Month: June 2011

Sean Carroll is distressed by Miss America contestants debating whether Darwin should be taught in schools:

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

Today on the Dish, we collected the web's best reax on marriage equality in New York, and Andrew eviscerated the right's sucker punches. Cuomo basked, Mehlman helped behind the scenes, and Frum admitted the conservative case against marriage equality didn't pass the real world test. TNR reprinted Andrew's original case for gay marriage, political donors stayed socially liberal, and family values came around. The long arc of history bent towards justice, our country needs more "threats" like gay marriage, and readers rejoiced around the world.

J.L. Wall couldn't walk out on Israel, Yemen was prepared to offer a safe haven for al Qaeda, and genocide in Sudan seemed imminent. A warrant for Qaddafi's arrest went out, an Egyptian gladiator fought a confused and possibly drugged lion, and air-conditioning for the US military in the Middle East totaled $20.2 billion. Sanction on Iran affected more than Iran, and China held its grip on freedom and blamed the deaths of prisoners on toilet paper.

Chris Christie spoke frankly and wouldn't apologize for it, Andrew debated instituting cuts first, and Herman Cain had all the warmth that Romney can't muster. Tough females broke the double bind, and Joe McGinniss deconstructed Palin's odd lie of being Undefeated. Obama prepared to fight for North Carolina, and education does give good returns over a lifetime. Apologizing to cops lowers your ticket price, bike lanes create more jobs, and Europeans do it better than us. HIV out-evolved us, science needs our humanism, and crime in DC never ceased to amaze us. Bill Hicks got spiritual on psilocybin, cigarettes still appealed to some after all the stigmatization, our stomachs outsmarted our tongues, and even the healthy cereal contained as much sugar as a chocolate bar. 

Chart of the day here, Malkin award here, quote for the day here, poseur alert here, VFYW here, FOTD here, and MHB here.

–Z.P.

Heads up: Some disturbing imagery in the above footage from Al Jazeera. Many more reports of escalating bloodshed are surfacing. Here's Eric Reeves last week:

Two weeks after Khartoum’s tanks, artillery, and military aircraft began moving into South Kordofan, violence—especially against civilians—continues to explode. There are now scores of reliable reports that attacks against the indigenous Nuba people have accelerated, both on the ground and from the air. Humanitarian conditions are deteriorating rapidly, aid workers are fleeing the region, essential relief supplies have been looted in the regional capital of Kadugli, and the U.N. World Food Programme has indicated that the violence could prevent it from reaching the 400,000 people it was serving before the recent onslaught. There are no verified estimates of the number of people displaced, but Abdel Aziz El Hilu, former governor of South Kordofan, has put the number at almost half a million. Dozens have been reported killed, but, in the absence of any effective humanitarian monitoring, this surely understates significantly.

It gets even worse:

The signature feature of Khartoum’s operation is the door-to-door roundup of Nuba, who are often summarily shot. The Nuba are also stopped at checkpoints grimly similar to those once seen in Rwanda. One aid worker who recently escaped from South Kordofan, told McClatchy, “Those [Nuba] coming in are saying, ‘Whenever they see you are a black person, they kill you.’”

Reeves isn't the only one seeing genocide as imminent. Here's Dan Morrison:

The 2005 peace deal that ended the civil war has led only to the imminent secession of the south. Southern Kordofan, a northern state whose residents largely supported the rebel cause, did not receive the right to self-determination. Instead, the state was given the sop of a "popular consultation" in which voters could express a desire for limited autonomy. Even that exercise never took place. For months now, the Nuba have felt Khartoum's noose slowly tightening. While the government claims it is justifiably squashing an armed rebellion, it has maintained a naked focus on ethnicity and religion, with distinct echoes of the jihad era.

Rebecca Hamilton has a heartbreaking letter from an on-site Western analyst:

What can only be called ethnic cleansing, when an ethnic group is targeted for extermination, started in Kadugli and Dilling while we were there. Door to door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat cutting, by special internal security forces. We don’t know how many yet; hundreds seems for sure, but could be much worse. Terrible accounts of civilians – friends – attempting to find safety in the UNMIS (United Nations Missions of Sudan) compound being pulled out of vehicles and executed immediately.

