In this handout provided by the FBI, five alleged anarchists (clockwise from top left: Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter, Anthony Hayne, Connor Stevens, and Joshua Stafford) pose for mug shots after being arrested in connection to a plot to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio for political reasons. The suspects face charges including conspiracy and attempting to use explosives to damage property affecting interstate commerce. By FBI via Getty Images.
Here's a statement from Romney's foreign policy spokesman, Ric Grenell, who has been prevented from, er, being a spokesman these past two weeks because of a Christianist campaign:
I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.
But it decidedly was not a non-issue for the base:
The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job.
Why? Grenell – like almost every homosexual in America – favors equal marriage rights for gays. He has indeed blasted Obama for his reticence on this question. He is also quite clearly a movement neo-conservative on a whole variety of issues, especially the area he was selected to be a spokesman for: national security. He was John Bolton's spokesman for Pete's sake. If a Boltonite cannot be allowed to speak about foreign policy because he is gay, is there any place for any gays in the GOP? National Review's Matthew Franck pounced last week:
When the Obama State Department is already moving to elevate the gay-rights agenda to a higher plane than religious freedom in the foreign policy of the United States, it is reasonable to wonder whether Grenell, after taking such a prominent place in the Romney campaign’s foreign-policy shop, would be in line for an influential State posting where he could pursue his passion for that same agenda.
In a subsequent post, Franck went further and abandoned any pretense:
Williamson is quite sure that it is harmless to hire an ardent advocate of same-sex marriage for a prominent place in a campaign pledged to defeat same-sex marriage, because the hireling’s brief runs to matters not directly related to the issue. If he thinks that the gay-rights agenda doesn’t have any bearing on American foreign policy, he’s not paying attention. If he thinks that influence doesn’t run up as well as it does down in the hierarchy of a campaign, that voters are not inclined, with some justice, to regard hiring decisions such as this as an indication of the seriousness of the candidate about such a subject, and that it doesn’t matter whether the campaign is seen to be unequivocal on an issue that moves many millions of voters, then he is not the keen observer of politics I took him for.
(To be fair to NRO, Kevin Williamson was a voice for toleration.)
If opposition to marriage equality is a litmus test for gay inclusion in the Romney campaign and administration, then there will be scarcely a single openly gay person willing to sign up to play any part in it. It has come to this. The GOP will have no gays within it unless they are prepared openly to oppose their own core rights and dignity. Romney has gone from promising to be more pro-gay in the Senate than Ted Kennedy than hanging a lone gay spokesman out to dry and pledging to write into the very constitution that gays are second class citizens.
If you're gay, or your friend, son, daughter, brother, sister, aunt or uncle is gay, you just learned something about what the GOP now is. Do not forget it.
James Bond sure did elicit a lot of Os:
Total count: 193 in 23 films.
Some of the most troubled economies are already full of it:
If building great roads and trains were the route to lasting prosperity, Greece and Spain would be booming. The past 30 years have seen a huge splurge in infrastructure spending, often funded by the EU. The Athens metro is excellent. The AVE fast-trains in Spain are a marvel. But this kind of spending has done very little to change the fundamental problems that now plague both Greece and Spain – in particular, youth unemployment. Worse, in some ways, EU funding for infrastructure has created problems. In Greece, milking the EU for subsidies became an industry in itself: and political connections were a surer route to wealth than entrepreneurial flair.
Labor market reforms are vital. But I don't see why the ECB cannot be a lender of last resort to avoid a depressive cycle.
I had a blessed childhood in some respects. I remember carrying boughs of cherry blossom to adorn our church in honor of the Virgin Mary – along with all the glorious Marian hymns now in such disrepair. And when I got to college, I was one of a handful allowed to go to the top of Magdalen College tower in Oxford to hear the choir sing the summer in at 6 am. The whole city gets out of bed to gather around the tower. It's a truly poignant moment.
Here's a personal video of the experience.
Christopher Ryan wonders after reading Dan Everett's book on an Amazonian language:
The Pirahã language is free of expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I'm sorry, you're welcome, and thank you—utterances that, as Everett puts it, "don't express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect." Rather than a verbal expression of appreciation for a favor or gift, "The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness…" Similarly, Everett says, "They have no words for I'm sorry. They can say, 'I was bad,' or some such, but do so rarely. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions."
Ryan's conclusion:
[W]e're taught from a very young age to, "Say you're sorry!" even when we're not at all sorry for hitting that snot-nosed kid who stole our lunch money. The 6-year-old who learned to apologize on command later has little compunction about stepping up to the microphones to beg forgiveness from God and country ("and my lovely wife, who deserves better") when circumstances require the appearance of contrition. There are times, lots of them, when saying sorry and being sorry are mutually exclusive.
