Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Can you help me with this? The most hawkish, Christianist Republicans support Israel militarily. And they're the same people who are against DADT being repealed. Meanwhile, gays can serve openly in the Israeli military. So we're sending however many gazillion dollars to a country whose military (a) seems to be generally considered one of the better functioning in the known universe and (b) has gays/lesbians serving side-by-side with heterosexuals. Do I have that right?

I imagine you've covered this before, but I wanted to make sure. I'd love to hear one of the pro-DADT "pro-Israel" militarists explain themselves on this.

They don't because they can't.

James Joyner explains the charges:

[Julian] Assange had consensual sex with two women, unbeknownst to one another, who were friends. They had hurt feelings afterwards and confided to a female police officer that Assange had engaged in sex with one of them without a condom, having worn a condom the night before. In the case of the second woman, Assange’s condom broke but he continued to climax, anyway.

Jill Filipovic, a lawyer at Feministe, provides context:

Withdrawal of consent should be grounds for a rape charge (and it is, in Sweden) — if you consent to having sex with someone and part of the way through you say to stop and the person you’re having sex with continues to have sex with you against your wishes, that’s rape. That may not sound entirely familiar to Americans, since the United States has relatively regressive rape laws; in most states, there’s a requirement of force in order to prove rape, rather than just demonstrating lack of consent. Consent is more often used as a defense to a rape charge, and it’s hard to convict someone of rape based solely on non-consent. Some states, like New York, have rape laws on the books which include “no means no” provisions for intercourse — basically, if a reasonable person would have understood that the sex was not consensual, then that’s rape. It seems obvious enough, but those laws are not used nearly as often as forcible-rape laws; they aren’t on the books in many states, and they’re difficult to enforce even where they are.

Jill also sparked a vigorous debate in the comments section over the sexual politics surrounding the case and the media's reaction to it. Amy Davidson's two cents:

The amount I value WikiLeaks’s work (quite a bit) is not a factor in what I may come to think, when all is said and done, about the credibility of two women in Sweden—they are separate issues. Assange has denied the charges, and the story is, to say the least, complicated. But I’ll confess that I bristle (perhaps reflexively) when people talk about “real” as opposed to supposedly non-real rape. One’s politics, film-making abilities, or the sports team one plays for should not be a factor in deciding if one is innocent of sex-crime charges. Or in deciding that one is guilty: If the Swedish prosecution is distorted by politics or American pressure, that is very bad, too. But Assange doesn’t get a pass just for being Assange.

The Guardian is live-blogging. Money quote in reaction to Palin's latest tweet:

To be fair, Palin did say that Assange should be "pursued with the same urgency" as [Osama bin Laden]. So if she meant Assange should be "fruitlessly hunted for nine years without success," then yes, Assange did misquote her.

Ahem:

Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows.

The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal investigation via credit card companies, rental car agencies, calling cards, and even grocery store loyalty programs. The revelation sheds a little more light on the Justice Department’s increasing power and willingness to surveil Americans with little to no judicial or Congressional oversight.

A digital artist's ad reel from 2010, set to Empire Of The Sun's "Standing on the Shore":

Plenty™ Reel 2010 from Plenty on Vimeo.

Scott Horton interviews C. Bradley Thompson about his book, Neoconservatism: An Obiturary for an Idea. Thompson:

The single greatest threat to America, according to many neocons, is not communism or radical Islam but nihilism, and they see nihilism as the inevitable outcome of Enlightenment liberalism and America’s founding principles. The real problem with liberal-capitalist society for Strauss, Kristol, and Brooks is that individuals do not sacrifice themselves to anything higher than themselves and their petty self-interest. What America needs, therefore, is a two-step antidote for its cultural malaise: the inculcation of public virtue and the promotion of nationalism. The neocons seek to restore a public philosophy that promotes sacrifice as the great moral ideal and patriotism as the great political ideal.

It's always good to get a sharp cold shower of epistemological conservatism from Jim Manzi. Noah Millman defends pragmatic economics in response. The important thing, it seems to me, is to resist economics' claims to the same level of proof as math or physics. The best economists make no such claims; but laymen sometimes think they do.

