Author: Andrew Sullivan

The awful fate of Ralph Maccio:

Bruce Bawer is the latest of several victims of laws against "hate speech". Because he tells the truth, as he sees it, about Islam.

Alan Dershowitz thinks Jan Schakowski is too soft on the Palestinians. But she signed the AIPAC resolution blaming Hamas for the civilian casualties in Gaza. Money quote from the Republican Likudnik Dershowitz is backing:

If we want Israel to survive to 2012 and beyond, we have to make a difference in 2010.

John Michael Greer sees the future of the Tea Party tendency (and other populist currents) as the obvious ecological limits to unlimited economic growth begin to sink in:

It seems uncomfortably likely to me that such movements could be set in motion by the emergence of peak oil as a publicly acknowledged crisis. Tendencies in that direction are already welded firmly in place in popular culture across the industrial world. The Sarah Palin supporters who turned “Drill, baby, drill” into their mantra du jour are engaging in incantation, to be sure, but there’s more to the slogan than a comfortable thoughtstopper; a great many of the people who mouth it believe with all their heart that all we have to do is drill enough wells and we can have all the petroleum we want, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get those wells drilled.

That plan of action can’t deliver the goods; they might as well be out there with the cargo cults, building mock airfields on isolated Pacific islands hoping to bring back the DC-3s full of K-rations and cheap trade goods that landed on a hundred archipelagoes during the Second World War. Still, that’s not something they are likely to grasp any time soon; mere reason has essentially no power against a nascent revitalization movement.

(Image via The Ecoterrorist).

Tuesday night on the O'Reilly Factor, former half-term governor of a state which has the population of a little more than Raleigh, North Carolina, said:

"… as governor of Alaska, what I did in dealing with the oil companies and I’ll betcha 75% of my time was being taken up by energy issues here in this state. I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues. It took us putting that as the highest priority to to protect our resources to protect our environment including not just the physical environment but the human environment here."

In her novel, Going Rogue, she is pretty clear as well:

So one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO). With the creation of the PSIO, Alaska became the first state to require industry operators to document their compliance with maintenance and quality assurance standards, and to share that information with the state.

But this is clearly misleading. The push for greater government scrutiny of Arctic Pipeline Technology first came from Palin's predecessor, Frank Murkowski, who set up the team to achieve this in 2006. Yes, Palin continued and moved this forward but it was not her idea, its core architecture was not set up by her, and under her brief tenure, BP, the major culprit, cut its budget for safety and maintenance by around a third. Full details at Palingates. It seems to me that this kind of truth-blurring is just as salient in a public official as loose language about former military service or teaching credentials – as in Blumenthal and Kirk.

If Palin had ever been subjected to the kind of scrutiny today's candidates are getting, she'd be toast. But the genius of Palin's appeal is that her base loves toast – as darkly burnt as possible.

Introducing North Korea's football fans.

Yglesias thinks this map is misleading.

The panda has some competition:

Conor notes this statement by Mark Steyn:

The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.

Thus is reproduced as fact at the Corner, the way Newsweek uses a campaign book like Going Rogue as self-evidently part of the historical record. But, to read only the NYT for the past decade reveals Steyn to be hallucinating:

Over a period of roughly a decade, the newspaper ran everything from major internationally reported stories on honor killings in its glossy magazine to a crime story about a local honor killing on its New York regional page. It covered honor killings in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The topic garnered attention from magazine editors, freelancers, staff reporters in the newspaper, writers on the book review and arts pages, and multiple op-ed columnists from across the ideological spectrum. One of those columnists wrote multiple items about honor killings across several years (and even mentioned them in a couple columns that won a Pulitzer Prize!). Considering the magazine stories on honor killings alone, the Times must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at minimum covering the subject in its Sunday glossy. Honor killings were also deemed important enough to frequently appear in the World Section briefs.

So what on earth is Mark Steyn talking about?

Himself, I think. But since there is only a tenuous connection between what Steyn writes and what most people deem as non-wingnut reality, this critique will hold no water on the right. What matters to them is not grappling with what is, but asserting an ideology and cultural solidarity against libruls. So we have a simple test: will NRO correct the record (as if Steyn has ever conceded an error on anything), or will epistemic closure reign on?

Tom Gross rounds up some of the worst anti-Semitic cartoons published in the Middle East since the Mava Marmara killings. Ugh.