Month: December 2011

Larison tries to understand Mitt's rationale: 

It’s tempting to say that he has reinvented himself so thoroughly that he can no longer remember what is true and what isn’t, and he has absorbed and appropriated so many new positions over the years that it all gets jumbled together and re-mixed according to whatever the political need of the moment happens to be. It’s easy to lose track after the fourth or fifth incarnation. More likely, he is so contemptuous of the people he tells these lies to that he never thinks he will be found out.

Steve Benen adds: 

Romney and his team have demonstrated a willingness to lie — blatantly and shamelessly — with discomforting ease. We’ve seen this in offensive campaign ads, routine talking points, policy arguments, and even personal anecdotes and characteristics. And when pressed, Romney and his aides have freely admitted, more than once, that niceties such as facts, evidence, and reason just aren’t that important to them. Dishonest “propaganda” should simply be expected and accepted, they’ve said. 

Krugman goes further:

[W]ith all the bad things that have happened in American politics over the centuries, I can’t think of any candidate who has lied so freely, with so little compunction.

Paul Pillar wrestles with the fact that, by 2059, the Ultra-Orthodox "are projected to constitute over thirty percent" of Israel's population:

The disproportionate growth of the Haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are also called, has severe implications for Israeli society and the Israeli economy. About 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men do not work for a living. They spend their time in religious study at yeshivas while they and their fast-growing families subsist on government stipends. This already constitutes a major burden on the remainder of Israelis and is a contributor to the economic discomfort that stimulated widespread demonstrations earlier this year. If the projected increase in the ultra-Orthodox proportion of the population involves a proportionate increase in those not contributing to the economy, it is hard to see how the even larger burden on everyone else could be sustained.

The ultra-Orthodox also are not subject to the same military service requirements as other Israeli Jews, constituting another area where the burden is all the greater on the others. Then there is the effect on social mores and freedoms. The growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox has already raised issues regarding the status and liberties of Israeli women. A further expansion of that influence will make Israel an ever more illiberal place.

Benny Morris takes a look at the left's decline in the present.

(Photo: An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man sits in a bus next to a woman in the center of Jerusalem on December 6, 2011. Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that public buses, which serve Israel's most conservative, ultra-Orthodox communities, cannot enforce separation between the sexes. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

Sasha Issenberg finds that citizens are terrible at predicting whether they will vote or not:

One possible reason that regular voters might consistently declare their lack of interest in voting, Aida and Rogers speculate, is “to convey disaffection toward the political process rather than a sincere lack of intention to vote.” The question of whether it’s better to include such people in a poll or just leave them out altogether remains open. “If I can’t trust them to be honest about whether they’re going to vote or not,” asks [Ayres McHenry, who is working for the Our Destiny super PAC backing Jon Huntsman], “how can I trust them on all the other questions I want to ask them?”

A visit to their sanctuary: 

A reader writes:

I'm disappointed that you linked to a piece as poorly reasoned and sex-negative as Roger Friedland's. His claim that men began to desire teenage females only in the 1970s is preposterous.  You may be familiar with a play written in the 16th century, titled "Romeo and Juliet".  In it, Juliet, who is 13, is considered an appropriate object of erotic desire (and an appropriate marital partner) both by a young man her age and by a man (Paris) whose age is not specified but who is clearly a full-fledged adult. I could multiply similar examples indefinitely. 

And if women in pornography shave their pubic hair because feminism has made men afraid of women with hair, why do male performers in pornography also shave their crotches?  Anyone who knew the first thing about cinema would know the answer to that question, which is that shaving (for both sexes) enhances visibility, and visibility is what film, especially pornographic film, is all about.

Today on the Dish, we collected reax to the death of Kim Jong-Il, wondered if the tears were fake, and summoned the ronery song. We delved into the psychology of dictators, charted the dramatic divergence of North and South Korea, and Jim Pethokoukis flipped out. The Dish memorialized Hitch, virtues cohabit with sins, and our readers got to know one another (update here). Ron Paul took the lead in Iowa, he's a demographic dream for the GOP, and news pegs obscured campaign coverage. Gingrich fell fast, he went after the "judicial dictatorship," and even the Rasmussenites fear government passivity. 

Preemptive war made a comeback, the power of denial prevailed in Egypt, and Tahrir erupted once more. We checked in on the gay community in Uganda, and Syrian defectors were executed en masse.

The prison population dwindled in the US, the Freakonomics approach is flawed, and our peach fuzz is perfectly evolved. We sized up the ambitions of Andrew Cuomo, higher education met Moneyball, and health care price controls flopped. Biometric IDs keep things honest, girls are catching up with boys in math, and bikes can save us. In our AAA video, Andrew explained why he opposes criminalizing prejudice. 

Tweet of the day here, creepy ad watch here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, our year-end lamest GOP jokes contest here, brave highdeas (including emergency texting) here, and Kim Jong-Il looking at things here. 

— M.A. 

Brad Plumer captions:

At the moment, North Korea’s per capita income is less than 5 percent of the South’s. As the Atlantic Council’s Peter Beck puts it, “Each year the dollar value of South Korea’s GDP expansion equals the entire North Korean economy.”

Nyhan hates how news pegs decide coverage: 

[P]olicy and biography stories are typically written early in campaigns when few voters are paying attention. By the time people start paying attention to the race, those sorts of stories are "old news" and not revisited unless there’s a news peg. As a result, horse race coverage tends to dominate during the late stages of campaigns. That's why negative ads and surrogate attacks can be democratically valuable— at their best, they can force media coverage to focus on a candidate’s weak point and provide a hook for reporters to explain the facts of the issue.

Fremont Center, New York, 9 am