The Dish

Douthat wades into the debate:

Manzi makes the sensible point that his essay (like my column, which quoted from it) was focusing on America’s position on the global stage as well as our domestic situation, and when it comes to global politics the sheer size of your economy — and not just your per capita wealth — matters a great deal.

On a per capita basis, after all, the richest countries in the world include Singapore, Qatar and Brunei, which nobody would confuse with great powers capable of playing a significant role in promoting stability, liberty and growth — or exerting significant cultural influence, for that matter — on the world stage. (Taiwan’s impressive per person G.D.P., Manzi points out, does not prevent it from being swallowed by mainland China; that job is the left to the U.S. Navy.)

Obviously, Western Europe is considerably more powerful and secure than Singapore and Taiwan. But just as obviously, Europe, too, is a beneficiary of the Pax Americana, and the outsize military spending that our overall economic size makes possible. And a world in which America’s economy had grown at European rates since the 1970s would be a very different place — less congenial to our own interests, and probably less stable and prosperous overall — even if our per capita G.D.P. had continued to rise smartly across that period.

"Let's do a brief thought experiment. I tell you the following: On New Year's Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is having his granddaughter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old granddaughter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homicidal intent. Your mammalian reaction, your reaction as a primate, is one of revulsion – I'm trusting you on this.

Then you pick up yesterday's Guardian, one of the most liberal newspapers in the Western world, and there's a long article that says, ah, that picture, that moral picture, that instinct to protect the old and the young doesn't apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a cartoon that upset some people. We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way. This is a sort of cultural and moral suicide, in my opinion," – Christopher Hitchens.

Megan takes issue with the framing of this post linking to Mike Konczal's thought experiment about how credit card companies could rip off senior citizens battling dementia:

[It's] pretty much standard libertarian theory that you shouldn't take advantage of people who do not have the cognitive ability to make contracts.  Marginal cases are hard not because we think it's okay, but because there is disagreement over what constitutes impairment, and the more forcefully you act to protect marginal cases, the more you start treating perfectly able-minded adults like children.The elderly are a challenge precisely because there's no obvious point at which you can say:  now this previously able adult should be treated like a child.  Either you let some people get ripped off, or you infringe the liberty, and the dignity, of people who are still capable of making their own decisions.

Natch. And so a populist-right front opens up. Who should be more afraid – the Dems or the Republicans? One wonders, however, if Joan Rivers might have a political future in this environment:

Nate Silver's early reading of the 2010 senate races:

I don't think it can be taken for granted that Democrats won't keep their "filibuster-proof" majority, or even expand upon it; I might put this possibility at something like 25-30 percent, following the Dorgan/Dodd retirements. On the other hand, the Democrats might also lose five, six, seven seats … or perhaps more. I don't think the possibility of their losing their majority rates as higher than a small, single-digit number, although it cannot totally be ruled out if unexpected events (incapacitation of Robert Byrd and/or Daniel Inouye, a party switch from Joe Lieberman and/or Ben Nelson) come into play.

Michael Barone wonders why one-party rule tends to last longer in Britain than in the United States:

There are two obvious negative consequences of the infrequency of shifts in party control in Britain. One is that the governing party in its later years in the majority grows tired, stale, corrupt, and fractious—as anyone familiar with the later Major years or the current Brown years knows. Of course this happens in America too, after even shorter periods in power, as denizens of Capitol Hill in 1994 or 2006 could easily observe.

The other consequence is that if an opposition party does win, its leaders typically have little if any experience holding executive office. This was true of New Labour: Blair and Brown had both first been elected to the Commons in 1983, and never were part of a majority. It will be true, or largely true, of a Cameron government if Conservatives win this year.

The Obama administration recently hired a transgender bureaucrat. Chait analyzes the Christianist right's response:

The interesting thing is that there's no attempt to show that the administration employed any sort of quota or affirmative action program. It just hired a person who's transgendered. The religious right obviously opposes that, but they can't say so. Thus they have come to employ words like "quota" to mean something entirely different than their literal meaning.

Today on the Dish we watched Dem dominance waver and saw hopeful signs that Obama will demand accountability for the undie-bomber. Yglesias talked sense on profiling and Michael Yon got a taste of TSA firsthand.

The Leveretts continued to downplay the protest movement in Iran – a critique that was picked apart by Scott Lucas, Dan Drezner, and a Dish reader. The newly-unleashed Chait went after Manzi's National Affairs piece, forcing Manzi to backtrack a bit. Andrew tackled marriage equality in Britain but later amended his argument. He also got fed up with the Palestinians and Israelis, triggering reader responses here and here.

Greenwald and Sullivan continued to pound on Politico, Frum pummeled Rubin over Palin, Mary Kate Cary wondered about the silence from the bloggy right on Iranian protestors and the Dish blegged for writings from conservatives condemning the Uganda bill. Also, we spotlighted a particularly scary Christianist and highlighted the missing hikers in Iran.

Rooting around the internet, the Dish watched a slut spillage, looked at Limbaugh's silver lining, and aired an enema. We featured views from Yemen and Jew Town, India. The latest Recession View update here.

— C.B.

Via Goldblog, Jonathan Rauch's column from last year is now available in video form:

Andrew Exum and Richard Fontaine get us up to speed on the situation in Yemen:

Yemen's economy depends heavily on oil production, and its government receives the vast majority of its revenue from oil taxes. Yet analysts predict that the country's petroleum output, which has declined over the last seven years, will fall to zero by 2017. The government has done little to plan for its post-oil future. Yemen's population, already the poorest on the Arabian peninsula and with an unemployment rate of 35%, is expected to double by 2035. An incredible 45% of Yemen's population is under the age of 15.

Bradford Plumer worries about water shortages in the country. Drum adds his take:

Frankly, it's a little hard to see how anything is likely to have much impact on a country with problems that severe. And until those problems are addressed, it's also hard to see how even the best designed and executed counterterrorism program can have more than a very limited effect.