Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

It is precisely when you are losing that denying the existence of God makes life make sense. I have had an illness for a number of years – it is a neurological illness, which is the existential equivalent of having your eye scraped or being kicked in the testicles. It gets you right where it hurts the most – in this case, in the white matter tracts of my brain. My torture from this illness only makes sense, is *only* meaningful to me if there is no God, or if the God which exists does not really care about my welfare at all. Because I have done nothing terribly wrong, immoral, in my life, let alone anything wrong that makes this punishment seem necessary or proportionate or just under any conception of ethics or justice. Strangely, it is only by denying God in these moments that my life makes enough sense for me to push forward.

Somehow the logical equation has been inverted against those who resist a positive belief in God especially in these moments. Following from the experience of suffering, the burden of proof is on those who believe in a God, or at the very least a beneficent God, to demonstrate how it is possible for both pure, intense suffering to exist, as it does in the story of the concentration camp victim or Hitch's devastating illness, and also for a beneficent God to exist. And yet, somehow people tend to resort to believe in a God when they are experiencing intense suffering.

Tracy Clark-Flory is asking.

Mother Jones publishes an investigative package on BP and the Gulf oil spill.

An Afghan boy visits a market during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on August 11, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Muslims all over the world are supposed to go without food, drink, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan in order to purify themselves and concentrate their mind on Islamic teachings. By Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

I haven't paid close attention to the debate, but it doesn't appear anyone has mentioned the math of term-limiting Supreme Court justices. Suppose the term limit for a justice were nine years (somewhere near the middle of Sides' suggestion of six, eight, or twelve years). Under such a limit, there would be one forced retirement per year (assuming equal spacing of appointment). Under such a system, Bush's fifth appointment to the Court would have come in 2005; not until 2012 would there be fewer than five Bush-appointed justices.

Really, any term limit under 14 years will guarantee any two-term president the ability to "pack" the court with justices of his or her ideological bent. Now you're facing a problem similar to FDR's: how do you limit the judiciary branch while keeping the branches of government separate? Well, you can't.

Another writes:

I worked as a law clerk for a federal judge for several years, and I saw the wisdom of lifetime tenure play out many times, both with my judge and others. It is indispensable.

The most fervent "liberal" or "conservative" judge sometimes loses his or her nerve when asked to disfigure the Constitution. Not always, to be sure, but plenty often enough to keep us very, very free after two-plus centuries. And although the collective (if it can be called that) mindset of the judiciary changes very slowly, it changes both to the left and the right. No school of thought has a permanent advantage just because the judges have quasi-permanent tenure. Finally, the tenor of federal judicial opinion tends to lag the tenor of political opinion by a decade or so – hence the wave of "liberal" rulings in the fifties and sixties, and the "conservative" outlook that will persist for at least the next ten or so. Ending lifetime tenure would tend to temporally correlate the effects of short-lived ideological trends between the branches – what could be worse for a system designed not to be reduced by occasional quakes, but to withstand them in favor of the persistent small tremor?

For crying out loud; Alexander Hamilton nailed it in Federalist 78 – and he nailed it BEFORE it happened, which I find truly extraordinary.

Greenwald summarizes Gibbs' rant:

(1) The Professional Left are totally irrelevant losers who speak for absolutely nobody, and certainly nobody in Real America who matters; but (2) they're ruining everything for the White House!!!  And:  if you criticize the President, it's only because you're such a rabid extremist that you harbor a secret desire to eliminate the Pentagon — that's how anti-American you are!  You're such a Far Left extremist that Dennis Kucinich isn't far enough Left for you, you subversive, drug-using hippies!  You're so far to the Left that you want to turn the U.S. into Canada.  As David Frum put it today:  "More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base." 

Yglesias somewhat sympathizes with the press secretary:

But you don’t improve your relationship with same-team ideological activists by attacking them in red-baiting terms. What’s more, we’re seeing a serious confusion here on the role of political activists in the system. As I said during the health care debate, it’s not the job of the President of the United States to stand up for a pure ideological vision—his job is to cut compromises to implement policies that improve on the status quo. But by the same token, it’s not the job of activists to be “satisfied” with compromises premised on the current boundaries of political feasibility.

Gibbs backpedals furiously. I suspect Obama's actual view is that pressure from his base – or just from those who voted for him on the basis if some unfulfilled promises – is a good thing. I see no contradiction, for example, in supporting this presidency as the best chance we've got on many fronts while severely criticizing its incoherence and cowardice on civil rights.

Will Wilkinson revisits his pro-immigration case against birthright citizenship. Tim Lee takes him on:

Each year, thousands of Americans are born to undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship guarantees that when they grow up, they’ll enjoy the same freedoms that the children of American citizens do. Ending birthright citizenship means that, instead, they’ll be forced to live underground in the country they call home. This isn’t an “act of symbolic violence against hard-won American ideals of equality.” It’s a sacrifice of the actual freedom and equality of actual human beings who will be born on American soil over the coming decade.

Wilkinson looks to other countries for alternatives to birthright citizenship. Both the conservative John J. Miller and the liberal Yglesias find the birthright debate a distraction to immigration reform. I agree. I'm in my third decade of trying to become a permanent resident. If I'd walked off the plane and got a woman pregnant, I'd be a lot richer (the legal fees over so many years are enormous) and a citizen by now. But I strongly support birthright citizenship and believe the reform we really need is a focus on skills rather than family ties beyond immediate ones. But I have long since understood that there is no way this country's political system can handle this question rationally – or at all. Not so long as one political party is completely batshit with cultural panic and paranoia.

Farhad Manjoo:

Black people —- specifically, young black people —- do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It's this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.

Caveats here.