Today on the Dish, Obama's jobs bill was proclaimed dead on arrival, and Andrew wondered if the GOP's cynical partisan destruction would prove to be as successful in the long-term as it has been in the short. The Tea Party is better at politics than the Wall Street occupiers, who don't really have a purpose but might actually re-center the debate. Chait skewered Cheney's absurd attempts at vindication, a Republican casualty of the Tea Party begged for climate science sanity, and a country music star came out for marriage equality. Andrew remembered the evening of June 23, 1993, when he found out he had HIV.
In election news, Chris Christie is sitting this one out, but his fatness warranted more discussion. Readers packed the in-tray with more definitions of "niggerhead," Perry honed his position on immigration but collapsed in the polls, and Cain, the "GOP's black friend," surged. Naturally, Bachmann received the Bad Lip Reading treatment, and an angsty Sarah Palin had a 100-second meltdown (but there's still a chance she'll declare in the coming weeks).
We compared 2011 to 1948 and parsed Bibi's demand for an official "Jewish state," and readers reacted to settler fundamentalism. Awlaki's assassination carries heavy implications for Muslim-Americans and the fate of the Yemeni dictator. We experienced the front-lines of the Libyan war, Egyptian democracy remains fragile, and shrinking the U.S. military simply makes strategic sense. In Europe, Greece is the new Lehman, and in the U.S., pro-lifers are the new prohibitionists.
The mystery of the impossible Oxford interview was unlocked, we need our "little bugs," and Steven Pinker elaborated on the historic trend toward pacifism. Educating a workforce doesn't create high-skilled jobs, and small business isn't all it's cracked up to be. We weighed the economic theories of Darwin and Smith and checked out the new iPhone. Exercise fuels creativity, a hearing implant introduced a 29-year-old to the miracles of our ordinary life, and "fuck" continued to surprise. A cashier smiled as a man attempted to rob his gas station, and we're psyched for the new season of South Park.
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— M.A.
(Photo by Flickr user _PaulS_.)
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