Category: The Dish

San Francisco, California, noon.

Some helpful background for the data presented by Petraeus:

Attacks against "same-sect civilians," U.S. forces, the Iraqi government or Iraqi security forces "are excluded and not defined as sectarian attacks." So even though Sunni insurgent groups loathe the Shiite-controlled government, insurgent attacks on it aren’t considered sectarian violence.

If no attacks on the Iraqi government forces are defined as sectarian, we have a problem. Full FOIAed report here.

One my favorite and constant emailers:

You wrote:

"If only more Republicans had the humanity and courage of the mayor of San Diego."

The mayor is advocating having a judge make the law not the people. Where in the annuals of western civilization is it best that judges make the law and not a legislative branch or the people by voting?

You are a selfish, demented faggot. All you care about is yourself and to hell with everyone else.

PS  Kerry still hasn’t released all his military records.

No, it isn’t Mickey Kaus. The legislature in California has now passed marriage equality twice, only to be vetoed by the governor. Sanders’ statement was simply in support of a veto-proof vote already made by the San Diego city council to petition the California Supreme Court to allow marriage equality. As for Kerry’s military records, it’s good to see Republicans focused on the war … of forty years ago.
It beats addressing the current one, doesn’t it?

A reader emails an addendum to my worries:

The main way the interests of partisan incumbents on both sides converge is in drawing Congressional district lines. There are very few competitive districts, which means in any given district (a) the incumbent has a tremendous advantage (incumbents in the House are re-elected well over 90% of the time), and (b) if there’s no incumbent, the advantage lies with whichever candidate has the strongest appeal to the majority party’s base — not to swing voters or moderates of both parties.

Think about the math behind this, and you’ll see why 2006 was the exception and not the rule.

Most 2006 districts were drawn by Republicans, as they controlled a majority of state legislatures pre-’06. Their aim was to maximize the number of majority-Republican districts, but obviously this required slicing their majority as thinly as possible in each district. Public sentiment swung far enough from the norm in ’06 that it exceeded the margin of safety the line-drawers had thought sufficient, and since this margin was similar in many districts, the result was a huge electoral swing for the Dems. Same principle as the Titanic’s watertight bulkheads going only partway up the hull — once one was overtopped, they all were.

I was disappointed that Schwarzenegger’s proposal to have district lines drawn by a panel of retired judges, instead of the legislature, was rejected by California voters. I think they were sufficiently outraged by his other proposals on the same ballot, and sufficiently bored by the arcanity of this issue, that they just threw the baby out with the bathwater.

So long as legislative district lines are drawn by partisans, legislatures will be dominated by extremists.

It’s come to this:

He’s going to move "In God We Trust" to the front of the new dollar coins instead of the side.

And this:

"I’ll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA."

I kid you not. Even the Corner groans.

James Joyner:

One of the clichés of developing world politics is that “the election is a census, and the census is an election.” We don’t want that to happen here.

In case you missed the final tally, the results are here.

A Republican stands by his daughter, does the right thing, and backs his daughter’s right to marry the woman she loves. If only more Republicans had the humanity and courage of the mayor of San Diego, they could go into the twenty-first century sharing their ideas rather than their phobias.

Norm Geras is a liberal who cannot fathom why the left is hostile to the concept. Money quote:

No, it doesn’t make you a rightwing anti-egalitarian. It’s one obvious basis for a philosophy of universal human rights – the idea that we share a common human nature, and by virtue of it common needs, common capacities and fundamental interests. These interests ought to be protected. Granted, the fact that a common human nature provides the intellectual basis for a justification of universal rights does not by itself show that there is such a common human nature. But there is one – as any open-eyed consultation of historical, anthropological and cultural evidence will vouchsafe. We can argue about what traits it includes and what traits it doesn’t – a really important area of argument – but the denial of there being any human nature at all is wasted breath.

"Don’t tase me, bro," is obviously already in the collective lexicon. So is YouTube: