Author: Andrew Sullivan

“I haven’t agreed so strongly with a statement from Lieberman’s office in quite a while,” – Steve Benen, agreeing with Senator Lieberman’s proposal that the Senate stay in session past December 17 to end DADT. Amen.

A reader writes:

My submission for the contest is "This One's for the Children." Check out the video for its gaudy display of righteous multi-culturalism. NKOTB is pretty serious about letting us know that this one's not just for American children, but all the children of the world. The song's lyrical gem: "Many people are happy / many people are sad."

(Full disclosure: As a kid, I definitely bought the complete NKOTB Christmas album from which this came.)

Another writes:

"This is a very serious message.  So, all of you, please listen."  Checkmate.

Apollo explains why a foreign force is never going to overrun the United States:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

So let's get this straight: at a moment when most acknowledge a fiscal crisis that requires sacrifice on both sides, such sacrifice means the GOP gets its budget-busting non-sunsetting of Bush's tax cuts, and the Dems get to extend unemployment insurance. The former is far more damaging than the latter to fiscal sanity, but both add to spending after an election in which the public allegedly stood up as one to demand fiscal restraint.

Here's why it makes sense for Obama. It certainly helps goose the economy for the next two years, which has got to help him win re-election; if done quickly, it can create room for the new START and repeal of DADT in this Congress; in the next Congress, Obama can focus on long-term debt reduction in the State of the Union, without being mau-maued on tax hikes.

I don't see this as surrender. I see this as Obama's cold-blooded pragmatism. Why is this still news?

(Photo: Andrew Harar/Getty.)

Ross claims the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission was a worthwhile exercise despite its failure to produce viable legislation:

The deficit debate has suffered, for some time, from a debilitating light-to-heat ratio. Liberals have accused conservatives of being irresponsible while turning evasive about the massive tax increases that their own vision requires. Conservatives have attacked liberals for being spendthrift without proposing any serious spending reductions of their own. Both sides have talked around the elephant in the room that is entitlement spending.

On all of these fronts, the debate over Simpson-Bowles — and the raft of alternative proposals the deficit commission’s efforts have summoned up — has been helpful, clarifying, and even occasionally surprising. Now we know that liberals can wax just as intransigent about entitlements as conservatives can about tax increases. We know what the left really wants, and what the anti-tax lobby would prefer. We know what Nancy Pelosi won’t stand for, and where Tom Coburn and Dick Durbin will consider compromising. We know where Paul Ryan and Alice Rivlin can find common ground. And we know that it’s possible for prominent right-wingers, Coburn now included, to stand up to Grover “better to risk a debt crisis than end a tax subsidy” Norquist, which is inherently good news for both conservatism and the country.

Yes, but … as long as the GOP is controlled by Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck and Levin, Ross's admirable hopes seem almost poignant. But they do offer the president a valuable opportunity to define himself as the anti-debt president, who, as with health insurance, refused to punt to his successor what could be tackled urgently today.

Gallup delivers some happier economic data:

In sharp contrast to the government's report Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate increased to 9.8% in November from 9.6% in October, unemployment as measured by Gallup declined to 8.8% in November. This is down from 9.4% in October and 10.1% in September. Because Gallup's U.S. unemployment rate is not seasonally adjusted, some of the late October and November improvement is likely the result of retailers hiring for the Christmas holidays. The demographic data reveal that younger Americans and those with some college education are among those now finding work.

Still, this unadjusted measure may be a better indication of actual labor market conditions than the seasonally adjusted measure reported by the government. Seasonal adjustments are useful for economists to attempt to filter out seasonal effects from underlying data trends, but they are hard to calculate when the U.S. economy has been depressed for about three years.

Brian Beutler knocks down a GOP canard designed to prevent repeal of DADT.

Bernstein draws a distinction between the parties:

[M]ost Democratic constituency groups have real policy demands, and that they're very eager to have those demands fulfilled.  My sense is that a lot of Republican constituency groups have more symbolic demands.

Therefore, at the end of the day, a lot of Republican constituency groups are willing to go along with an all-or-nothing strategy on most issues, while Democratic constituency groups are perfectly willing to bargain for as much as they can get.  Look: if you want universal health care, you are probably willing to settle for moving from 80% coverage to 95% coverage (or whatever the actual numbers are).  If you believe that government involvement in health care is unconstitutional, or immoral, or whatever, then there's not much to bargain over. 

He acknowledges that this is "a generalization that doesn't always hold, and probably an exaggeration" but he still thinks "it accounts for some key differences." But another way of looking at this is that the GOP is a theological movement, while the Democrats are a political one. Theology is about reiterating timeless truths – tax cuts are always good, regardless of circumstances, data, math, economics, etc; America can do no wrong, even if we do; anything gay is bad; spending must be stopped, except for Medicare, defense and that bridge down the street; climate change is untrue because liberals accept it, etc. Politics is about solving immediate problems while bribing your supporters.

When you look at it this way, you see the difficulty in compromising. How does the Pope compromise with an accountant? Until one side ceases to be grounded in magical/theological thinking, it's theater.

The Urbanophile notes that the density of people with college degrees increased fastest in New York County over the last 10 years – and shares a staggering statistic:

Manhattan increased its density of people with college degrees by 7,500 people per square mile in the last decade. That’s just the increase in density of just people with college degrees. That’s more than the total population density of most cities in the United States.

Colorado is poised to prevent its bars from selling brew that is too low in alcohol. Aside from an age restriction, is there any compelling reason to regulate beer sales at all?