Author: Andrew Sullivan

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Nate Silver explains it:

[W]hen liberals are scoring Mr. Obama during 2012, his having achieved the goal of repealing DADT would help to reassure liberals that there had indeed been progress made. In some ways, it would represent a nice compliment to health care: one piece of economic reform, one piece of social reform. Both policies, also, proved problematic for Bill Clinton during the first two years of his term, and so achieving them would perhaps provide liberals with some sense of closure.

We have entered a new age in terms of government information and transparency. Governments are now attempting to scapegoat Asssange or pressure companies like Mastercard to squelch the new asymmetry. They remind me of those running the record industry a decade ago or the newspaper industry five years ago or the magazine industry now. Barret Brown observes the radicalism of the change:

There is no period in human history that matches the years between 1990 and 2010 in the degree to which the common terminology used at end would have been unrecognizable to those who lived at its beginning… [T]he central dynamic by which each of several billion people may now communicate and collaborate with any of those other several billion people has already been established, and all that remains now is for more of those people to realize the implications of this and then act upon those implications, as they have already begun to do, even if the media at large is still having trouble with the former.

The Emperor still has clothes. He just has no control over whether and when they are removed.

"Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions," – Glenn Greenwald.

I have to say I don't know what to say. I suppose I should hereby retire from blogging. Maybe my amygdala is just completely side-swiped by the mustache or the smile to feel the revulsion at the narcissism others feel. Or maybe Franco is able to show us that he's mocking narcissism, while obviously seducing himself. Anyway, I can't stop myself watching it, in the same way a lot of people can't stop watching Franco wherever he appears.

The idea of a video-photo spread for the NYT magazine remains, however, an inspired piece of new media. Congrats.

Daniel Larison says I'm wrong to call Mitch McConnell  the "most rightwing of Republicans." What about DeMint?

While I can understand opposing the deal, DeMint and the Club are in error in their resistance to the deal when they insist that all of the tax cuts be made permanent. The absolutist rejection of the estate tax compromise is also foolish, since the 35%/$5 million exemption arrangement is probably the best that can be had. For the sake of adding hundreds of billions more in debt, DeMint appears to be prepared to try to kill the deal. It’s important to note here that if DeMint succeeds, it will be in the name of even greater fiscal irresponsibility.

It’s Kelly Slater, and according to Matt Feeney he ought to get more love:

Given surfing’s vague and powerful evocation of things we wish we could do but can’t, Slater’s utterly transcendent status in that sport should offer him somewhere higher to transcend to. If there existed some minimal template for appreciating his brand of excellence, moments like his Teahupoo contortion (or this perfect 10 from South Africa, my personal favorite, or the insane barrels in the second half of this video) should muscle out the occasional dunk on SportsCenter, should bring Slater onstage at the idiotic ESPYs, should make Slateresque an adjective for people besides (so far) me. Our sports world—which for a while took seriously the idea that the world’s greatest athlete was a golfer—would be more interesting if it did.

So why doesn’t it?

Most of it is surely that contest surfing sucks on television and will never fit into a multisport mega-event like the Olympics. Unfortunately, surfing’s TV problem is bound up with Slater’s coolest attribute—his spooky dominance in a vast range of unreliable conditions: big waves and small waves, slow rampy walls and slabby, spitting barrels, perfect glassy peaks and windblown junk. (Watch him grind like a teenage skater on this dribbler.) Kelly’s not only the “king” athletically, he’s also the acknowledged master of wave magic. He seems to conduct waves when he’s on them and, if you believe his exasperated opponents, he has the power to summon them from the ocean itself when he needs one good one to win a heat.

I'm with Bill Galston on this: the key to Obama winning the next two years politically (he's already won them economically by getting a GOP-backed second stimulus) is to use his next key speech to make one clear commitment: he will do everything in his power to end the long-term debt by the end of his first term. He will do it in part by sweeping tax reform and simplification – the sugar that will make the medicine go down. He should eschew any classic SOTU laundry list and go for the central, simple message, repeated again and again and again with as much insistence and regularity as "hope and change" in 2008. The gist:

"We will not pass on this debt to our children. Not on my watch. Not at this time. We must get past partisan bickering and solve this once and for all. I've proved I can work out a compromise with the Republicans. We now need an even grander compromise – to end the debt within a generation, restore long-term confidence, and simplify and reform our insane tax code."

It writes itself.

Peter Beinart measures the fallout from various nations recognizing Palestinian statehood:

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of Israelis applying annually for permanent residence in the United States doubled between 2000 and 2009. Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak both have adult children living here. And it's not just the U.S. An Israeli friend recently told me that there are so many young Israelis in Berlin (Berlin!) that when he goes there and runs into acquaintances from Tel Aviv, they don't even act surprised.

These young, cosmopolitan, educated Israelis are exactly the ones you can't afford to lose. They're leaving for graduate school, and jobs in finance and high-tech and a thousand other things, but they're also leaving because they want to be connected to the world, not only economically, but politically and culturally as well. And they're not thrilled about spending a month a year as army reservists manning checkpoints in the West Bank. Offer them a future of mounting international isolation and no prospect for peace, and watch them flood into Williamsburg and West L.A.

Maybe you can console yourselves that their ultra-Orthodox counterparts—who don't work, don't serve in the army, have an average of seven children per family, and drain the government coffers dry—aren't going anywhere. Luckily for you, one of their parties, Shas, controls the ministry charged with fighting the fires that last week ravaged Israel. Shas' spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, helpfully volunteered that the fires were God's punishment for Israelis who didn't keep the Sabbath.

 

Hugh Hewitt, appalled at any cooperation between the GOP and Obama, hyperventilates about Tea Party opposition to President Obama's deal on tax cuts and unemployment benefits:

On my program today Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake announced he is a "hard no" on "the deal," and Senator Tom Coburn has not yet decided how he will vote though he sounded very skeptical to me … TeaPartyPatriots.org founder Mark Meckler announced his organizations complete opposition to "the deal," as well as its opinion that voting for "the deal" breaks the Pledge to America.  The members of TeaPartyPatriots.org, believed by many to be the most representative of the Tea party movement's umbrella organizations, are contacting the current and future members of the D.C. GOP to express their dismay with the terms of the deal as well as with the manner in which it was negotiated and the new House committee chairs. 

I read both the congressman and the senator the language of the House GOP's "Pledge To America," and both did not attempt to argue that "the deal" fulfilled those specifics (listed in the post below) but instead argued that the Pledge wasn't binding until the 112th Congress arrived. Perhaps, but invoking a technicality to justify abandoning the terms of the Pledge, given in September, is not the way to build confidence in the new House majority.