The Dish

Chait thinks that the House will pass the health care bill unchanged:

Ben Smith lays out two possibilities for passage. The first is to rush a bill through both chambers before Brown takes office. The second would be for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate bill unchanged, which would require no further vote by the Senate.

Room For Debate argues over slowing American mobility. It has decreased substantially since the recession started. Bill Bishop is worried about our migratory patterns:

People have moved to be around others like themselves, so most American communities have also grown either increasingly Democratic or Republican since the ’70s. (This trend continued through the 2008 election, by the way.) Party affiliation is a minor part of what is becoming political inequality. We’re really sorting by way of life and that is correlated with how we vote.

Andrew Gelman has a different take.

AIPAC wants massive crippling sanctions against Israel's prime enemy in the Middle East. Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US, keeps making that case. The Obama administration, on the other hand, wants sanctions targeted more narrowly at the regime rather than the people:

U.S. Treasury Department strategists already have been focusing on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has emerged as the economic and military power behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In recent weeks, senior Green Movement figures — who have been speaking at major Washington think tanks — have made up a list of IRGC-related companies they suggest targeting, which has been forwarded to the Obama administration by third parties….

Clinton has been working indirectly with the Green Movement to fashion sanctions that will support them (their leaders oppose the kind of sanctions AIPAC wants). Lieberman and McCain have stated that they, rather than the president, determine American foreign policy toward Israel and Iran. They've stated that in Israel in a blatant attempt to undermine a sitting president's leverage with an ally he wants to nudge away from the brink of self-destruction.

We'll see in the near future if they are right. I mean: McCain won the last election, right? Or does it really matter who wins elections as far as Middle East policy is concerned?

E.D. Kain defends his criticism of Avatar and his reading of the Na'vi as noble savages:

The movie theatre I saw this in was packed, and about half the audience were Navajos.  My home town is mostly white, but the second largest racial demographic is Native American – mostly Navajo and some Hopi.  In college, pretty much all my lit classes were on multi-cultural themes, but the vast bulk of time was spent on Native American literature in particular.  I have spent more hours than I care to count thinking about these issues – about Native American rights, land rights, the various mythas and religious themes which surround Native American culture, and the ways in which popular culture (and Hollywood) has portrayed native peoples in America.

I have a number of friends (past  and present) who are Navajo (or Diné, as they prefer to be called).  We even have a public elementary school here which teaches one third of all its material in the Navajo language (and one third in Spanish).

So, whether the Na’vi are simple “stand-ins for the Navajos” or whether Cameron was trying to write his very own native-from-scratch is immaterial.  Surely Conor has heard the term “extended metaphor” before.  Cameron’s alien moon, Pandora, may not be the American frontier, and the Na’vi may not be the Diné, but the parallels are obvious and purposeful.  And the real problem is not that such parallels exist but that Cameron’s handling of his Pandoran tribal people is so one-dimensional.

A fantastic new tumblr. A Dish fave:

Ted Olson's article has sparked an extended debate over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Orin Kerr pushes back against the pessimists in the most recent post:

For those in favor of same-sex marriage, I’m not sure that a hypothetical Supreme Court decision concluding there is no right to same-sex marriage would do much to set back that cause. It seems to me that the cause of same-sex marriage has been advancing in recent years with the background understanding that federal courts are not likely to recognize such a right anytime soon. A decision rejecting the right would maintain that status quo. Some would argue that a decision rejecting the right in the near-term would delay or block a future decision coming out the other way. Whatever the Court does, however, my guess is that an early decision rejecting the right wouldn’t have a great deal of impact on later litigation.

But if you believe, as I do, that the case is extremely strong, then airing it in a controlled and rational court room in which all the arguments can be thrashed out in public is inherently good. Anything that can expose more people to the core arguments of this issue is, in my judgment, good for the cause. Because our arguments are so vastly superior to what passes for theirs' and the animus toward gays as a whole so clear from their literature and backgrounds that it will force this ugliness to the surface. I believe in sunlight on this issue. I believe that even if we lose in this process, we educate and inform. And the more we educate and inform the sooner our equality will come.

TNC on the Reid/Lott comparison puts it as best as anyone I know:

Leaving aside political cynicism, this entire affair proves that the GOP is not simply still infected with the vestiges of white supremacy and racism, but is neither aware of the infection, nor understands the disease. Listening to Liz Cheney explain why Harry Reid's comments were racist, was like listening to me give lessons on the finer points of the comma splice. This a party, rightly or wrongly, regarded by significant portions of the country as a haven for racists. They aren't simply having a hard time re-branding, they don't actually understand how and why they got the tag. 

These guys are lost.