The Dish

Julian Sanchez has a judicious post on last week's commotion regarding Elena Kagan's sexual orientation. Like Julian, I found the White House's response to be totally tone-deaf:

They could simply have said that Kagan has never publicly discussed the details of her private life either way, which would have been enough to establish that the CBS story overreached. By going further and asserting that Kagan is straight—though in the absence of a verbatim quote, it’s possible that a spox really just flubbed an attempt to deny the “openly” part—they’ve made it actually newsworthy if the claim turns out to be false. Moreover, as many have noted, responding as though being called a lesbian constitutes a “charge” is a stupid goof in 2010.

If Kagan is straight, why have so many people simply assumed she's gay? If Kagan is gay, why is there such pushback against such a "charge"? I fear this is an instance where shifting mores have left someone stranded. The kind of "I'm-out-but-not-really-out" straddle cannot work any more in national public discourse. But now the White House has boxed itself, and Kagan, in.

He's been followed around by a tabloid journalist dressed in a giant chicken suit and today got hit by an egg wielded by a student. I have to say, reading the stories of Iraq's election, that this is kind of reassuring. Cameron did get a good line out of it though:

"Now I know which came first – the chicken not the egg."

Egging has a long tradition in British politics. Harold Wilson got egged in 1970; John Prescott got a egged at "point-blank" range and punched the poor egger.

(Photo: Adrian Dennis/Getty.)

John Meroney features footage that hasn't been seen in nearly six decades:

Today, it's an astonishing, even eerie, scene: the icon of modern American conservatism, whose rise to political prominence was galvanized by the cultural rebellion of the 1960s, fighting off an attack-at-gunpoint by the quintessential modern American rebel. But when "The Dark, Dark Hours" episode of General Electric Theater aired live from Hollywood on December 12, 1954, Ronald Reagan and James Dean were just two actors yet to find the roles that would define them.

And yet in this clip, they do seem to have stumbled across the roles that would define them.

Two of the five polls now show the Liberal Democrats slightly in the lead, ahead of both Tories and Labour. In every other polls, they are just a few points' shy of being on top. This has never happened in decades.

As Balko writes, the Washington press corps could learn a thing or two from this exchange.

 
Derek Thompson looks at the unemployment insurance (UI) debate:

The San Francisco Fed has weighed in with its own report on the effect of UI on unemployment. The verdict: "We calculate that, in the absence of extended benefits, the unemployment rate would have been about 0.4 percentage point lower at the end of 2009, or about 9.6% rather than 10.0%."

Both the White House and the Fed expect unemployment to remain above 9% by the end of the year and above 8 percent through 2011. This will create significant pressure for benefits to continue, especially since the Congressional Budget Office considers UI one of the most effective fulcrums for raising aggregate demand and creating more work hours. But eventually, UI could unnaturally extend periods of unemployment, costing the government billions of dollars (both in spending and foregone tax revenue) and subsidizing the atrophy of our labor force's skills. Like so much about the federal deficit, jobless benefits today are necessary and potent medication — but they should not come with permanent refill option.

(Image from Cellania)

Graeme Wood considers Eyjafjallajökull's chill factor.

Carl Zimmer examines them:

Del Percio’s team has…measured brain waves of athletes and nonathletes in action. In one experiment the researchers observed pistol shooters as they fired 120 times. In another experiment Del Percio had fencers balance on one foot. In both cases the scientists arrived at the same surprising results: The athletes’ brains were quieter, which means they devoted less brain activity to these motor tasks than nonathletes did. The reason, Del Percio argues, is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. Del Percio’s research suggests that the more efficient a brain, the better job it does in sports. The scientists also found that when the pistol shooters hit their target, their brains tended to be quieter than when they missed.

Vaughan Bell adds his two cents.

Catherine Mohr reminds us that the greenest option often isn’t obvious:

Douthat turns a skeptical eye to the Canadian example:

Canada’s budget was balanced because a right-of-center party passed a V.A.T., whose massive unpopularity helped elect a large left-of-center majority, which then used its newfound power to make drastic spending cuts. To have an equivalent sequence of events in American politics, you would need Barack Obama and the Democrats to pass dramatic cuts to Medicare and Social Security in 2014 or so, followed by a 2016 campaign in which Bobby Jindal and his running mate, Paul Ryan, swept to victory by promising to repeal the entitlement cuts, but then broke their promise once in office and starting raising taxes instead.

Stranger things have happened. But not many.