Month: June 2011

"Dear Photograph" is single-serving site of photographs rephotographed at their original location:

Noah Millman connects the Weiner scandal to the dudes-pretending-to-be-lesbians hoaxes:

The online world has made it easier than ever before to fully commit to one’s fantasy life. That’s a fact that has consequences both good and bad. Because our fantasies can be important, having a space to explore them can be a very good thing – an opening to greater self-understanding. But because we can pretend our online selves are separate from our real selves, we can, instead of pursuing self-understanding, simply build a shadow fantasy life and live there in secret. And, whether or not we realize it when we first start playing this game, these days it’s harder than ever to keep people on the internet from finding out you’re a dog.

McSweeney's modernizes opening lines from classic novels. Another Dish fave:

Alice was beginning to tire of sitting by her sister on the bank. She took out her iPhone and played Angry Birds for the next three hours.

Dianne Tice explains it:

Currently, there are a few things that have been shown to improve willpower once it gets depleted. First of all is rest or sleep. Rested, well-slept people have more willpower than tired people. In fact, people’s willpower is often highest in the morning, and lowest late at night. Very few people break their diets first thing in the morning, or go on an impulsive crime spree right after waking up. Instead, these self-control failures are more likely to occur at the end of the day, leading many researchers to conclude that sleep and rest can replenish our willpower.

Adam Ozimek lines up the two:

Ideally speaking, I don’t think history is the most important subject when it comes to making better voters. You’d do better off to drill students on economics 101 and the basics of the budget. … Many serious, button downed, grown-up careers require artistic skills: architects, marketing, graphic design, engineers, web designers, city planners… the list goes on. Which careers require knowledge of history? Journalists, history teachers, politicians? It seems as though the caricatures of these fields should be exactly the opposite, and that history should be viewed as soft, idealistic, and unpractical, whereas art should be viewed as the hard-nosed practical subject of serious people.

Jon Huntsman wants to pull out of Afghanistan. Adam Sorensen analyzes:

As I wrote when Huntsman first starting talking to the press about these issues, there’s room for a mainstream Republican isolationist to capitalize on the unpopularity of the wars in Afghanistan and Libya, at least in a general election. (Independents and Democrats disapprove more than Republicans, but the Tea Party shares some of their distaste for intervention, albeit for fiscal reasons.) Haley Barbour seemed to be making that calculation back when he was still flirting with a presidential bid. And for Huntsman, as a moderate Mormon technocrat and recent employee of Barack Obama, it’s one of the few areas where he can draw a strong contrast with his chief primary rival, and ultimately, the President himself.

Today on the Dish, Andrew weighed in on Tracy Morgan's homophobic rant and Romney's inability to say Afghans, while Republicans may have turned the page for peace. Bjorn Lomborg still believed innovation could solve climate change, Andrew challenged Pareene on why we shouldn't always out gay politicians, and we unpacked the Judge Vaughn Walker ruling, which showed that everyone benefits from equal treatment under the law.

Texas offered Rick Perry a success story, Michelle Goldberg exposed Bachmann's extreme, religious roots, and Romney offered a reliable empty shell candidacy. Bush's tax cuts paled in comparison to Pawlenty's, America failed miserably in global healthcare ratings, and retirement funds and social security remained the third rail of American politics. Robert Gates called out NATO, Stephen Walt and Joyner picked sides, and Coburn bested Norquist on tax cuts and we looked for a trend. Marc Lynch advised Obama to exercise prudence in Syria, whistleblowers won, and drones bucked oversight under the CIA.

Facebook peaked, only those without internet remained, and Mike Masnick promoted letting old companies expire. Tea Party kids learned the meaning of liberty at summer camp, Google threatened the VFYW contest, and not all sex offenders are created equal. A journalist tried to tell a joke to the Dalai Lama, readers comforted the troubled author of a depressed confession and shared stories of their own. Map of the day here, quotes for the day here and here, Ygesias award here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

On Tuesday, Archbishop Timothy Dolan ranted against marriage equality in New York. He compared America to North Korea before asking what happens to "other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?" Amy Davidson untangles Dolan's illogic:

Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance, violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? Would he prefer that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so, that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer of North Korean communiqués).

Does he think that children should be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? And even if he agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were thieves in his house.

Chuck Marr graphed Pawlenty's tax cuts by income:

[I]n 2013 the Pawlenty plan would give people in the top one-tenth of 1 percent on the income scale (i.e., people with incomes above $2.7 million) an average annual tax cut of $1.8 million — which is more than four times what they got last year from the Bush tax cuts.

Jonathan Bernstein sighs:

Kevin Drum, of course, is correct that in the context of the Republican nomination process these are exactly what people want. I expect Mitt Romney to match Pawlenty, in both size and skew of tax cut proposals.