A reader writes:
OMG I just LOVE "The View From Your Airplane Window"! I've been taking photos from window seats for years, and it's one of my most favorite things! When I fly, I carry this book with me, "Window Seat: Reading the Landscape From the Air". It's well worn and dog eared by now. Of course, nowadays – there's an app for that! My next trip is July 10th; I'll have to give the app a go.
(Hat tip: Dave Stopera)
Steve Kornacki compares Michele Bachmann's presidental campaign to Pat Robertson's. Contra Chait, Kornacki thinks Bachmann can't win:
Elites still ultimately control the process, and there's no reason to believe they will ever line up behind Bachmann. She can definitely cause her party some serious headaches next year. Just don't bet on her winning the nomination.
Pareene puts the camp in context:
If there's one thing conservatives enjoy more than accusing liberals of doing the horrible things that conservatives actually do, it's imitating the horrible things they have convinced themselves that liberals do. They convince themselves that the liberal media is an anti-conservative smear machine with no regard for the truth, and that the only purpose of journalism and art is propaganda, and so they create "BigJournalism.com." They convince themselves that liberals are using public schools to indoctrinate our children into worshiping Barack Obama, and so they start a Tea Party Summer Camp, where our children will be properly indoctrinated into loving liberty.
Juan Cole reacts to news that the Bush White House repeatedly asked the CIA to spy on him, in order to discredit his reputation and quiet his criticisms of the Iraq war:
What alarms me most of all in the nakedly illegal deployment of the CIA against an academic for the explicit purpose of destroying his reputation for political purposes is that I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House. After the Valerie Plame affair, it seemed clear that there was nothing those people wouldn’t stoop to.
You wonder how many critics were effectively “destroyed.” It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest. They have brought great shame upon the traditions of the White House, which go back to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who had hoped that checks and balances would forestall such abuses of power.
History, I suspect, will treat them as the nemeses of American decline. They helped undermine America's soft and hard power and permanently tainted its moral standing. I wonder what else Mr Carle is going to reveal in his forthcoming book. What many of these ruthless men forgot is that other decent men and women were among them. And one day we'll hear more of their stories.
A eunuch writes:
I concur with your article on the "
Although not bearing my cross, you have spoken admirably about the strange dance of males with their glands. A prostatectomy three years ago followed by intense testosterone suppression hormone therapy has left me with a unique trifecta: impotence, incontinence and sexlessness (total absence of desire).
The first time after the surgery I saw a group of strapping, robust teenage males walking toward me, I had an inner disquiet I had not felt since my pre-pubescent days in the presence of older young men. The downside of this strange journey of total and perhaps permanent sexual inadequacy is an equally strange release and realization I had been a prisoner to testosterone for nearly half a century. I had spent every hour of every day since I was thirteen driven by an inner force that was at once angelic and demonic. Now I was paroled into a world that no longer holds any desire for me.
Even more tragic, was that the older I became and the more invisible (and unattractive) I became to others the more the hormonally-driven desire to not fade into oblivion drove me to act in desperation; this is what Dylan Thomas means to me by that phrase…"raging against the dying of the light!"
Death would be a welcome relief from such dying of the light in sexual anonymity! I am sure the public personae of well-known men – Weiner, Ensign, Vitter, Clinton, Gingrich, Spitzer, et al. – has even intensified my anguished ' desire to be desired'. Thanks again for your good words.
I hope I have the courage as a 60 year old male to start a support group in my city for men similarly situated to me. I think I shall call it Eunuchs Anonymous.
Nate Silver measures it:
Not only are governors more likely to win nomination, they also do better than senators even after accounting for their polling. That is, if you take a governor who is polling at 10 percent and a senator who is polling at 10 percent in a race, and the candidates seem about equal in most other respects, the governor is more likely to outperform his polling and win the nomination. Governors likewise hold an advantage over members of the House of Representatives and over holders of most other elected offices — everyone except presidents and vice presidents.
A first. And what a precedent. (And, yes, life does seem to be getting more like the Onion every day.)
The rationale is familiar:
The only thing pot does for me is it gets me to stop thinking. Sometimes I have a brain that needs to be turned off.
A reader writes:
Contra Massie, "It worked in Massachusetts" could be a decent narrative for Mitt Romney, if he was appealing to more than the Republican base. Take a look at the map you posted earlier today; Massachusetts has some of the highest GDP growth in the country. The state has been relatively lightly hit by the housing crisis. Unemployment is still rather high, but under 8%. And something staggeringly high, like 95-98% of the state, is covered by health insurance. This is a problem for Mitt, because, apparently, amongst Republican primary voters, the fewer people covered by insurance, the better.
But come general election time, this could be a problem for Perry. Texas has one of the highest percentages of people uncovered by health insurance, at 26%. Massachusetts is #1. Texas is #51.
(For adults, 19-64, the percentages are 33% vs 6%; for children it's 18% vs 3%.) That could be a pretty big hammer for the Democrats: "How is Rick Perry going to solve (arguably) the biggest problem in our generation when a quarter of his own state didn't have insurance?!"
And how does Texas (otherwise) work pretty well? Oil and gas. Again, that plays really well in the primaries, but maybe not so well in the general. Of course, Perry plays better in the GE than, say, Palin, Bachmann or Cain.
Another targets another vulnerability for Perry:
We now know that prior to his last reelection, the reality of the dire economy in Texas was hidden. Now the state's huge deficit has been exposed! Don't let lines like "Texas is working" go unchecked. It was all smoke and mirrors, and Perry will have to be held accountable for that!
Another goes into more detail:
The argument has always been that low taxes, small government and less regulation would grow the economy so the deficit could be avoided, if not kept at a minimum. That fiscal "responsibility" has left Texas with a deficit the size of California and New York – with all of their unions and social programs. So Texas doesn't have the same service or protections as the other two states, or the costs associated with those issues, and still has the same size deficit. Now that Perry will take credit for balancing the budget, which has to happen by law (As Chris Rock says, "You don't get credit for things you are supposed to do"), but it is difficult to argue that the "Texas Approach" is working. Perry will also take credit for adding jobs, which is nice, but the unemployment rate in Texas is similar to the unemployment rate in New York (though better than California), and has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
So if your model is huge deficits, draconian cuts in services, positive job growth, but lots of poverty and high unemployment, then yeah, "Texas is working."
The Dish 