Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ambers is optimistic about eventual Republican adjustment to a world where gay men and women are treated the same way – legally and socially – as straight men and women. I hope he's right.

Riverside, California, 7.22 am

Cameron should be an example here. For all the reasons David Leonhardt lays out today and Jon Chait patiently explains here, we need to make stiff entitlement and defense cuts – but we must also raise some taxes. The debate should not be whether but how – and I agree with Jonah that tax simplification should be the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. It's time to end the supply-side craziness, the tea-party looniness and the ideological fixity of Bush-Cheney economics. Obama needs bipartisan support to do the conservative and responsible thing. Which means that the real war for this country's future must be waged within the GOP. I fear, alas, that war is already being lost in the thickets of Southern populism. So the damage that today's Republican party can still do to America's future remains as real as the wreckage it has already accomplished.

From Fallows's cover story, which is worth reading in full:

Online display ads may not be so valuable now, [Neal Mohan of Google] said, but that is because we’re still in the drawn-out “transition” period. Sooner or later—maybe in two years, certainly in 10—display ads will, per eyeball, be worth more online than they were in print.

How could this be? In part, he said, today’s discouraging ad results simply reflect a lag time. The audience has shifted dramatically from print to online. So has the accumulation of minutes people choose to spend each day reading the news. Wherever people choose to spend their time, Mohan said, they can eventually be “monetized”—the principle on which every newspaper and magazine (and television network) has survived until today. “This [online-display] market has the opportunity to be much larger,” he said. It was about $8 billion in the U.S. last year. “If you just do the math—audience coming online, the time they spend—it could be an order of magnitude larger.” In case you missed that, he means tenfold growth.

Radio Free Europe has details:

Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist whose sketch of the Prophet Muhammad enraged many Muslims, was head-butted today while giving a lecture about freedom of speech. Vilks, who depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007, said he was assaulted by a man sitting on the front row as he spoke at the University of Uppsala, about 70 kilometers from Stockholm. A spokesman for the Uppsala police said about 20 people tried to attack Vilks after interrupting his lecture, adding that the police had to intervene to stop them.

Hamilton Nolan fumes:

The fact that so many American media and academic institutions have caved into the imagined fear of such religious fascists is shameful. If the free societies of the world can’t stand up for a person’s right to draw a fucking cartoon without becoming the victim of a multinational assassination plot, well, we lose. And if people’s faith in their god is not strong enough to allow them to laugh off and dismiss an offensive little drawing, they lose.

Yes, this is priceless:

On Wednesday, one reporter reminded Mr. Cameron that when asked what his favorite joke was, he had responded, “Nick Clegg.” A chagrined-looking Mr. Cameron admitted he had said as much, prompting Mr. Clegg to jokingly pretend to stalk away from his lectern.

HarperCollins announces Palin's latest book, "America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag." Mudflats is nauseated:

Yes, boys and girls, just in time for that money making holiday the liberals are trying to destroy, you too can buy a collection of stuff other people have written, with comments that Sarah Palin’s ‘collaborator’ has written, that Sarah Palin herself read, probably, and approved. 

Ben Smith looks at the timing of her book tour with the election cycle. I'm just cock-a-hoop. I may even have to put out a little book at the same time.

Alex Massie:

The government is…likely to be less influential on the international stage than its predecessors. As a Tory-Liberal alliance could be broken by arguments over the European Union, Britain’s relationship with Brussels will be placed in cryogenic suspended animation with the label, “Do Not Waken Before 2015.” And a Tory-Liberal partnership will need to compromise on Afghanistan. Both want the mission “clarified” and agree that the commitment cannot be indefinite.

Andrew Sparrow:

I'm going to go through the coalition agreement section by section. I won't summarise all the points, because you can read the whole thing for yourself here, but I'll just note the points I find interesting.

On deficit reduction, the document says both parties are still committed to cuts worth £6bn this year. But it introduces some "wriggle room" that could be used to justify amending this target. It says the £6m figure is "subject to advice from the Treasury and the Bank of England" on the feasibility and advisability of the cuts.

Renard Sexton:

One element that will be curious to watch will be the strategy of Labour, as the party revamps and retools. Will they go the route of the Canadian Liberals and aim to keep a snap election from occurring, in order to give David Cameron and Nick Clegg the pleasure of taking credit for the inevitable public belt-tightening that will have to take place, the swoop in with avengence in 2 or 3 years. Or will they quickly name new leadership and set to work lobbying the leftist bloc of the Liberal Democrats, who may be less than pleased to be in cahoots with the Tories.

