The Dish

Greenwald criticizes a few Dish readers:

Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual.  These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies.  But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important.  They're also far more potent.  Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one's life who — like a loved one or close friend or religious leader — must be protected and defended at all costs.

Ambinder counters.

The details of the public option compromise are still shaking out. Ezra Klein is excited about the possibility of opening Medicare to Americans a few years shy of 65:

[T]he Medicare buy-in lets people in the broader insurance market see what national bargaining power can do for individual premiums. Right now, Medicare's rates are largely hidden, as no one pays the full premiums, and so no one can really compare it to private offerings. But if the premiums become visible, and Medicare's superior bargaining power is capable of offering rates 20 to 30 percent lower than its private competitors can muster, we'll see how long it is before representatives begin getting calls from 50-year-olds who'd like the opportunity to exchange money in return for insurance as good as what 55-year-olds can get.

Brian Beutler is all over the story.

Ackerman plucks out an interesting bit of testimony from Gen. McChrystal about the Taliban paying its soldiers more than the Afghan government does. Yglesias reflects:

[A]s far as problems go it’s an exceedingly correctable one. If there’s anything the international coalition has, it’s more money than the Taliban. If the Taliban pay $300 a month, there should be no problem with the coalition putting $350 or $400 a month together. This sort of thing is one reason why, despite some serious doubts about the strategy being pursued, I think there’s reason to believe Obama, Petraeus, McChrystal, etc. can make it work. Some of the mistakes in our policy are so egregious that an enormous amount of good is going to be done as we simply reverse the obvious errors.

He also asks: "Why are we spending a multiple of Afghanistan’s total GDP on fighting a war in the country? Couldn’t more be done, for cheaper, with cash for bribes and development?"

What about the oyster guy?

The AP reports:

[Afghan President Hamid Karzai] said it will be at least 15 years before his government can bankroll a security force strong enough to protect the country from the threat of insurgency.

(Hat tip: Joe Klein)

Noah Pollak sees things roughly the way I do but puts more flesh on the bones (and keeps his own position somewhat veiled):

It’s clear at this point that the Obama administration has reconciled itself to a nuclear Iran and even, I think, convinced itself that this won’t be such a bad thing. After all, China opened up to the West after it went nuclear. We dealt with the Russians after they went nuclear. The Indians and Pakistanis haven’t nuked each other, despite Kashmir and all the terrorism. Neither has Israel used nukes, for that matter.

In fact, Iran going nuclear might help remove the chip on the shoulder of the Islamic Revolutionaries by making them feel as important as they hope to be — because as we all know from our Iran experts, there’s an important psychological dimension to all of this; one must understand the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The nuclear program will really be a socialization program, in other words. It is how Iran will be broken to the saddle of the international system.

So, if you’ve reconciled yourself to all of that, the next step is ensuring the smooth transition of the Middle East into a region with two, not one, nuclear powers. This is where the Israelis, and Israeli power, become a huge problem. Such a problem, I think, that the real challenge for Obama over the next year isn’t going to be dealing with the Iranians, it’s going to be deterring the Israelis.

Ross gives two readings of the dropping divorce rate. His more pessimistic angle:

[W]hile some upper-middle class marriages may be strengthened, on the margins, by the recession, working class marriages are more likely to be weakened, even as the continued decline of the manufacturing sector makes men without college degrees less marriageable to begin with. We already have a large “marriage gap” between well-educated and less-educated Americans; the recession is likely to widen it. And once it’s over, as Hanna Rosin suggests, the working class may look that much more “like the inner city—a matriarchy with struggling mothers and drifting men and unmoored children.”

In light of Huckabee's clemency scandal, Radley Balko zooms out and considers the issue more generally:

The wisdom of a pardon or clemency granted because a particular verdict, sentence, or application of the law was unjust ought to be judged on precisely that, and only that—whether the final outcome is consistent with our notion of justice. What happens later is irrelevant. On the other hand, when a governor pardons or frees on rehabilitation grounds someone who unquestionably committed the crime, he's made a bolder proclamation, and put his own judgment on the line. If you're going to pronounce a convicted murderer redeemed by letting him out of prison, you really should be on the hook for the killer's behavior for the rest of his life.

DiA weighs in on the interview with a suicide bomber:

Mr Sullivan calls this an interview with "evil", but that is an abstract way of looking at it. Although the would-be terrorist's answers may sound absurd, he appears to be a very rational actor (based on what he believes) who is not accustomed to being confronted with dissonance-causing information. (An interesting paper from earlier this year looked into the rationality of suicide bombers.)