Author: Andrew Sullivan

Elle revisits an age-old debate by highlighting a complicated case. A couple agreed to terminate should they become pregnant, but the girlfriend changed her mind when the moment came. She's asking for child support:

While neither [Greg Bruell] nor [Mel Feit] believes a man should be able to compel a woman to abort or keep a pregnancy, they don’t want the state to make men pay for children they’ve made explicit they don’t want. Not all of their comrades in the father’s rights movement have been so moderate.

Brendan Nyhan gets butterflies. Douthat looks at the upside:

If Meacham had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength — its large audience outside the Acela corridor — he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative. He would have staffed up with right-leaning columnists, reporters and cultural critics whose work could translate to a broad, not-that-ideological audience. (I’m thinking of writers like Jonathan Rauches and Matt Labashes, among many others.) And he would have embraced Newsweek’s brand advantage in the heartland, and tried to turn that to his magazine’s advantage, instead of convincing himself that he could compete with The New Yorker for the eyeballs and dollars of the liberal intelligentsia.

Newsmax is simply deranged. I read it for some kind of insight into the fever swamps of the Christianist right. It sure wouldn't publish Rauch or Labash. It publishes Beck and Coulter.

Israel has yet to release the full video they have of the attack on the Mavi Marmara. Until they do that, they do not appear interested in showing all the facts and therefore should not be allowed to conduct their own inquiry into the murder of nine unarmed civilians. Meanwhile, we have more testimony that I cannot confirm but that should certainly be reviewed by an international inquiry. It's from a "peace activist", former US Marine, Gulf War vet, and now Irish and Palestinian citizen, Ken O'Keefe. Again, I do not know whether these are untruths, whether the bloody scars on his face were self-inflicted, but I'd like to know the full story. I do not believe for one minute that the Netanyahu government or the IDF will provide it. Money quote:

While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect.  Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted.  Access to food and water and toilets was denied.  Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs.  We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands.  We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really.  We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell.

In all this what I saw more than anything else were cowards… and yet I also see my brothers.  Because no matter how vile and wrong the Israeli agents and government are, they are still my brothers and sisters and for now I only have pity for them.  Because they are relinquishing the most precious thing a human being has, their humanity.

From ads to a more innovative tactic:

[BP] has purchased several phrases on search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that the first result that shows up directs information seekers to the company's official website. A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads.

I let rip in the Sunday Times yesterday:

Oil companies failed to report fully what they were planning, and permits were approved with almost absurd speed. In the Deepwater Horizon case, a permit was approved a mere 10 minutes after it was submitted. Obama did nothing to stop this syndrome when he came in, and his interior secretary, Ken Salazar, is well known for his cosiness with big oil. That will change now.

Alas, what won’t change is the oil addiction that has forced the US to drill deeper and deeper in more and more treacherous waters, where techniques carry more risks precisely because the terrain is brand new. If you want to assign real, structural blame, it belongs in the end to the American people, who simply refuse to wean themselves off carbon and want to continue having the cheapest petrol in the West.

This habit bolsters America’s enemies, empowers oil-rich Islamic states and is slowly cooking the planet. Meanwhile, the climate change bill passed in the House of Representatives remains stalled in the Senate. Because deep-sea oil exploration was a key way to get some Republicans on board for the package, the bill that might in the long run have prevented the same thing happening again has been killed by the BP gusher and a suspension of deep-sea drilling.

The obvious solution — some kind of carbon tax — remains anathema. Remember that America is a country whose de facto leader of the opposition, Sarah Palin, ran on a slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Which means that it’s not just a question of when this ghastly gusher is stopped; it’s a question of when exactly this will happen again. And there will be another company to blame then, like a crooked drug dealer whose addicted customer is getting sicker and sicker and more and more determined to get his fix. Maybe it will take an even greater disaster to force Americans to realise that they have finally hit bottom in their addiction. But I wouldn’t count on it, even then.

(Photo: Shawn Luzmoor wears a gas mask and holds a sign reading, 'Drill, Baby, Drill !' as he tries to get people to react to the oil spill that is now washing up in the form of small oil globs on Pensacola Beach from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on June 5, 2010 in Pensacola, Florida. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

This video is making the rounds:

Chait crafts a backhanded defense:

I find it morally abhorrent, but I don't think being an honest anti-Zionist should disqualify a person from working in journalism.

Agreed on both counts. Joe Klein agrees Thomas shouldn't be fired but thinks some punishment is due:

It's not unprecedented for journalists with odious views to have access to the press room. What is unprecedented is for such a journalist to have a front-row center seat. Thomas should no longer have that privilege. The front row should be occupied by working reporters, not columnists. The WHCA should sanction Thomas by sending her back to the cheap seats. This would accurately reflect her current status as a journalist while preserving her First Amendment right to be as obnoxious as she wants.

I don't see why the front row should belong just to reporters. Their total submission to the news cycle and making news renders much of their questioning a big old kabuki show. Why not allow bloggers in the front row? We'd sure make the awful, smug, useless Gibbs less comfortable.

Serwer whacks Bush for cementing his approval of waterboarding. Bernstein gulps:

Bush, at least, doesn't seem to be headed in the "we do not torture" direction.  And I do think that without him, it would be very difficult to move the Republican Party on this issue.  The only other hope is that an explicitly pro-torture presidential candidate gets clobbered — which certainly is a plausible scenario  in 2012 — but even then, it's more likely that the Rush Limbaughs and Marc Thiessens of the world would interpret such an event as a sign that the candidate wasn't sufficiently strident on the issue.  There are to be sure quite a few conservatives who oppose torture, but fewer and fewer of them are candidates for elective office.  Barring something new (and Bush could still flip, after all), I think a pro-torture candidate and platform is virtually certain for the GOP in 2012. And we know how the nomination process works (in both parties): candidates who are in reality basically similar in their positions on public policy are driven to differentiate themselves by taking high-profile extreme positions on symbolic, highly visible issues.

In my view, this embrace of torture – it is simply insane to describe waterboarding someone 183 times as anything else – is why the GOP needs to be defeated as a political force in its current incarnation. It is on the side of barbarism. It is an assault on America and the values generations of Americans fought and died for.

Now we know for sure: Caused by humans.

Remembering the McCarthyite mindset of TV legend Jack Paar.

Now we're talking:

Although generally hawkish and conservative with a libertarian streak — “we’re for strong defense” is an oft-repeated mantra in the movement — tea party leaders and allies contacted by POLITICO said that both fairness and common sense dictate that the military budget be scrutinized for such cuts, a view that puts them in sync with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and some of the most liberal members of Congress.

“Everything is on the table,” insisted Mark Meckler, a national coordinator with the group Tea Party Patriots. “I have yet to hear anyone say, ‘We can’t touch defense spending,’ or any other issue. … Any tea partier who says something else lacks integrity.”…

[Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a tea party favorite], a bitter critic of Obama — and no fan of Gates or the history of U.S. military intervention since World War II, including NATO — said the country “cannot be a protector of the whole world. We cannot do that any longer. We don’t have the money to do it anyway.”

When the tea-partiers put entitlements and defense on the table and produce real plans to cut all of the above, they will get the Dish's support. I'm waiting, like a lot of people, to see whether they mean what they say. So far, they have failed utterly. But if they show a willingness to cut entitlements and defense by the amounts needed for long term fiscal sanity, we'll back them all the way.

Oh dear: