Author: Andrew Sullivan

Today on the Dish, Andrew collapsed the Big Lie of the right, and Rush Limbaugh believed in the twinkie diet. Obama's Indonesian nanny was a tranny, and he used his trip to Asia to put Israel in its place, while Larison wondered what India on the UN Council would mean for Iran.

Sarah Palin still couldn't read the WSJ on grocery prices, and readers sounded off. Palin's Alaska heavily depended on federal funding, and we looked at the 2012 Tea leaves state by state. Romney's former sanity on healthcare has been destroyed by his ambition, Dylan Matthews doubted Hillary Clinton could have passed healthcare reform, and Frum proposed that eventually the GOP will realize it should have cut a deal on Obamacare. Douthat dissed the unprincipled moderates, Nils August Andresen charted the GOP's brain drain, and political scientists tracked Democrats' unpopularity.

Jack Shafer urged MSNBC to come out of the partisan closet, and Jason Mazzone pointed the way forward for Obama to end DADT, but Drum wasn't on board. Ryan Avent bet there'd be self-driving cars for his infant daughter to ride in 2026, and Americans overestimated the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. FDR's innate leadership stemmed from his temperament, and readers insisted Mitch Daniels was pretty short. Johann Hari put Churchill's racism in perspective, and P.J. O'Rourke had sympathy but not empathy for politicians.

Andrew almost lost his lunch over this foreskin revelation, Serwer skewered The Walking Dead, and this writer was losing his words. This reader's father enjoyed his vaporizer over Christmas dinner, readers taught us all a lesson about illegal US plants, and many responded to the agnostic thread. This is how Michael Caine speaks, Yglesias award here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and the VFYW contest #23 winner here.

–Z.P.

James Fallows' new Atlantic cover story on the need for clean coal technologies deserves to be read in full. The basics:

Precisely because coal already plays such a major role in world power supplies, basic math means that it will inescapably do so for a very long time. For instance: through the past decade, the United States has talked about, passed regulations in favor of, and made technological breakthroughs in all fields of renewable energy. Between 1995 and 2008, the amount of electricity coming from solar power rose by two-thirds in the United States, and wind-generated electricity went up more than 15-fold. Yet over those same years, the amount of electricity generated by coal went up much faster, in absolute terms, than electricity generated from any other source. The journalist Robert Bryce has drawn on U.S. government figures to show that between 1995 and 2008, “the absolute increase in total electricity produced by coal was about 5.8 times as great as the increase from wind and 823 times as great as the increase from solar”—and this during the dawn of the green-energy era in America.

Power generated by the wind and sun increased significantly in America last year; but power generated by coal increased more than seven times as much. As Americans have read many times, Chinese companies are the world’s leaders in manufacturing solar panels, often using technology originally developed in the United States. Many of the panels are used inside China for its own rapidly growing solar-power system; still, solar energy accounts for about 1 percent of its total power supply. In his book PowerHungry, Bryce describes a visit to a single coal mine, the Cardinal Mine in western Kentucky, whose daily output supports three-quarters as much electricity generation as all the solar and wind facilities in the United States combined. David MacKay, of the physics department at Cambridge University in England, has compiled an encyclopedia of such energy-related comparisons, which is available for free download (under the misleadingly lowbrow title Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air). For instance: he calculates that if the windiest 10 percent of the entire British landmass were completely covered with wind turbines, they would produce power roughly equivalent to half of what Britons expend merely by driving each day.

A reader writes:

I can't speak for all agnostics, but your reader has gotten my agnosticism exactly backward: I'm agnostic because I care about the source of that mystery.

Searching beyond the religion of my childhood, I have discovered the sacrificial death of a god followed by his resurrection three days later in multiple versions, across centuries and continents. I have sought out moments of spiritual transcendence precisely because I am enthralled by the universal nature of the "religious" experience. Your reader speaks of the humility of faith, but centers that faith around just one of the many faces of humanity's belief. Who looks at the all the great old books of other religions and just shrugs?

I, too, look forward to a day of knowing, and I approach it with hope – that no loving, caring Deity would place us on this Earth without the intention of watching us exercise our curiosity. If I am to be rejected for doubting, seeking, and using my intellectual gifts to understand this beautiful universe, then there is no loving, caring Deity to embrace me, and I have lost nothing.

Another writes:

I am an agnostic who does not feel my life one bit less richer because of it.  I acknowledge mystery in the world.  In fact, I see the world at times as a beautiful, mysterious, dreamlike place.  I constantly ask myself what this all means.  However, I know that no one, including myself, has the answer. 

