The Dish

David Weigel reports on the Daily Caller, which is scheduled to launch this week and is led by Tucker Carlson:

“If there’s a story whose facts are verifiable, and it generates interest, and it comes from Satan himself, I will take it and I will pay him a reporting fee,” Carlson said. “But if we take a piece from Satan, that does not mean we’re on board with Satan’s agenda. It just means that the provenance of the piece, the origins of the piece, is not the most important thing. People don’t give you stuff because they love journalists. They give you that stuff because they’re pushing an agenda.”

Scott H. Payne:

I find myself torn between the fact that he was slated to hire the inimitable Helen Rittlemeyer as a reporter and that the venture’s partner is a former Cheney aide.

Reihan makes an essential point:

France, for example, has higher output per hour — but to reiterate: while we could characterize this as an income vs. leisure trade-off, we can also characterize this as a function of rigid labor markets that have led to persistently high youth unemployment rates in Europe. See Annie Lowrey's Foreign Policy article on this subject. Your 10-person firm's productivity would increase if you fired the nine least productive employees, or the three or the one. There is a learning curve, and younger workers tend to be less productive than older workers.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with me," – president Obama, on security failures on his watch.

I don't remember anyone in the Bush administration ever saying such a thing about Richard Reid. If you can recall any, let me know.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"It's just that in Africa, there is no real gay rights movement, no constitutional protections for a tiny, already persecuted minority, and thereby we have a revelation of what the eliminationist rhetoric around evil homosexual plots would aim for in America if it could."

Almost correct.

With the exception of the Coalition for African Lesbians, I don't believe there is a single pan-African organisation which fights for the rights of LGBT individuals.  However, when you say there are no constitutional protections, there is one very notable country which provides rights of far greater depth than most European countries and certainly those in the US at a federal level. Back in 1996 South Africa became the first country in the world to provide constitutional protections for gay people, and while gay marriage didn't become legal until 2006, same-sex relationships were legally recognised in 1996 and the prohibition on same-sex adoption lifted in 2002.  Furthermore, gay people are allowed to serve openly in the South African military.  That should serve as an embarrassment to both the Obama administration and the GOP.

A reader writes:

Would it be too much of an exaggeration to say that, based on recent media reports that many of the innocent people held in US custody under Bush and Cheney are now engaging in terrorism, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush ran one of the most successful jihadist recruiting programs and training camps?

Not too much of an exaggeration. Al Qaeda nutjobs need no extra reason to kill infidels. But Gitmo was clearly as effective a Jihadist training and indoctrination camp as any in Waziristan. If I'd been innocent, and then seized, abused and tortured at Gitmo, I'd become an anti-American radical as well. Wouldn't you? However much Bush and Cheney regard these prisoners as sub-human, they aren't. 

I have little doubt that Bush and Cheney cluelessly created far more terrorism than they prevented because of their fiasco in Iraq, incompetent occupation of Afghanistan, and embrace of torture techniques once the rpeserve of totalitarian regimes. Everyone in intelligence agrees that Gitmo and Abu Ghraib in particular were recruitment tools for the enemy. And so the resistance to closing Gitmo helps al Qaeda's goals. Again, it is not clear that Dick Cheney ever fully grasped that this country was at war and needed smarter, more professional leadership than his panicked proto-fascist incompetence.

Kinsley's attack on bloated newspaper articles has been getting some attention. A snippet:

The software industry has a concept known as “legacy code,” meaning old stuff that is left in software programs, even after they are revised and updated, so that they will still work with older operating systems. The equivalent exists in newspaper stories, which are written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine. Who needs to be told that reforming health care (three words) involves “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system” (nine words)? Who needs to be reminded that Hillary Clinton tried this in her husband’s administration without success? Anybody who doesn’t know these things already is unlikely to care. (Is, in fact, unlikely to be reading the article.)

Flip-book style parkour:

parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

A reader from India writes:

One of your readers association of the Swastika with the Nazis in modern America and much of the West is quite frustrating.

