Author: Andrew Sullivan

Catherine Rampell compares people unemployed for more than six months to people unemployed for under six months:

Perhaps those who were unemployed longer were less desirable job candidates to begin with, which would explain both why it took them so long to find work, and why, when they did found new work, the job was relatively crummy. Or perhaps people who have been job-hunting for a long time are more desperate to take any job that becomes available, so they end up in less attractive positions. Or maybe the gaping holes on their resumes start to look more and more suspicious to employers, so the job options become narrower and narrower.

Or perhaps those who’ve been out of work longer have become so embittered by the experience of unemployment that any new job they take will be viewed as a disappointment.

Jay Cost looks to November:

The best case scenario for Democrats at this point is a nominal majority where the median member is not a terribly reliable ally of the party's liberal leadership. Something similar is set to occur in the Senate, where a Republican gain of at least five seats will push the filibuster to more conservative ground, from Brown/Collins/Snowe to Alexander/Cochran/Murkowski. Barack Obama ran for and won the Presidency in 2008 based upon a pledge to pursue bipartisanship, and the results in 2010 are effectively going to force him to do just that, at long last.

Not just him.

An Israeli reader writes:

A point which is rarely mentioned in the coverage of the “rape by deception” case – either by Israeli or foreign media – is that the case started out as a regular rape case. The woman claimed she was forcibly raped by Kashour. Once on the stand, however, the defense demolished her story and she admitted she lied and that they had consensual sex. She admitted that after learning Kashour lied to her, she felt humiliated and went to the police. It was at that point the prosecution came up with the plea bargain. A normal court would have just acquitted Kashour, but this court decided to convict.

Several further points:

1. If the woman had told the true story to the police in the first place, there would have been no trial, not to mention any conviction.

2. Kashour has no earlier convictions. In another “rape by deception”” case, which involved a lesbian masquerading as a man in order to have sex with women, she received only six months of suspended sentence. Kashour got 18 months of incarceration.

3. One of the three judges is Moshe Drori, who was embroiled in a scandal last year, when he refused to convict a very well connected yeshiva boy who admitted – and was filmed – running over a security guard with his vehicle. The security guard was an Ethiopian woman. Drori, a Jewish Orthodox, forced the guard to accept the apology of the yeshiva boy, and then invoked a judgment by 12th century scholar Maimonides (I shit you not), which says once an apology is accepted by the victim, the case is closed. And he closed the case. He is apparently a Maimonidas affectionado. The case was overturned in the Supreme Court, and this schtick cost Drori his chance at becoming a Supreme Court justice. Let’s say that a non-Jew masquerading as a Jew won’t stand much of a chance in the court of Judge Drori.

Couldn’t resist:

David Brooks shares his view:

My view is data based. The international evidence shows that if you want to balance the budget, something like 66 percent to 80 percent of your effort should go into cutting spending and something like a third to a fifth should consist of tax increases. If you rely on tax increases too much, you end up messing up the incentives for people who save and invest. Also spending cuts on entitlement programs have been the most enduring way to change long term fiscal trends. Cuts in other spending are too trivial to make a difference and don’t last because politicians reverse themselves.

Agreed on all counts. But can the GOP accept even this degree of compromise? And could Obama bring Pelosi along? It seems to me that next year will be the acid test of "Goodbye To All That." If wrecking America's finances was Bush's legacy, restoring them should be Obama's.

It seems to me simply wrong to ascribe the bile of flocks of angry commenters that appear on any site that tackles contentious topics to the blogger himself. You can criticize him or her for not deleting them and providing a platform to hate (Ann Althouse's readers routinely mock me for having HIV, for example, and she does nothing) but you can't criticize someone for attracting such creatures on the internet – let alone convict him of the same views. To further convict him on the basis of anti-Semitic emails sent entirely independently of him to a third party – and to describe them as "Stephen Walt's Mailbag" when in fact, it's Jeffrey Goldberg's in-tray – strikes me as deeply unfair. But that's what my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has done with Stephen Walt in his latest post. He has every right to lambaste Walt for things he writes and has written (although I think "Jew-baiter" is an ugly and absurd excess) – but this guilt-by-association is perverse. As Walt notes,

If we judge bloggers not by what they write but by what some of their readers write in response, we would be giving opponents of those bloggers an easy way to discredit them. If you don't like what a particular blogger says, write an anonymous comment praising him or her, add some bigoted statements of your own, and then send Smith an anonymous email and tell him to check out the comments thread. Voila!

It also violates a core Internet etiquette – and seems remarkably defensive – not to link to a post you criticize. 

And if raising questions about Israel's policies inflames anti-Semitism (and how can it not among the fever swamps of hate out there?), should that therefore prevent us from airing such questions? The chilling implications of this kind of argument are profound – and inimical to free discourse. Look: I know it's awful to read bigoted emails. And relatively new bloggers may be unused to the routine bile. But you need to accept it as part of a new media with no filters. 

Powerline, comparing Breitbart to Buckley!:

With the hounds baying, Andrew deserves the support of conservatives in his struggle with the Democrat-Media complex.

Yes, they're that insane. Limbaugh goes after Shep Smith for using basic journalistic ethics, and repeats the Big Race-Baiting Lie:

“This regime is tribalizing this country. They are dividing this country. It's not just enough to say that they are dividing us. They are tribalizing this country. We aren't Americans anymore. We're all members of different racial tribes, and we are to be pitted against each other: Black Americans, White Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans. We're all being divided up racially, by tribes.”

The pure projection is staggering. Breitbart won't apologize and the amoral pageview machine Politico puffs him up. I suspect the small, sudden moment of some ethics and honesty on the right scared the bullies.

A reader writes:

Although I agree that you have every right to be suspicious, I suggest you change tack on the Trig stuff and just keep publicizing the story exactly as Palin presents it. Because I think the facts of the story as she presents them show her in even worse light than if it were proved that Trig was not hers.

From what I’ve read the facts as she presents them show her to be either monumentally stupid, monumentally hubristic, or monumentally cavalier with another person’s life. Why, it’s almost as if she didn’t want her special needs child to be born safely.  Anyone who has ever had a child, knows someone who’s had a child or is part of the medical profession (which I would imagine covers a fairly significant proportion of the electorate) would, if they fully knew the story Palin herself recounts, either think that she was acting in a grossly irresponsible, dangerous way or else being in some way ‘economical with the truth’.  All the other women I’ve talked to who’ve been through labor and birth are far more shocked by her version of events than by the notion that she may have adopted her own grandchild.

The reason Palin hasn’t made more of a song and dance about the Trig stuff is that every version of the story reflects incredibly badly on her.

A reader writes:

Here’s what I find most ironic about Palin’s staunch opposition to the Cordoba House: there are already at least 10 mosques in Manhattan, including Masjid Manhattan, which has been a mere 4 blocks from Ground Zero since 1970.  Palin is worried about Muslims taking over area near the Ground Zero site even though they’ve been there for decades.