Alexis Madrigal captions this bar graph from a Pew study:
[T]he average person over the age of 75 on Facebook has 42 friends. That may be the smallest number of any age cohort, but it's certainly not nothing. Previous research found that people in their mid-70s and up were the fastest growing group of social media adopters in 2010. Now, more than 16 percent of people in that bracket are cruising Facebook and other social networks.
The far right, says Jamelle Bouie:
Romney is running for president as a right-wing Republican with right-wing ideas, and it is absurd to think that he would suddenly revert to the Mitt who governed Massachusetts. Even if he wanted to, he would first have to contend with a conservative movement that sees itself as the dominant partner in this relationship.
Scott Galupo counters:
How would the GOP, as a whole, maintain enough popularity to keep its grip on the White House and Congress? Looked at this way, Bouie’s vision of conservatives forcing Romney to impose an unpopular agenda of deep spending cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy seems farfetched. The more likely scenario is that Romney and a Republican-led Congress are going to do everything in their power to stay in power.
Edward Hugh examines Spain's economic troubles at length. A taste:
I think austerity and why it is necessary is largely misunderstood in Spain. No one likes pain, and it is nice to think that there is a way out of all this that is relatively painless. The fact that the insistence on austerity comes from Germany adds to the problem, since it only serves to highlight a religious fault line that has long divided Europe.
A reader writes:
When Friedersdorf and Wilkinson
piece of writing that attempts to achieve understanding – as a form. Our culture has an overabundance of professional arguers: people with opinions firmly in place who set out to convert us to their way of thinking (or, more often the case, to increase our certainty in the way we already think).
What we don't have much of are writers who allow us to see their own uncertainty and who invite us to think along with them. Montaigne says it best:
I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in.
Friedersdorf and Wilkinson are great writers and journalists, but they aren't essayists. They write not to discover what they think, but with their ideas already firmly in place. Is there anything wrong with this? No, but I don't need to turn to them to find out what they think about the latest political development, because I already know what they think, and so do they.
Having read your blog for several years, I have a general sense of how your mind works, but I can never guess how it will express itself on any particular issue or incident. That's what makes reading the Dish interesting.
My essay, "Why I Blog", might be helpful here. Another writes:
Why is the burden on you to complain more about Obama’s failings rather than on Friedersdorf to acknowledge any of the president’s positive achievements?
You mention the president’s failings far more than I’ve ever seen him acknowledge the president’s successes. These cats are projecting. As a member of the middle class, it means the world to me that you and Bill Maher (and only you and Bill Maher in my observation) notice that the president’s policies save middle classers like me hundreds of dollars a month despite the fact that – gasp! – the military still exists! If your flaw is detailing your responses to the Obama presidency in a human way, your critics’ flaw is ignoring how the Obama presidency affects the 100 million people in the country like me that make $30,000 dollars a year or less.
Your comments imply that your critics are not blogging with their all like you are. I agree with this implication.
A rhesus macaque eats watermelon, provided by zookeepers to help the monkeys deal with hot summer temperatures, at the Kamla Nehru Zoological Gardens in Ahmedabad, India on May 18, 2012. The rhesus monkey (macaca mulatta) is native to northern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan and southern China. By Sam Panthaky/AFP/GettyImage.
Timothy Jost runs down the grotesque inefficiencies in our "neither public nor private" healthcare system. The clearest next step in reform – getting rid of fee for service:
Our problems are exacerbated because, as the Bipartisan Policy Center's Julie Barnes pointed out in a March 2012 "America the Fixable" essay, we pay for most health care on a fee-for-service basis. This creates incentives for physicians to provide as many discrete services as possible to maximize payment (a tendency often justified by an asserted fear of malpractice litigation). Moreover, hospitals, laboratories, imaging facilities, and drug companies are often eager to reward physicians for ordering their products and services. Attempts by the fee-for-service Medicare program to control the amount or payments physicians receive to a "sustainable growth rate" were stymied as utilization of services grew rapidly and intensive lobbying defeated attempts to reduce prices accordingly.
It's best to attempt this before you start drinking:
Reid Wilson suggests that this will be a "classic mobilization election," where base turnout matters more than persuading the "undecided middle." Chait analyzes:
This would explain why Obama’s campaign has devoted the vast bulk of its resources to turning out its base. It would also explain why polls have produced such divergent shares of the nonwhite vote. The pollsters’ challenge is to guess how many nonwhite voters will show up. Obama’s is twofold: First to make sure it has found them, and then get them to do it.
Lisbon, Portugal, 1.51 pm
According to a proposed revision of the mental health diagnostic guide, that might be an accurate description of college students. Russell Blackford rages:
I get fed up with the constant attempts to treat people's legitimate choices as pathological … A diagnostic manual of mental disorders can end up being used to do an end run around people's political freedom – all sorts of behavioral choices could be stigmatised as revealing mental disorder. It's not as if we lack historical experience with this. Think of how homosexuality has been treated in the past, not to mention any interest in sex on the part of women. If we're not careful, "mental disorders" can become, as they sometimes have become in the past, mere political constructs.
The Dish 
