The Dish

You don't hear this very often these days:

The Atlantic saw digital revenues leap 275% in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to the same quarter the previous year. Online ad dollars now make up 32% of the magazine’s total revenue, at a time when most magazines get far less than 25% of revenue from online advertising.

Thanks to Jay Lauf and Justin Smith and their team – and to you for showing up and supporting us.

From the WSJ editorial today:

In any event, this is hardly Mr. Reid's worst rhetorical offense. That prize goes to his all too public comments in April 2007 that "the war is lost" in Iraq, even as the surge was finally making victory possible. That was a betrayal of American soldiers risking their lives in Iraq, and to the extent it emboldened the enemy, it may have cost American lives.

So any position other than a firm support for the "surge" – whose success in its stated objective, a political settlement in Iraq that is non-sectarian, is still unproven – was a "betrayal" of the troops. These people never disappoint, do they?

Veronique de Rugy, who is against the current health care bill, connects the decline in out-of-pocket spending on health care to out-of-control health care costs:

[The graph] shows out-of-pocket payments by consumers and spending by Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurers on healthcare from 1965 to 2008. Since the passage of Medicare in 1965, consumers’ out-of pocket spending on healthcare has decreased steadily as a percentage of overall U.S. healthcare spending. While real and nominal out-of-pocket healthcare payments increased over the period, growth in these costs was dwarfed by a much more rapid growth in overall spending. On average, consumers’ out-of pocket healthcare costs increased 6.7 percent each year, while national healthcare expenditures increased by an average 9.8 percent each year.

Goldblog responds:

Hillary Mann Leverett, in her weak-tea response to my original post about her new politics, denies that she jumped from Team Sanctions to Team Appeasement because she lost her bearings, but because she came to realize that negotiations with Iran could work. …Hillary Mann Leverett and her husband are among the more cynical foreign policy realists (by definition, of course, not an idealistic bunch) I've ever read, so I won't critique the morality of their desire to buttress an Iranian regime that rapes and murders its own citizens in order to maintain its hold on power. But I can say that, in realist terms, her response to my post is deeply unrealistic.

First, the senior diplomats for whom she worked (including Ryan Crocker, the most esteemed American diplomat of his generation) don't seem to have the same rosy memories of these negotiations that she does, but in any case, the conditions that pertained at the time no longer exist. The people who conducted Iran's negotiating in the pre-Ahmadinejad period aren't the same ones who would do the negotiating today (Some of these officials have been purged from the system and face imprisonment.) Imagine a foreign leader stating that he believed he could successfully negotiate with George W. Bush because he once successfully negotiated with Jimmy Carter; this is what Hillary Mann Leverett, in essence, is saying.

New Jersey has just become the 14th state to legalize medical marijuana. Jacob Sullum:

It's not clear where this leaves John Ray Wilson, the New Jersey man who was convicted last month of growing marijuana that he used to treat his M.S. Although the new law would not have allowed such cultivation, it would have made it unnecessary, and it highlights the injustice of punishing Wilson for using a soon-to-be-legal method of relieving his symptoms. Corzine's office said he was waiting for the outcome of Wilson's trial before considering the case for clemency. If that means waiting until Wilson is sentenced on February 5, Wilson may be out of luck, since Corzine leaves office on Tuesday.

I suspect that when historians review the Obama presidency, one of the biggest shifts will be more sanity in the drug war. Obama has done nothing in this but respect states' rights. And federalism allowed this issue to be resolved.

Schneier joins the debate.

Yes, the risks are different. Your personal chance of dying in a car accident depends on where you live, how much you drive, whether or not you drink and drive, and so on. But your personal chance of dying in a terrorist attack also depends on these sorts of things: where you live, how often you fly, what you do for a living, and so on. (There's also a control bias at work: we underestimate the risk in situations where we're in control, or think we're in control — like driving — and overestimate the risks in situations where we're not in control.) But as a nation we get to set our priorities, and decide how to spend our money. No one is suggesting we ignore the risks of terrorism — and making people feel safe is a good thing to do — but it makes no sense to focus so much effort and money on it when there are far worse risks to Americans.

Not just a 19 year old she knew since childhood – his father too. And a colleague in the DUP. Joe My God reacts:

We may be seeing the first ever incidence of entire government brought down by homophobia. The investigation into Iris Robinson's past would surely not have happened had she not gone on national radio to declare that gays were perverted abominations.

But it's staggering how much of the MSM hasn't understood that critical hypocritical part of the equation.

West Hebron, New York, 10.20 am