Author: Andrew Sullivan

Cowen's response to my last post:

When it comes to marijuana legalization, I believe that the "anti-" forces will muster as many parental votes as they need to, to defeat it when they need to.  The elasticity of supply is nearly infinite at relevant margins.  Legalization may appear "close" for a long time, but in equilibrium it will not spread very far.  The "no" votes will pop up as needed.

McArdle thinks Cowen might have a point:

There's a case to be made that it started the trend:

The phone itself was a pretty big deal, of course, helping intimacy transcend proximity. But phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. In the beginning of 1880, Shea writes, there were 30,000 telephone subscribers in the U.S. At the end of the year, that number had grown to 50,000, and because of phone books, each one of them was exposed to the others as never before. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.

Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. “Hey strangers!” anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. “Here’s how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are.”

Greg Scoblete accuses me of being "a bit circuitous":

The basic problem here isn't that the U.S. has a huge stake in who lives where in the West Bank. It doesn't. The problem seems to be that American interests are endangered by Israeli behavior. But America is only implicated in Israel's behavior because of its generous financial, military and diplomatic support for the country. If you insist that this behavior is endangering American interests, and previous efforts to stop that behavior have failed, why not cease subsidizing it?

It's easier (in theory, at least) for the United States to change its own policies than to have the United States try to change another country's policy … I'm not saying I endorse cutting off aid, but just that this seems to be the logical denouement of Sullivan's argument.

I'd cut off aid myself – because they don't need it and we cannot afford it – not as a pressure tactic. But even if you did, the key issue seems to me to be the UN veto. Until the US stops protecting Israel from isolation in the Security Council, the US's foreign policy and Israel's Palestinian policy are inextricable from one another. 

Scott Morgan's two cents:

The bottom line is that this was not a presidential election year. Doing this campaign in a midterm election put us at a significant disadvantage. When the White House is up for grabs, young voters turn out in huge numbers, guaranteeing big points for an issue like marijuana reform. This means we could likely win by running basically the same campaign in 2012. It's really important that we emphasize this fact as much as possible, because we don't want anyone underestimating public support for legalization. Tell your friends: we lost because of timing, not lack of public support.

A reader writes:

I know national politics is your bread and butter, but after weeks of feverish analysis in the industrial-punditry complex over what would happen in the midterms, and now with feverish 24-7 analysis over what the election meant and what will happen next, I'm so. sick. of. politics. A little breather would be wonderful.

Breather above. And it's nearly the weekend.

Mickey plumbs them:

At some point, GOP legislators may realize that it's in their individual interests, if they want to be reelected, to actually accomplish something, even if that means boosting Obama at the expense of whoever gets the GOP presidential nomination. This realization often takes a while to dawn, however. In 1995 and 1996, for example, Republicans initially resisted a reasonable compromise on welfare reform, preferring to have "the issue" to use against President Clinton in the Presidential race. Only at the second-to-last moment in 1996 did Newt Gingrich decide—despite pressure from the Dole campaign—to actually try to enact a piece of legislation. The resulting bill was quite radical, by conventional Washington standards—but even then the constant temptation was to pass a bill so extreme that Clinton would have to veto it (a process recounted in Ron Haskins' insider history, Work over Welfare)

“The real question from Tuesday night’s outcome is how long can the US government issue its own increasingly toxic sovereign debt into the global market at a rate twice as fast as underlying economic growth? The cynic might say: as long as the Fed can continue to monetize 100% of the new debt issue, as it promised in Wednesday’s $100 billion per month quantitative easing 2 (QE2) announcement. But it should be obvious to all except the insouciant boys and girls and robots of Wall Street that the world’s leading central bank is now dispensing pure monetary heroin. And, ironically, that’s likely to kill the patient before the fiscal question is even addressed,” – David Stockman.

A fatal overdose, please. I Heart Chaos reviews an upcoming series:

At some point, we either have to reach the end of shit that can possibly be created for reality TV or we, as a civilization will just chop our own head off with a chainsaw. If a show coming out next year on E! is any indication, it will be the latter. “Bridalplasty” will combine all the fun of OCD bridezillas with the unspeakable horrors of women who think having the entire front part of their skull reconstructed to look like Elizabeth Taylor is a good idea.