Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ed Kilgore thinks they will eventually take aim at Medicaid:

Medicare beneficiaries are the very core of the GOP's political base at present; Medicaid beneficiaries decidedly are not. Moreover, as I argued last year, for all the pundit hilarity about people receiving socialized health insurance via Medicare railing against socialized health insurance, many of these folk think of their coverage as an earned benefit, not as any form of government largesse. So there's nothing inherently implausible politically about the GOP just flatly defending Medicare (and for that matter, Social Security) while going after the lazy welfare bums under the age of 65. Some of you may have read Tom Edsall's recent dark vision of an impending era of scarcity wherein politics is dominated by generational and class battles over who gets what from government. Thanks to the central position of older white voters in the GOP, and of Medicare in the federal budget, this nasty scenario could arrive a lot faster than even Edsall has imagined.

Today on the Dish, Andrew had hope for the Simpson-Bowles proposal to crack down on the debt, with more reax here. He took on Maureen Dowd (and her brother) about the Big Lie of the right, and readers rallied. Andrew expressed shock and dismay at the recent round of Israel's settlement rhetoric, violence raged on London campuses, Afghanistan has developed into a blitzkreig, and sectarian violence surged in Iraq. We rounded up reax to ending DADT, and the new threats to DOMA.

Palin served cookies at a school, but didn't want John Dickerson posting on her wall. This Alaska voter corrected the record on Miller vs. Murkowski, and this one lobbed the head off Limbaugh's twinkie distortion. Andrew rejected this reader's grocery list computations, and Ezra Klein dared the GOP to repeal the popular parts of healthcare reform. Nate Silver comforted the Dems about 2012, we gathered assessments of the GOP's lame horses, and Allahpundit wondered What Would Karl (Rove) Do about a Romney / Mitch Daniels square off.

Sprung danced circles around Krugman on the stimulus, we could learn from Pittsburgh's failures, and jobless claims bottomed out. Dave Roberts added his input to Fallows' coal debate, student stalker Andrew Shirvell could be Fox's new star, Clay Shirky tore down the paywall, and BloggingHeads rocked out. Readers defended Maddow on her partisan honesty, even policy wonks were fleeing the GOP, and Jonah Goldberg was sorry he popularized fascism.

Spam might be worth more than gold since at least you can eat it, and industrious readers shared their weed secrets. Arnold pandered to pot a couple of weeks too late, teenagers needed to know if a joint was similar to birth control, Nate Silver sized up pot's future, and this reader benefited from a foreskin graft (to a foot). Chart of the day here, quote for the day here, beard for the day here, VFYW here, MHB here, FOTD here, and beards? There's an app for that.

–Z.P.

A reader writes:

You're in the funeral in this Jameson's commercial, too.

In the end, all bald bears can look alike.

Nils August Andresen sees the danger:

A party needs a well-educated echelon – call it an elite – to formulate policy to deal with complex challenges. Without the philosophical and academic achievements of the likes of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, the Reagan revolution would not have been possible. …

I believe future Republican administrations would also try to draw on such talent to formulate policy. However, the well is drying up. So few of the experts in any given field will in the future be Republican. That is an enormous problem. The intellectual resources directed at finding conservative answers to today’s problems are weakened year by year. If not quite critical yet, thanks to the efforts of an older generation of Republicans, the ramifications of this trend might be dramatic.

Nate Silver introduces some data into the debate:

Suppose we are in a world in which: (i) members of the pre-Baby Boom generation are eventually replaced in the electorate by Millennials, who have relatively liberal views on marijuana; and (ii) nobody else ever changes their views on marijuana, other than if they have children, when some of them go from being in favor of legalization to against it.

In this world — which is a reasonable model of America in 2010 — support for marijuana initiatives would continue to increase for a few years until adults now over the age of 60 were no longer a significant part of the population. Then it would enter some sort of steady state.

…my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that support would tap out at something on the order of 45-47 percent nationally. Of course, 45 percent support nationwide would probably translate to better than 50 percent support in states like California, Oregon, Nevada, New York, Vermont and so forth.  But it probably would not lead to a world in which, for instance, the Democratic nominee for President were willing to support marijuana legalization as part of his platform (and certainly not the Republican one)

(Photo: Michel Porro/Getty)

Noah Shachtman checks in on the air war in Afghanistan. It's become a blitzkrieg:

The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.

And:

[S]ome outside observers believe the strikes are part of an attempt to soften up the insurgency before negotiations with them begin in earnest. But one thing is clear: it’s a strategy Petraeus has used before. Once he took over the Iraq war effort, air strikes jumped nearly sevenfold.

National Institute of Drug Abuse experts recently answered teenagers' questions about drugs in an online forum. Crushable rounded up some of the best ones. A gem:

some guy – St. Henry District High School, Kentucky: can smoking a joint be a form of birth control

Dr.Ruben Baler: I am not aware of any evidence that suggests marijuana would be a viable mode of birth control. thanks for the question.

Edith Zimmerman calls the chat "one of the funnest things online right now."

Fallows' cover story is rightly getting attention. Kevin Drum has questions about Chinese clean coal technologies. Dave Roberts, on the other hand, draws a line between what he terms "Dirty F*ckin' Hippies (DFHs)", who don't believe that coal is a necessary part of our energy future, and "Powers That Be (PTBs)", who don't believe coal does enormous environmental damage and don't think that carbon reduction is necessary. Roberts chastises Fallows for framing his article as a rebuke of the former:

If you believe, as Fallows does, that climate change is an urgent, enormous challenge, then it's hard to see the value in worrying that some idealistic green somewhere thinks we can tackle it without coal. Being contrarian toward DFHs is a little … safe. If "clean coal" development isn't happening in the U.S., it's not because DFHs are against it, it's because nothing is happening in the U.S. A piece focused on that corrupt, criminal inaction might rattle a few cages. A piece reassuring Big Coal and its many backers that they'll always be in the driver's seat won't.

What Jim is doing, I suspect, is framing this argument in a way that cannot be dismissed as DFH-y by the PTBs. But DFHs should get past their coal WTFs ASAP anyhoo.

As the country navigates this latest recession, The Urbanophile advises that we learn from a city that faced its own economic collapse:

The lesson to be gleamed from Pittsburgh isn’t so much in what steps it’s taken on its way to recovery. Rather, the lesson to be learned from Pittsburgh is what happened to it when its Great Recession hit in 1983.

It failed. The steel collapse decimated Pittsburgh and its region, taking with it nearly 1 out of every 10 jobs there. Entire towns surrounding the city became obsolete. But it is because of that failure, that absolute bottoming-out, that Pittsburgh has been able to cast aside its past and emerge as a unique showcase of what a small, bustling, connected American city can eventually become.

The example of Pittsburgh is to fail on the failures and invest in the attributes- granted, of which the ‘Burgh had many, in its beautiful architecture, old establishment money, intact communities and ethnic organizations, and cultural trusts and universities- that a place already has. It is a tale not so much for cities facing similar problems to the Pittsburgh of 30 years past, as it is for the country as a whole in this stage of national transmogrification.

Not out of line with Tom Friedman's column today.