Illinois state senator, Ricky Hendon, tells it like it is on civil unions:

A reader writes:

Why is even an age restriction a compelling reason to regulate beer sales?

I grew up in Wisconsin, in the days when the legal drinking age was 18, a restriction seldom or never enforced.  There was some drunkenness among my high school classmates, but mostly supervised by parents, and seldom dangerous.  When I went to college out of state, we Wisconsin folks were the ones drinking responsibly, because we had learned to do it.

Now I live in a large Italian city, in a neighborhood with a lot of bars frequented by young people.  The legal drinking age here is 14, but as weakly enforced as the 18 of my Midwest youth.  Even on weekends, there is never (read NEVER) a drunk kid to be seen.  The streets and bars are crowded with Italians drinking responsibly.  I credit the lack of an enforced drinking age.

In the Wisconsin of my youth, I learned to drink responsibly with my parents at the tavern around the corner.  In the Turin of my middle age, I continue to be surrounded by responsible people for whom drinking is a natural part of life.  Ah, la vita è bella!

Another writes:

Colorado liquor laws are, indeed, a bit crazy, but it's ironic that the tavern owner is complaining about these rules being the product of a "nanny state" when a big part of the reason that the rules are as they are is because liquor stores and taverns and breweries (which have a lot of pull in the state) have successfully lobbied for the 3.2% delineation that restricts supermarkets and convenience stores from selling anything heavier (much to their chagrin), with the compromise being that only the markets can sell the weaker brews.

The tavern owners basically want to have their cake and to eat it, too – by restricting supermarkets to weak alcohol that lowers competition while constantly skirting those same rules so that they can cut into the supermarket's business. So it's a little hard for me to feel too much sympathy when they get hoisted by their own legislative petards.

Another:

There is a lot of background omitted in the DP article you linked to. Colorado has a long history of law around 3.2 beer, lots of it ultimately tied up around economics and business competition as around puritanical impulses toward blue laws. It was legal for 18 to 21 yo's to drink 3.2 beer for a period after the drinking age was raised. You could consume 3.2 beer in public places like parks (still can in a lot of places). Liquor stores were not allowed to be open on Sunday, groceries stores and gas stations could only sell 3.2 beer but they could do it on Sundays. (Incidentally of course, in the past 20 years Colorado has become a microbrew mecca.)

What upset the applecart was the change in law two years ago that allowed liquor to open on Sunday (a glorious day, the first Sunday of July 2009 was). An amendment to that legislation would have also allowed groceries and convenience stores to sell regular beer. That was struck down, and the 3.2 franchise, such as it is/was in the new world, was continued. So this is really just a turf protection move, the grocery stores and gas stations saying, hey, you wanted it this way…

A glimpse into the early work of Calvin and Hobbes' Bill Watterson – and the general logic of the Sullivan-Tone household. The back-scratch is what nails it.

Lyle Denniston provides highlights:

If there was a surprise, it was that the one judge on the three-judge panel known as a conservative, Circuit Judge N. Randy Smith, found a possibly fatal flaw in logic in support of the ban.  What is rational, Judge Smith asked, about a state giving gay and lesbian couples complete equality in the legal rights and benefits that married couples have, including the right to raise children, but then to deny them marriage itself.  The state’s voters, he said, had just opted to omit a single word, “marriage,”  and how is that rational?  He seemed skeptical of the response by Charles Cooper, Proposition 8 lawyer, that “it is a word that is essentially the institution; you cannot separate the two.”

But, however Judge Smith might vote on the constitutionality of the ban, if the panel gets to that, it seemed clear that his two colleagues, Circuit Judges Stephen R. Reinhardt and Michael Daly Hawkins would nullify the ban, provided they could do so without having to write a sweeping opinion that established a national constitutional right of gay marriage.  At most, they seemed inclined only to rule that California had first allowed a right to same-sex marriage, then took it away by singling out gays and lesbians for the loss of an existing right — a targeted exclusion that could only have resulted from bias.