I hope there is an afterlife.  I hope that it is a place of love considering all of the suffering that goes on in this world.  But religions created by men cannot tell us these things.  In the meantime, I'm satisfied with the meaning of life as given to us by Kurt Vonnegut: We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

Adam Serwer nit picks AMC's The Walking Dead:

What was great about Kirkman's comic [upon which the TV series is based] is its relative lack of sentiment, its willingness to allow even its most compelling characters to meet gruesome ends while crushing the survivors under the weight of incomprehensible suffering in the face of a bleak, hopeless future. You turn the page because you can't believe the people who are still alive are actually making it, and because you can't wait to see the people they must become in order to do so. The Walking Dead is fundamentally a tragedy about how people become inhuman in order to survive, and for that to work, you need some characters who actually resemble human beings. 

Scott Meslow also advocates for more character development.

PPP has done some early polling. Tom Jensen's summary:

In the critical early state of New Hampshire Romney continues to hold a dominant polling advantage, with 40% to 13% for Huckabee and 10% each for Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. If Tim Pawlenty, Mike Pence, Mitch Daniels, or John Thune somehow emerges as the winner in New Hampshire they'll be able to truthfully say they started out with nothing- they poll at 4%, 3%, 1%, and 1% respectively.

If Romney really does run he puts the New Hampshire primary at some risk of being irrelevant. If he continues to post huge leads in the polls there other top contenders could end up just writing it off and focusing their efforts on states like Nevada, South Carolina, and Florida that could have more competitive contests.

Weigel analyzes the poll and calls Romney's support "wide but not deep." Some general election polling:

In Pennsylvania 11% of 2008 Obama voters say they're inclined to vote Republican next time while only 2% who voted for McCain say they would now vote for Obama. Similarly in New Hampshire 11% of Obama voters are leaning toward supporting a GOP candidate next time to just 4% of McCain voters he's converted to his side. And in Colorado it's 12% who supported Obama the first time around who are now looking more toward the Republicans and only 5% of McCain voters who say Obama's won them over.

Based on last week's results the state out of this group that might be most worrisome for Obama is New Hampshire, where his numbers have fallen precipitously and the Republican Senate candidate won by greater than 20 points.

Ryan Enos performs a valuable service:

In 2008, the Pew Hispanic Center, calculated that there might be 11.2 million illegal immigrants in the United States. That is about 4% of the population. …poll respondents have a completely distorted estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in their state. The average response when asked what percent of their state is illegal immigrants was just over 17% – that is, the average American thinks almost 1 in 5 people are illegal immigrants.  

He goes on:

Americans of all political ideologies show some tendency to, not only over-estimate the number of illegal immigrants, but also to have trouble separating Hispanics generally from illegal immigrants particularly. Let me explain: in addition to asking about the percentage of illegal immigrants in their state, I also asked what percentage of their state is Hispanic. I think it is safe to assume that when most people hear the term “illegal immigrant”, they almost exclusively assume that the illegal immigrant is from Latin America – meaning that when they say 17% of their state is illegal immigrants that they are saying that at least 17% of their state is Hispanic.

If I am correct about this, a rough way to estimate the percentage of Hispanics that a respondent thinks are illegal immigrants is simply to compare their answer to the questions about the percentage Hispanic to their answer about the percentage illegal immigrants. Among all white respondents, the average answer to the question about illegal immigrants was almost 2/3^rds the size of their answer to the question about Hispanics – meaning, if they thought about it – they are likely indicating that they think that 2/3^rds of all Hispanics in their state are illegal immigrants. Among “very conservative” whites the answer to the Hispanic question was, astoundingly, almost 3/4^ths the size of the answer about illegal immigrants – implying that 3/4^ths of Hispanics are illegal immigrants.

Gordon Adams asks defense budget hawks to get their facts straight:

[Bob] Gates has not cut $330 billion from defense.  When he announced hardware cuts, he said the out-year savings were estimated at $330 billion, but he didn't cut a nickel from the projected defense budgets; he wants, as he has clearly said, to use those savings for other investments, not give them back to the taxpayer. And the figure is way too big, anyway, because he terminated the F-22 and the C-17 cargo plane when neither one of them was in the long-term budget… And as for his general support for "significant cuts?"  Well, no.  Gates has a plan to find $100 billion over the next four years in "efficiency savings," which he announced in August.  But, again, he has been clear that these will not cut the defense budget, he wants to keep them to plow back into forces and other investments, while ensuring the DOD budget continues to grow. 

Johann Hari's take on Churchill's racism here. Money quote:

Didn't everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin."

But there is a larger truth to the great man's legacy:

If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life.

In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him.

Mitt Romney Central is outraged by the above video. Chait looks on:

Romney's problem is that he was caught up in his party's massive rightward lurch – his position [on health care] was almost completely uncontroversial in 2008, but it has become anathema in 2012 because the GOP has lost its mind. I genuinely wish Romney good luck in winning the party nomination, because he's at heart a sane man trying to lead an insane party.

There is nothing sane about Romney's ambition. It has destroyed whatever was left in his brain. Does Chait remember Romney's speech in St Paul? Even David Brooks called it "borderline insane."