Barbara King's takeaway from Everett's new book, Language: The Cultural Tool:
There's no language gene. There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language. There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.
Beinart predicts one:
Obama has become a cautious, constrained Washington Democrat; Bill Clinton without the demons. The Republicans have nominated Mitt Romney, the guy who made Rick Santorum seem colorful. Romney is delivering a Muzak version of the standard GOP refrain about unshackling capitalism and restoring belief in America. Barack Obama is warning of the Dickensian suffering that Romney’s "severe" conservatism will bring. Obama probably will win, since the GOP is an election or two away from retooling itself for a younger, browner, more female America. It’s going to be dull.
I'm not so sure. Obama wants this to be a choice election, and he has not yet fully defined the choice. Once that happens, you'll see scraps like the current Bin Laden one come up repeatedly. Obama is not re-running the 2008 campaign; he tried consensus; now, he's trying a fight back against the policies he opposes. I suspect he'll be taking on Romney hard, and vice-versa. I just hope Obama doesn't come off as mean or arrogant, rather than tough and honest. Negative campaigning can be risky for someone whose personal appeal is one of his core strengths.
(Video: a mock Super PAC ad from Obama's WHCD speech)
Friedersdorf talks up the Libertarian duo aiming for the White House:
It's an opportune moment for a libertarian ticket to offer a serious, forceful critique of drug policy, for beyond fortuitous changes in public opinion, there's an incumbent with broken promises and a lackluster record on the issue; and a Republican challenger who is even more of a drug warrior in his avowed positions and such a teetotaller personally that he eschews even caffeine.
Are [former New Mexico governor Gary] Johnson and [California judge Jim] Gray the right team to make this critique? Whatever their shortcomings, they're ideal in this respect: one is an extreme athlete and health nut; the other is a veteran, former prosecutor, and judge who used to be a drug warrior and switched sides based on what he saw in his own courtroom. Can they succeed in injecting the issue into the general election campaign?
There would be no point in reaching for the respirator:
All the oxygen, nitrogen and other stuff in Earth's atmosphere has a whopping combined mass of 5 quadrillion tons, so a falling sky would mean that nearly 10 tons of molecules — roughly the heft of a school bus — would drop on every square meter of Earth's surface. Pancakes, everyone?
To keep things interesting, let's envision a less "crushing" scenario: What if the atmosphere suddenly disappeared — if an exceedingly rare quantum fluctuation caused all the atmospheric particles to unexpectedly jump to the other side of the galaxy, leaving Earth floating in a vacuum?
Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Canada, said three things would kill us: oxygen deprivation, a severe drop in temperature, and exposure to a full dose of UV radiation from the sun, most of which the atmosphere currently blocks. … As all the birds and airborne insects plummeted to the ground around us like rocks, lacking an atmosphere to beat their wings against, and as the world fell eerily mute, lacking the air that normally carries sound, we would all die of oxygen deprivation in less than three minutes, Smil said.
(Photo by Flickr user NebraskaSC)
A reader writes:
Your sense of John McCain's betrayal of the country, the conservative cause, and rational common sense has come to overwhelm your ability to speak about him in any kind of reasonable way. Reducing his service to getting shot down, tortured, and "cracking" is … well, snotty and dismissive. That's not a tone you usually adopt, except for when there's a personal beef there.
McCain chose Sarah Palin, which was cynical and dangerous. He has not done all he could do to bring justice to torturers like those who mangled his own body. He disappointed me as much as any politician out there. But his war record demonstrated that he would refuse release, after years of torture, when he thought it wasn't right to be treated differently from other prisoners.
Do you think he bragged about it? Do you think that means he shouldn't question anyone else touting their record? Maybe so. But don't get so pissy about a foolish quote from a man you dislike that you discount the truly incredible testament to perseverence and, yes, character that his war record represents. I'd rather vote for the man who refuses special treatment in hellish conditions, than the "war hero" who "killed someone." I don't know if I have the strength to do either, but I guarantee you the former is more difficult than the latter.
I apologize for those splenetic words. I do not apologize for the massive irony that a man who has relentlessly bragged, exploited and milked his own military service and heroism now has the chutzpah to argue that "heroes don't brag". He's been bragging for decades. He hired Mark Salter to elaborate and decorate the brag to novelistic proportions.
And one small thing: McCain acquiesced to the Military Commissions Act in 2006 which allowed the CIA to do to others what the Vietnamese once did to him. For a victim of torture to knowingly allow others to be tortured to advance his own career in the Republican party before a mid-term election is not just a mistake. It's a loss of soul.
The Dish 