Sarah Palin meets her new neighbor, journalist Joe McGinniss. Classy:
Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole? Welcome, Joe! It’ll be a great summer – come borrow a cup of sugar if ever you need some sweetener. And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow …
Footage from ABC News of what the spill looks like from beneath the waves. The money shots begin at 1.30.
Andrew Sprung tries to wrestle some kind of rationality from Sarah Palin's latest magical realism … and fails:
We are literally in fantasyland, where it's natural to body forth the possibility that Obama has been influenced by oil money and then conjure a Republican president who's received "even less" than Obama but whom the media will assume (as it would have with Bush, who received proportionately more of the industry's dollars, but never mind…) is more influenced than Obama is (was). And just as the slip about "support by the oil companies to the administration" suggests the opposite of what she purportedly means, so the "even" in "even as much," taken literally, would seem to suggest that Obama hasn't received much from the oil industry.
It all makes sense in her own head. She has a priori conclusions and reasons through bad grammar and total fantasy to the alleged premises. And this is not a bug for Palin Inc. It's a feature.
Bernstein wants to take judges off the ballot:
It's not remotely realistic to expect that voters make careful decisions about judges. Not really because of the technical expertise needed to do so, but because of the numbers game. Voters don't sit down and carefully consider the case for and against handfuls of state judges, on top of federal, state, and local legislative and executive branch candidates, not to mention in many places both state and local ballot measures. Instead, voters use shortcuts, with the big one being party affiliation. O'Connor's preference is for a yes/no vote on incumbent judges (something already used in some states), but in reality voters have no idea who their states' judges are, much less whether they're doing a good job or not. What this translates into is incumbent judges who are safe unless they annoy a well-funded interest group, a coalition of groups, or a political party. Is that really what we want? Judges who know that their jobs are safe as long as they don't rattle any cages — at least not any cages that can do full-scale opposition research and produce TV ads?
Elizabeth Kolbert puts the BP spill in context:
While the point of “peak oil” may or may not have been reached, what Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has dubbed the Age of Tough Oil has clearly begun. This year, the United States’ largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas.
(Image: Oily water is seen at sunset at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill May 11, 2010 off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. By Gerald Herbert/Getty Images.)
TNC guest-blogger, Darius Tahir, rates a series of movie adaptations:
Great books are great books; that is, they're great books because they're great at being books. And many of the qualities that make a book great as a book aren't portable to movies. Any kind of inner voice; psychologizing; stream of consciousness; many kinds of allusion; many kinds of wordplay, and I'm sure there are more examples that I didn't think of.
That's why it's a pretty bad idea to try your hand at the great books, though people keep on trying (The Great Gatsby, say, or All the King's Men). No, were I a director, I would only choose to adapt mediocre books with promise.
Kerry Howley reviews Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham:
You can be fairly sure that a thirty-year-old American self-identified feminist today is a fan of birth control, Medicare, and democracy. In 1890 one could make no such assumptions about a pro-woman radical. She might well support free love but think condoms a tool of the sex-mad patriarchy; she might want to socialize housework or smash the state. One is struck, paging through this idiosyncratic survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, by the enthusiasm for a kind of fluid, shape-shifting self-conception…
If the period Rowbotham surveys was indeed characterized by wide-eyed "optimistic imagining," our own time is striking for the narrowness of its political and economic questions.
The successes of feminism and market capitalism (the latter trend evidenced by the desperate use of words like socialist and fascist to describe various shades of market-friendly moderates in American political discourse) have bequeathed to today's feminists a straitened range of internecine dispute. Movement types are less likely to question the gender assumptions of liberal democracy than to argue about the importance of a female president, less likely to discuss the machinery of production than to discuss the role of woman as consumer. This comparatively fixed framework, this shift from sprawling questions to well-defined goals, is a symptom of progress. And yet after reading Rowbotham it's hard not to notice the comparative tininess of today's tent.
Scientist and biotech entrepreneur William Haseltine challenges the importance of the synthetic cell story. While agreeing the research is significant, he argues that the breakthrough has been blown out of proportion:
Has man indeed made life? I think not. The replica is indistinguishable in form and function from the original. Were it not for marker tags introduced into the replica DNA, there would be no difference at all. It is as if one were to create a copy of Michelangelo's David, accurate down to the last crack and imperfection except for the signature, and call it new. Is the organism so created useful? No more so than the original, most famous for being small, with no known use outside the laboratory.
Will this work open a new era of modern biology? Again unlikely. That door was opened some time ago with the advent of genetic engineering that allows functioning genes of one organism to be inserted into another (think of the human gene for insulin inserted in bacterium to produce the replacement hormone for diabetics), and more recently by mixing and matching the genes from many different species to create new useful biochemical pathways. For example, nine different genes, some from bacteria and some from plants, were spliced into yeast DNA to direct the production of an anti-malarial drug previously only obtainable from a tropical plant. Similar methods have already been used to ferment diesel and jet fuel. These techniques are part of a rapidly growing field I call "constructive biology," but now goes by the unfortunate name "synthetic biology."
(Image: Electron micrographs by Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman of the NCMIR at UCSD)
Avent defends the district against Friedersdorf's assault:
People blame the city of Washington for all kinds of things, and they’re almost always wrong to do so. They are especially wrong when they blame the city for generating this kind of corrosive camaraderie or group think. The Washington metropolitan area is home to nearly 6 million people (over 8 million if you count the Baltimore metro area). The central 125 square miles or so are home to just over 1 million people. If you can’t help but spend all your time with the same people, you might want to start by asking whether it isn’t your own shortcomings that need attention, rather than Washington’s.
Friedersdorf continues the thread by asking what would happen if "we reformed the insular nature of Washington DC by dispersing its powerful political figures throughout the country?""
Today on the Dish, Pelosi got bolder over ending DADT, we checked in on the size of the oil spill, and Andrew let out a great lament. He also took another long look at the Beinart-led debate on Israel. In the wake of Rand Paul bailing on Meet the Press, Ambers thought he will weather the storm, several bloggers assessed his libertarian cred on foreign policy, Julian Sanchez addressed the conflict between his idealism and the real world, TNC examined the racist baggage plaguing many libertarians, and a reader wrung his hands over the media's treatment of Rand.
In other coverage, a Republican won the seat of Obama's birthplace, Ricks relayed a daunting report on getting stuck in Afghanistan, and a new twist on the Malawi couple surfaced. Palin told another pernicious lie, a former conservative pointed his finger at her, even Pete Wehner couldn't defend her, and Todd, as it turns out, appeared to make most of the decisions.
Bruce Bartlett predicted a political storm over Medicare and slapped conservatives over military spending. John Seabrook sang the praises of adoption while a few readers took exception. More on the origins of Jesus Christ here and here, More on the essence of hippies here. A video version of the Hewitt Award here, a kick-ass nature clip here, and a cool ad for the World Cup here.
— C.B.
The Dish 