colleague at the Washington Institute, Michael Singh, sees it, in contrast, as a sign of the increasing isolation of Khamenei:
In my view this is the next step in what has been a long-unfolding consolidation of power by hardliners in Iran. In its current form, it began in the background during the presidency of Mohammed Khatami, picked up steam with the rigged election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, and accelerated further with the outbreak of the opposition Green Movement in 2009. [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei no longer makes any pretense of hovering above politics or balancing factions against one another, but rather relies increasingly on the hardest-line elements and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for his authority. It is not just reformists who are shut out of the corridors of power now, but also traditional conservatives.
Khamenei may be motivated by the desire to eliminate any perceived threats to his absolute power, but one can't help but feel that the Iranian regime is increasingly a one-legged stool. In the short run this move may enhance Khamenei's power, but in the longer run it seems likely to unify his foes and give dissenting political factions in Iran — reformist and conservative — common cause.
Brooklyn, New York, 8.45 pm
John Phillips makes a coherent case for Palin as the GOP nominee. If the GOP is going to lose, why not go out with an emotionally satisfying bang?
The Dish 