The Dish

That’s how the Washington Post described the Guardian. Funny because both papers have a staff of just under 600, and then there’s this:

The Guardian’s global monthly unique visitors: 23.2 million

The Washington Post’s monthly unique visitors: 17.2 million

Do you think the WaPo even has the faintest clue how irrelevant it is?

Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan’s piece on GOP donors who support immigration reform calls such donors “political pragmatists” and claims that the donors are “trying to move the party forward — and more toward the ideological center.” Douthat contrasts the article with others on GOP donors:

It’s absurdly credulous about how the rich and powerful inside the G.O.P. tent are supporting comprehensive immigration reform for purely selfless reasons, because it’s the only way to save the party from the yahoos, and displays little of the “follow the money” skepticism that you would normally expect from the press when there’s a united corporate front on one side of a given debate.

This isn’t to say that what I’ve termed the “donorist” perspective on the Republican Party’s situation is actually purely cynical, or deserves to be covered that way. The pro-business, pro-immigration socially liberal perspective of the party’s elite donors is as sincerely held as any other perspective in our politics. But as is so often the case with people who spend heavily on elections, whether they’re Wall Street conservatives or Hollywood liberals, that worldview does happen to coincide pretty neatly with the economic interests of the people who hold it. And the fact that many journalists are more sympathetic to immigration reform than they are to other causes back by the Kochs and Adelsons of the world is not a good reason to write about the immigration debate as though those interests don’t exist.

Jane Mayer, on the other hand, follows the money when looking at how the Koch brothers have worked to prevent congressional action on climate change:

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming. In 2011, according to the E.P.A.’s greenhouse-gas-reporting database, the company, which has oil refineries in three states, emitted over twenty-four million tons of carbon dioxide, as much as is typically emitted by five million cars.

Neil Irwin rails against the rise of restaurants that only serve small plates:

With a conventional entrée, the chef enters into an implicit agreement with the customer. You, Mr. or Ms. Customer, will order an entrée. I, the chef, will provide you with a properly sized portion of food for an adult human. It will be reasonably balanced nutritionally, with a mix of protein, starch and vegetables. It will be appropriately seasoned so that you might eat the whole thing. And the dish will arrive at the same time as your dining companions’ dinners. Small-plates restaurants take each of those obligations and put them on the shoulders of the diner!

Yglesias fires back:

[T]he case for small plates seems obvious to me: You get to try more stuff. And because you get to try more stuff you get to be more venturesome in your eating. If you’re going to order and eat just one thing then you have to be conservative in what you order; you have to be sure you’ll like it. If you’re sharing a series of small plates with friends, then you have the opportunity to sample things that you’re not sure you’ll like.

Cowen and Ezra follow-up by comparing small plates to TV packages.

Christian Jarrett describes a study that examines how men size up conflict:

[Researchers] approached 149 men who were either on their own or in a group of 2 to 7 friends. Each participant was taken to one side and shown a picture of a turbaned, bearded terrorist pointing a gun. The photo was cropped so the aggressor’s physical size was hidden. The participants were asked to estimate his physical size and muscularity …

The key finding was that participants with one or more friends tended to estimate that the terrorist was shorter by around one and a half inches, and less muscular (having more than one friend in tow didn’t exaggerate this effect). In contrast, participants who were alone or smaller stature tended to guess that the terrorist was more physically formidable.

The researchers also approached men in groups and gave them the same test either away from or nearby their friends:

Once again, the men tested with their friends nearby tended to estimate that the terrorist was less physically formidable, as compared with men tested on their own. “These findings indicate that the immediate presence of allies is an important factor in men’s estimations of the formidability of potential opponents,” the researchers said – a result that they suggested could be relevant for “violence prevention, policing and military science”.

Jarrett wonders, “Would the study replicate with women?”

National Review dead-ender, Ed Whelan, still refuses to use the simple term marriage when referring to gay people who are married. We are “married,” not married. Under the law, of course, I am married in state and federal law – indistinguishably from my fellow straight married couples. I do not walk around with quotation marks around my relationship any more – and, as Wally Olson notes, not even Scalia and Alito went so far as to insult fellow citizens in this manner.  Wally makes a point I have long insisted upon – which is the double standard deployed by some theocons with respect to divorce and marriage. No traditional Catholic can recognize a civil divorce or re-marriage. Do they put scare quotes around “divorced” or “re-married”? No. Do they threaten to end all their social services if they unwittingly employ a “divorced” non-Catholic or Catholic in their social services? No.

This they reserve for gay people. And they bridle at the suggestion that they are motivated in any way by animus. Well, Ed, prove it.

In today’s video, Dan explains how he kind of respects the “batshittery” of Peter LaBarbera, head of the anti-gay group Truth About Homosexuality:

For a more extensive rundown on LaBarbera and his group, watch this video from Dan. His new book, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, is in bookstores now. My recent conversation with him at the New York Public Library is here. Dan’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.