Daniel Serwer advocates for Western diplomacy to resolve the issue. Khartoum has ominously pledged to continue fighting.

Why it's an important state to keep an eye on:

Wake County is home to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. Bush won it by 7 points in 2000 and then, in a sign that demographics were changing, by just 2 points in 2004 against the Yankee John Kerry. But in 2008 Obama blew it open—a 15-point win, 57–42, and a turnout 80,000 votes higher than in ’04. Since then? Very different story. In 2009 voters installed an aggressive conservative majority on the school board, and in 2010 Republicans took a congressional seat and swept most state and county offices (the GOP won back both statehouses last year). I don’t know a single expert who thinks Obama has a great shot at winning the Tarheel State again. But he wants it badly enough to hold the Democratic convention in Charlotte…

Ed Kilgore focuses on other sections of the article.

As the government today claims it prevented a terrorist attack, the AP reports that the al Qaeda affiliated Islamist group in the South is gaining strength.  Joshua Goldstein takes a step back from the "Yemen mess":

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of Yemenis turned out to demonstrate peacefully for a transitional council to take over from President Saleh. With the president still in a hospital in Saudi Arabia — where Western diplomats say his progress will take months — bargaining on his exit from power seems truly stalled. The president’s supporters say he will make a speech to the nation shortly and return to the country soon. The vice president, the military led by the president’s son, and the opposition armed tribes all are circling without much direction. The son is even talking peace recently, though it’s hard to know if there’s anything behind that. The bright side is that a cease-fire between the government military and the armed tribesmen has pretty much held up over the last couple of weeks.

No such good news in the south of the country, however. …

The militants might actually capture the main city in the south, Aden. Tens of thousands of refugees have fled the fighting. And the country’s economy — already the poorest in the Arab world — has declined by half amidst all these problems.

Why does it matter for Americans? Ten years after ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan so that al Qaeda did not have a safe territorial base from which to attack America, the militants in Yemen are poised to potentially give al Qaeda a safe territorial base to attack America.

Amel Ahmed keeps tabs on the current state of the opposition. Previous Dish coverage here.

Leonhardt looks at the returns on education:

The Hamilton researchers … offer a chart on lifetime earnings, which shows that a big part of college’s value is that it brings much larger raises over someone’s career

Violent crime in DC is a well-known fact, but these statistics are still staggering:

[O]n a per resident basis, blacks in the District face over double the homicide rate as blacks in the nation as a whole. There were 1.3 homicides per every 100,000 white D.C. residents in 2010, the same year that saw 37.7 homicides per every 100,000 black D.C. residents.

Elsewhere, Martin Austermuhle puts the brakes on the sensational tendencies in the Examiner's front-page story, "Violent crimes by teens soar in D.C.: Homicide, rape, assault up 10 percent."

Michelle Goldberg tracks it:

Some of the most moving moments in New York’s gay marriage fight involved Republicans. There was the gruff eloquence of Republican State Senator Roy McDonald, who told reporters, “You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing.” State Senator Mark Grisanti, a Catholic from Buffalo who ran for office as a gay marriage opponent, decided to vote yes at the last minute, saying, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.” It’s hugely significant that the language of moral bravery and family values now belongs to the marriage equality side.

(Photo submitted by a Dish reader)

Will Wilkinson sees Herman Cain's appeal:

He is large, voluble, and warm. He leavens his business-speak with a pinch of folksiness, often leaving the g's off words like "leaving." He is a dark-skinned black man from Georgia, who attended a black college, belongs to a black church, and seems not to try to not sound black. Cain's delivery evidently delights the older, thoroughly Caucasian audience, especially at those moments when Cain mounts the pulpit and gives 'em a lick of Sunday fire. Whatever makes Mitt Romney sound fake, Herman Cain has the opposite of that. No one thinks Herman Cain is bullshitting them.