Jonathan Bernstein says it's "exceedingly small":
If she gives conventional answers to tough questions, she runs the risk of being Just Another Conservative, albeit one with a back-history of oddball statements and positions. In other words, by doing what she can to reassure the people in the party who care about winning in November, she risks her ability to stand out from the Cain-Santorum part of the field.
Mackey is on it.
A reader writes:
I live in Albany, New York and read this blog daily. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that my apartment was in the VFYW contest (the non-gabled building to the left). Un-f-ing-believable for a number of reasons. 1) I work in the legislature and walk down State every day for work; 2) after session wrapped on Friday, I, like many other staff, took a well-deserved break from Mondays and missed this window view, which 3) figures because I never have any idea where the picture is from and, 4) I have, in the past, thought about sending in my own pic to confound everyone with Albany’s diverse architectural styles, so it’s kinda awesome that my apartment made it in without me sending a pic.
Of actual interest to you and maybe your other readers: the picture you posted of the winning entry includes, on the right side in the dark brick, the NYS Republican committee building, which is a fitting tribute because it was Republican Senators Roy McDonald, Mark Grisanti, Jim Alesi and especially Stephen Saland that made the vote possible. I imagine this diminishes my chances of getting my own VFYW, but it is a fitting Dish tribute to a truly historic moment.
Today on the Dish, New York marriage brought glasnost to the NRO, who also happened to endorse Barney Frank and Ron Paul's marijuana bill. People opposed marriage equality for the same reasons they opposed freeing slaves, and it meant some gay men had to leave behind their outsider status. Meanwhile, New York's decision could impact the Supreme Court, boost tourism, and aid feminism.
Michele Bachmann struggled to get anything right, partially because the right can't reconcile slavery with the infallible Founding Fathers. Our ears perked up for the next wave of Bachmann attacks, Romney ripped off Thatcher but butchered her pun, and Palin was ready for her close-up. Default precautions could still seriously mess with our economy, and some assholes weren't paying any federal income taxes.
The Taliban attacked Kabul, but we're screwed if we leave Afghanistan and if we don't. We treated military children like we used to treat soldiers at Walter Reed, and we may be feeding the dictators in the Middle East with our insane appetite for oil. Petraeus remained powerful, brain scans can't indicate whether someone's a terrorist, and the Israeli family is more diverse than many Jews care to admit. Private prisons go against society's best interests, China faced down the US, and intellectuals picked on Al Gore.
Andrew challenged the idea that science killed God, and pondered whether the universe being conscious of itself is a workable definition of God. Miss America remained ambivalent about evolution, New York battled the Canadian goose, and diabetes boomed. We investigated the linguistics of "like," Giles Turnbull nailed all job interviews, and home is a malleable thing. Assault by flatulence here, blog of the day here, merry go-round horse race here, chart of the day here, cool ad watch here, quotes for the day here and here, poseur alert here, Colbert bait here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here and contest winner #56 here.
–Z.P.
A reader writes:
I am a 27-year-old gay man, and consider(ed) myself very post-gay and post-marriage since I came out (late, a few years ago). I thought that if society didn't accept me, I would define my relationships myself, that I would forge a new world, a new type of relationship. Two decades ago (if I weren't seven), I would have been on the side that opposed you in your marriage fight.
But I'll be damned if hearing the stories of this battle that began years before I was born, reading the reactions, and in particular, seeing that video of you in 1997 and reading your posts yesterday haven't cracked something inside me.
You talk about this being a generally conservative movement, that it is about people in love wanting expansion of a traditional institution to them. But no one talks about the influence this has on single gay men. For the first time since I came out, I feel forced to look at the fact that I am not just in this for dating, for sex. Maybe if I were older, I would already have an identity hardened against being defined by society, and it would not matter so much. But we are on the way to a world where society will accept my relationships, and I will not be able to use outsider status as an excuse for any behavior.
Traditionalists will fight this tooth and nail, but the last great joke will be how much this gives them what they want.
I waver between a deep gratitude to New York for accepting me, and being spiteful for making me grow up. But I suspect that the former emotion will be the lasting one.
From Kristen Lombardi's heartrending report on the state of military schools:
The Pentagon now estimates it will take $3.7 billion and as many as seven years to renovate or rebuild most of its schools, a backlog that accumulated over the last decade as defense officials failed to press for the funds they needed in stretched military budgets.
The take-away:
The problem, [Chet Edwards, former congressman and chair of the House Appropriations Military Construction Subcommittee] says, is that military families with few resources face a “stacked deck” and must compete for budget dollars with the well-oiled lobbying machines of the military-industrial complex. “I had hundreds of representatives and lobbyists come into my office fighting for multibillion-dollar weapons programs,” he recalls. “But I only had a handful who ever walked in and said…our kids deserve better education.”
Lauren Streib does some quick math:
[A] report from the Independent Economic Conference projected that same-sex unions would generate about $284 million in additional wedding revenue and tourism and put another $27 million in taxes and license fees into the state’s coffers over the next three years. Brad Sears, the Executive Director of the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, which has released similar studies for 15 other states and D.C., estimates a more conservative $225 million of economic activity, taking into account the state’s 9,000 couples that are already married.
But these figures are—intentionally—very conservative, using an average spend of $4,000 per wedding. Given that the average wedding in New York City costs about $70,000, while statewide average spend is closer to $30,000, according to The Knot, the impact is likely to be far, far bigger. Using the IDC’s estimate of 66,000 couples to marry in the next three years, that means at least $2 billion will be spent on same-sex weddings. Add in the amount spent on wedding rings and on gifts from guests, and the total injected income will average nearly $1 billion a year for the next few years.
Aaron Friedberg thinks the US and China are headed "toward mistrust and competition, if not necessarily toward open conflict"
In contrast to what some realists claim, ideology matters at least as much as power in determining the course of relations among nations. The fact that America is a liberal democracy while China remains under authoritarian rule is a significant additional impetus for rivalry, an obstacle to stable, cooperative relations, and a source of mutual hostility and mistrust in its own right.
Larison asks why this is:
There’s no question that ideology matters as much as power, but what remains puzzling is why states permit themselves to be held hostage to the dictates of ideology when these promise to fuel dangerous rivalries with other major powers.
Greg Scoblete provides some partial answers, but Larison remains puzzled.
The Bornean bearded pig Sus barbatus, photographed by Markus Bühler at the Berlin Zoo.
The Justice Policy Institute, a criminal-justice-reform advocacy group, has a new report (pdf) with some eye-opening statistics on the lobbying strategies of for-profit private prisons. For instance, while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent respectively. J.F. at DiA homes in on the strongest arguments against private prisons:
[T]here are for-profit hospitals, and for them to do well people have to get sick. The difference is that for-profit hospitals tend not to poison people and break legs to keep their beds fully occupied, while for-profit prisons, as the JPI's report explains, tend to lobby for policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole. Admittedly, the report shows a great deal more smoke than fire, and its most damning intimation—that private-prison lobbyists were behind Arizona's immigration bill—overlooks the regrettable popularity of such measures. And, once again, companies are free to lobby for their own interests.
The problem is that their interests—imprisoning more people and keeping them in jail for longer periods of time—are not ours.
The Dish 