About 100 sex workers, some wearing masks to avoid identification, and human rights activists march through Cape Town, South Africa on March 3, 2011. The day marks International Sex Workers Rights Day and thousands of people worldwide took to the streets to march for the cause. There are similar events planned in seven African countries: Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. By Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images.
Paul Constant conveys Gingrich's latest gesture toward the White House:
No Republicans actually want to announce that they're running for president, apparently. Everyone thought maybe Newt Gingrich would be the first to take a stand and officially announce his intentions, but no: Today, he announced a website: newtexplore2012. And that's it. Not even an exploratory committee. A website.
Bernstein isn't taking his candidacy seriously:
GOP elites, especially the ones [Gingrich] worked with when he was Speaker, probably neither like nor trust him very much. Yes, Iowa social conservatives are willing to vote for people who are disdained by other conservative leaders. But is Newt really going to get the kind of support from Christian conservative leaders, especially national leaders, that Mike Huckabee had in 2008? I find that very, very difficult to believe, no matter how much he's been tailoring his rhetoric to appeal to them.
Alexei Bayer focuses on the plight of recent graduates:
[N]ew graduates have faced dismal job prospects since 2007. Most recent graduates don’t show up in unemployment statistics because they don’t collect benefits. Some have chosen to go to graduate school in order not to be looking for work in an extremely difficult environment, while others have moved in with their parents and taken up part-time or unskilled work. In addition to 8 million jobs lost since the start of 2008, there have also been millions of jobs not created to accommodate the natural rate of expansion of the labor force.
(Hat tip: Frum)
Tom Ricks lists six things to consider before proposing one:
[T]he Iraqi no-fly zones are not a good precedent to cite. I actually went out and looked at the operation of the northern no-fly zone in October of 2000. I came away thinking that one reason that no American aircraft were shot down in the Iraqi no-fly zones was because Saddam Hussein really did not want to-that is, he did not want to provoke America. The anti-aircraft shots that were taken were wide on purpose. A better parallel might be Serbia, which (aided by a smart Hungarian national who now is a baker) managed to down an F-117 stealth fighter aircraft in March 1999 with an SA-3 anti-aircraft missile.
Dish readers know everything:
Hamengkubuwono IX, the Sultan of Yogyakarta, was a major figure in the Indonesian independence movement and a major supporter of the Boy Scouts. (There are scouts on the banknote designed in his honor.) So maybe Obama was a scout in Indonesia and that's where he got his anti-imperialist ideas from.
Another writes:
My son is a Cub Scout. He and my husband recently went on a camping trip to a nearby desert. Guess what? There was an entire pack (Cub Scout lingo for troop) of Muslim boys who recited, along with everybody else, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Cub Scout promise, which goes as follows:
I promise to do my best/To do my duty to God/And my country/To help other people, and/To obey the law of the Pack.
Doesn't sound like a bunch of Madrassa maniacs to me.
One of Tyler Cowen's commenters, Marcos Jazzan, asks:
The quality of fiction seems to be decreasing relative to the quality of non-fiction, or am I just biased against active fiction writers vs. dead ones?
Cowen agrees and wonders about the causes. One of them is splendid one-off downloadable essays, such as Cowen's "The Great Stagnation". As deep-dive magazines struggle online, the mini-ebook awaits its moment. But just because non-fiction has more potential these days, that doesn't mean fiction has declined in quality. Another commenter gets it right:
I think you have to really dig to get past the crap, now more than ever, simply because so much is being published. Zadie Smith's novels were brilliant; Helen DeWitt put out a masterpiece for her first novel; Haruki Murakami continues to put out great work. I also think that as you read more, you need something unique or unusual. You can't read just another damn bildungsroman like the hundred you've read before. You can't read another tale of heartbreak. It makes most novels seem dull (this happened to me about age 25, but I read A LOT). I have to seek out experimental narratives or ordinary narratives about unusual circumstances (Kim Young-Ha does this well in both of the novels of his I've read). I also read a lot of science fiction, because it's at least an exploration of possibilities. But no, I honestly think that fiction is breaching new frontiers and getting better.
Goldblog doesn't think Lizza is actually defending Mark Leibovich. Neither does Lizza, who writes:
I think the inference [that I support publishing emails from journalists to sources] is absurd and the problem is compounded by the fact that you didn't quote anything in your item to back up your claim, so your readers would have no way of testing the truth of your headline unless they click through and read my entire piece. (Which, let's face it, readers rarely do.)
Even worse, now that I've pressed you on it the best you can do is say that your claim hangs on a quote that any fair observer would see is an objective observation about who is likely to be embarrassed by the emails and not in any way a "defense" (or criticism) of Leibovich. There is no commentary in my article about whether this is good or bad.
Two points: readers do click through to the original links all the time. Secondly my inference of Lizza backing his friend Leibovich comes from this sentence:
From what I know of what Bardella shared, the beat reporters who cover Issa and engaged in this kind of game with Bardella will be the ones most embarrassed by the e-mails that Leibovich possesses.
Maybe I inferred too much. I've asked Ryan what his position on this actually is. I presume from his "absurd" that he opposes such activity. But I can't tell now. I'll let you know his response. Jeffrey takes a step back:
The dirty secret driving this conversation is the near-universal recognition among reporters that, in trying to nab access and interviews, we sometimes tend to paint a rather benign portrait of our intentions in the pitch e-mails we write. (To wit, my e-mail last week to Muammar Qaddafi: "Dear Mo, it's been long time — too long, in fact! How are you? I would love to come to see you, and no, I don't want to talk about Benghazi, and these al-Qaeda putzes trying to overthrow your glorious and democratically-chosen governnment! Mainly what I want to talk to you about is flowers. All facets of horticulture, actually. And, by the way, I'm on your side! I just read the Green Book again, and man, it is just brilliant! You're like James Madison in a dress! Which would make you Dolley Madison, I guess, but whatever. XXOO, Jeff.")
"What the hell??" indeed:
Tmobile "Charles Barkley/I May Be Wrong" from Süperfad on Vimeo.
Noah Millman thinks bad teachers are a symptom of a bigger problem:
It’s not that hard to identify really terrible teachers. It’s much harder to design a bureaucratic evaluation mechanism properly tuned to align incentives for leaders to run their schools correctly. A major effect of the kinds of school-evaluation tools that have already been deployed has been to encourage teaching to the test above all. That may actually be an improvement in some schools, and certainly helps identify schools that are completely failing to teach – but in many others, it has incentivized the leadership to destroy much of what made the schools effective in the first place.
Nate Silver's conclusion:
[H]igher gas prices are important to the extent that they affect things like G.D.P., inflation and unemployment. But there isn’t evidence that they matter above and beyond that.
But if oil gives us a double dip?
The Dish 