Month: September 2011

Chait upgrades Mitt's chances:

Romney still has enormous vulnerabilities if the right opponent can exploit them. And it’s worth keeping in mind that Perry will have more success exploiting them through written speeches and paid advertisements — he’s just too slow-witted to express them in debate. Still, we may be approaching a danger zone for Perry where the Party Establishment panics about his suitability and throws itself openly behind Romney.

Nate Silver finds evidence that Romney is already winning the endorsement race.

Allison Hoffman profiles one of Bibi's key advisors, Ron Dermer:

Dermer offers the Israeli prime minister something deeper. He embodies the ideal combination of intellectual pedigree, physical prowess, and family commitment prized by Israelis of Netanyahu’s generation. He shares—and, by his choice to become Israeli, affirms—Netanyahu’s conviction about the outsize role that Israel plays in the grand sweep not just of Jewish history, but also of Western history. Perhaps most important, 15 years after moving to Israel, Dermer retains the brash confidence of a born Yankee—a quality that’s harder to pick up than an accent and precious to a politician like Netanyahu, who plainly yearns for his fellow Israeli Jews to feel they share the same superpower birthright as their American cousins.

Eli Lake reveals that Obama sold Israel bunker-buster bombs that could be used in an attack on Iran, controversial weapons that even Bush refused to hand over. Ackerman gets furious over Bibi's reaction:

So here comes this shipment of bunker-busters, from the patron to the client. Netanyahu opens the package. And then a card comes in the mail. Hey, it reads, now we need you to stop settlement construction. That's what Abbas needs to come back to the table. And Netanyahu says: Nah, fuck Obama. Not only does Netanyahu refuse, but he cynically repurposes Obama's "negotiations without preconditions" line to mean that he's ready to talk only under conditions that Abbas cannot take back to the Palestinians and look like a credible peacemaker. It's a lot like saying that you're perfectly welcome to come over for dinner, as long as you don't mind watching me fuck your wife.

Larison, pivoting off Walter Shapiro, tears into the governor's answer:

What really stands out in Perry’s response is how both issues have absolutely nothing to do with the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal (how would selling fighters to Taiwan give them the ability to intervene in Pakistan?), but his answer was even worse than most people think. Perry remarks on India managed to get the essential facts wrong. Perry said, “For instance, when we had the opportunity to sell India the upgraded F-16s, we chose not to do that.” In fact, what made the Indian decision to reject American bids for the new fighter jet contract so bothersome was that the administration had actively lobbied on behalf of the bids. The problem wasn’t that the U.S. chose not to sell jets to India. Despite the fact that it would have angered Pakistan, the administration was eager to sell them. Because the purchase was so large and will eventually make up half of their air force, India’s government didn’t want to buy from American companies because of a fear of what future administrations might do.

Steve Benen thinks Perry just doesn't care to learn anything:

Sure, Perry is a fairly new candidate with no meaningful foreign policy experience, and maybe if he brushed up on the basics, he wouldn’t appear quite this incompetent. But at a certain level, that’s not reassuring — he’s been on the trail for over a month, and doesn’t appear to have invested any time at all in learning anything at all. Indeed, Perry has dabbled in foreign policy quite a bit lately, but with consistently ridiculous results. Hell, the other day, Perry blamed “instability in the Middle East” on President Obama “apologizing for America’s exceptionalism,” which is plainly idiotic.

Yglesias and Drum pile on.

In a lengthy discussion (pdf) of the GOP's demographics problem, Ron Unz addresses immigration-related job displacement and arrives at a surprising conclusion. He proposes a large-scale increase of the federal minimum wage:

Consider the consequences of a very substantial rise in the national minimum wage, perhaps to $10 or more likely $12 per hour. The automatic rejoinder to proposals for hiking the minimum wage is that "jobs will be lost." But in today’s America a huge fraction of jobs at or near the minimum wage are held by immigrants, often illegal ones. Eliminating those jobs is a central goal of the plan, a feature not a bug.

Knoxville, Tennessee, 6.38 am 

Philip Klein isn't convinced that Romney would have the gall to repeal the ACA as president: 

[Romney] has displayed zero political courage during his career. He has held opposite positions on nearly every issue, with one obvious exception. He still hasn't disavowed the health care law he designed, campaigned for, and signed with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side. And it happens to be the forerunner to Obamacare. There's no reason to believe as cautious and calculating of a figure as Mitt Romney would stake the crucial first months of his presidency getting into a bruising political battle to repeal a law, when he still clings to its underlying policy ideas.

A reader writes:

Are multiple gold medals in successive Olympics not sufficient for stardom? Does Greg Louganis somehow not qualify as a superstar? That he was widely known as a diver, a sport that does itself lead to wider fame, suggests that he should be regarded as such.

On a broader level, it seems that the gay athletic superstars come from sports where athletes compete as individuals rather than team sports. 

I am not sure when there will be an openly gay superstar in will appear in a major team sport, but when I see my aunt and her wife cheering for their son in his little league games and youth soccer matches, it's clear to me that it's only a matter of time before we see cameras cut from a quarterback passing for a crucial touchdown in a playoff game to his proud moms cheering for him in the stands.

Another writes:

If you want to find a gay superstar, Andrew, you should be looking a little closer to your native land.  Specifically, Wales, where rugby star Gareth Thomas has come out as openly gay. He is the 2nd highest try scorer in Welsh rugby union history.  (That sentence should make perfect to sense to, what, 5% of your readership??)  And he's got a lovely shiny bald head and sometimes sports a beard.

Let's see a tea-partier boo him to this face:

Another:

He may not be well-known worldwide, but in the world of rugby Gareth Thomas is a superstar. There was a wonderful profile of him in Sports Illustrated last year.

Thomas also did an IGB video. One more from the homeland:

Steve Davies is one of the better batsman in English County cricket right now, and he’s out.

"Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage. Whatever you think of 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country. It is troubling, and revealing, that Santorum’s answer entirely defined Hill as a gay man first and as a soldier second, if at all," – Jim Geraghty, NRO.

Noreen Malone illuminates some statistics on the plight of today's twentysomethings:

The rate of poverty among young adults is just about the same as that of New York City, one in five. And it's a cohort that has the worst rate of unemployment since the Second World War. Just 55.3 percent of people ages 16–29 are employed, compared with 67.3 percent in 2000.

We (sorry, this feels personal!) are more likely to delay major life decisions as a result, it seems. The median age of marriage has crept up by about a year since 2006. The marriage rate was at a record low in the population at large, as well as young adults specifically. And even though the number of women between 20 and 34 increased by about a million between 2008 and 2010, the number of children born to women in that age range dropped by 200,000. Instead of getting married and moving out, people are living at home. Mobility among college graduates is also at a post-WWII nadir, and a whopping 25 percent more young people live at home than at the outset of the recession.