When my family visited some German friends about 15 years ago, we thought extremely carefully about giving them a little artistic idol of Lord Ganesha (a very happy God in our Hindu Mythology, one considered to be "vighnaharta" – or the "defeater of obstacles"), because Ganesha is associated with the Swastika. The Swastik (this is how we would pronounce it in Hindi or Marathi), is typically not turned through 45 degrees (like the Nazi one). The 4 sides refer to the 4 Vedas, the Four directions (this confirms that we couldn't fly in ancient times since we never refer to Six directions), the Four seasons and the 4 stages of life. Sadly, these days, everywhere except India, it seems to only signify the hideous Nazis.

I also disagree with your other reader about ghettos.

Ghettos are in fact fairly common in most Indian cities. They come about because of various reasons – they could be descendants of a Garrison (like the maharashtrian ghetto in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh) or could be due to migration (like the Sindhi ghetto in Ulhasnagar to the North Eastern of Bombay). People want to live with their own people. But that does not mean that they prevent other people from coming or stop going to other places.

Like the Swastika, the Ghetto also has frustratingly bad connotations in America or even in England. How about calling them Communities instead? The word has it's origins in the City of Venice – Jews were forced to live in a specific part of that city (or, more accurately, were not allowed to live in other parts of that city). This is not true in India – the State does not and has never sanctioned this kind of discrimination. Sure there is some economic pressure – a lot of it is positive pressure – one's chances of doing well improve dramatically if one lives amongst his or her own people, especially given the multiple languages that operate in any one Indian city at any time.

The charm above can be bought here. Another reader writes:

I have to say the swastika/star of David dynamic is hilarious here. The manufacturer of the elevator in our Delhi hotel has a swastika for a logo. Today the Hindu temple we visited was plastered with them, then we went to a Muslim tomb that was covered with six-sided stars.

Dick Cheney is the former vice-president whose national security expertise was central to his appeal in 2000 as Bush's running mate. Yet within nine months, Cheney presided over the worst attack on American soil in US history, failed to capture its perpetrators, failed to bring any of its plotters to justice, made convicting them much harder because he secretly and illegally authorized their brutal torture, and recruited a new and young wave of Jihadists by the exposure of the barbarism at Gitmo, Bagram, Camp Cropper, Camp Nama and the various black torture sites he helped set up across the globe. For good measure, Cheney also lost the war in Afghanistan and his closest confidant Don Rumsfeld lost the war in Iraq (the success of the subsequent "surge" will be tested this year as troops withdraw). Under Cheney, for good measure, both Iran and North Korea made huge strides toward getting nukes.

Not only did Cheney allow bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora, he also helped radicalize many actually innocent prisoners (three quarters of those thrown into the torture camp at Gitmo were innocent of any charges), and then set many of these radicalized new Jihadists free to wreak further terror on the US and the world.

In fact, an Obama administration official has asserted that all the former Gitmo prisoners who have become Jihadists upon release were set free by Bush and Cheney. Just as Cheney had bin Laden in his grasp and allowed his fathomless incompetence to lose him, he has actually helped create and then unleash Jihadists across the world.

How this utter failure gets to pontificate on terror after his disastrous record is beyond me. But then, Mike Allen would have fewer pageviews, wouldn't he?

Ryan Avent once more defends Richard Florida against Alec MacGillis's critique:

I don’t think MacGillis has grappled with the implications of his complaint that investing in prosperous hubs “exacerbat[es] the disequilibrium”. Investments in prosperous places yield high returns, providing governments with more resources to use in other ways. And no one is suggesting we abandon whole swathes of the country. I don’t think I could have been more explicit in saying that both countercyclical aid and adjustment assistance for struggling cities are justified. Investments in growing cities also help struggling areas by increasing the overall size of the national economy, and by creating more opporunities for migrants. And MacGillis needs to recognize that if you pour a ton of money into places that lack an underlying economic justification, you’re attracting a lot of people into cities that represent economic dead ends.