Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Of Disney's animated feature films, that list leaves out at least two:

Victory Through Air Power (1943)
Song of the South (1947)

Probably not an oversight.

Joe Posnanski describes a certain kind of Hollywood plot:

How many movies would you say you KNEW the ending before it happened? I'm not talking about you figuring out the ending of Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects or Memento or whatever (good for you, Nostradamus). No, I'm talking about movies that are essentially made with the premise that you will know the ending. You know the killer will die. You know the guy and girl will get together. You know the planet will be saved. You know the home team will win. You know George Clooney will end up in a tuxedo. You know the castaways will not get off the island.

You know because you are supposed to know, the director expects you to know, the producer expects you to know, the actors essentially act like you know … KNOWING is part of the experience. This is why sometimes you will hear people, when asked about a movie, say something like: "Oh, well, it was predictable, but it was still pretty good." There is in some of us a capacity to not only like a predictable movie, but like it BECAUSE it's predictable.

A search engine finds it:

April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful and boring day of the 20th century. Every day something of significance occurs, but nothing remarkable had happened on the said day in 1954, according to experts who inserted over 300 million important events of the century into a computer search programme to calculate.

Another gut-wrenching case of how the US government tears apart marriages, and forces American citizens to choose between their spouse or their country.

Tyler Cowen warns:

The differential payment rates across Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance are becoming unsustainable more quickly than I had anticipated … Further reforms will be required more quickly than had been anticipated, but it's not obvious how such reforms should proceed.  It's hard to either upgrade the Medicaid (and Medicare) rates or to downgrade the private insurance rates.  Monitor this one closely, because it is likely to prove the breaking point of our health care status quo, with or without the Obama plan. 

Ezra Klein explains the issue in more detail:

The problem is that Medicare can't control costs too much better than private insurers or … doctors will simply abandon Medicare. In a world where there's only Medicare and Medicare decides to control costs, doctors can either take the pay cut or stop being doctors. And as we see from other countries, lots of people want to be doctors, even if being a doctor doesn't make you particularly wealthy. But in a world where Medicare is just one of many payers and Medicare decides to control costs, doctors can simply stop taking Medicare patients and a lot of legislators will lose their jobs. 

Julian Hattem pays tribute to Kid Rock for sucking:

Although he has been culturally irrelevant for the last half-decade, his songs are always playing whenever you turn on the radio. Slowly, he has turned himself into the turn-of-the-millennium answer to the Monkees or, maybe even the late Rolling Stones: quintessentially shallow, timeless pop music that does nothing new and enforces old clichés, forever recapitulating them until, at the end, we can finally come around to enjoying it.

Alan Jacobs muses on communication etiquette:

I like the lightweight minimalism of text/IM/Twitter, and use them when I can in preference to email. That said, there's one very important way in which email is superior to those other technologies: it is completely asynchronous. People may send emails hoping for a quick reply, but they generally know better than to expect one. But if you've tweeted recently, people expect quick responses to replies and direct messages, and of course, nothing says "Interrupt me!" like that green light next to your name in someone's IM client. (Whether texting is similarly always-on depends on how old you are, I suppose.)

I haven't figured out quite how to manage all this, and maybe I never will.

Typically I set my IM status to "invisible," but I don't want my friends to do the same — if they did, how would I know when to send them a message? So I fall short of the categorical imperative there. Basically, I am coming to realize, I want a medium of communication which allows me to interrupt friends whenever I want to without ever allowing them to interrupt me. I ain't asking for much.

Instapundit surveys those who say yes. Here's David Skeel:

When the possibility is mentioned of creating a new chapter for states in U.S. bankruptcy law (Chapter 8, perhaps, which isn’t currently taken), most people have two reactions. First, that bankruptcy might be a great solution for exploding state debt; and second, that it can’t possibly be constitutional for Congress to enact such a law. Surprisingly enough, this reaction is exactly backwards. The constitutionality of bankruptcy-for-states is beyond serious dispute. The real question is whether the benefits would be large enough to justify congressional action. The short answer is yes. Although bankruptcy would be an imperfect solution to out-of-control state deficits, it’s the best option we have, at least if we want to have any chance of avoiding massive federal bailouts of state governments.

A couple of Wikileaks data points:

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) just before becoming prime minister again and forming the current Israeli coalition government. When describing "his approach to 'economic peace' with the Palestinians, Netanyahu suggested he would cut through bureaucratic obstacles to Palestinian economic development to build a 'pyramid' from the 'bottom up' that would strengthen the Palestinian Authority, and offer the Palestinians a viable alternative to radicalism." He also indicated he wasn't interested in a sovereign Palestinian state emerging in the West Bank, but rather "an agreement over territory,settlements and 'refined' Palestinian sovereignty without an army or control over air space and borders." Further evidence of Netanyahu's stance, which he states is not unlike Livni's, is described in a cable about a meeting between Netanyahu and a Congressional Delegation (CODEL) in late April 2009. He states "A Palestinian state must be demilitarized, without control over its air space and electro-magnetic field, and without the power to enter into treaties or control its borders."

Bryan Curtis reminds us of his past statements:

If the GOP votes as expected this month, Steve King will be in charge of immigration legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives. For proof that a meteor hit D.C. on November 2, listen to the ideas running through the head of the likely next chair of the immigration subcommittee. King has called for an electrified fence along the border. He wants to interpret the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to deny birthright citizenship for immigrants who have children here.

He has dubbed illegal immigration not just a “slow-motion terrorist attack” but a “slow-motion holocaust.” “The line of scrimmage has moved closer to our goal line,” King tells me, “and you’ve got a different team calling the plays.” What gives liberals tremors is not just that Barack Obama’s immigration agenda is dead. It’s that King’s swaggering personality will dominate the debate for years.

And that poisonous, xenophobic atmosphere affects legal immigration as well as illegal.