The Dish

Henry Farrell makes a prediction:

My best guess – as discussed before – is that the initial boost for the Liberal Democrats from the first debate was less a simple result of Clegg having done well, than of Clegg suddenly appearing to be a viable candidate, voters (who might have preferred to have voted Lib Dem if they didn’t think their vote was going to be wasted) seeing that others perceived Clegg as a possible winner and revising their own voting tactics etc. In other words – the debate didn’t pick winners or losers based on the strength or weakness of their performance so much as it revealed possibilities that voters had hitherto discounted.

If this is right, we will not see a major boost for Cameron in the final vote. Instead, we’ll see a continuation of the trendline – Labor doing badly, the Liberal Democrats doing well, but bleeding some support, and the Conservatives doing fine, but not fine enough to win a majority in Parliament.

Dan Berman and Renard Sexton have a slightly different read:

It seems that Clegg’s vacillation over the weekend as to who he would back in a hung parliament was at least part of his undoing. In the second debate he had been able to pretend that he was a serious contender for the big chair, confidently stating that the Liberal Democrats in power would do this or change that. The coalition discussions ended that. By the time of the third debate, it was clear that though one man on the stage would end up Prime Minister, it would not be Clegg.

Pablo Paster looks at the science of turning the oil spill into air pollution – the "lesser evil". Dream on.

This is how my colleague, Jeffrey Goldberg, describes John Mearsheimer's recent speech on the Israel/Palestine question:

"a forgettable death-to-Israel speech."

If Mearsheimer's speech, which coolly explained why the two-state solution he favors is highly unlikely to occur and that Israel faces a demographic or moral suicide as a Jewish state as a result, then Jeffrey Goldberg's own gesammelte Schriften, making many of the same points over the years, should also be considered "death-to-Israel" doggerel.

The obvious and serious flaw in Mearsheimer's argument, as I noted, is the absence of a deep analysis of Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution and the Palestinian support of those forces that seek to end Israel altogether. He does mention it, but, to my mind, in far too cursory a fashion:

The Palestinians are badly divided among themselves and not in a good position to make a deal with Israel and then stick to it. That problem is fixable with time and help from Israel and the United States. But time has run out and neither Jerusalem nor Washington is likely to provide a helping hand.

His best point here is surely that almost all of the power belongs to Israel and the US at this point, and that Israel's intransigence (and America's long enabling of it) is a more pressing reason behind the impending long-term collapse of the Zionist experiment than Palestinian rejectionism. Agree with this or not, but it seems perfectly plausible to me. Noah Pollak also loses his shit. Take this sentence:

John Mearsheimer gave a speech at the Palestine Center in Washington yesterday and called Israel an apartheid state that has practiced ethnic cleansing and will likely practice it in the future.

In fact, Mearsheimer is clear (read the speech) that the apartheid state he fears is in the future, not now (many Israelis believe the same); and Mearsheimer specifically writes that, contra Pollak, he believes Israel is unlikely to engage in mass deportation any time soon:

That murderous strategy seems unlikely, because it would do enormous damage to Israel's moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and its international standing.  Israel and its supporters would be treated harshly by history, and it would poison relations with Israel's neighbors for years to come.  No genuine friend of Israel could support this policy, which would clearly be a crime against humanity.  It also seems unlikely, because most of the 5.5 million Palestinians living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean would put up fierce resistance if Israel tried to expel them from their homes.

My italics. Yes, he thinks that in a future war, such a thing is not inconceivable. But Pollak is unfair to state this as Mearsheimer's main prediction (when, in fact, it is the opposite).

Then there is the hysteria about Mearsheimer's (deliberately?) provocative categorization of three broad camps in the American Jewish community.

Goldblog and others equate this to Father Coughlin's rants in the 1930s. The only problem with this analogy is that Mearsheimer's point is that the hardline neocons are misguided because they are hastening the moral and demographic collapse of Israel, rather than stopping it. So he is not criticizing American Jews for being Jewish or for supporting Israel over America (the "dual loyalty" red herring) but for being, in his view, mistaken in how they believe Israel should be saved. He is criticizing them for blind support, rather than intelligent support, and believes this blind support is actually consigning Israel to a bloody endless war that it cannot fully ever win. And he notes, for good measure, how many leading American Jews dissent from this AIPAC "Israel Is Always Right" line, and how the bulk of American Jews feel ambivalent and conflicted about all of it.

If this is the analysis of an anti-Semite, then which critic of Israel's current trajectory isn't one? David Bernstein, in the middle of another emotional harrumph, even concedes, to his credit, that "Mearsheimer describes the obvious solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in terms I (more or less) agree with." 

I suspect the virulence and extreme rhetoric of those criticizing Mearsheimer's challenging and provocative address is directly related to the brutal truth of the analysis he presents. If Israel does not get out of the West Bank soon, if it does not remove every single settlement, if it does not act decisively to escape the death trap of Greater Israel, no Israel will survive as a morally defensible or democratic or Jewish state.

