Author: Andrew Sullivan

Steve Chapman recounts his personal journey from homophobe to gay rights advocate:

It's easy to be homophobic if you don't know anyone who is openly gay. But that's true of fewer and fewer people. As gays have become forthright about their sexual orientation, the rest of us have had to assess them not as gays, but as whole human beings… In 1985, only 22 percent of us said they had a friend who was gay. By 2008, 66 percent did. And attitudes have followed. In 1982, only 34 percent of Americans regarded "homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle." Today, it's 57 percent.

Familiarity, in this case, doesn't breed contempt. It breeds acceptance. Heterosexuals have always lived and worked with gays, but without knowing it. Once they find out, most learn they have more similarities than differences. If the military's ban on open gays is repealed, a lot of people in uniform will soon come to the same realization. Many already have.

 

Some like the winter weather more than others:

Larison sees potential:

[Gary Johnson] isn’t just badly positioned [to run for the GOP's presidential nomination]–he’s horribly positioned, but there’s a chance that he might run anyway and have a salutary effect on the primary contest. His candidacy would force debates on civil liberties, foreign policy, and the drug war, which are all subjects where most of the other likely candidates hold misguided and sometimes appalling views. The rest of the field will all be officially pro-life*, but perfectly content with the idea of starting wars, detaining suspects indefinitely, and perhaps even torturing detainees when “necessary.” The contrast would be useful and instructive, and it might even lead some pro-life voters to insist that their leaders show more consistent respect for human life. All right, that last part is pretty unlikely, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

Larison throws in that asterisk on "pro-life" because Johnson is pro-choice but advocates overturning Roe v. Wade because he thinks abortion should be a state issue.

Clive Thompson explains the hot new app, and why he's addicted to it:

…it's a brilliantly simple concept: You snap pictures on your phone, apply one of a dozen filters that work various forms of retro-izing algorithmic hoodoo — remaking them Lomo style, for example — after which you upload the pictures to your stream. Then it's off to the social-media races! You subscribe to other folks' photo streams, comment or "like" other photos, check out the trending "popular" photos, etcetera etcetera. I was instantly, and horribly, hooked. Sure, I have lots of apps on my phone, and I check some of them very, very often. But my Instagram behavior verges into the realm of what one could more properly call tweaking. Apparently I'm not alone; after only one month in business, Instagram has already amassed well over 500,000 users. But why? What's the allure?

As many have noted, some of Instagram's appeal is that it's so perfectly simple, with none of crufty bells and whistles that plague, say, Facebook. Instagram is simpler even than Flickr: As Faruk Ates pointed out, you're not trying to collect and curate photos. You just see something and — boom — in about 15 seconds you've shared it with everyone in your network. And while, sure, there are photos on Facebook and Twitter, it turns out there's something weirdly hypnotic about following the lives of your friends through nothing but images. Given that Instagram's user base is very international (for now, anyway), the most-popular page of photos is like a constellation of slices-'o-life from around the globe. About half the people I'm following are total strangers in Russia, Korea and Argentina who take strikingly cool pictures.

Leonhardt gives three possibilities:

1. Mr. Obama and his Republican opponent in 2012 both campaign on the issue, but nothing happens before the election. One party wins a resounding enough victory that it gets its way after the election.

2. Nothing happens before the 2012 election. Mr. Obama wins re-election, but Republicans retain the House and maybe even take the Senate. The two parties then engage in the showdown many liberals wanted this time around, in which Mr. Obama refuses to sign any extension that includes the high-end tax cuts. Everyone’s taxes rise in 2013. They remain higher — helping reduce the deficit — or one party eventually stands down.

3. Congress and the White House manage to agree on an overhaul of the whole tax code before 2013, as various deficit panels have urged. Rates fall for all taxpayers, while various deductions are eliminated. The Bush tax cuts become an anachronism.

I’m guessing that Option 3 is the least likely.

It may already exist:

Nature has had millions of years to come up with perfect natural packaging solutions — brilliant designs made from elements as simple as water, sun and nutrients that keep liquids wet, protect cargo during transportation, and prevent mold or insects from getting in. The purpose of our Packaging the Future series is to highlight how we can use nature’s examples to make low-impact designs for better packaging, and so far I’ve focused more on the pipe-dream than the practical. This week is different; banana leaves are a packaging solution that has existed for thousands of years, still exists today, and that could benefit the environment by simply expanding their use to new areas.

(Photo: Madhawa Habarakada, whose slideshow can be viewed here.)

Jacob Sullum summarizes the good news:

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the FDA may not ban electronic cigarettes as an unapproved "drug/device combination." The appeals court agreed with U.S. District Judge Richard Leon that the battery-powered e-cigarettes, which generate a smoke-free vapor containing nicotine derived from tobacco, are properly regulated as tobacco products. That means the FDA may regulate the marketing of e-cigarettes under the authority granted by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act but may not treat them like a pharmaceutical product subject to strict clinical testing requirements (a trick it once tried with conventional cigarettes, only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court). The ruling is a victory not just for the companies that brought it, NJOY and Smoking Everywhere, but for smokers who use their products as replacements for ordinary cigarettes, which are far more hazardous.

 

Larison frames the GOP’s recent behavior:

One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” …Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now.

The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.

Brian Beutler explains the Republicans' dilemma:

How is it that the conservative movement spent two years characterizing Barack Obama as a socialislamokenyan just to the right of Stalin, turning him into a figure so noxious to the GOP base that Republicans only negotiated with him at their peril… and then suddenly, a month after the election, Republican leaders sit down with his administration, and hash out a tax plan and everyone from Olympia Snowe to Mitch McConnell to Paul Ryan walk away celebrating. It doesn't make sense. Yes, the plan is, on the merits, very friendly to Republican interests, and presages an election year tax fight Republicans seem itching to have. But it's still the Obama tax cut compromise.

That's why I think this development could be so portentous.

Yes, yes and yes.

The most powerul aspect of this entire deal is how it has delivered a body-blow to the FNC/Limbaugh/RNC notion that Obama is an enemy and an alien and a threat. Instead, he's now the architect of a deal with that most rightwing of Republicans, Mitch McConnell, a deal that legitimizes Obama on the right with consequences McConnell probably hasn't completely absorbed yet. Maybe this was an inevitable consequence of the GOP assuming some responsibility in running the country. But it has pricked that balloon of demonization that has given much of the right its energy these past two years.

Meep, meep.