Teddy Wayne has some fun. Dish faves:
Why put off 'til tomorrow what you can
and
A penny saved is a penny earned, excluding all the pennies you dump in a jar for an eventual trip to a Coinstar machine, but the prospect of carrying a jar of loose change that's top-heavy with pennies to Food Emporium to earn $12.47 is so depressing that you never do it and the jar remains unused, so, really, sometimes saving pennies actually ends up making you lose money.
Jon Rowe's lightbulb switches on:
The case will very likely be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. Assuming Kagan is on the bench and the lineup remains, I predict there will be 4 votes for gay marriage, 4 against with Justice Kennedy breaking the tie AGAINST constitutionalizing gay marriage. BUT Kennedy being Kennedy he very likely would “split the baby” by demanding a federal constitutional right to civil unions that grant all the rights of marriage other than the name.
Interesting – and plausible.
(Photo: Russians wear facemasks to protect themselves from forest fire smog while walking on Red Square in Moscow on August 6, 2010. Smog from wildfires in the countryside cloaked Moscow, with the levels of toxic particles, raising alarm over public health and numerous commuters wearing anti-pollution masks. By Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty.)
Dreher misses his never-happened twenty-something sojourn in Europe. But he wanted a wife and kids and thought he'd be on the shelf if he waited too long.
The regret I have about never having lived in Europe is very, very mild — but that's because I have what I most wanted in life (a family). If I had reached middle age without marrying, and was locked into a job I couldn't now afford to leave because I needed the health care, or for whatever middle-aged reason, the regret would be fairly unbearable for me.
I can't see the iron-clad logic of that myself. But he asks an eternal question: what does one regret? Most of the candidates, as Rod notes, are two-sided. I regret deeply getting HIV. I still don't know how it happened, but it did, which means I wasn't being careful enough in my twenties, as many young men can testify to as well. And yet, looking back, how would my life have been without facing mortality so young? I tried an answer here. Not so simple.
Do I regret leaving Britain and what would probably have been a political career – now part of a truly exciting experiment in liberal Tory governance? I think at some point you understand that this is the life you have, a consequence of countless tiny decisions that didn't even seem like decisions at the time. I loved America from the get-go but the decision to immigrate was never clear, always incremental, beset by fate and chances and love and illness.
And this is life. It is an adventure, not a plan. Regrets are the flip-side of freedom. I'd rather have both than neither.
Painful for me to watch because I love him so. But riveting.
You're never too old to fall in love. But shouldn't this kind of thing be illegal in South Carolina because they have no way to procreate? Over to you, Robbie George.
From Calculated Risk:
Longer. Deeper. And flat at the bottom. Unfortunately that describes the 2007 employment recession.
The long free ride is over – and the bubbles that created the illusion of sustaining it have all burst. Don Peck was onto something. This is the new normal.
A reader writes:
Walker writes (and you quote):
“Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage.”
Huh? “Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality…?” Um, there were no such “eras” unless he’s really speaking of one era: all of recorded history. For there never was a time when gender did not matter in marriage. Historically – a word the judge bends and shapes at will, but let’s assume it means what everyone knows it to mean – there never was a time when marriage referred to anything other than the union of man and woman.
So when he says that “such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage,” I begin to wonder if he is not taking advantage of California’s relaxed laws regarding the use of marijuana, because what he states is wrong in every possible way. If ancient societies did not codify the illegality of gay marriage, it was only because marriage was, to them, so obviously meant for opposite-sex unions that it never occurred to them to make a law about it. But written as a law or not, the fact is that historically (to use that term accurately and not as the Judge uses it) there was no gay marriage. Nope, never.
There were homosexual relationships and, of course, gay people living together. But such relationships were never called marriage. Marriage has always, throughout all of history, referred to a union of men with women. I suspect that “history,” to the Judge, means “How I think things should have been, and how I will – for the purposes of this ruling – assume they were, even though they weren’t.” (But maybe that’s the marijuana talking.)
But you know, when your reasoning and logic rely upon faulty premises, you get yourself into trouble. To prove just that point, it seems, he writes (and you quote):
“…plaintiffs’ relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States.”