Far from being, as Goldblog asserts, an abandonment of foreign policy realism, Mearsheimer's speech is a pellucid, if flawed, example of it. I suspect that's why it wounds. The truth usually does.

Aditya Mandayam creates "laptopograms," which are "images made by pressing photosensitive paper onto a laptop screen and flashing an image in a manner not unlike contact printing or photograms." More here.

A nice little vignette from a Tennessee Republican Congressional candidate, describing his days in the military:

“I can tell you if there were any homosexuals in that group, they were taken care of in ways I can’t describe to you.”

The leader of the conservative movement in America, whom no one in the GOP dare cross, now says the rig explosion in the Gulf was detonated by those opposed to off-shore drilling in the energy bill. See if any leading Republican knocks this down. Or is this merely "entertainment"?

TNC counters Frum:

Defenders of the law will say that police still have to stop you for something, and they still have to "suspect" that you did something.

Forgive, but I don't find that comforting. Amadou Diallo is dead because the police "suspected" he was drawing a gun. Oscar Grant is dead because the police "suspected" he needed to be tased. My old friend, Prince Jones, Howard University student and father of a baby girl, was  murdered by the police in front of his daughter's home because police "suspected" he was a drug-dealer. (The cop was not kicked off the force.) Only a year ago, I was stopped in Chelsea, coming from an interview with NPR, because police "suspected" I was the Latino male who'd recently robbed someone. 

This comes down to police power, and how comfortable you are with its extension. George Will, in a bit of populist demagoguery, implies that the critics of the Arizona law are people who only know illegal immigrants as cheap labor. But I suspect Will mostly has the exact same relationship with illegal immigrants. Moreover, I suspect that he only knows the police as the kind of Officer Friendlies who only arrest "the bad people."

"Jay’s got The Tonight Show. I have a beard and an inflatable bat. And I’m touring city to city. Who can say who won and who lost?” – Conan O'Brien.

Paul Tullis criticizes the NYT for pushing the "Obama's Katrina" meme and spells out the differences between the oil spill and the hurricane. John Hinderaker – surprise! – takes the other side. Michael Roston also casts a critical eye on the administration's preparedness. The NYT follows up with more scrutiny. Ambers, meanwhile, predicts that "offshore drilling is dead in the water as a policy anytime soon, much like the Three Mile Island accident soured politicians and the public on nuclear power."

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry cautions:

[T]he fact that an activity carries risk does not mean it is ill-advised. It does mean that precautions must be taken. “Drill baby drill” is a simplistic slogan, but thinking “drill baby drill” is made wrong by one oil spill is equally simplistic — and we don’t want to be as simplistic as Sarah Palin, do we?

Room For Debate also focuses on costs and benefits. Here's Matthew Kotchen, an environmental economics professor:

In terms of benefits, the amount of oil under consideration is so small compared to domestic consumption that we can confidently dismiss all arguments about decreasing prices and reducing our reliance on imports.The real benefit is that oil is worth a lot. And this is why the Obama administration sees an opportunity. Sizeable revenue from the sale of offshore leases can help build political and financial support for more comprehensive climate and energy policies.

Dreher looks at the local impact:

I don't see how it's avoidable that this spill is going to have major, major impact, and not just on the coastal environment. According to the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries department, the Louisiana seafood industry is worth $265 billion annually "at the dockside," and beyond that has a $2.3 trillion economic impact. The state's budget was already in dire shape, with dramatic cuts to higher education and state services on their way for next year … and now the state is faced with the possible destruction of its fishing industry. The economic pain could be extreme — likewise for the coastal tourism industries in Mississippi, Alabama, still struggling to recover from Katrina, and perhaps even the Florida Panhandle. The entire nation benefits from the oil harvested from Gulf waters, but now the cost of it is going to be borne in a particularly horrible way by Louisiana and neighboring states.

More along these lines from Nicole Allan. And from John Besh. Lisa Margonelli advocates:

The oil spill in the Gulf is horrific and it's very likely it'll get worse. While locals get to work scrubbing the oiled birds with Dawn dish detergent,  a fracas will begin in Washington. Generally speaking this is an opera called "The Punishment," and for the last two major oil spills of great political  consequence (Santa Barbara in 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989) it involved  a moratorium on drilling somewhere in the US. The problem with this, as I lay out in an op-ed in today's New York Times, is that we basically shift drilling and  its risks to other countries. (The figure that the Niger Delta, roughly the size of England, has suffered the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez of spilled oil every year since 1969 ought to make us cry.)

This time we need to use the political will generated by this really awful event to implement a comprehensive plan to reduce American dependence on oil. 

(Image: A dead fish lies on the beach as concern continues for the creatures that are in the path of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on May 3, 2010 in Gulfport, Mississippi. It is unknown if the fish died due to the oil spill. Oil is still leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead at an estimated rate of 1,000-5,000 barrels a day. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images)