The Dish

Baltimore, Maryland, 8 am.

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My take on the latest survey of the under-30s can be read here. Not as liberal as some would tell you, but that makes their hefty preference for the Democrats that much more depressing for the GOP. Money quote:

Americans are a naturally optimistic nation; and the younger they are, the more hope they have: 31% of the underthirties even believe the chaotic occupation of Iraq has made the US safer. Fewer than one in five believe it has made the US less safe, and 38% believe that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do, compared with 35% of all adults. If you want to find the most antiwar part of the population, you need to look at senior citizens, not the young. Does this make the next generation more conservative? On some issues, the answer seems to be yes. Take abortion. The underthirties are marginally more opposed to abortion than their parents: One in four want it made illegal altogether. Thirty-seven per cent of the underthirties are pro-choice, compared with 39% of the population; 38% of the underthirties want more restrictions.

The young are also slightly less likely to support gun control than their elders, even in the wake of the college shootings at Virginia Tech. A solid 43% of the underthirties, moreover, believe being gay is a choice, compared with only 34% of the general population. Seventy-four per cent said that most people they know would not vote for a president who had ever used cocaine.

So are they a more Republican generation than Democrat? Here’s where the surprise is. Despite their marginally more conservative views on the war and Iraq, the underthirties are strikingly more committed to the Democratic party than at any time since the high-water mark of young Republicanism in the Reagan Eighties. Bush has turned out to be a reverse-Reagan.

Despite their marginally more conservative views on the war and Iraq, the underthirties are strikingly more committed to the Democratic party than at any time since the high-water mark of young Republicanism in the Reagan Eighties. Bush has turned out to be a reverse-Reagan. This has something to do with the fact that the underthirties are less white than their elders. But it’s hard to explain the massive gulf that has opened up between the parties by race alone.

You can read the rest here.

Christianists and social conservatives have argued against same-sex marriage, because children are the central point of the insitution. One reason they have largely lost the argument is that heterosexuals no longer think of the institution that way:

"When I think of marriage, I don’t think of children at all. I have them. But with marriage, I think of a husband and a wife, and I don’t think it’s the children that make it work."

That’s a 42-year-old DC resident. There’s an argument to be made that marriage should be re-focused on children, but as a purely civil matter, it isn’t any more. That’s why gay marriage is here to stay. Because, under the current cultural meaning of civil marriage, the discriminatory exclusion of some childless loving couples and inclusion of others makes no sense at all.

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it? And there’s something oddly comforting about hearing these words from a Scot whose accent and common sense seem as alien to the Middle East’s pathologies as can be imagined. What a cultural clash. But my money’s on the Scot.

The police have just made a fifth arrest in connection with Britain’s wave of Jihadist violence. The one good thing that may come out of this rash of terror is better intelligence.

Bush is much more like Churchill’s longtime foe than Winnie himself:

Like Bush, Chamberlain laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the office of prime minister. He scorned dissenting views, both inside and outside government. When Chamberlain arranged his face-to-face meetings with Hitler in 1938 that ended in the catastrophic Munich conference, he did so without consulting his cabinet, which, under the British system, is responsible for making policy. He also bypassed the House of Commons, leading Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister who was then an anti-appeasement MP, to complain that Chamberlain was treating Parliament "like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government of the day" …

Churchill, on the other hand, revered Parliament and was appalled by Chamberlain’s determination to dominate the Commons in the late 1930s. Churchill considered himself first and foremost "a child" and "servant" of the House of Commons and strongly believed in the legislature’s constitutional role to oversee the executive (even when, after becoming prime minister, he often railed against MPs who criticized him). In August 1939, when Chamberlain rammed through a two-month parliamentary adjournment just weeks before the war began, Churchill — then still a backbencher — exploded with anger in the House, calling the prime minister’s move "disastrous," "pathetic" and shameful." He encouraged his anti-appeasement colleagues to mount similar attacks against Chamberlain, and when one of them, Ronald Cartland, called the prime minister a dictator to his face in the same debate, Churchill congratulated Cartland with an enthusiastic, "Well done, my boy, well done!"

Churchill would be appalled by the indefinite suspension of habeas corpus and even more by the shameful adoption of torture by the Americans. He was a realist, a pragmatist and a defender of actual liberty. In all three things, he is Bush’s nemesis.

This I didn’t know:

But although the online videos of men scaling drainage pipes and jumping from rooftop to rooftop make [parkour] seem like the latest extreme sport, its metaphysical component makes it more of a nascent martial art. Freerunning focuses on the feeling and aesthetic expression of freedom, thinking that can be traced to the transcendentalism of Rousseau and Thoreau. And parkour’s "utility," of which Mr. Cliff and other traceurs speak, is akin to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham in its application of mathematical principles to everyday life.

I can just see Mill trying this, can’t you?

Apologies for random beefcake.

I’ll say more when we have more solid information, but there are two things worth saying, I think, about the rash of car/suicide bombs in Britain. The first is: they look like amateur, Jihadist violence. This is both good in as much as it helped foil all three, and resulted in no civilian deaths – and bad, in as much as it suggests a systemic problem with some Muslims in Britain. We no longer need a professional international al Qaeda to murder innocents in the name of Allah.  The second is: the British authorities must have acquired a wealth of intelligence. They have two unexploded cars, plenty of video, and one captured Jihadist. With any luck, this could lead to better surveillance and prevention of future attacks. That’s looking on the bright side.  The truth is: it’s amazing we haven’t had more of this kind of thing, especially in the US. When it comes, we need stamina, stoicism and calm. And it’s coming.

(Photo: Kieran Dodds/AFP/Getty.)

CNN highlights some obvious information that somehow never made it into "Sicko":

Moore focuses on the private insurance companies and makes no mention of the U.S. government-funded health-care systems such as Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Veterans Affairs health-care systems. About 50 percent of all health-care dollars spent in the United States flows through these government systems.

"Sicko" also ignores a handful of good things about the American system. Believe it or not, the United States does rank highest in the patient satisfaction category. Americans do have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when it comes to nonemergency elective surgery such as hip replacements, cataract removal or knee repair.

So half of US healthcare is already government-funded; and patient satisfaction with treatment is the highest in the world. Does that not count for something in the argument?

This has long been the pattern – Christianists so hostile to gay people that they’d rather destroy the institution of civil marriage for all than allow gay couples into it. A Michigan reader notes:

Ok, Andrew – I’ve found beautiful proof of your thesis: the more restrictive states are in passing ant-gay marriage amendments, the faster this actually undermines traditional marriage for heterosexuals.

Take Michigan, for example, which has one of the most restrictive anti-gay marriage amendments. The Michigan attorney general recently ruled that state universities and government institutions had to stop offering insurance benefits to gay domestic partners, since that would "recognize a relationship equivalent to marriage."

So what has Michigan State University done in response? They have re-written their insurance policy to offer insurance to anyone who lives with a state employee who is neither "a tenant or a legal dependent":

"As it happens, the new Michigan State program has at least one positive side effect, at least from the employees’ view: it would potentially expand eligibility to more people than under its previous domestic partnership plan. Unmarried heterosexual couples who met the criteria, for example, could now take advantage of the benefits."

The attorney general approves of Michigan State rewriting its partner benefits this way, since it avoids the issue of the partner’s sexual orientation. Thus, the only way state governments have of responding to conservative attacks on the right of gay people to partake of marriage benefits is to provide insentives to further dilute heterosexual marriage, so that they can continue to offer the same benefits to all. In the name of "protecting marriage" these people are in fact speeding its dismantlement.

I made this point in 1989. I wish they’d listened.