Today on the Dish, Andrew illustrated Romney’s rock and a hard place on the individual mandate, among other things, and scrutinized his silence on foreign policy. The debate over healthcare raged on, as readers weighed in on Andrew’s commentary from yesterday and Douthat celebrated Justice Roberts' "umpiring" of healthcare policy – but the resounding absence of a GOP healthcare plan suggests a lack of interest in playing ball. And in his new book, Scalia turns himself inside out.
Ad spending will hit $15 million this week, with the Battle of Bain barreling on. Obama’s drug policy suggests the independent power of the DEA, while in Mexico, the ostensible war on drugs has given rise to an explosion in organized crime. Elsewhere in the world, things look bad in Afghanistan and ever-more horrific in Syria. On the environmental front, Frum made the case for burying power lines to reduce power outages and we highlighted the fault of urban planning in keeping America car-dependent – something the NYC-LA divide illustrates well through LA’s abundance of "pod people."
In political history, Ask Veronique broke down the Keynesian nature of the Bush tax cuts, Eric Rauchway refreshed the debate between FDR and SCOTUS over the New Deal, and a 1995 Charlie Rose interview featured a bright, young, beardless thing framing the arguments for same-sex marriage and DADT-repeal that would help define those issues to the present day. In a birthday tribute to Rousseau, Terry Eagleton wondered what he would make of our "selfish age," and, on that theme, a critique of the single life homed in on its embrace of selfishness.
Readers praised Anderson’s coming out and asked Andrew to try the email treatment on other celebrities. Meanwhile, this post explored the moral ambiguity of snitching-for-pay, readers added nuance to the male genital mutilation debate, and new data gave the atheism stigma some quantifiable definition. The absence of a synonym for synonym threatened to explode heads, while the origins of male stripping was, er, uncovered. In the annals of "ew," we explored a bloody sea creature that looks like a rock and and highlighted a beer made from beards. (Also in this category might fall Andrew’s flashback to a hunt for non-crusty black socks during his Oxford final exams.) VFYW contest here, VFYW here, MHB here, and our Face of the Day memorialized the late Andy Griffith.
— G.G.
(Photo: Jean Carson as Daphne, Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor and Joyce Jameson as Skippy in the episode 'The Fun Girls'. Image dated February 24, 1964. By CBS via Getty Images.)
The Dish 