Author: Andrew Sullivan

Avent counters Leonhardt over whether Greece's fate will be our own:

Degree is important here. America's trend growth rate is higher than Greece's. Its political system is less dysfunctional. Its economy is overwhelmingly on the books and taxed. Its labour markets are more flexible, its public sector is smaller, and its unions are less powerful. It's currency floats, and its monetary policy is its own.The bottom line is that it's not clear that there is any set of policies Greece can adopt which will prevent default. Debt costs are too high and growth is too slow. There are many different ways that America could close its budget gap; it's merely having an intense political debate over which way is the best way. This could potentially be a problem, but it's a different problem from the one in Greece.

Krugman has related thoughts. Derek Thompson's contribution:

We don't have to make spending and revenue perfectly equal. Nobody is saying we need to balance the budget in 2015. We can run deficits. We just can't run structural deficits that add to our debt faster than we grow the economy.

From a Michael Rosenwald profile of Tyler Cowen:

Cowen also has rules about stories: He distrusts them, particularly ones like this profile. The writer is arranging facts to keep readers reading. "The more inspired the story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get," he once said. He believes nearly all stories follow seven templates: "monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth."…Cowen, based on his reading of thousands of books, thinks stories trick readers because they are filtered: Writers "take a lot of information and they leave some of it out," he says.

Frum asks:

There’s much talk of the “instability” of this new government. I wonder. The closest area of coalition cooperation looks to be Britain’s debt emergency. The Liberals are under-represented in defense/national security portfolios – and over-represented in economics and finance. That seems to imply that the Liberals and Conservatives share a similar sense of urgency about Britain’s horrific budget deficit. Frankly, it would be interesting to know how much even the new leadership of the Labour party disagrees. Britain is not Greece, debt repudiation is not an acceptable option. I’m wondering if the real model for Britain’s next decade is not Canada’s 1990s, also a time of governments that were weak on paper, but that were able to act strongly, because their opponents tacitly approved and accepted their most important decisions.

Laura Bush on marriage equality:

Balko follows up on this video, which now has over a million views:

Shooting the family's dogs isn't unusual, either. To be fair, that's in part because some drug dealers do in fact obtain vicious dogs to guard their supply. But there are other, safer ways to deal with these dogs than shooting them. In the Columbia case, a bullet fired at one dog ricocheted and struck another dog. The bullet could just as easily have struck a person. In the case of Tarika Wilson, a Lima, Ohio, SWAT officer mistook the sounds of a colleague shooting a drug dealer's dogs for hostile gunfire. He then opened fire into a bedroom, killing a 23-year-old mother and shooting the hand off of the one-year-old child in her arms.

A reader sharpens my point:

The experience of failure, not the embrace of risk, is the missing element in Kagan's biography.  You wrote that you were concerned because she had never once taken a risk during her life.  That standard recommends Evil Knievel rather than Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court.

What is striking to me is the disconnect between Kagan's life experience and Obama's stated desire to add someone to the court with life experience.  Most people I know have suffered from failures and setbacks.  Indeed, most people find such adversity to be a path towards wisdom, self-knowledge, self-improvement, and even compassion for others.

Consider, for instance, that Justice John Paul Stevens was shaped by his family's bout with failure and prosecution.  Indeed, that experience shaped Justice Stevens' approach to criminal law and federal power.

The greatest figures in American history have overcome failures and adversity.  Lincoln lost several political campaigns.  Franklin D. Roosevelt lost a vice-presidental election and was afflicted with polio.  And though Obama has not entered these ranks, it is notable that he, too, tasted political failure before rising to the presidency.

And Kagan?  Nothing but a gilded path.  Like the Chief Justice John Roberts – the "compassionate" jurist who supposedly calls ball and strikes but has never experienced being called out – the only "failure" on Kagan's resume is a nomination for an appeals court slot that expired for lack of a Senate vote.  Never fired, never rejected, never sick, never (so far as we know) even spurned in her personal life.

The Supreme Court can do without failed people and without mediocrities.  But it should not do without people who understand that suffering and setbacks are central to the human experience. 

I think the Kagan nomination really rips off the bullshit of the "life-experience" argument that Obama has deployed (and manifestly failed to substantiate in the case of his second pick). Compared with Sonia Sotomayor or Clarence Thomas, Kagan is a very privileged member of a very privileged elite she has done everything she can to placate and flatter at every turn.

My provisional view is that she is, in fact, probably far more left-liberal in terms of enabling the federal government to reshape the lives of Americans than is currently understood. I don't buy Sean Wilentz's argument that she was once fascinated by socialism out of scholarly disinterest. Where left-liberal executive power is concerned, she's Obama's redistributionist enabler over the long run. I suspect she is a calculated check on Roberts – and as radical as he, on the other side. Her family and background are obviously saturated in left-liberalism. She has the chops. But her ultra-caution is an almost text-book case of the quite march through the institutions, beloved of the left whence she comes. That makes a robust grilling of her positions all the more important. After all, she asked for it.

Bernstein reports on stories that weren't:

Iowa and marriage.  It's been a year now that same-sex marriage has been the law in radical lefty Iowa, and no one seems to care.  As far as I'm aware, it's not really much of an issue there; here's an article from last month giving an update.

(Image via Waking Up Now)

With the World Cup just around the corner, hosted by a country, South Africa, with one of the highest levels of rape, Katy Kelleher referees the revived debate over the "condom with teeth."

Josh Green suggests another reason that Kagan will get fewer votes than Sotomayor: race. Ramesh's logic:

She will get fewer votes than Sotomayor. But I suspect ethnic politics is a bigger factor than the mood of conservatives. Several Republican senators didn't want to vote against the first Latina nominee. They're not going to have a similar reason to vote for Kagan. Moreover, they probably don't want to explain why they voted against Obama's liberal Latina nominee but for his liberal non-Latina nominee.

Is non-Latina now code for Jewish? Careful now. The Foxman cometh.