Alastair Campbell:

If Cameron proves me wrong, good luck to him. I mean that. He has taken on an enormous job, with tremendous capacity to do good. But I do not believe his Party has the values or the understanding of the modern world to make the most of it, and certainly not for the benefit of people who most need an active government on their side. And I don't believe the Liberal Democrats can either. Otherwise they would not have shepherded a right-wing, unchanged Tory Party – that hates Europe, has crazy policies on schools, wanted to help the richest first, wants to bring back hunting and all the other paraphernalia of a backward-looking non progressive force – through the door in the first place.

Janet Daley:

While Labour implodes – torn between the inclination to become a public sector union lobby group and the determination to maintain the myth of New Labour – there will be no effective opposition at all. Even the anti-Tory media camp will be in disarray: the Guardian, after all, backed the LibDems. Surely that means they must support them now that they are in government? Hopefully, the Conservatives will be able to get through at least one Budget and one Public Spending Review before the confused ranks of what the Opposition is going to be, manage to get themselves together.

Hopi Sen:

[T]he changes the Lib Dems negotiated are real.

I’m pleased about that – a more moderate Conservative government is a far better outcome than the one were were offered at the start of the General Election campaign. In effect, the voters, the Lib Dems and the presence of an alternative  have forced the Conservatives to deliver the great centrist move that Cameron always failed to quite complete.

Yet this is the danger for the Lib Dems…

Tyler Cowen:

Britain should avoid proportional representation.  Classic parliamentary systems are good at making big changes in a hurry, when the major party knows which changes are needed, and that is Britain's current position.  It's no accident that Thatcher and Roger Douglas — both of whom operated under extreme Westminster systems – were two of the major reformers in the late 20th century.  PR gives too much power to minority parties in the ex post electoral bargain and it works best when there is extreme consensus at the social level, combined with the need to bring certain co-optable minorities into that consensus.

Thoreau:

Less than a week after an election that yielded no clear winner, they have resolved the matter. I actually like the result, first and foremost because Labour lost. Say what you will about the Conservatives, but I believe that 13 years is long enough for any party to hold power. The Conservatives may or may not deserve to win, but any party in power for 13 years probably deserves to lose.

The Spectator:

The Lib Dems are left with prestigious-sounding non-jobs like Scotland Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister. To adapt Boris Johnson’s metaphor, we have been served up a sausage government and it is never edifying to see how sausages are made. But the meat in this sausage is most certainly Conservative. The Lib Dems are the gristle.

Hertzberg:

The irony is that center-left political reform types like me suddenly have a stake in the success of a, yes, Conservative government. An unfamiliar sensation, but not a wholly unpleasant one.

(Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty.)

A memoir of Britain's new chancellor.

It seems to me that a judgment of the Goldstone Report is perfectly possible without an attempted character assassination of the author. But it is very telling that this tactic – a central one among those fanatically defending the policies of the Israeli government – is so swiftly deployed. One key weapon of those attempting to police and stifle debate on the Middle East is the personal smear. The sheer viciousness of the way in which the anti-Semite card is played is testimony to a position that endures in part by bullying – a sign of its essential weakness. But the Yediot Ahronoth smear of Richard Goldstone as some kind of racist Afrikaner really did up the ante. It was not news; and it is not in any way salient to the critique of Israel's and Hamas's war crimes in Gaza. But it is made especially absurd by the obvious fact that if one is going to judge people on the basis of their former positions on apartheid, Goldstone is a human rights icon compared with the state of Israel, which propped up the sanctioned racist regime with arms sales.

Pro-Israel fanatic, Ron Radosh, offers the following defense of Israel's enmeshment with apartheid:

The truth is that all governments have and do make alliances of necessity that many find objectionable.

What made the Israel-South Africa alliance under apartheid one of "necessity"? Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who has written a book on the Israel-apartheid alliance recalls a quote from a former editor of Yediot Ahronoth in 1985 while visiting South Africa:

"Give the blacks the vote very slowly. See how it works. Bit by bit. If you see that your bit by bit approach is not working, change it. But make the world believe you are sincere. You have to be hypocritical to survive."

Sounds eerily familiar, no? But Goldstone Delendum Est.