Author: Andrew Sullivan

Seth Masket has a theory:

I think the soccer issue is one instance where conservative leaders are simply trying to draw a line.  They feel they’ve made enough accommodations to other countries and cultures.  They simply do not acknowledge soccer as an American pastime and feel they are justified in trying to exclude it from our main culture.  We cannot just keep adding things to our nation and assume that the nation will still stand for anything.  Lines must be drawn.  This far, no farther.

Or maybe they just think it’s gay.

CFR interviews Stephen Biddle about the war in Afghanistan. This is about as positive a spin you can put on the situation:

We're at one of those moments where it's very hard to tell whether things are going well or badly. Counterinsurgency always has this "darkest before the dawn" quality.  When you start with a tough situation, you introduce reinforcements and you begin to contest insurgent control of population areas they now control, violence then rises. Enemy causalities go up, causalities to your own forces rise, casualties to civilians increase, general mayhem rises. If you succeed, you gain political control of these populations and violence eventually comes down. From an early increase in violence, you can't deduce that you're winning or that you're losing because you would see exactly the same thing either way at this point in the war.

One more scientific insight into the genetic differences between gay and straight men.

Dan Steinberg searches for the linguistic origin of "my bad."

A reader writes:

For your West Seattle reader, the place to go for city and state coverage is PubliCola, a well-funded site run by two ex-Stranger reporters, Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett. They report the heck out of City Hall and Olympia.  In fact, Josh was the first online reporter to get state house accreditation a couple of years ago.

Another writes:

There are a bevy of local blogs for Seattle neighborhoods started by the "Geeky Swedes," who started the My Ballard blog for my neighborhood, Ballard (historically a Scandinavian area). They have an agreement with the Seattle Times to share stories and information. The lede is that the only remaining mainstream newspaper in Seattle (now that the Post-Intelligencer has shuttered its printers) has in large part given up reporting local news and ceded that role to the blogger community.

As for the best state level blog for Washington, it's horsesass.org. It's excellent AND has had a similar competition as VFYW for the last couple years: Bird’s Eye View Contest.

Another:

Regarding the decline of local news, check out The Capitol Fax Blog, which provides the best coverage of the Illinois statehouse. (And, as the world knows, our state government is a sodden mess.) There’s a subscription service for breaking news that generates revenue, and it’s a must-have for politicians, lobbyists, and community organizations. It’s a slightly different revenue model for new media, but it seems to work. Also, the commentators are possibly the most hilarious people in the entire country.

Massie is pleased:

This was, on the face of it, a good budget. Four out of every five pounds in savings come from spending restraint, not tax rises and this seems to strike the right balance. "We have had to pay the bills of past irresponsibility" said the Chancellor as he opened and closed his speech with a reminder that it's the record of the last government that makes this extra budget necessary in the first place.

The much more lightly taxed American economy could do with more revenue (Britain already has a VAT and as serious tax on gas). John Cassidy, on the other hand, performs Krugman's routine for the British audience.

Molde, Norway, 7.10 am

Saletan examines the ban on gay men donating blood:

"Men who have had sex with men since 1977 have an HIV prevalence … 60 times higher than the general population," the [FDA}] observes. "Even taking into account that 75% of HIV infected men who have sex with men already know they are HIV positive and would be unlikely to donate blood," that leaves a population of MSM blood-donor applicants whose HIV prevalence is "over 15 fold higher than the general population."

So a 15-fold difference is good enough to warrant group exclusion. How about a nine-fold difference? According to the Centers for Disease Control, HIV prevalence is eight to nine times higher among blacks than among whites, and HIV incidence (the rate of new infections in a given year) is seven times higher. For black women, HIV prevalence is 18 times higher than for white women.