Author: Andrew Sullivan

Will Wilkinson defends the propriety of allowing foreign citizens and corporations to finance campaign ads in the US:

The United States is no hermit kingdom. If America decides it is going to invade a place, impose sanctions, or otherwise meddle in another country's business—and it has been known to do such things—it only seems fair to hear what others around the world think about it. Will American sanctions hurt a Belgian business? Will an American invasion lead to the deaths of allied Australian troops? Let's hear about it! The performance of the world's largest national economy naturally reverberates across the globe. And foreign-owned corporations are an integral part of the American economy. Obviously, Americans are not the only ones with a large stake in American economic policy. America's "war on drugs" has had, in my opinion, an enormously deleterious effect on a number of our Latin American neighbours. As a general matter, the effects of American policy are hardly confined within American borders. Non-citizens can't vote in American elections. The least we can do is permit them access to the public sphere so that they can attempt to inform and persuade American voters.

Ta-Nehisi reflects on the factors that might drive him away from the public school system:

I understand the need to push basic competency in reading and math. But if you have a household where people read of their own volition, where kids like books and are fortunate enough to have access to them, if you have two parents–and in the summer grandparents–who stay on the kid about math–test scores be damned–then you tend to have other, more abstract concerns. You tend to be worried about instilling a deeper love of learning, and, in my case, trying to prevent your kid from having the rather problematic experiences with school that you had. It is critically important that my son have positive feelings when he thinks about school. The social aspect is a clear loss. We may have to look elsewhere for that.

A reader writes:

Am I the only gay person who's on the side of not taking kids to gay pride?  Let's be honest here – it's not the most family-friendly environment.  Most gay pride events involve a hyper-sexualized parade and a hyper-commercialized fair.  Maybe I'm just a prudish American, but it's a party for adults, not children.  It's not Folsom Street, but it's not Sesame Street either. 

Want your kids to be exposed to homosexuality as a normal thing?  Spend time with gay people you know and bring your kids along.  Our friends' young children spend a lot of time around us.  They were the ring bearers at our wedding.  They absolutely adore us (and we them!) and completely understand the concept of what we are.

I think there's a high level of defensiveness that arises any time someone says they wouldn't want their children around gay people. Granted, Paladino's statement came in a more deplorable context of general homophobia, but I think it's possible to simultaneously be supportive of homosexuality and be opposed to taking kids to gay pride.

I tend to agree. Gay pride events are far, far tamer than they once were (and not the caricature that Paladino presents). I favor freedom for everyone to express themselves at such events, even in bad taste. There are, moreover, many other public gay events that are totally family-friendly, like last year's Equality March. But there's a part of gay pride history that really is a kind of Mardi Gras, with all the adult sexuality that implies, and many wouldn't take kids to that either.

In the end, this is for parents to decide for themselves, not me. But I sure wouldn't criticize a parent who decided to keep it an adult affair. And I sure don't think it's inherently homophobic.

Eye-opening.

The company is telling its baristas to take their time making coffee so that the product is more consistent in quality. Megan explains the significance by analogy:

Consider Burger King and McDonalds differentiated themselves a few decades ago: McDonalds maximized throughput with batch cooking, while Burger King relied on a sort of mechanized burger assembly line.  That meant that Burger King's product was more consistent, and could be more easily customized, since they arrived in a continuous stream rather than all at once; that's why they emphasized that you could "have it your way".  Among other things, this made labor quality less important, because the machine, not the worker, cooked the burgers.  

But while the "burger stream" arguably delivered a better hamburger, it also meant throughput was bottlenecked; you got one burger every few seconds, no matter what.  So Burger King tended to deliver a better burger during slow times, but McDonalds could handle the highest volume periods.  In burgers, it turned out that volume mattered more than the ability to have exactly the burger you wanted.

In this case, Starbucks seems to be choosing quality–or at least, standardization of quality–over speed.  As with Burger King, this is going to have some unwanted side effects.

Suderman goes after the president:

You might think that in a time of near-universal worry about the growing deficit, a Democratic president might take the opportunity to trim the defense budget by a few bombs. But holding military spending at its current levels—much less trimming it by the trillion-or-so dollars that experts say could be cut—apparently isn’t on the table. Obama wouldn’t even include military spending in his proposed spending freeze. As an influential critic of military spending once said about the country's ongoing indulgence in defense pork, "Twenty years after the Cold War ended, this is simply not acceptable. It's irresponsible. Our troops and our taxpayers deserve better." That's true, and could be pretty good guidance for a willing politician. And all it would take for the president to follow it would be for him to listen to his own advice.

The caution is still there. And can you imagine the next GOP Congress taking on defense spending? There are some hopeful signs among some of the saner fiscal conservatives. But there needs to be a civil war within the GOP first. Meanwhile, the dollars keep coming.

Tim Lee has tweeted that "voting by mail is a huge privacy and security risk, and states should be discouraging it a lot more." He elaborates on his blog:

Imagine if an employer, who everyone knew to be a Republican, required his employees to request absentee ballots and show them to him before they were submitted. Think of an abusive husband who insists that he and his wife fill out their ballots together. Or imagine a political operative going around a low-income neighborhood paying people $50 if they let him fill out their ballots for them. This kind of corruption is very hard for voting officials to detect. And more insidious, voters themselves may not even realize that it’s unethical.

Now, there are some circumstances, such as soldiers stationed overseas, where absentee voting is unavoidable. But traditionally, to get an absentee ballot you had to give a specific reason that you would be unable to make it to your regular polling place on election day. But in the last couple of decades a growing number of states are dropping these restrictions, allowing anyone to vote by mail without giving a reason. And the states of Washington and Oregon are moving towards mail-in voting as the default option. Although this is moderately more convenient for voters (and election officials!), the effective abandonment of the secret ballot is too high a price to pay.

I worry about this too. There's also the issue of losing a collective decision at the same time on the same day. Things change, events occur, the world moves. It makes sense to me that an electoral decision is more coherent when it is made simultaneously over a single day, than stretched out over weeks or even more than a month.