Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Patrick Appel

Why dieting is hard.

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver knocks the Pentagon's DADT survey of the troops. In one section it asks service-members to speculate whether other troops are gay:

The survey (at least from what we've seen of it so far) goes out of its way to avoid asking the troops about something which is arguably more relevant and which is certainly more measurable: their opinions about DADT. At no point, for instance does it pose the simple question of whether or not the solider thinks that DADT should be repealed. I'd have no huge problem if we asked our troops that; it would be up to our policymakers to weigh those findings against other factors. But the survey does not solicit the soldiers' opinions; instead, it solicits their speculation on the sexual preferences of their peers. In so doing, it insults their intelligence — and ours.

by Dave Weigel

The former OMB director best remembered now as a slash-and-burn critic of Republican economics talks to Lloyd Grove and… well, try not to be shocked.

Stockman was an economic superstar on a par with former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.  The previous day at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he had used a luncheon to grill his former mentor, who had employed him as a student policy trainee in the Ford White House. “Alan, a long time ago, when I didn’t know anything, you taught me four things,” Stockman informed his ex-boss, who had a wry smile plastered on his otherwise poker face. “One, lower tax rates are better than higher; solvency is better than insolvency; in the long run the budget has to be balanced; and the way you do it is cut spending structurally over time. Thirty years later we didn’t follow those principles. We now have massive debt and, in that 30 years, the Republican Party had an opportunity to stand up and be counted on spending cuts and never did.” Stockman demanded:  “Would you be willing to tell them, ‘Game over! You had 30 years. Now sit down and let taxes be raised so we can avoid insolvency?’

Stockman wants Republicans to win Congress and "reform entitlements and cut spending." Sounds great! I wonder if the best way to open the conversation is over coffee in Aspen, and I wonder if Stockman can do it at all. His credibly with conservatives is about as high as Dick Morris's with Democrats. But picking apart Alan Greenspan's record here is good work, no matter who does it and where it happens.

by Patrick Appel

Dan Ariely pinpoints the problem with online dating:

by David Frum

Andrew Ferguson explains:

[I]t is now an article of faith in the magazine business that readers don’t want this at all. Immersed as they are in round-the-clock cable TV and websites, they don’t need a rehash of events a week old. I’m a fuddy-duddy, world class, but I’m not so sure. It’s true that most journalists have fixed themselves to the info-teat of their iPhones’ Twitter feeds. A rather smaller percentage of normal people live this way, and the presumption that the desires and tastes of journalists are identical to those of their customers is one of the many mistakes that brought Meacham and his colleagues to their present pickle.

Meanwhile, the most successful weekly magazine in the English-speaking world is the Economist, and one of the most successful magazine start-ups of the recent past has been the Week. Both offer readers, among much else, a rehash of the past week’s events. Donald Graham might want to give them a second look.

by Patrick Appel

Larison compares Palin's 2012 run to Giuliani's doomed 2008 campaign:

You will immediately object that Giuliani and Palin are completely different, and in most respects that’s true. Regardless, in one of the most important respects they are very much alike: pundits and journalists took Giuliani seriously as a candidate for the Republican nomination when there was absolutely no reason to do so, and now more than a few of them are doing the same thing with Palin. If Giuliani’s candidacy wasn’t viable because of his social liberalism and his, er, colorful personal life, Palin’s won’t be viable because she will be seen as unprepared, out of her depth and inexperienced, which are all of the things that Republicans have said about Obama for years and will want to use to attack him again in 2012.

I'm basically where Jonathan Bernstein is on the Palin question, but much could change between now and 2012. It's easy to see how this next cycle could provide an opening for a dark horse candidate. The GOP is likely to do very well with governorships in 2010. And if we continue to stumble unevenly towards recovery, this new crop of politicians can take credit for the upturn without being tainted by the downturn. The only question is whether a politician who won in 2010 would have enough time to stage a presidential run.

by Chris Bodenner

Susan Gardner insists that supporters of raising the retirement age are focused on the wrong statistics:

The fact is, men are living less than three years longer, women about five. Yes, there are more people living longer because they didn't die at age 3 of whooping cough or polio, but the life expectancy for an individual has not been extended very much at all once age 65 is reached. Disturbingly, pushing the retirement age out five years as is currently proposed actually means an individual male retiree today is at risk of being cheated of two years more retirement than our supposedly drastically shorter-lived forebears received more than half a century ago.

Ezra Klein continues with the class angle by posting a chart that Drum finds "pretty astonishing":

It shows that since 1972 the life expectancy of men with low incomes has increased by two years while life expectancy for men with high incomes has increased by more than six years. … Obviously, increasing the retirement age to, say, 70, is a much bigger deal for someone likely to live to 79 than it is for someone likely to live to 85. In my book, this is yet another reason not to try to balance Social Security's books by changing the retirement age dramatically.

And we probably don't have to. There are plenty of other ways we could do it instead.

And if we do do it, this chart suggests a couple of things: (a) the change should be modest (maybe going from 67 to 68) and (b) it should be accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement that disability retirements will be routinely available at the same age as now to workers who perform body-draining physical labor.

A Drum reader makes a shrewd point and ties together another thread followed by the Dish:

The [chart's] data is a very strong argument for removing the ceiling on Social Security payments — that is, collecting Social Security on 100% of wages, no matter how high (while not adjusting benefits). That's because the Social Security system, now, assumes that life expectancy is the same for low-income and high-income workers, while in fact low-income workers collect benefits for far fewer years. So higher-income workers *should* pay more than they do today.

by Chris Bodenner

In three words:

(Hat tip: TDW)

by David Frum

Barry Rubin debunks the President's insulting explanation of Israeli mistrust of him. 

Israelis, after all, have dealt with two famous Husseins: King Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The former was a good friend, the most popular Arab leader in Israeli history. (Note 1)

So one can be a good Hussein or a bad Hussein. Of course the issue with this third Hussein is his policies. And that's why I find his saying this thing far more upsetting.

I'd respect Obama more, and perhaps trust him a little more, if he had said something like this:

We've had our differences and we don't see everything the same way. But we are so fundamentally on the same side that our friendship and alliance will overcome these smaller issues. And, of course, we know that our mutual enemies are out to destroy us and favor totalitarian dictatorship rather than democracy.

By denying there were ever some problems and underplaying the reality of what I'll call for brevity's sake the "bad guys", Obama shows an ability to rewrite history in his own mind and forget what has happened. This may signal that in six months he will forget all of Israel's cooperation and concessions, which is precisely what happened last time, between October 2009 and March 2010.

by Patrick Appel

Conor Friedersdorf calls this article by Mariah Blake on the medical industry "the most important story of the year." It's about Thomas Shaw, a man who invented a syringe that dramatically cuts down on infections. The devices only cost a few pennies more but they haven't been adopted. The story is about how laws governing Group Purchasing Organizations are disrupting the implementation of innovations such as Shaw's:

For Shaw this unsolvable riddle has become a kind of obsession. He turns it over and over in his head like an engineering problem, as if the fix might come to him if he just looks at it from enough different angles. Perhaps the part he finds most perplexing is that it was largely government grants that paid for him to develop his retractable syringe. “I’ve spent twenty years fighting to return my obligation to the American taxpayer and to a government that turns its head from its responsibility to protect the free market,” he says. “The taxpayers got screwed out of the technology they paid for.”