Month: January 2013

A reader writes:

Check out the attribution to “Andy Sullivan” in Google search results. An interesting sort of meta-doppleganger going on when that post about your basketball Googleganger is “authored” by your other Googleganger.

That “Andy Sullivan” just started appearing in Google searches this week. Eerie. It seems to have something to do with my Google Plus account. The Dish team is investigating where this pleasant looking fellow came from.

Jacob Sullum summarizes a new public opinion poll (pdf) on cannabis:

Opposition to federal interference was even stronger than support for legalization. While 47 percent favored “legalizing marijuana for recreational use” and 53 percent said “the government should treat marijuana the same as alcohol,” 68 percent said the feds should leave state-legal growers alone and 64 percent said the same about state-legal sellers. These results indicate that some people who oppose marijuana legalization nevertheless believe the choice should be left to the states, as a consistent federalist would. Reflecting that tendency, most Republicans and self-identified conservatives supported marijuana prohibition, but most also said the federal government should not try to impose that policy on Colorado and Washington.

E. D. Hirsch believes that increasing vocabularies is the key:

Because vocabulary is a plant of slow growth, no quick fix to American education is possible. That fact accounts for many of the disappointments of current education-reform movements. For example, the founders of the KIPP charter schools, which have greatly helped disadvantaged children, recently expressed concern that only 30 percent of their graduates had managed to stay in college and gain a degree. But note that KIPP schools typically start in fifth or sixth grade, and while KIPP’s annual reports show that their students achieve high scores in math, they score significantly lower in reading. I interpret those facts to signify that middle school is too late to rectify disadvantaged students’ deficits of vocabulary and knowledge. Word-learning is just too slow a process to close those initial gaps in time for college. The work of systematic knowledge- and word-building has to begin earlier.

He advocates for “better preschools, run along the French lines; classroom instruction based on domain immersion; and a specific, cumulative curriculum sequence across the grades, starting in preschool.” Jacobs thinks Hirsch is often miscategorized as a conservative.

Hirsch has always been a committed political liberal: he has consistently stated that he wants a stronger educational system in order to address inequality and give the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised a better chance to succeed in American society.

That’s Butters to Hagel on the power of the Greater Israel Lobby:

Hagel completes the Kabuki dance. Any Senator who has refused to make military aid contingent on stopping the illegal West Bank settlements has been intimidated into doing a dumb thing – for this country and for Israel. But you cannot say that in public in Washington. And have your nomination survive.

On the broader question, I’m struck by the total embrace of neoconservatism on the GOP side even after Iraq; and by the really low-key, low-impact, risk-averse, underwhelming testimony from Hagel.

A reader notes:

Watching bits and pieces of the hearing on the web. Looks like a lot of angry old men really pissed off that anyone would question the wisdom of the Iraq war. Which demonstrates something: this was the biggest foreign policy mistake of modern US history, yet we had an institutional failure of accountability for it. This hearing is, it would seem, our sole accountability moment… but Hagel doesn’t quite seem up to the task.

No, he doesn’t. But I suspect that’s the point.

The revenue graphs we’ve shown so far include the huge burst of subscriptions at the time of the announcement, and a much lower line since. But if you chart donations from January 8 till today (excluding the big bang), you see that pre-subscriptions (become a member here!) have actually been gaining a little before the meter arrives on Monday (inshallah):

We have absolutely no idea what will happen when the meter comes into force next week. But we will keep you posted. Gross revenue as of now: $511,000.

“I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers,” – Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, September 13th, 2008.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the institution of marriage was a direct response to the unique tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended offspring … Only opposite-sex relationships have the tendency to produce children without such advance planning (indeed, especially without advance planning),” – Paul Clement, January 22, 2013, making the Republican House’s argument for keeping civil marriage exclusively for heterosexuals.

I’d say you can’t make this shit up, but Tina Fey actually did!

A reader writes:

As a father of two Eagle Scouts, with a third son on his way, and as the token liberal in my Scout troop, I would like to temper the enthusiasm of the recent announcements by the BSA. The key is not to forget who the “local sponsoring organizations” are. The largest sponsor is the Mormon church, but if taken collectively, Catholic parishes are almost as large. All I can think is that this will generate noise but not much progress at ground level. However, while I am happy for the scouting professional who wrote in and others like him who can proudly continue their service, free of shame, I plan on continuing having to explain (to otherwise fairly bright people) the difference between homosexuals and pedophiles.

Another:

Thank you for staying on this story. It means a lot in our house. Dad was an Eagle Scout, and I as a Girl Scout have my Leadership Award. I couldn’t wait to get my son into Scouts to continue the family tradition, and so that he could learn lots of great skills and gain confidence. (He says just wearing the uniform makes him stand up straighter. He’s 8.)  But I’m bisexual, and I’m raising my son with tolerance.

We’re lucky, our Cub Scout pack is very open. We not only accept everyone as-is, we leave religion at home too (we talk about the importance of faith, but leave your choice for how you follow that up to each Scout and their families). I love our pack and all the people in it. It breaks my heart that the Boy Scouts are linked to such intolerance – how do I square that with everything else I’m teaching my boy?

So I called the BSA phone line you posted and voiced my opinion. I should add that a live person answered, and asked me very quickly, “Are you for or against the motion?” without saying what the question was. I was a bit taken aback, which way was the right answer? So I said, “I would like you to lift the ban,” and she worked it out. Just a tip for those who call, wouldn’t want one of those Prop 8 situations where “for” is really “against” or something.

Another shifts focus:

There remains the ban on atheists in the Boy Scouts. While being gay is difficult, it is becoming more acceptable.  Atheists/Doubters/Skeptics?  Still in the closet for most of America.

(Photo: A Boy Scout Color Guard stands at attention during a rally for Senator Scott Brown, R-Mass., in Cumnock Hall at the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus in Lowell, Mass. By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

After this embarrassment, Conor piles on to a recent NRO discussion of hip-hop:

Hint: Perhaps the crack epidemic, the unwed-teen birthrate, the dissolution of families, the epidemic of crime, AIDS, and all sorts of other ills besides are better symbols of decline in the West than the subset of rap music that depicts those realities.

It didn’t work, as we all know by now, on its own utopian terms. It did help us get out with less humiliation. But McCain still insists he was right about everything from the get-go:

The good news is that we almost got a real debate on this question. Not exactly, because describing the “surge” as a p.r. exercize to disguise the complete failure of the Iraq War is not something Washington can yet cop to – just as it has great difficulty copping to the fact that the last president was and is a war criminal, under the strictest legal definition of that term.

But Hagel is right: without the switch in Anbar and the exhaustion of ethnic segregation and warfare, those extra troops could have been there indefinitely – and, if McCain had won in 2008, would be there still most likely. What’s striking to me is not McCain’s fury or douchiness (what’s new?) – but his complete assumption that he couldn’t possibly be wrong, his insistence that this debate is already over, and his refusal to allow for the notion that this question may only eventually be resolved by a more distant historical judgment.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, McCain’s views on military intervention have not changed. Hagel’s have. Somehow, I think Hagel is closer to where the country actually is.