Author: Andrew Sullivan

"The problem with COIN is not that it can be done better or worse. Of course their are methods and strategies that are sometimes successful. The problem is that the very idea of COIN inclines policy makers to get involved in stretched versions of the national interest that require astronomical levels of resources to even have a CHANCE at succeeding," – a commenter at Exum's joint.

Bernstein pushes back:

Is the Sage of Wasilla winning?  Is she "getting away with it"? Well, that's where it gets interesting.  For her troubles, Palin is massively unpopular.  Pollster.com has her at favorable/unfavorable averages at 35/52…that's pretty awful.   For a comparison, Romney is at 32/33; Obama is currently at 52/40.  What Sarah Palin has done is to retain the extremely strong support of a fairly small number of Americans.  But that's probably something she would have even if she was giving interviews!  Meanwhile, her media strategy is obviously doing an absolutely terrible job of selling her to anyone outside that small group.  Granted, in my view the product is at least as much of the problem as is the sales campaign, but then again all anyone is asking here is whether she's liked (as opposed to the much tougher sell of whether one would want her as president), and she's failing on that one, too.  It doesn't mean that she could never reach the presidency, if that's what she wants, but it's hard for me at least to see that the press strategy is helping her get there.

A reader writes:

I find it pretty ironic that in your post on pan-Africanism you have a photo of Kevin-Prince Boateng, born and raised in Berlin.

Another writes:

Using Kevin-Prince Boateng's picture is actually a very interesting choice. He has both German and Ghanaian citizenship. His half-brother Jerome is also German/Ghanaian and also an international soccer player – but with Germany instead of Ghana. They've already played against each other in this World Cup. It's the first time brothers ever did so.

Germany beat Ghana 1-0, but the two teams could face each other again.

"You can support Pamela Gorman here, just to drive them crazy," – conservative blogger William A. Jacobson, on the latest Palin clone.

Something possibly profound happened in the recently concluded case, Christian Legal Society vs Martinez. It's summed up by a letter from a lawyer for the anti-Prop 8 side to Judge Walker:

 

According to SCOTUS, gays and lesbians are now a class with respect to equal protection in the current court – hence the importance of this precedent with respect to the Prop 8 case.

My main fear with Elena Kagan, of course, is that she disagrees with this and will burnish her credentials among the judicial restraint chorus by siding with the right against gay people. How does Obama know she won't? How do we? Such questions are not to be asked or answered.

A reader writes:

I thought that the rise of social media and quick, easy access to information would render our politics more transparent, but it appears as though the opposite is true.  Social media has enabled politicians to bypass the traditional channels to create their own narratives and directly reach their audience. 

Sadly, it appears as though this arrangement suits most journalists.

They seem more than happy to summarize Facebook posts or write articles about incoherent tweets.  If they put an edgy headline and enable comments they can increase the number of hits on their website without having to invest any real time in holding politicians and candidates accountable.  As we have seen, even nationally televised "debates" don't require candidates to answer questions anymore. I fear that the "Palin model" – where candidates don't have to answer any difficult questions – will become much more common because people will feel proximity to politicians; every tweet shows up on their cell phone like a personal text.

We need journalism now more than ever but journalists now seem more worried about their access and celebrity than truth.  As you might say, we have entered the age of deference journalism.

Jim Burroway provides more background:

This case isn’t the first time we’ve seen researchers suggest that trying to prevent homosexuality is an ethically defensible position. In 2001, Aaron Greenberg and the controversial J. Michael Baily, both of Northwestern University, published a paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior noting that “As we learn more about the causes of sexual orientation, the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children.” They gave a number of reasons why parents might seek to prevent homosexuality in their children or even abort a fetus if a test were to determine that the fetus were homosexual. Interestingly, they deny that the reasons are based on heterosexism, yet go on to raise a number of heteronormative reasons why parents might want to abort or treat gay fetuses…Of course, many on the religious right would still condemn all abortions regardless of the reason. But for them, finding a medical “cure” for homosexuality would be perfectly acceptable.

Because he is at the center of her politics:

The federal medical care overhaul would limit contributions to health savings accounts and raise insurance costs for people including those with special needs, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said at a fundraiser Tuesday for developmentally disabled children. She warned that new rules aiming to raise $13 billion by limiting contributions to flexible spending accounts amount to a "hefty tax hike" for families of special needs children struggling with health care costs.