Month: May 2011

Matt Yglesias defends standarized tests. He insists that schools need to take "checking to see if the kids are learning anything more seriously":

Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy is that I think a lot of middle class liberals implicitly underestimate the extent of really bad learning outcomes. Take this report (PDF) from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund which notes “that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations”

McArdle agrees.

Today on the Dish, Andrew bemoaned torture creep from the GOP, and set the record straight on Dick Cheney's war crimes. McCain even admitted torture wasn't key, and Rob Delaney rubbed it in Palin's face. We analyzed how Osama was shot, Reuters released other gruesome corpse shots, Harold Evans examined history's other gruesome shots, and Ambinder explained why the Osama photos were nixed. Tony Dokoupil ran through the Navy SEAL training, and we cooed over the dog that helped take down Osama. Nancy Pelosi shifted gears, readers looked on the bright side of teenage naivete about bin Laden, and this is a beautiful tale of forgiveness.

Steven Cook pressured the US to undermine Assad and consequently Iran, Joel Wing tracked deaths in Iraq, and Andrew considered conservatism's war on Jihad. Andrew got excited for Gary Johnson on the drug war at tonight's debate, Hertzberg hyped Mitch Daniels, the vegetarian, Ben Smith feared for Pawlenty, and Romney didn't flip-flop, the GOP did. Birthers came around after the birth certificate came out, and we parsed PEW's reading of ideological divides. Andrew weighed in on Jews fed up with Israeli hypocrisy, and welcomed New York's embrace of gay marriage. Sara Mayeux defended prison guards for the hard work they do, we assessed voting based on the economy, and Massie wasn't optimistic about a republic in Britain. We explored birth control's evolution of the IUD, Bollywood tackled the right to marry who you love, and old people married.

Map of the day here, chart of the day here, cool ad watch here, Moore award here, creepy ad watch here, quote for the day here, MHB here, VFYW here, FOTD here, and Dishtern casting call here.

–Z.P.

Rob Delaney swats the tweet:

I’m imagining a group of terrorists sitting around a computer, pulling up a photo of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse, and one saying “WHOA GUYS, if we try to ‘destroy America’ they might try put BULLETS in our FACES. We better knock this malarkey off ASAP. Return that fertilizer to the hardware store and let’s use the fuel we’ve stockpiled to power the generator at my nephew’s school for a few weeks.”

Terrorists, especially of the Jihadi variety, are frequently prepared for and SEEKING death, whether it come in the form of a bullet, explosion, or underpants conflagration on a Detroit-bound flight. But I presume Sarah Palin knows this. So her tweet is both “politicking” and “drama.” It’s theater, in fact.

In 1993, Irving Kristol wrote "My Cold War":

There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers. We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. Now that the other "Cold War" is over, the real cold war has begun.

Michael Lind extends the metaphor:

9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism. And the idea of World War IV enabled the right once again to smear American liberals as defeatists or appeasers, if not traitors, in a struggle on the scale of the world wars and the Cold War. … World War IV was never really about bin Laden or al-Qaida. It was always about American domestic politics.

I think it's fairer to say it was about both. I do believe that the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others – mainly neocons – were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence. There is the covert ideology of Strauss or the overt anti-ideology of Oakeshott.

Joel Wing tracks them:

Since 2009 the average number of deaths has hit a plateau. In 2009, there was an average of 9.4 deaths per day, compared to 20.4 the year before, and 65.2 per day in 2007. In 2010, the average death count dropped to 8.8 per day. There have been an average of 7.8 deaths since the beginning of 2011.

Wing also finds that violence in Iraq is now more political than sectarian.

Ryan Avent imagines a wealthier world:

I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world in which four times as many people enjoy rich-world living standards as is currently the case. But for it to be possible, humanity must either start discovering and exploiting new earthlike planets, or come up with revolutionary new ways to increase terrestrial supplies of critical resources, or dramatically decrease the resource-intensity of wealth. The mechanism that will encourage one or some (or, I suppose, all) of these developments is high resource prices.

David Frum contemplates this poll:

It’s my “suspicion” that the collapse of birtherism has as much to do with the bin Laden killing as the release of the long-form birth certificate.

Weigel has the same thought:

What would the result be if bin Laden hadn't just been captured and Obama wasn't on a high? Good question. What'll it be in a few months when his approval is back down and the Internet has churned with new theories? Another good question.

Bucky Turco describes the scene:

As if Chinese authorities weren’t angered enough by the rash of pro-Ai Weiwei stencils popping up all over Hong Kong, someone is now projecting the same message on unauthorized locations around the city, including the barracks of the People’s Liberation Army. A person using the moniker “Cpak Ming” is then taking photos of the “flash graffiti” and posting them on Facebook, which isn’t necessarily illegal, but has thoroughly pissed off military officials regardless.

Larison ponders Mitch Daniels' foreign policy:

Daniels has been very reticent on foreign policy, which hasn’t bothered me. Still, if his silence is the product of a lack of interest or lack of detailed knowledge of the subject, what are the odds that he is going to turn out to be an unconventional Republican on foreign policy questions? Isn’t it more likely that Daniels will feel the need to minimize his differences with the rest of the field on other issues in order to separate himself on the fiscal issues that do interest him?

Yglesias, meanwhile, hopes Daniels will run as himself.