Author: Andrew Sullivan

C.H. at DiA flags a Pew study:

Marriage explains only part of the gap in mobility rates between white and black children.

A good start for the Lib-Tory government in Britain.

Larison has a glowing column on Rand Paul's foreign policy views:

On foreign policy and defense, Paul has said, “One of the enumerated powers is defense.  So I believe that the defense of our country may be the primary enumerated power.  Does that mean I believe in a blank check for the military?  No.  Does that mean I believe we have to have troops in 130 countries and 750 bases?  No.”   If elected, Paul would arguably be the first Senator since Robert Taft to represent the foreign policy tradition of the pre-war Old Right, while also projecting the anti-war spirit of the progressive Republican Sen. Robert LaFollette.

Just to have a fiscal conservative who sees defense as somewhere that can be cut is a step forward for a wider and freer debate in this country. Greg Scoblete looks beyond Paul's reasoned critique of military adventurism and finds much lacking:

It's one thing to make the case to the American public that U.S. foreign policy is too meddlesome in other states' business, too quick to reach for punitive sticks and too grandiose in scope and ambition. If that was Paul's message, I suspect it would find a lot of takers. But this is only a piece of what is a larger, more radical frontal assault against the post WWII institutions that, for better or for worse, the U.S. has worked to shape and lead to our general betterment. Some, like NATO, have arguably outlived their usefulness. Others, like the IMF and World Bank, likely need reforms. But a blanket rejection of U.S. participation in all of them just seems ill considered.

Larison bats the ball back over the net by noting that many of these international institutions have facilitated American interventionism. Scoblete parries:

Withdrawing from the UN would not act as a check on interventionism. If anything, given how vociferously hawks like John Bolton denounce it, I suspect it would lead to much more.

What we need is a moderate conservative understanding of defense and national security, aware of threats but not prone to messianism. You know: like Cheney, before he went mad.

A useful reminder that she will say anything, however ludicrous:

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Republicans receive far more campaign money from the oil and gas industry than do Democrats.

So far in 2010, the oil and gas industries have contributed $12.8 million to all candidates, with 71% of that money going to Republicans. During the 2008 election cycle, 77% of the industry’s $35.6 million in contributions went to Republicans, and in the 2008 presidential contest, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain received more than twice as much money from the oil and gas industries as Obama: McCain collected $2.4 million; Obama, $898,000.

The fact that this disaster has happened slowly and cumulatively makes it no less severe:

Along with the marine toxicologist Susan Shaw, of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, I’ve come to peer into the hidden side of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Wreathed in neoprene and with Vaseline coating the exposed skin around our faces, we slip into the clear water in the lee of the boat. Beneath the mats of radioactive-looking, excrement-coloured sludge are smaller gobs of congealed oil. Taking a cautious, shallow breath through my snorkel I head downwards. Twelve metres under, the specks of sludge are smaller, but they are still everywhere.

Among the specks are those of a different hue. These are wisps of drifting plankton, the eggs and larvae of fish and the microscopic plants and animals that form the base of almost all marine food webs. Any plankton-eating fish would now have trouble distinguishing food from poison, let alone the larger filter-feeders.

Onshore, small landfalls of the same sludge have started to cause panic among locals as they coat the marshes. Here, just a few feet beneath the surface, a much bigger disaster is unfolding in slow motion.

“This is terrible, just terrible,” says Dr Shaw, back on the boat. “The situation in the water column is horrible all the way down. Combined with the dispersants, the toxic effects of the oil will be far worse for sea life. It’s death in the ocean from the top to the bottom.”

I have to say I have struggled with how to blog about this. In many ways, it seems to me to be the biggest story of the year, a gaping, unstaunched wound in the planet, emitting death. And yet the prospect of going without drilling seems remote, the possibility of any political will to jump-start alternatives with the impact we need seems just as elusive, and the helplessness of government and industry to stop this nightmare is the most obvious fact (I just assume that BP is doing all it can as of now): all of it makes this story as huge as it is simply despair-inducing. 

If we cannot stop this, what else can we not stop?

(Photo: John Moore/Getty.)

New evidence that one nuclear-power state offered to sell its arms to a rogue regime.

TNC compares the principled libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and the cynicism of George Wallace when it came to race relations:

Goldwater's sin was naivety, and a dangerous underestimation of the precise nature and vintage of evil then stalking the South. Wallace understood the evil too well, and thus set about manipulating it. Wallace knew that this was more than abstract theory, that there was real power at stake.  In that sense, Goldwater is the more appropriate hero for today's generation of blissfully ignorant ("How did that 'White slavery' sign get there?") non-racist Republican. It's not so much that they hate you, it's they are shocked—shocked–to discover that some of their fellow travelers hate you.

When discussing them, all bloggers are required to begin their missives by quickly dispensing with the "Are they racist?" strawman. Answering in the affirmative has been outlawed in polite company, where there are no actual racists. And so we are left, as I've said, with imbecility as an explanation, and a much more troubling query–"Are they stupid?"  ("Are you so stupid that you would allow racist newsletters to be published in your name?" "Are you so stupid that you would have a campaign manager with "Happy Nigger day" on his Myspace page?")

"A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only answer the great paradox by repeating the truism," – G.K. Chesterton.