As the Judge might say, “Oh, gnarly, dude!” Because as everyone knows, the very reason this trial occurred is because gay marriage is nowhere to be found in the “core of history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States.” And the very reason there is opposition to gay marriage is because a majority of the people of the state of California (in two referenda, remember) found it to be inconsistent with “the core of history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States.”
The Judge gave us a good explanation for why he would have, and might have, voted “No” on Proposition 8. He did not give us a good reason why the votes of everyone else should have been cast out, and his the only one that matters.
Leaving the marijuana issue out of it, and leaving all the other reasons Walker deployed out of it, we are back again to the historical argument: Because something never was, it never can be. My reader has a point, nonetheless, about the sentence he cites. In much of the world, and a whole swathe of America, racial restrictions were indeed integral to civil marriage from the get-go – since marriage meant procreation and racial "purity" was a core value. And for much of human history, marriage entailed ownership of women by men. Were these things integral to the meaning of marriage? You bet they were. So was the prohibition on divorce. Because these things no longer count, does this mean that marriage strictly speaking, has ceased to exist? If not, then what is the common thread that makes sense of marriage as an institution that is continuous?
Opponents of marriage equality say procreation, which is obviously untrue. Or heterosexuality, which is partly true (although many gay people entered into opposite-sex marriages for fear of social ostracism). But if a civil institution with enormous cultural meaning, social status and enumerated benefits, is to be defined by the exclusion of a minority, what of equal protection? That's what Walker is grappling with.
For the record, it is also untrue that gay relationships have never been formalized in the past, or referred to as marriages. In my anthology, you can read about many precedents, from Montaigne's diary to Africa and China and the Balkans and, yes, Massachusetts. Ever heard of what was once called a "Boston marriage"? Yes, in the West, these institutions never got legal status. Because gay people were easily suppressed. But they existed, as my reader acknowledges, and were understood as marriages by their participants.
Marc Lynch warns that “Arab confidence in Obama is collapsing.” He flags a new survey as evidence:
The survey’s findings suggest overwhelmingly that it is the administration’s failures on the Israeli-Palestinian front which drove the collapse in Arab attitudes towards Obama. Sixty-one percent of the respondents say that this is the area in which they are most disappointed (Iraq, at 27 percent, is the only other issue which cracks double digits — only one percent name “spreading democracy”). Only one percent say they are pleased with his policy.
Fifty-four percent name an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement as one of two things which would most improve their views of the United States (withdrawing from Iraq is second, at 45 percent, and stopping aid to Israel third at 43 percent ). The numbers of Arabs saying they are prepared for peace with Israel has risen — to 86 percent — but so has the number who say that Israel will not give up the occupied territories (from 45 percent to 56 percent ). Only 12 percent — down from 25 percent last year — say that Arabs should continue to fight even if there is a two-state peace agreement. Should a two-state solution collapse, 57 percent expect intense conflict for years to come, 30% expect the status quo, and only ten percent expect a one-state solution.
The powerful logic of insisting on a freeze to settlement construction and a viable two-state solution – essential to turning the propaganda tide in the terror war – is based in Arab public opinion. The reason many of us supported Obama was his unique capacity to win over the Muslim middle and isolate the Jihadist fringe. Israel’s government, and its most ferocious supporters in the US, have done a great deal to destroy that promise, and, in so doing, have weakened the United States in the war on Jihadist terror.
Hence my anger. It is one thing for Israelis to commit their own national suicide; it is another thing for them to cripple their most important ally in a war we have to win.
He advises Obama to become a far right neocon to avoid a "failed presidency". The three priorities he argues for are an indefinite commitment to nation-building and war in Afghanistan; adding $700 billion to the debt by stopping the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than a quarter of a million a year; and opposing the Cordoba Initiative, which Kristol insists is run by a "Wahhabist". Oh, and for good measure: a bombing campaign in Iran! In other words, the man who was elected to undo the Bush catastrophe should actually go to the right of Bush to win re-election.
I kid you not. From the man who helped give us the Iraq war, Sarah Palin and torture … and whose policies will lead ineluctably to a non-Jewish majority Israel. You have to hand it to him for chutzpah.
The Dish 